Jblum5

Jackpot! Tells the story of a dystopian future where it is legal to hunt and kill the winner of the Los Angeles lottery and claim the prize as your own. This movie is the biggest PG13 movie ever to be rated R and I feel like the film did not know the direction it wanted to go. At the end you feel nearly confused on how you were suppose to feel, but a few laughs make it worth the watch. You have to go into this movie knowing you are just watching a comedy. If you take anything else seriously, you will truly hate this film.

John Cena absolutely shines again in a comedic role. After this and Ricky Stanicky, I feel comfortable saying he is the best comic actor making movies today. He has impeccable timing, no boundaries and is capable of handling dramatic scenes. Awkwafina also gives among the best performances of her career here and the two are pleasant to spend the entire movie with. There are a few laugh out loud moments sprinkled in.

The issues here is the tone of the movie. Sometimes it wants you to take the plot seriously and it makes so little sense that it seems silly. The violence is a PG-13 level , with an R rating it makes no sense. No blood, there could be some fun gore but you get nothing in that department. Characters suffer massive injuries in one scene, are fine the next. It almost feels like a video game where there are no stakes. A character can be in a room 1 v 10 and escape with hardly a challenge. It takes all of the tension out of fight scenes as you are more just waiting for what is going to be funny verses caring at all what will happen.

Overall I did enjoy the film, but it needed some dramatic tweaking to make it worth recommending. If you go into it wanting to laugh, I think it's well worth the watch. It just could have been so much better than what we got.

Monkey Man tells the story of a an underground fighter who sets on a path to get revenge on those that wronged him and his family. Dev Patel stars and directs the film.

Overall the movie suffers from drowning in action revenge cliches and most of the beats of this film were better in other films. Movies like RRR, John Wick, Oldboy, Kill Bill, Mayhem and so many more. The issue it, it isn't better than any of those films, and doesn't have the script nuance to make it stand out like those films do.

The action scenes have far too many cuts and went on for so long it was not enjoyable to watch. The movie throws in so few surprises that if you have seen this time of film before, you are just waiting until the end and hoping you enjoy some of the violence.

This being said there are some positives here. There is one scene from his time as an underground fighter that was truly great. The acting is consistently good throughout and the sound design is used well in some scenes.

Overall this is a skip for me as it doesn't do anything to stand out from the crowded action revenge sub-genre and is surely to be a movie that will be forgotten in 10 years despite some solid acting.

Longlegs tells the story of an FBI agent attempting to catch a horrific serial killer who has been murdering family's for over a decade. We follow two FBI agents who are attempting to put the clues together,

I believe the hype train got moving on this rather average film too hard and it does not deliver what last years horror darling "Talk to Me" did.

It obviously isn't all bad. I love Nick Cage and it's one of those movies that I am thrilled he got to do. I had the thought of "there is a finite number of Nick Cage performances left" and this felt like a good use of his talent. Maika Moneroe and Blair Underwood have good chemistry as the lead and her boss.

This film is shot absolutely beautifully. The shots are well thought out. Color is used well , and technically it's very well done . I feel like this is causing a lot of people to significantly overrated this film because the ol' "well I don't want to say I didn't get it!" Because everything else about it seems like things you learn in film school to NOT do.

The film uses many lazy, non sensical jump scares throughout. Almost like they didn't think the film was scary enough so they went back through and added a bunch to make it feel less slow? It just didn't need it and it's a big negative to me.

The plot conveniences are many, I won't get into spoilers but the tagline should probably be "what are the odds?" I always expect that in movies-obviously, but this is so easy to predict once you catch on . There is some lazy narration and exposition dumps that aren't very clever and seem blunt and fall flat, whereas a more seasoned director can work in those things throughout the film.,

So overall , Longlegs combines great cinematography with film school 101 fails in the script that ultimately will scare the crap out of you... but isn't a compelling enough story to warrant comparisons to the genre greats.

I'd watch maybe on streaming but this was not a must watch. 6/10.