Wake Up Dead Man Knives Out Three: The End Of A Deal

Rian Johnson gives up.

The first Knives Out film was good, the second was bad, but the third is meh. Whilst it is better than the second film which was out and out trash, it is an effort in passive watching and little more. By that I mean the film feels very low energy and as though it was done just to make another one rather than out of a genuinely good idea, or need.

Josh Brolin commands the film admirably, but everyone else is just turning out for the pay check, even Craig’s fateful inspector feels like a flanderised version of himself from the previous films. Craig’s Blanc feels at times almost cartoonishly impotent or incompetent, and behaves at times in a way that is entirely alien to how we have seen him up until that point. Bad character writing.

The commentary of the film is on religion and how it divides us, but I suppose if done in a more effeminate way, is still good I guess, would arguably be the message of the film. Personally, I am not very religious, but I can imagine how if you were you might find elements of this film highly objectionable.

Overall, this feels like it was done to satisfy the Netflix demand for new content and not out of need, or due to some great new idea.

2.5/5

Pros.

It is watchable

Brolin

It has a few laughs

Cons.

There are too many underdeveloped characters

The preaching

It feels purposeless

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Only Murders In The Building Season 5: A Quest For Meaning

Summary

The murders trio are back.

I have to say whilst very watchable I think this season was weaker than some of the others and had a number of needless asides and B stories. Straight off the bat the focus on Lester the doorman was a bit bland, the murder itself wasn’t all that interesting. The mobster stuff was always reliable throughout the season and could perk up any episode. I thought that this was mainly due to Bobby Cannavale and Tea Leoine really brought it in terms of Murder’s guest stars.

The billionaires who like to play board games were a lot of fun and once again brought the season up. Widely I would say that it is the central trio who brought the season down and that everyone else was doing a hell of a lot of the heavy lifting. Charles is having a loneliness arc and questioning where he will end up, I feel like the show has been through this with him before, and it was a huge missed opportunity to not have him get with Leoine and have her remain at the Arconia with him. Then Oliver is debating leaving the building which again feels like its been done before yet you know he won’t actually leave. Disney needs to decide if they want to give Meryl Streep more money and make her a regular. Then you have Mabel who has a jealousy arc which just feels like giving her something to do.

Overall, this season feels like a series going through the motions trying to find a reason to carry on, but the Tina Fey stuff next season seems interesting.

3/5

Pros.

The guest characters

Some good jokes

The billionaires

Cons.

The main cast feel like they are going through the motions

It feels a bit aimless

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Yellowjackets Season Three Overview: Falling Off

Summary

After a long hiatus the yellowjackets are back.

So by and large this was the worst season of the show. The fundamental question regarding that is why that is, was it because they never really had a clear plan for this show? Was it because the writers strike changed thing? Or are they trying to spin their wheels for as long as they can in order to profit off the show?

Who is to say, however, I will say that the first half of this season is damn near unwatchable with how slowly it is paced. The amount of filler that is being injected into this part of the show, would make even Millie Bobby Brown blush, it is infuriating to watch as you are left with week after week with basically nothing of major importance happening.

You have the season long mystery of who killed Lottie, Simone Kessell, which just feels like it comes out of nowhere, and the revelation of who did it was both obvious and also uninspiring. It just feels like such a missed opportunity, as there was far more ground they could have covered and directions they could have gone in if they had not done that.

Then you have what I think is the biggest flaw of the season Shauna. So Shauna, Melaine Lynskey, has always been shown to be cold blooded, however, in this season she goes off the rails in a cartoonish way trying to feed a woman a piece of her arm, and vowing to go after her husband and daughter who have left her and reclaim her Queenhood, meaning the savage side of her from her time in the Wilderness. This is coupled with the teen timeline where Shauna seemingly becomes even more of a supervillain as she can force other people to do what she wants with a bark and manages to keep well over ten people locked down when they want to leave with a glare. The writing here is absolutely stupid as it makes no logical sense how one small young woman could keep all of these other people at her mercy with one gun, yes she could shoot one of them but the rest would still get away. The writers I assume would explain Shauna’s fall to the dark side in the teen years by trauma resulting from the death of her child, yet even in that context this seems far fetch and simply as bad writing. They have turned Shauna into this almost psychopathic killer when she really wasn’t presenting as that before, they have likely done this to create drama and not for any other reason. It feels like extreme flanderisation.

Overall a step back in almost everyway from the previous two seasons.

2/5

Pros.

It still has some good moments

Hilary Swank

Cons.

The death of Lottie

How they change Shauna’s character

The pacing

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A Simple Favour Two: Blake Lively Runs Damage Control

Summary

The internet’s favourite bogeywoman Blake Lively, Amber Heard has run off into obscurity and Rachel Zegler is a bit played out, makes her film comeback in what might be the most chillingly telling performance of her career.

For those unaware, in the first film, we were introduced to Emily, Lively, a character who fakes her own death and then tries to blame it on someone else, Kendrick, and who has a child admitted to killing her father along with her sister. Therein lies my half joke half speculative theory, how far does life imitate art? Could it not be that Lively was drawn to the character for her own cold and bitter ways, both seek to incriminate someone else for something they did not do in order to punish them.

Moving off Lively for a moment the question with this film becomes why? Why wait well over 5 years to make this sequel and who was demanding for it to continue. Was it the director who has not had much success in recent years, Lively in an attempt to rehabilitate her image that was soured long before her most recent scandal who’s to say.

I think this film knows it doesn’t really have a purpose and so just repeats a lot of the plot beats from the first film just with a few characters swapped around for good measure.

Overall, this was doomed to cost Amazon money.

0.5/5

Pros.

It is hilariously telling

Cons.

It is unnecessary

It is boring

It is a rehash

Lively

It has pacing issues

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From Season Three: The Wheels Come Unstuck

Summary

Answers are revealed and far, far more questions are asked.

So, I would say upon reflection that this is probably the most polarising of the series released so far, I saw a lot of angry fan backlash to this season. For the most part I agree with it, I think the pacing this season was bad, I think this is likely a result of the writers strikes and then needing to make more of less. I think the fact that we only got a very limited amount of night scenes which are often the best in the show and a lot of this season happened over a couple of days was disappointing. Pound for pound we got a lot less of the monsters this season overall.

As for the mysteries and answers I thought Tabitha’s, Catalina Sandrio Moreno, time in the real world was a little too short lived, they could have done more there but they didn’t. Moreover, the reveal of the baby being a creature and Tabitha and Jade, David Alpay, being reincarnations of previous From residents all felt a bit too much like fan fiction. In the former’s case people liked Smiley and wanted him back, in the latter’s case it felt like they didn’t know where to take the mystery so read something on reddit and was like yes I’ll do that.

When the show was good, such as during the barn scene in the first episode and the ambulance scene later in the season, it was really good and reminded you of why you like the show. However, there was just too much talking and filler this season and that crucially was its central problem.

Overall, a step back from previous seasons.

4/5

Pros.

A few good scenes

Possible better reveals being set up

The man in yellow

Some good scares

Cons.

Far too much filler

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The Rig Season 2 Overview: A Sinking Feeling

Summary

Amazon needs to burn more money so they made a sequel series to something that didn’t need it.

The Rig came out a while ago, and I wouldn’t say it was popular, I never saw anyone talk about it on social media for example, and for the most part the ending of the first season closed out the loop. This secondary season was in no way needed.

There also seems to be far less to do this time around, the new season is mainly split between a refugee camp, post wave, and a new rig, if you would permit me. For the most part it is just folks stood around talking, and the few times they do venture outside of this it looks cheap.

I found the characters also to be much more unlikable this time around, we some of the relationships not making a lick of sense, it felt as though they had in new writers who just didn’t get the characters and couldn’t be bothered to read the scripts for the first season so just wrote this with no frame of reference.

Also and this may be a little mean so I’ll keep it brief but Emily Hampshire has clearly had plastic surgery and it is distracting in a bad way, she looks uncanny valley but in real life. Also because of whatever she has done whenever she tries to emote her face doesn’t really change in any way and that also takes you out of it.

Overall, a disappointing and unnecessary second season.

1/5

Pros.

It is laughably bad

Cons.

It doesn’t justify its existence

It has a terrible ending

Emily Hampshire is distracting

It is too bloated

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Velma Season 2 Overview: Please God Let It Stay Dead

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

The Scooby Doo franchise is once again vandalised.

There is nothing that can be said about this show that hasn’t already been said. This show is the most clear cut example of a film or tv show that hates its IP, not only is this a self-insert for Mindy Kaling, the woman who joked about how she had forced a man to kiss her which is sexual harassment, but it just hates the Scooby Doo brand.

Velma, voiced by Kailing, could only be more annoying if she did everything in a high pitch squeaky voice, she is hateful towards men, towards women, toward anyone that is not like her. Honestly in real life she would be the villain, despite her saying on the show she’s so progressive she is actually really horrible and judgemental to everyone around her, the show thinks it can get around this by going oh but we acknowledge she’s a bad person so its fine. Nope having horrible unlikeable characters is all on the writers.

They pull out all the cards to make this edgy, with the sex and the violence but they need to realise the reason other adult animations can get away with that sort of thing is because people care about the characters, no one cares about Velma. I was honestly surprised there wasn’t a scene of Velma having sexual relations with the well-known great dane, but hey Warner Brothers Discovery said she can’t have the dog appear in the show. The fact I expected to see that shows you just how low and gutter trash this show is, it will do anything for a cheap shock laugh.

They also made Scrappy Doo the villain of the season, which because of how the show is made him the hero of the season instead, which is an odd feeling when it comes to Scrappy, but hey ho. Velma dies in the final battle so hopefully she and the series never come back.

Overall, just as bad as the first season but now a little bit extra stale.

0/5

Pros.

None, this was a few hours of my life I’ll never get back

Cons.

Kailing

It is not funny

It hates the IP

It is frequently gross for no rhyme or reason

Velma is an awful person

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The Watchers: Nepobaby The Movie

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

M.Night’s nepobaby tries to make a film like her dad.

Dakota Fanning has a lot of bad luck picking projects. It is a shame for her as she deserved better than this.

The film has a group of people get lost in a wood and then they have to perform every night for the watchers, shapeshifting creatures trying to mimic humans, they have to escape and one of them follows the gang back to civilisation. That’s the whole plot summed up for you in two and a bit lines, the film goes on and on about its lore as though it is the most interesting thing in the world, it seems to think it is incredibly deep when it actual fact you can see the bottom.

The twist is that it is not Fanning’s character that is the watcher but rather the old woman who has been menacing but is supposedly a goody. Again this twist is so obvious that M. Night would have laughed and thrown it in the fire and questioned whether what he had for dinner that night was throwing him off. Here however, it is treated as though it is clever. It is not.

Moreover, the villainous fairies from Irish myth have been cropping up a lot recently in horror and as such I didn’t find them all that scary as it was just the same thing again. They are freaky to look at in their watching mode, but other than that there is nothing really scary about this film either.

Overall, M. Night should give his daughter some lessons and help her learn how to make a good twist.

2/5

Pros.

The watchers are freaky to look at when not human

It has a good atmosphere, that it does nothing with

Cons.

The twist is terrible

It is not deep

It isn’t scary

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Poker Face: A Shorter Slightly Worse Knives Out

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A woman, Natasha Lyonne, who can always tell when people are lying heads out on the road to solve crimes. It is such a simple premise you wonder why it hasn’t been done before.

Rian Johnson is a controversial figure, a man of highs and lows, sometimes he makes something very good Looper sometimes he makes something very bad The Last Jedi. His Knives Out films were woefully not of the same quality, with the Netflix sequel being dumber and more distracted. Clearly he was working on other things whilst writing it. As such this series could have either been great or terrible, there was no room for in between.

Turns out life won’t be put in a box and despite my previous statement this is a pretty mixed show.

Now there are some things that it does well Lyonne is a strong and likable lead and you care about what happens to her character. I think if you had got someone who was less affable to do this show then it would have just been bad, as even in some of the harder to get through episodes Lyonne’s charm just about makes it bearable.

The episodes themselves fall into more of a villain of the week sort of thing, though the series tries for a wider overarching plot, for the most part it is oh the lead has tripped over a corpse better find out who killed them. Some of these episodes are good, usually the ones with notable guest stars who get to have fun, but some aren’t. The issue with villain of the week storytelling is that not all the episodes are created equal, some get the guest stars and more time to do interesting things and some are filler, and that is not just true here but in a lot of shows.

The issue with this show is that it can have a few bad episodes in a row before you get a good one and because of that it is a slog to get through.

If you are a Knives Out fan then you will almost certainly be into this show.

Overall, fun at times but mostly slow and predictable.

2.5/5

Pros.

Lyonne

Some of the episodes are fun

It has some good ideas

Cons.

Some of the episodes are dull

It is not as smart as it thinks it is

The ending is underwhelming

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Only Murders In The Building: Season III Overview

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

The murders continue as the dynamic frays

You can have too much of a good thing, that simply is a fact.

The first two seasons of this show were good if not great, and did a lot for all involved whereas this season instead gave of the idea that the series was running out of ideas. It was not helped by the fact that a theme of this season was separation and the gang moving in different directions each of which feel a little too familiar. The show doesn’t seem to understand how to write solo stories for their central trio without them ending up in a relationship as all did here. I have no issue with Gomez or Short’s characters relationships as I thought they were well done and the two characters played off well with each other, but Steve Martin’s characters relationship storyline made no sense and was just ill fitting.

The mystery of the season is okay and it isn’t immediately obvious though I would say you can see it from the midpoint. Broadly, I would say the highlight of the season is Meryl Streep as she is easily the most compelling new character.

Overall, there shouldn’t be a season four.

2/5

Pros.

Streep

The new romances, bar Martin’s

Cons.

Its repetitive

It feels like it’s run out of steam

It wastes the talents of Ashley Park

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