Alyx Jaraba

A fantastic cast makes this romp of Shakespearean misunderstandings and entanglements absolutely impossible to not enjoy. The dialogue sings, particularly any time you have Carell and Gosling bantering about manliness. Stone puts her smaller screen time to good use with her great physical comedy and pure charm. Moore holds her own while playing the straight man to the chaos crumbling her family, while Bacon goes against his more leading man type as the other man of convenience rather than adventure. Tomei plays a familiar role as the one-night stand who turns out to be an unavoidable spoiler, but she’s so good at it she can be fresh every time, and this script is rich with lines for her to scaldingly drop to flare up drama.

A overly slick film held together purely on the personalities of Dwayne Johnson and Neve Campbell. Trying to set this in anything resembling a real Hong Kong does it no favors, it only makes the ludicrous action setups more glaring. If a monster had shown up and started swiping parts of the Pearl away it would have felt as if the film had suddenly realized its genre, but no, instead we are supposed to buy that the ‘most secure and safe’ super scraper in history is actually stupidly easy for a few dozen thugs to turn into a fatal trap. It’s not unusual for action films to ignore physics, almost expected, but this one can’t keep its own rules consistent and comes off like a pitch party for ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if’ prompts. The plot is transparently thin and the cinematography doesn’t enrich anything. Johnson and Campbell are the only reason this film gets a second star, they’re very believable as a loving couple even while delivering lines that are so cheesy you expect them to swill wine to wash it down.

Very good cinematography and the creature effects are impressive. The English dub, however, is inconsistent in quality, with some of the tone being downright grating and making some characters just annoying, which is a shame as the actors themselves seem to be giving worthy performances. The writing is hard to judge since I don’t speak Thai and don’t know how much was lost in translation, but the pacing can drag during what are meant to be impactful emotional moments and the film never seems to hit the beats perfectly in order to create a sense of tension.