Nigel D'Sa

Pity, this could have been amusing - but the comic tone is off. Jon Hamm can’t quite pull off Fletch, and director Mottolo lacks finesse on this film. Not exactly a bad film but one wants to step in and direct the actors half the time. Script isn’t bad but the perfs and mise en scene needed a bit of a Cohen bros boost. It’s all rather lackluster and drab.

Starts off well enough although the lead looks like a Beetlejuice subplot. Unfortunately by end of ep 02 we realize we’re in the hands of a feminist coven of middling writers with a tenuous grip on believability. Pass.

Body horror films can be riveting, thought provoking, even cathartic. Sadly this awful schlock is none of the above. It felt like it was made by a mentally disturbed person who sees the world in crassly distorted and oversimplified way. As there was nothing and no one to root for, it wasn’t scary, just stultifying and over long. I’m not sure why it gets rated highly, but then lately it’s usually the ones that lower audience IQ that critics love.

I couldn’t figure out what the film was about. The main character, Sam, a dwarf with a personality disorder, recalls being an au pair to a troubled young teen. In her spare time Sam is a performance artist (she describes herself as a standup comic but she never says anything funny, and neither do her ‘comic’ friends. They tend to be obsessed with comforting each other.) 90% of the dialogue is stunningly opaque - devoid of meaning and purpose within the story. Unfortunately the story culminates in a laughably contrived fantasy as we realize the au pair is mentally ill, mendacious and thus an unreliable narrator. The lead performance is passable but the father-daughter pair are cringe-worthy. It looks and feels like a student film made by the type of ideological drones Canadian universities are churning out by the truck load these days. I laughed at the main characters and cheered the purported villain. Then I turned it off and went back to playing with my dog.

Barely comprehensible - it’s Iike it’s set in some kind of alternative reality derived from watching too many nonsense tv shows. Couldn’t relate to a single character and didn’t care what happened to them. The script is awful - the writer probably never set foot in NYC. Pretentious, disjointed, scattershot, unrealistic, contrived, patronizing and vacuous.

It didn’t quite reach the fever dream virtuosity of its predecessor, but the shift to world building and drama was promising. Unfortunately it lacked cohesion - the many parts - Furiosa’s hometown, her abduction into Dementus’ gang, the Citadel state and its rulers, the adventures with Jack, the Bullet Farm - don’t add up to much in the long run. Some key scenes were weakly expressed - like when Dementus again destroys Furiosa’s hope and heart, it isn’t conveyed very effectively. Some CGI looked rather hoaky - flames and fire scenes especially. Furiosa isn’t as interesting a character as Mad Max was. She’s either glaring at something or performing amazing feats. Could have developed her a bit more. The final showdown was surprisingly dialogue-ridden and unwieldy - didn’t quite fit. Chris Hemsworth was excellent throughout, but his character was underwritten. Many missed opportunities between Dementus and Furiosa that could have enriched the drama. And most of these brutal male characters were fairly chaste which I found surprising.

Unmitigated drivel. Is it comedy? Tone-deaf absurdities packaged in Hallmark meets National Geographic mise-en-scène, No attempt at realistic characters or performances. The southern ‘swamp girl’ speaks English with better diction than the townsfolk. Lol.

Season 1 was terrific, but the writing really slumped in season 2. Gone is the comedy, the brisk, edgy charm, and comic yet harrowing plight of its main characters. Now instead the writers take their characters too seriously - and we get sappy unrealistic introspection - as Carmy bores us with a whiny monologue about his childhood at an AA meeting, and the four black chefs prepare in different ways for re-opening. Dullest of all was the dessert chef episode - i literally switched it off halfway thru to write this negative review, lol.

Paint-by-numbers show with some terrible writing. I couldn't get past the silly pilot episode.

It’s not a very good film - there’s a lack of dramatic impetus - and unless you are aware of the Manson family murders, you will wonder what the point of the Sharon Tate segment was. Brad Pitt was cool. DiCaprio was alright. Mostly it’s a nostalgia piece with some funny and some tense moments but not much in between - in which case it fails to properly emulate the cinematic epoch it admires - it can’t tell a good story.