James Bennett

Spoiler free review. Excepting Deadpool, best Marvel movie for a while, IMHO. No CGI army, only a bit of a sky beam. It was a surprisingly heartfelt movie that was a metaphor for dealing with depression through love and family, without being heavy handed and hitting you over the head with the message. Action was good. Characters were good. Humour was good. Fun end credit scene. Met the "rule of 5" that a comedic movie should get 5 laughs minimum. But it also had good action and a good message. 7.75/10. Very close to being an 8, I can only think of small changes I would have made.

Kay Vess is a great main character. She has that unsure, socially awkward feel of Han in Solo: A Star Wars Story. A scoundrel on their first day. It's a great origin story. Update - I love her character arc, and where her story ends by the game's conclusion. I would buy a sequel in a heartbeat. I would die for Nix. He's my precious baby. ND-5 is my buddy. Why does every Star Wars media have such great droids? Every time one becomes my new fav. Think ND-5 might have to take 2nd place behind B2-EMO though. The soundtrack is great. No notes. Give it a listen on YT. The gameplay is fun, although nothing groundbreaking, and the stealth could use a bit of tweaking, but I've enjoyed it a lot. The space combat is excellent, best outside of Squadrons IMHO. An open world Star Wars game, where you play as a mercenary/rogue starting out, trying to gain rep with the major syndicates and power players, with nothing more than a ship, a speeder, a blaster, and your wits, is such a great idea I can't believe it's taken this long. Is the game perfect? No, of course not. For one, it's a Ubisoft game. They'll nickel and dime you for the tiniest slice of content. Some of the DLC's are ridiculously priced. For another, there are still some bugs, although I encountered no major ones. Update - by end of the game, I had encountered only 3 bugs, 1 with hair physics which lasted about 5 seconds, and 2 with Kay landing somewhere she wasn't supposed to be and sliding to the side in an un-natural way. I encountered more and worse bugs in BG3. Overall- 8/10, would recommend to any Star Wars fan, but especially the fans who enjoyed Andor and Mandalorian, getting to dive into a part of Star Wars previously only seen in novels. Update - just finished the game today, then took an hour to think about it before writing this. I adored Kay, Nix and ND-5. I think this is the best Star Wars game since the original Battlefront 2 on the PS2. After SWTOR and BF2, Outlaws is my fav Star Wars game. 8.5/10

The game has it's good and bad points. I'm playing the PS4 version on PS5 (next gen edition not out as of October 2021), and while I have had a few CTD's, I've not experienced any other issues. And though the game has crashed a half dozen times, that is over more than 30 hours of gameplay. I went for the streetkid background, and I'm looking forward to replaying the PS5 version as a Nomad. I've enjoyed the game so far. The story has been good; many of the suppporting characters are loveable (I chose a male V and romanced Panam, and I'll be going female and romancing Judy next.); and the first person camera is mostly well managed, though it can be jarring at times - the sex scenes are WEIRD. As you'd expect from CD Projekt Red, there are some very morally ambigious quests. Playing through the crucifixion questline reminded me of The Bloody Baron storyline in Witcher 3, where you get a strong initial impression of an NPC, then the quest slowly turns that on it's head by making the character complex and multifaceted, before finishing the quest in an open enough way that you could draw a dozen different conclusions. The mind control apparment quest and rescuing River Ward's nephew were some real intense horror movie level stuff, which I'm glad I played on October 30th. The braindances have some horrifying implications, for the more messed up ones. The father son team that was making the *super immoral evil crazy* ones? That will stick with me for a long time. But the more regular braindances you can buy and the ones in the booths at The Mox are ones I wish they put in the game for V to use. Overall, I think it's an excellent game thst has recovered well from it's poor start. It's recovery from garbage to greatness reminds me of No Man's Sky, another game which promised more than it could deliver at launch, but went on to more than keep those promises. Driving mechanics are awful though. That needs an overhaul. I am constantly slamming Scorpion's bike into traffic lights and pedestrians while trying to turn a corner. Driving is a lot easier in the game's only 3rd person camera mode, buy if you want to keep the 1st person immersive experience while playing, be prepared to spend some time on every journey trying to move your car after you've crashed and it's stuck on a guard rail.

No spoilers. Came out of the cinema after seeing it with a friend about an hour ago, and after a bit of thinking on the film, I have some thoughts to share. I thought it was really good. It had a couple of issues. Sometimes the pacing was off. Some scenes I didn't like, but mostly that was early scenes of Harley grieving her lost relationship with Joker, which were plot vital. I just wasn't a fan of the hard partying. Occasionally it had sound mixing problems and you struggled to hear what people said. And it took far too long for the team to get together. My friend's main complaint was the OOT, sometimes cartoonish scenes. He said it didn't fit with the DC universe's dark and gritty realism. I actually really liked that though. It fits Harley's character, the film is told mostly from her perspective, and she's crazy. She will imagine things as being OTT when they aren't. The fight scenes were DC's best, hand's down. I'd say better than most Marvel films too. Only peak Marvel like Thor: Ragnarok can claim to top this in the superhero genre. Bird of Prey's fights were stylish, sometimes brutal, and absolutely brilliant. Some of the performances were fantastic. Ewan was great as Black Mask. Jurnee Smollett-Bell was awesome as Black Canary. Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress is wooden at first but very quickly becomes golden. Chris Messina was appropriately creepy and disturbing as Victor Zsasz. And Margot Robbie knocked it out of the park. I hated her as Harley after Suicide Squad. I doubted she'd match up to Kaley Cucuo's voice acting of the new animated series. But she was fantastic. The performances elevated an at times fairly bad script to often pretty damn good scenes. It had problems, but it was a really good, solid movie. That, unlike most DC films, was entertaining. Overall, I'd give it a 7/10. I can't say I was overwhelmed, but I wasn't underwhelmed either. I was mostly just whelmed. I'd say it's a very good popcorn movie. I'd say it's more in the realm of Fast and Furious, than The Dark Knight. Turn your brain off, pop some corn, and enjoy 2 hours of good fun and great fight scenes.

This show is incredibly well written. The whole main cast, from Dr Psycho and Clayface to the stars Harley and Poison Ivy are loveable and likeable. There is clever humour, great animation, incredible voice acting (OMG Kaley Cucuo is so much better behind a mic than behind a camera), everything about it is spot on. It's one of the most near-flawless series' I've ever seen, right up there with Netflix Daredevil season 3. This, Stranger Things season 3, Mandalorian, Vikings... all the streaming services' are knocking it out of the park lately. I've been talking about it non-stop and recommending it to all my nerd friends since the first episode. It's just a shame I live in the UK so have to pirate it (come on DC, get your act together, and let me give you my money!).

No spoilers in this review. I just came out of the cinema. I had a smile on my face. I cried twice. I think they resolved the various plot threads about as well as they possibly could have. I wasn't surprised by the main twist, but I watch loads of theory videos, so I heard the idea months ago. If you haven't heard it, it probably would be a surprise. I would recommend seeing it quickly before it gets spoiled for you. My review - 8/10 I think it would have only been better if The Last Jedi had done more to set it up, but Rian Johnson wasted the 2 hours he was given. Not Abrams fault, but he worked around it admirably.

I've just been to see Crimes of Grindelwald today, and I rather liked it. There were a couple of issues - the lighting was sometimes too dark during Gellert's escape, and sometimes the camera got too close and cut too often during the CGI beast chase in the French Ministry, when it's CGI so could have been a wide angle shot just as easily. Minerva McGonnagall should be one of Dumbledore's students in his Transfiguration class at the time too. The story was compelling, everyone's journey had an emotional arc that drove them in a believable way. Some people are complaining about the end reveal of Credence's heritage, but considering we have 3 more films left and Grindelwald, who told him, is an evil, amoral Dark Lord, it's a fair bet he's lying. At this point, judging the movie on the basis of Credence's heritage is judging Fantastic Beasts on less than half the story. That'd be like stopping reading Philosopher's Stone halfway through and never finding out Quirrel was the real villain, not Snape. Depp was actually fantastic as Grindelwald (which I didn't expect, I had been very disappointed Colin Farrell wouldn't be playing him), Jude Law was a very convincing Young Dumbledore. Everyone sold their roles, with the exception of Eddie Redmayne's occasional slip into that annoying trend of whisper acting. Leda being the last LeStrange makes no sense because it makes Bellatrix LeStrange's husband Rodolphus' birth impossible...unless Credence is truly Corvus after all, as I suspect. The CGI of the beasts was nearly flawless, the magic use was much better than the first film too. My only real problem is that the Zouwu looked like the Ghost of Christmas Present from Muppet's Christmas Carol had a baby with the Luck Dragon from Never Ending Story. It was all I could think of during any scene with the Zouwu. This film did everything the first film did, but better. 9/10 would definitely recommend.

Most of this movie is absolutely average, but Tom Hardy both as Eddie Brock and Venom is attention-grabbing every time he's on the screen. The Venom fight scenes are inventive, brutal and damn entertaining. Tom Hardy's acting is as incredible as we've come to expect from him. The Venom/Eddie interactions are often hilarious. However, most of the other character's come across quite flat, the plot is fairly cliche and pedestrian, the first act drags quite a bit, and not enough is explained about how the main villain somehow has intergalactic rocket technology but every other technology on Earth is the same as reality. This film has all the basic building blocks of a great movie, I think with a better writer a Venom sequel would be amazing. Especially if it was brought into the Marvel universe proper. There is one truly awful, terrible thing about this film - the theme song. I would be so happy for theme songs to make a comeback, it's been too long since the glory days of the Will Smith themes from Men In Black, or the LL Cool J song from Deep Blue Sea, but this Eminem song is hilariously bad.

I thought Alicia Vikander was very good, and is perfect casting for films based off the modern games - just as Angelina Jolie was for the films based on the early games - but the script of the 2018 reboot was not great. She did the best she could with what she was given, and in fact most of the cast turned in good performances. However, the plot is a chore to struggle through, Lara doesn't come away from her quest having learned anything new about herself or the world, and the ending seems far too arrogant about assuming it would have a sequel - and that we would want to see political/business espionage by the look of it. I want to see Lara chasing down lost treasures and beating the living hell out of thugs, not taking down a shadowy organisation who have control of the Croft family businesses after she willingly and with no coercion signed a power of attorney form for them. That film sounds like it'd just be a long court case and a lot of paperwork. I would love to see Alicia Vikander have another go at Lara, but they need to get a better writer in first.

I watched this on Netflix today. I don't know why I bothered. As usual with an Eli Roth film, it has no idea what it's trying to be. Revenge? Suspense filled thriller? Horror? Home invasion? Dark comedy? Roth tried to blend all of them but as is his wont forgot to come up with a plot to tie it all together. This isn't a story, it's just a loose series of events. Keanu Reeves, bless his little cotton socks, tried his best, and at times managed to elevate truly awful writing to just mediocre, which was impressive for someone who usually shows all the facial expression range of a granite slab. 3/10. And that might be a touch too generous. The best part of this 'film' is the credits, as you sigh in relief knowing it's over.