Review - Lucy

Let's just get this out of the way - Lucy is a terrible, terrible film.

According to Wikipedia, it made a lot of money, but I''m not sure how, because it's arrant nonsense.

Scarlett Johanssen is Lucy, a young woman on holiday with her loser boyfriend. When her loser boyfriend tricks her into becoming a drug mule, Lucy's life changes forever.

She's "given" a sachet of blue powder to carry in her abdomen but when someone kicks her in the stomach, the powder is released into her system and suddenly Lucy's brain power starts ratcheting up at an alarming rate.

Something, something. 10 percent of our brain, something something Morgan Freeman trying to persuade us that we're not watching arrant nonsense.

Sorry, Mr Freeman, even your gravitas can't save this one.

Review - The Losers

The Losers are an elite Black Ops team of special forces operatives.

Led by Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), they take on difficult tasks, such as the one that kicks off the movie - a search and destroy mission of a Columbian drug lord. However, when the team discovers the compound has children there, they alter the mission to try and save the children's lives.

They think they're getting the children to safety, but the helicopter is blown up, with their superior, Max, assuming that the team is on board.

Thought dead, the Losers decide it's time to take the fight to Max ...

I watched this last Friday night and honestly I'm having trouble recalling most of it. It's fun, mostly, and the best part of the whole movie is Chris Evans' character Jensen - the team's intelligence specialist. He plays him as a happy-go-lucky nerd and is the highlight of what is otherwise a pretty average action-ish movie.

Though it DOES have Idris Elba in it, which automatically levels it up.

Review - White House Down

You have to like a movie that pretty much starts with Channing Tatum arguing with a squirrel. I mean, I think it's a law or something.

White House Down is - you know how some action movies are growly and grumpy dobermans and some are golden retrievers and they just want you to like them? White House Down is a golden retriever action movie.

It's all about the explosions and Channing Tatum Saving the Day and Jamie Foxx being president and Channing Tatum's eleven year old daughter being In Danger but also being A Badass.

Anyway. Uhm. Bad guys have taken over the White House and are pretty much shooting everyone ever on staff. Channing Tatum - who is not on staff but had come in for an interview - is also multi-tasking by taking his daughter on the White House tour. He's .. a police officer? Some kind of low-level bodyguard for an admin guy? To be honest, I'm not clear on what Channing Tatum's job is. I'm not entirely sure it matters.

What DOES matter is that he's the man on the ground in the White House who is going to save the president, his daughter, AND the day.

He has good chemistry with President Jamie Foxx, which is nice and honestly ... look, the story doesn't matter.

Bad guys. Blow stuff up/shoot things.

Good guys. Also blow things up and shoot things but only bad guys.

Badass eleven year old girl.

I watched it on Friday night, and it is the IDEAL Friday night film, because you know Channing Tatum will save the day, and you don't even really have to concentrate at all. It's completely ridiculous, but it retains a certain greatness because of that level of ridiculousness.

You go Channing Tatum. Save the day.

Mad Max Fury Road review

I have seen, I think, one of the Mel Gibson Mad Max movies. The one with Tina Turner in it. I remember it being vaguely batshit, but not much else.

In this incarnation, it’s gone full batshit. And I mean that in a good way.

Tom Hardy takes up the Mad Max mantle this time around, surviving in a post-apocalyptic world where the worst of men control all of the world’s remaining resources - mostly gas, and water.

One of those men is about to send out his favourite Imperator - Furiosa - in search of gas - when Max stumbles over her, and her very illegal cargo - young women that the bad man back at the compound treated as little better than breeding cattle.

Oh, this was great. I loved it. I really, really loved it. It was crazy insane, and the crazy never let up, but it was so great.

Tom Hardy says about three words in the whole movie, and the rest of the time  he looks a bit like a confused golden retriever, but that’s okay because Furiosa knows exactly what she’s doing the whole time.

It’s set in post-apocalypse outback Australia, as were the originals but I’m pretty sure any and all similarities end there.

I just. Look, my favourite terrible, bad, great movie most recently is Jupiter Ascending. Mad Max Fury Road does have the distinction of making slightly more sense than that clusterfuck (that AWESOME clusterfuck) but Mad Max also has a guy strapped to the front of a giant truck playing an electric guitar.

So.

Ride eternal, shiny and chrome.