MUFCOK

Anuvahood is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's not a great film by any means, but it is entertaining and a good time. When I saw the trailer for Sumotherhood, I won't lie to you, it looked pretty bad. Much more slapstick, much more 'action' comedy than the first movie and only a sprinkling of the original cast returning. Nevertheless, after a couple of beers and some food, we decided to give it a go. How bad could it be?

... It's pretty bad.

One thing that I found quite jarring is that the names and characters have changed from the first movie? The two leads have different names and the other returning actors are playing different characters. I can only imagine Adam Deacon wanted to get the full gang back to play the same characters but they weren't having it so he got what he could and changed them completely.

This movie is loud, too loud. The shouting gets irritating after about 15 minutes and that delivery of shouting jokes and screaming all the time just isn't that funny. Not to mention that 9 out of 10 jokes just aren't funny. There are some good one-liners in this, and I did have a few chuckles, but it just wasn't enough.

Adam Deacon has bipolar and I believe that is why he has been away from acting for quite some time and his inclusion of mentioning this in the movie is about a subtle as a third nipple. The ending is also hilarious with some social commentary shoehorned in which is completely out of place and out of the blue.

The cameos are in the trailer and aside from Jeremy Corben saying 'allow it wasteman', they all add nothing to the comedy.

Overall, the movie is pretty bad, it's not that funny, it's repetitive and it falls flat on so many occasions. Surprisingly though, it's actually better than I thought it would be.

A very generous 4/10.

I make a point of not watching trailers prior to watching a new film as experience tells me that rather than get me excited to watch a movie, they essentially give me an overly exposed look at a film with key plot points being shown. With this in mind, it was almost impossible to not see parts of trailers for Bullet Train, whether that was on TV or YouTube advertising etc. The marketing campaign for this film is mental, I have seen it everywhere.

The trailer makes the movie look like a massive bloated action piece - Think Nonstop meets Train to Busan. However, having watched a couple of YouTube film reviews, I was pleasantly surprised to see it described as not just a brainless action movie, but more of a dialogue-based film with clever writing and fast paced back and forth. One reviewer compared it to Guy Ritchie's Snatch and the classic Pulp Fiction - Two of my favourite and most watched movies. That was enough for me, I was going to give it a try and I booked a couple of tickets for opening day, something that I don't do very often.

Let's start with the Dialogue. If anything, it just tries too hard, far too hard. Most of the jokes didn't land for me and the delivery of the fast-paced dialogue quite often would not hit the mark. I can't quite but my finger on why that is. Is it simply poor writing? Or is it down to the delivery? Or is it simply that a number of my favourite movies are heavy, witty dialogue-based movies and my expectations were so high based on several reviews, that I just felt disappointed by this? Either way, it didn't really work for me.

As you can imagine, almost all the action scenes involved in this movie were delivered on a train, meaning that the fight scenes needed to be compact and tight. This was delivered better than I expected to be fair and plenty of the action scenes were enjoyable, if not incredibly farfetched.

The characters were relatively varied but were quite generic and cliché. Brad Pitt is essentially the lead actor and probably the best on show. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry (Tangerine and Lemon) were the characters which I was most excited to see, they played the east end cockney gangster/hitmen type characters. Unfortunately, they came across as just trying far too hard and the chemistry between them just wasn't as good as I imagine the director and producers thought it would be. The Thomas the Tank Engine metaphor also got repetitive after the 25th time it was mentioned. The rest of the cast are hit and miss, nothing majorly impressive and nothing majorly terrible. There are some strange cameos, and when I say cameos, I mean cameos. They literally get seconds of screen time.

Overall, Bullet Train was entertaining enough as a popcorn flick and was an inoffensive way of turning my brain off for two hours and relaxing. I do feel that it's a slightly wasted opportunity though as I can see what the director was trying to do, but it just felt flat and missed the mark on quite a few occasions. Style over substance is the best way I would describe it.

6/10.

I honestly can't make my mind up. Was it good or not?

I watched Stay Close in two sittings. After the first two episodes I was close to telling my Mrs that I was out and that she could finish the show on her own as she seems much more invested than myself. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and sat through a couple more and by this point, I had invested too much time into it to stop there. I was halfway through, intrigued in the story and committed to finishing it.

Every man and his dog seem to be watching and telling me to watch some of Harlan Cobens adaptations. I haven't seen any of the previous shows, this is my first, so I cannot compare this to any of the other shows and neither did I have any expectations or bias.

Aside from James Nesbit and Eddie Izzard, there are plenty of cast members who you find yourself recognising but not quite where from, which is distracting at first, but you soon get over that. I found it hard to put my finger on if the acting was bad, or was it simply the Coronation Street level of scripting which made these actors appear worse than they are? Because the script is bad at times, really bad. The interchanges between characters are so wooden and one dimensional, full of cliches, poor humour and stating the obvious far too often that it made it quite a distraction for me and I couldn't help pass comment, pretty much twice an episode, at how awkward it was. With that being said, the script may have added to the wooden acting approach, but it can't be to blame for Cush Jumbo's ability to only have one confused distant look for the entire series.

'Ken and Barbie' got some criticism but in all honestly, I didn't mind them. They were a little too Kill Bill to be realistic but if we're being honest here, all of this to happen in one small town stunk of the Midsummer Murders anyway, so realism wasn't exactly fitting for this show in the first instance. There were many other plot holes which stood out to me (which I won't go in to as I want to keep this spoiler free) which escalated the unrealistic feel to the show.

One thing that this show isn't, is slow. It's 100 miles an hour from the first scene to the last. The idea is clearly to have as many twists as possible, as many characters with grey areas as possible and as many story lines which can potentially intertwine as possible. There is so much going on and with that it can feel a little bogged down and like it has too many fingers in too many pies. I did get the feeling that some of the characters or some of the twists could have been cut out and it could have been trimmed and polished a little better. Twists and shocks for the sake of twists and shocks work, but not if you have more of them than you have episodes. The flashbacks and exposition to remind us of what has happened literally one episode prior, just incase we somehow forgot is also irritating after a while. If you need that many reminders then its one of two things: You're either expecting your audience to have short term memory loss, or there is so much information you want to be sure people are keeping up with what has happened. I'm assuming it's the latter, but you never know.

Also, if you're going to film in Blackpool and pass it off as just any seaside town, it would be best if you didn't get all of the Blackpool landmarks in. Plus - why is everybody's house massively superior to any house you've ever been in? Not a single thing is ever out of place and there is also a massive CCTV plot hole. I can't go to the toilet without being caught on CCTV but in this knockoff Blackpool, people can do what they want with minimal camera surveillance which is even more surprising when this includes Police Stations and million pound homes.

So having said all that, you're probably expecting me to have hated this show. But believe it or not, I actually enjoyed it. Everything above is completely how I felt when watching it, but I cannot deny, it was incredibly entertaining. Once I accepted the fact it wasn't going to be a HBO/True Detective/Mare of East town subtly intelligent type of detective show, I took it for what it was and I did enjoy it. Time flew when watching and the eight episodes went by quite quickly in just two sittings. I didn't see the 'killer reveal' coming, but that could just be my level of intelligence as many other people found the show too obvious. Sometimes TV doesn't need to be perfect, or something more than it is. Sometimes we can just sit back for 6 hours on a Sunday and Monday evening and watch something which entertains us. I will certainly be looking at some of Harlan Cobens other adaptations but having seen this first I will go into them with an idea of what to expect, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Would I recommend Stay Close? Yeah, believe it or not. 6/10.