In short: Skylines (2020)

aka Skylin3s [ugh]

I thought that Liam O’Donnell’s Beyond Skyline was quite an improvement over the first film in the series, winning my heart through the overwhelming powers of all sorts of sci fi pulp martial arts tokusatsu action nonsense. When presented with so much energy, only a fool would have cared about the thing having the brain of a dinosaur.

Alas, a returning O’Donnell can’t catch this kind of lightning in a bottle twice, and this sequel starring the perfectly decent Lindsey Morgan (replacing the perfectly awesome Frank Grillo), is a real drag, trying to do epic science fiction world building on a budget that can’t pay for it, and with brains that can’t conceive of it, and so falls back on a mess of boring clichés, failing with little grace and no style whatsoever.

Once the plot actually gets going, the film is slowly – for some reason the thing puts half an hour of actual plot into nearly two hours runtime - crawling through all your usual sci-fi action clichés, in the classic tradition of all films that are kinda like Cameron’s Aliens but crap. The final thirty minutes or so do win back some of the energy and general craziness of the second film but at that point it’s simply a case of too little, too late to save the film as a whole.

Not improving my mood is some of the worst dialogue I have had the bad luck to encounter (seriously, the sentence level writing makes Michael Bay look like a writer), and a supposed scenery-chewing villain performance by Alexander Siddig (who can really do better) that reminds of nothing so much as a little boy playing dress-up, badly.

Oh well, there’s always going to be Skyfourth4line, right?

Three Films Make A Rather Grumpy Post: Buckle up for a ***** ride

Stuber (2019): Well, at least that tagline is honest about the quality of the movie, which is a bit of a shame seeing how much I usually enjoy the body of work of many of people in front of the camera here. But what good is an action comedy with a script (by Tripper Clancy) that can hardly land any joke even if most of them come out of Kumail Nanjiani’s and Dave Bautista’s mouths, two gentlemen with excellent comedic timing? And what good is an action comedy whose direction (by Michael Dowse) is so bland, it completely wastes some perfectly good set-ups for violence and shouting (as well as Bautista’s and Iko Uwais’s talents in this regard)? This one’s really only recommended to people who think the title is funny, methinks.

Portals (2019): To stay very much in the same realm, the abilities of the directors behind this weird SF horror anthology – or at least three out of four of them, namely Eduardo Sánchez, Liam O’Donnell and Timo Tjahjanto – stand in inverse proportion to the quality of their movie. All segments here share more or less the same problems, featuring characters who aren’t fleshed out enough for the psychological aspects of the horror to work, a weird threat feels rather more generic than actually weird, and little sense of actual tension to anything happening. There’s not much for any audience to actually care about here, nor does the film present any idea that feels even the faintest bit fleshed out. Tjahjanto’s segment is probably the strongest because it does at least have a tiny bit of dramatic pull, but it’s still disappointingly mediocre. On the plus side, at least it’s not a bro horror anthology.


Vox Lux (2018): Let’s finish this as grumpily as we started, with Brady Corbet’s – also director of the much superior The Childhood of a Leader – anti-pop movie full of songs that may mirror the most insipid side of mainstream pop music but too much in loathing with it to come up with songs for its protagonist that could still believably be hits. One can’t help but think that Sia, who is responsible for the songs, just used old songs of her own deigned too bad to put them out under her own name. Our main character Celeste starts as something of a human being but increasingly turns into a caricature, something that’s not at all helped but the most misguided performance by the usually extremely capable Natalie Portman I’ve ever seen. Structurally and stylistically, the film is more straining to acquire an artsy patina instead of actually doing anything artistically interesting. I also can’t help but raise an eyebrow at a film that so clearly wants to criticize the commodification of pain in popular culture but actually does exactly the same thing, just with an expression of general loathing for said culture on its face.