Lynnmarie Thompson

On my favorite movies of all time. Wildly inventive visuals; incredible, innovative fight choreography; very catchy songs—this is a film I’ll go to over and over and over again when I need cheering up. Just to be as fair as possible, I will admit to finding the final triumphant song and dance performance mildly creepy in the way it displays the giant, monolithic, overly muscular humanoid figures one might recall of late 20th century Eastern European Communist propaganda. But that is probably unintended by the filmmaker and just my old age speaking. So, overall, I love this film. It’s from 2022, so it hasn’t been out long enough for it to make the usual lists of Bollywood films worth watching. Go watch it. I think you’ll like it.

Wow. From the reviews, I was hoping for a good time. But this was an awful stinker. And not even in the “so bad that it’s good” sort of way. I felt so bad for Gabriel Byrne. He’s been in enough great and very good films that seeing him in THIS piece of drippy dreck is mystifying. He was maybe being blackmailed to appear as one of the leads? Perhaps a beloved relative begged him and he couldn’t say no? This film is just bad in every way possible. And now I need to find something to cleanse my mind of its icky, nasty dreckiness. Ugh. Something so fabulously bat-s**t nutso that its over-the-top crazy campiness will purify and uplift my soul—“Lair of the White Worm,” for example. Baby Hugh Grant, here I come!