Tags: Debilitating Sequelitis
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
It’s a potentially promising setup for a slam-bang finale to what has been, despite its flaws, one of the brightest and most entertaining franchises around. Unfortunately, the slapdash plot is pretty much a disaster. A string of miscalculations hamper the fun. And a late revelation, when you stop and think about it, undermines most of the preceding drama.
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Oz the Great and Powerful in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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C |
** |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
Oz the Great and Powerful is brightly colorful, sincere and meant for children. That doesn’t make it good, exactly, but at least it’s basically the right
kind of movie, which is saying something these days, alas.
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C |
** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Ice Age: Continental Drift is more like a Happy Meal than a movie. It’s another serving of exactly the same product that millions of families have been served before and will come back to again and again. Its brand-name familiarity and reassuring sameness are its stock in trade. Nothing is different except for the toys; last time it was dinosaurs, this time it’s pirates. It’s more resolutely like the three previous
Ice Age movies than they are like themselves.
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D |
** |
-3|
Adults*
I don’t mind that
Prometheus raises big questions without ultimately answering them. Unanswered questions are part of life, and there’s no reason you can’t have them in art. I do mind that
Prometheus raises big questions and has virtually nothing interesting, insightful or thoughtful to say about them. If the questions aren’t interesting in this film, why should anyone care whether they’re answered in another one?
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
It’s all acceptably diverting, and not actively unpleasant like the 2002 sequel. There are no grand twists or revelations comparable to the truth about the “galaxy” in the original. What the film could most use, I think, is a wide-eyed uninitiate like Linda Fiorentino in the original or Rosario Dawson in the sequel — but one from 1969, which would offer a fresh twist on the outsider’s experience of the MIB’s nutty world.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Visuals aside,
Cars 2 is the first Pixar film ever (or at least since
A Bug’s Life) that could one could easily imagine as a DreamWorks film—circa
Shark Tale perhaps, with its punningly fishified analog of the human world. Or, with its frenetic action and gimmickry,
Cars 2 bears some resemblance to a Blue Sky Studios cartoon (circa
Robots, say, or
Rio, with its world culture flavor). In a word, not only is
Cars 2 mediocre, it doesn’t even feel like mediocre Pixar.
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C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
Was Catholic novelist Tim Powers’ 1987 historical fantasy-adventure novel
On Stranger Tides in some way the inspiration, or an inspiration, not only for this fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick, but for the whole franchise?
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C+ |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
In the years since
Tron, of course, video games have come closer and closer to approximating reality, and computer-graphics in movies have gone further still — and, in a way, this is the problem with
Tron: Legacy.
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(Newly available on Blu-ray/DVD) Rather than a static motion picture,
Fantasia was originally conceived as a repertoire, a selection of presentations that over time could be augmented by new pieces while old ones were retired, like an orchestra rotating its concert lineup … Ten years ago, amid the wreckage at the end of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, the Disney studio marked
Fantasia’s 60th anniversary with
Fantasia 2000, a film intended to honor in a way the original repertory conception of
Fantasia.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
The seventh Harry Potter movie, based on the seventh and final book, is here at last, yet the saga is not over. Extending their biggest cash cow of the millennium into next year, Warner Bros. has split
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in two, with Part 2 coming next year, almost a full decade after the series started.
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C- |
**½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
As a collection of parts, almost an anthology of ideas,
Dawn of the Dinosaurs is fitfully entertaining … Alas,
Dawn of the Dinosaurs also marks Blue Sky Studios’ descent into the kind of crude and suggestive humor they once left to DreamWorks.
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C- |
** |
+0|
Teens & Up
If
Dead Man’s Chest was inspiration gone amok,
At World’s End is more — much, much,
much more — of the same, only without the inspiration. In every respect it outdoes its predecessor, except in charm, entertainment and fun. Add
Pirates of the Caribbean to the roster of franchises foundering on the rocks the third time out.
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C |
** |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Shrek the Third continues the deliberate bad taste that is the franchise’s hallmark, with the usual hit-and-miss results… What’s missing is the heart that leavened the first two films.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Expressions like “Good things come in threes” and “Third time’s the charm” may have their place in the world, but when it comes to comic-book movies, so far at least, anything after two is all downhill.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Ice Age 2 isn’t really a meltdown, but it’s no bolt from a Blue Sky.
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D+ |
*½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
More precisely, it’s a “funny family action film” in the
Fantastic Four mold — that is, a movie whose key qualification as kid entertainment is that it isn’t good enough for grown‑ups. Too bad. Our kids deserve better. For that matter, so do we.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Beyond that, unlike
Reloaded, which featured an
impressive but hardly groundbreaking freeway chase scene as its
biggest set piece,
Revolutions has startling new sights to
offer, notably a spectacular siege scene that recalls the first
act of
The Empire Strikes
Back with its Walker attack on the Hoth Rebel base. In
fact,
The Matrix Revolutions arguably had the potential to
be the
Empire Strikes Back to The Matrix’s
Star
Wars, had the Wachowskis not squandered that opportunity six
months ago with
Reloaded.
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C- |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
Morpheus’s expository speech to Neo in the first film about
the history of the power behind the Matrix — particularly the bit
about the solar issue and the moment when he holds up the battery — is both the least persuasive and the least interesting thing
about the film. It’s a perfunctory plot-level explanation that
one accepts for the sake of the action and the hero’s journey,
not something one particularly cares about for its own sake.
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D- |
** |
-3|
Adults*
As directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator), Hannibal is
stylishly mounted and has its entertaining moments. Ultimately,
though, it’s like most horror movies: repellent where it should
have been frightening, and, in the end, uninvolving and hollow.
So many characters suffer such ghastly things, yet none of it
seems to matter much.
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C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
If Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over were consistent, that
protest would become Juni’s mantra, repeated every thirty seconds
or so from that point on until the end of the film. Then again,
if Spy Kids 3-D were consistent — about anything at all — it might actually start making some kind of sense.
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C- |
** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
In the original Spy Kids, dashing spy parents Gregorio
and Ingrid Cortez (Antonio Banderas and Carla Guigino) exchanged
the glamorous world of espionage for the even greater adventure
of raising a family. Their children Carmen and Juni (Alexa Vega
and Daryl Sabara) weren’t actually "Spy Kids" — a term that in
the movie actually applied to a line of robotic child warriors
designed by the only somewhat sinister Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming) — but became entangled in their parents’ exotic former life when
the latter were captured by Floop’s forces.
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C- |
** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Beyond more action and bigger effects, the sequel brings
nothing new to the table. You’ll wait in vain for satirical
"revelations" about the presence of aliens among us to match the
wit of the jokes in the original about cab drivers or the World’s
Fair. Instead, we get limp gags like the one about the Post
Office being staffed by aliens. (Why? Is it a joke about postal
efficiency? The "going postal" stereotype? The fact that they
make rounds? What?)
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F |
½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
As an enthusiastic fan of the first
Babe, I wanted to
believe in the sequel, even if it did turn out to be too dark for
young kids. After all, Miller was also the screenwriter and
producer for the original film, directed by Chris Noonan. So I
came to
Babe: Pig in the City with high hopes.
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