Villains

I really like Maika, everything she is in is quirky and fun (THE GUEST, was awesome). The male lead was also great, as were the "evil" couple. The acting was so on point, and everyone was incredibly likeable, I think they made the film better than it otherwise would've been!

With that said, the plot is kinda wonky, and it's nothing you haven't seen 100x it's kinda the typical, "outlaws stumble upon a dangerous abode" type film.

As much as I'm not a comedy fan really, if this was a straight up comedy, it would've been AMAZING!! But...it's actually a crime/horror/drama/comedy. I believe it tried to be so much that it never really decided what to be. The beginning was light hearted and funny, the middle was a bit odd, but tries to be serious, and the final act it gets super dark out of no where.

It's one of those movies that you're glad you saw but probably won't watch again. I liked it, I wanted to love it.

Find myself saying this fairly often, but this too would've been a fantastic TV show.

A secret-in-the-basement plot that is almost wafer-thin. Four magnetic leads and a fifth little charmer who barely talks. I guess Villains banks a little too much on its leads to keep things engaging. Sure, Bill Skarsgård, Maika Monroe, Jeffrey Donovan, and Kyra Sedgwick are all excellent but some extra character-texture would have helped. The writers do not give the antagonists-turned-protagonists enough context to believe that one of them is good at lock-picking but is dumb enough to forget the fuel levels in their escape-car or can't hotwire one. That is conveniently treated as humour instead. Also, a change-of-heart scenario isn't fleshed out well enough.

I'd have to say that the first couple of acts in Villains are incredibly better than the rest of the film, primarily owing to better-written gags. The cleverly titled film discusses the moral dilemma of bad-guys-turning-good (and vice versa) by making two extremely different couples tread that thin line separating right and wrong. Skarsgård and Monroe play a modern, quirkier, sillier version of Bonnie & Clyde while Donovan and Sedgwick enact a deadly boomer-couple - they play off of each other well. The horror in Villains is more or less restricted to some gore but it's the dark humour that mostly works.

*NON-SPOILER*

No doubt this film lives up to the comedy-horror genre, but the horror isn't the type of 'gory, scary, intense' horror. It's more of a mysterious, bad-situation type horror.

The comedy side of things can be funny at times. It's hard to describe what the film is about without giving out a 'big chunk' of a spoiler. A lot of the storyline occurs within 4 walls, where one of the two couples involved, live. The other couple is battling to get away.

The film is filled with the standard tense moments, 'will they, won't they' type scenes but overall it's alright to watch, nothing special but I've seen a lot lot worse.

When you're watching a movie, you know it is not so good when it fails to go into an interesting direction and at the same time your mind comes up with so many other directions in which the movie could've gone. That is the kind of feeling you get while watching Villains. It had a good premise. But fails to develop that premise properly.

It had some inklings of developing the characters, but no. It doesn't fully develop any of the characters.

It had some comedy moments. But then it never fully uses that potential.

By the end of the movie, I didn't care about any of the characters at all. I didn't care about where the story went.

The acting was good. But that was not enough to keep me interested.

I was lured in here by the 84% Rotten Tom score.

It looked promising... all the actors here are very talented. If nothing else, it could have been nicely demented in ways only indie horror dares to aim for.

But there's nothing really here script-wise you haven't seen unless you've just come off the Tom Hanks Mr. Rogers movie. In the past few years we've seen some really creative small production horror/black comedy/thrillers from "Bliss" to "68 Kill" --- movies that take no prisoners (or even spin new angles on old tropes like "Witch In the Window"), and the blood and guts rest stop is a last resort though that can be cool peppered in with well-developed characters and interesting plot twists.

"Villains" really doesn't have any of that. It starts out with Skarsgard and Monroe robbing a gas station, Natural Born Killers lite-style but with some nice cutting and a good chem between the leads. Both are pushing the overacting buttons just a tad, but it seems oddly in character. These are two lost souls who really do think their life is a movie, or they wish it was.

The big problem with these anti-heroes is you're never truly won over by them, but the script desperately wishes you were. Scene after scene we're hoping for something beneath the surface with Mickey and Jules, and we get a glimpse of it in the last few minutes of the movie --- up till then, they never seem engaged enough with each other or what's happening to make you really care. Monroe in particular is natural but oddly restrained. It's almost as if the light tone set at the beginning works against them for the rest of the film. Ditto the "sadistic crazy" couple whose crumbling country home they raid for a gallon of gas. They're bad but not REALLY that bad... hey shading is great but there's no decent story to hang anything on here.

"Villains" is a gigantic wish-wash of this type of soft pedaling. To generate real emotion and engagement you have to take some risks, but Villains plays it safe till an end that stretches all credibility and nullifies the scant backstory Monroe has been given (not a real original one, of course).

This isn't an awful film by any means and maybe some people will find it interesting, original, and off-beat in a warm-fuzzy way.

But if you go in expecting something off-the-wall insane like The Devil's Rejects or as creative as Apple TV+'s "Servant", you'll be disappointed. Or even something as sincere as the Mister Rogers movie, now that I think about it.