"Deliver Us From Evil" Movie Review

        Deliver Us From Evil is directed by Scott Derrickson and stars Eric Bana, Edgar Ramirez, and Olivia Munn. It is about two police officers who start to find that some of the crime they are finding is connected, and when things start happening to one of the officers, they seek help from a priest (Edgar Ramirez) to stop what is going on.

            I really enjoyed this movie overall. From the beginning, it is very interesting. From then on, it continued to invite in new things to make it more interesting. And the film also has some very creepy horror elements. There is some disturbing imagery and there are some tension-building scenes. There were times when an image would pop up on the screen for less than half a second. The images themselves were creepy, but it was even creepier that we did not get a chance to absorb the entire image, so we missed some of it.

            But the film could have been scarier. Scott Derrickson also directed Sinister, which I am a very big fan of. He is very good with directing horror, but here, there were not enough chances for him to show that. And some of the times when he could have shown it, false scares were used. Someone hears movement… They slowly go toward it… It is getting louder… …It was a bird! There are some jump scares in this movie, but not too much, so I will allow that and not take off any points for the film. But there are some lame scares here that really do not work. Though, sometimes Derrickson can make them work.

            The horror scenes are very well directed here. A lot of the tension has to do with what arrangement of shots Scott Derrickson decides to use. Derrickson is also very good with the visual elements of the scares.

            The plot here is very original. There are some little clichés here and there, but the actual plot itself is very different. That helped the enjoyment a lot. That was what helped keep my interest and what helped me want to know what was going to happen next.

            The little clichés I was talking about are in some of the scares. There is some dialogue that is clichéd, and the construction of the scenes is somewhat clichéd. But there is one cliché inside of the plot. It has to do with the main character. He is a police officer that does not believe. Things start happening to him. You know exactly what direction that is going in, and it goes in that direction.

            While the main character does have a cliché in the construction of him, at least he does have development. It took a while, but I eventually got invested into his character. He was the only one with development. His partner was there for comic relief. The family was there so he could have a family. The priest is probably the only other character that is actually essential to the narrative.

            There is a twist-type plot turn directly before the third act starts and this twist-type plot turn was very interesting. There was a thing I liked and I thing I did not like in it. Things started happening to the main character earlier on in the film. Those things were unclear. This twist-type plot turn tells us about them. Some of it was cool and I liked it. Though, one thing ruined the scariest element of the film. It stopped that element of the film from being scary at all anymore.

            At one point, the film stops being a horror film and turns into a thriller. Because of this, there are some action scenes. Those action scenes are poorly directed. Scott Derrickson is not an action director, so I understand why the action scenes are not the best directed action scenes of all time. But the action scenes are poorly directed. The style of the action is quick-cut editing. For every movement one person makes, there are three cuts. I had no idea what was going on. Therefore, the action was not good at all.

            The last ten or twenty minutes of this movie follow the same end formula as many other horror movies out there. I will not say what type of scene it ends with, but it would not be hard to guess. For what type of scene it is, it definitely could have been scary, which it was not. Though, I will say that it was different from other scenes in the same style that other movies have.

            Overall, I guess I did like the film. Though, I would not recommend paying the money to see it in the theater. It is not worth it. It is an alright movie. There are things I liked about it and things I did not like about it.

"Godzilla" (2014) Movie Review

         Godzilla (2014) is directed by Gareth Edwards and stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Wantanabe, and Bryan Cranston. It is the well-known story of… Godzilla. Except here, the plot is very different from the plot of the original 1954 version. Because of that, I will provide no plot details so I will not accidentally disclose any plot points to people who have still not seen the film yet.

            As far as enjoyment goes, I really enjoyed this movie. It is very fast-paced and provides just enough fantastic action to thrill audience members. There are throw downs in this movie that are incredible, and the visual effects for the monsters are excellent. Down to very detail, they look fantastic. The sound is also excellent in this movie. When Godzilla does his shriek, it is awesome. The score here is also very good. It is not only very exciting and very powerful, it also provides very eerie music during some scenes to show how scary and menacing some of this is for the humans. Although the music seems to be copied straight from 2001: A Space Odyssey, that film had no original score, so I will not count that against this film.

            This is a very well-directed movie. Throughout the movie, everything looks very good. During the scenes with Godzilla, everything looks great. Some of the shots used in this movie are incredible. There is one POV shot that really shows how gigantic and menacing these monsters are. The ways the action sequences are directed make them incredible. The only reason I will not say the directed did a great job is because during the dialogue scenes, he uses the usual cut-back-and-forth-between-characters thing, which is not a flaw, it is just that he does not direct the film greatly throughout all of it.

            As far as the performances go, they are good overall. Bryan Cranston is great in this film, but he is not in it that much. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is alright, but he should be better as the leader character whose eyes we are seeing all of this happen through. Elizabeth Olsen is good, but she does not have much to do here, either. Ken Wantanabe is good, too. And though he is in the movie more than Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen, he is not in the movie nearly as much as Aaron Taylor-Johnson is.

            Another thing I liked about the film is how different it is. It is not a straight copy off of the original. It is very different and new. Though, my favorite thing about the movie is that it gives some insight on the monsters. It treats them not as big CGI cool beasts that just destroy things; it treats them as animals that could really exist. This adds a lot of realism to the film.

            Speaking of the realism of the film, one of the film’s main goals is to be a realistic Godzilla movie, and, for the most part, it succeeds. Sometimes I did feel the movie was unrealistic. Sometimes I did not quite know if it was realistic or not. But for the movie part, the movie felt realistic.

            Many people who have seen this movie have had problems with Godzilla and how much we see him. I think that it does well in not showing Godzilla too much. It does tease us, and I do not think that should have done, but it does it for the better. I do not have a problem with how much they show Godzilla. I have other problems with the film, though.

            I did say that I liked how different this film was from the original, but sometimes it is way too different. It forgets major plot points and completely makes the plot a completely different plot. I will not take as many points off the film as I normally wood, though. That is because the original film is foreign and sixty years older than this film. I will allow some of it, but not all of it. This film also completely forgot about the moral of the original. It did not have that at all.

            This film also has some movie clichés. The first 25 to 30 minutes of the movie were thoroughly predictable and incredibly familiar. The plot of these first 25 or 30 minutes was clichéd. The characters were clichéd. Everything was clichéd. Luckily, soon after this, a somewhat large plot point happens and the movie takes a different turn in which it is not nearly as clichéd as it was before. Though, there still are some clichés I found in the script here and there.

            I have another very small flaw with the movie. It is that in a few scenes there is some explanatory dialogue. In one of them, the scene called for explanatory dialogue, but the flaw is in the way the dialogue is worded. It is worded like narration of a documentary. Human dialogue is not planned-out, documentary dialogue. It is us improvising. This explanatory dialogue was not like human dialogue.

            My last flaw here is the characters. When a movie does not have much character development, but does not call for us to care about the characters and does not shoot for big character moments, that is alright. This film does not have much character development. At the beginning, there is character development. But after that, it switches to fast-paced plot and no more character development. Though, this film does call for us to care about the characters and does call for big character moments. Therefore, the emotion with the characters does not work.

            I did have flaws with this movie, but I really enjoyed it and it was very well done. It is a good movie.

"A Million Ways to Die in the West" Movie Review

        

            A Million Ways to Die in the West is directed by Seth MacFarlane, the man behind Ted, and it stars: Seth MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, Liam Neeson, Neil Patrick Harris, Amanda Seyfried, Giovanni Ribisi, and Sarah Silverman. There are also many cameos from other actors that I will not spoil. The film is about a very cowardly farmer (Seth MacFarlane) who is dumped by a girl (Amanda Seyfried) who starts dating a rich man (Neil Patrick Harris). The farmer meets a new, mysterious girl (Charlize Theron) who is married to a dangerous bandit (Liam Neeson), and the farmer must find some courage so he can face this bandit because a few things that I will not spoil happen.

            This movie starts out with several shots of huge landscapes in the west with a lot of credits in a font that is a throwback to westerns and very good music that is a big throwback to westerns. The musical throughout the entire film is actually very good. The first ten to fifteen minutes of this movie are very, very funny and I really enjoyed them. Then, the plot starts…

            The plot here is not awful, but it definitely has some problems. The biggest problem I have with the plot is how familiar it is. You could probably tell from what I said about the plot of the movie that there are clichéd elements, but there are much more clichéd elements that I left out. Just about every beat of the plot is clichéd. The film is thoroughly predictable. It seems like two clichéd, typical romance/dramas combined together with a little comedy and action added. Even the characters themselves are clichéd. This film’s narrative is the weakest thing about it.

            Though, I did enjoy this movie overall. There were some dull moments in the movie; it was too long. But I enjoyed most of it and had a really good time with the first fifteen or so minutes. The movie had good comedy overall. The movie was actually very well directed, too. It looks very good and Seth MacFarlane also does a very good job with the camerawork. There are many wide shots used and the few actions scenes are filmed very well. There were some good things in this movie.

            Because this movie is technically a comedy overall, I will talk about the comedy, although after the first thirty minutes the comedy almost virtually stops and there are only a few jokes here and there. I already said that comedy was good overall. I laughed at most of the jokes. There were no gut-busters here, but I was laughing for several seconds after the scene was over sometimes. But there was some comedy that missed here. There was also some over-crude and -dirty comedy in this movie that is not funny and is just disgusting. There are also some times when a joke is taken way too far, beyond being funny. There is also a bit of slapstick comedy in this movie. Though, there is not that much. Despite all of these flaws with the comedy, there is some very clever comedy, too. This movie uses the setting for a lot of its comedy and it all works very well. There is also some comedy that is very conversational. Some jokes fly by and I always like that. There are also some very random outbursts of violence. The first two were very funny, but the rest were not. After a while it seemed as if they were going to start getting Final Destination-like.

            As far as the acting goes, there are some very good performances like those given by Neil Patrick Harris and Charlize Theron. There were some good performances like those given by Seth MacFarlane and Liam Neeson. The rest of the performances were fine. The chemistry between the actors was mostly good, but the chemistry Charlize Theron and Seth MacFarlane had was fantastic. Sometimes the performances did seem as if they were not as good sometimes, though. It was very odd. Some of it has to do with what seemed like the use of improvisation. It seemed like there was improvisation used in several scenes. Sometimes it seemed like the actors were trying to come up with something to say and you could definitely tell that they were acting and takes you out of the movie. Though, sometimes it does seem like two people are really talking and making jokes and it works very, very well. Not all that type of comedy had the audience roaring in laughter, but it did work in what it was shooting for.

            Overall, this is an alright movie. It has good and bad elements too it. I do think of this movie positively, though.

"Godzilla" (1954) Movie Review

        

            The new (and hopefully improved) American version of Godzilla came out on Friday and I will have a review for it up next weekend. In the meantime, we will ignore the 1998 American version of Godzilla and focus on the 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla.

            Godzilla takes place in ‘50s Japan. When a ship gets destroyed in water, another ship is sent to record what happened. That ship gets destroyed, too. Some of the older people believe that it is Godzilla that is doing this. Godzilla, according to old folklore, is a monster that lives in sea and eats all of the fish. Scientists go on an expedition to see if there really is a monster, and they do indeed find a giant monster that has been moved from its natural habitat by testing of nuclear weapons, and now it has soaked up a huge amount of radiation and seems to be unstoppable.

            With a running time as short of 96 minutes, Godzilla has to move very quickly to get the entire story into the movie. It does move very fast and I did enjoy this movie. There were many interesting scenes having to do with the scientists looking to find Godzilla or finding things about Godzilla. There were also exciting scenes in which Godzilla was destroying the city. I thought they were very cool and exhilarating.

            But I do have a flaw with this. In the first five to ten minutes of the movie, it went by so fast that it would skip hours and days on end just to get to a scene that contained something having to do with the plot. It did eventually stop this, but those first few minutes did bother me in that they went too fast and only showed what was important for the plot.

            Another flaw I have with the movie is that there is little character development. We have a few characters that I would call main characters, and they had little-to-no depth. Because of this, in scenes with them that did not have much to do with the central plot of the movie, I was less into the movie. I also did not care much about them when some things that I will not spoil happened, and during emotional scenes with the characters, I was not invested.

            Though, one big positive is that this movie is really well directed. During the dialogue scenes we get a bit of a sense of depth because of the camerawork. A combination of up-close shots and wide shots helped me figure out what one character may be feeling. The destruction scenes with Godzilla are also really well directed. The shots that are used are all wide shots, and the assemblage of shots was very good and the uses of cuts helped make the scene better.

            I thought the premise here was very good. I liked the fact that the firing of nuclear weapons was how Godzilla came to be. And there was a moral at the end having to do with nuclear weapons and mass destruction weapons in general. That theme was the best part of the movie.

            But there is one very unbelievable thing having to do with how Godzilla is alive. It made no sense. There was also one thing that Godzilla could do that went too far and was also very silly and unbelievable.

            The movies also had some very awful choppy editing that could have easily been fixed. It was like no cared while editing the movie.

            Just because the movie is old does not mean I am going to let the flaws slide. I did enjoy the movie, it was very well made, it had a really good premise, it did have a theme, it was exciting sometimes and interesting sometimes, and it also had a very good score, but it has actual movie flaws. There is some choppy editing, there is an unbelievable idea, there are over-the-top things, there is very little character development, and the beginning does movie.

            Overall, I did think Godzilla is an alright movie.

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" Movie Review

 

        The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is directed by Marc Webb and stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, and Dan Dehaan. It is the continuation of the reboots of Spider-Man after The Amazing Spider-Man. I thought that the first was an alright movie. I enjoyed it, but it did have some flaws. It told how Peter Parker became Spider-Man and threw in a villain. Everyone was wondering what this movie would be about. Is it Peter Parker dealing with these two different lives? Is it Spider-Man versus a villain? Is it about the relationship between Peter and Gwen? Is it Peter trying to find out what his father was up to? It is about all of these things.

            I think this film is on the same level as the first. It clearly has many issues, which I will talk about first.

            All of these issues are with the film’s narrative. First off, this film is cluttered with many different storylines. The way the script was written, we will have a scene dealing with one storyline, then a scene dealing with another, then another. Not only is this film being cluttered a flaw in itself, it also brings upon another flaw: the film’s tone is inconsistent. It will jump from a scene of heartfelt drama to a scene of fun, silly comedy. Sometimes it even switches between the scenes because they are going on at the same time. This film is bloated and cluttered, causing for a very slopping narrative.

            The villains here are also a problem. The portrayal of them is on the same level of the portrayal of the villains in Spider-Man 3. The two main villains are the Green Goblin and Electro. The buildup for these two villains is good, but once they really become villains, they do not do much, and they are brought down in two minutes. The villains here are poorly portrayed and pose little threat to Spider-Man. They are weak villains that do not really do anything until the end. There is also one surprise villain at the end a surprise plot point that sets up for Sinister Six, and while it does seem cool, the villain they bring out is terrible.

            My last flaw is not a very big flaw here. It is about the logical errors in this movie. I know that this is a superhero movie and it will not be realistic, but when some defies physics and it is obvious, I have to take some points away from this film. I did let most of the logical errors slide, but I am counting the bigger ones against the movie. Sometimes Spider-Man is swinging in the middle of the street and his web is going straight up. What is it attached to? The sky? Sometimes Spider-Man is in the air and is about to bounce off nothing but air and get a boost to fly in a different direction…

            Those are all of my true flaws with the movie. There are some little things here and there, but they are canceled out by an equally good thing. The first use of slow-motion is fantastic, but the next few uses are unnecessary. Some of the dialogue is very good. Some of the dialogue is not very good. There are some little things like that with the movie. Now I will move on to the things I liked about the film.

            I did mostly enjoy this movie. The pacing here is good and Marc Webb is able to make this film enjoyable. There were some parts where I was getting a bit bored, but not many.

            The film is also great looking. The visual effects here are excellent. They are even transcendent above effects of the other Marvel superhero films with budgets equal to this one’s. The action in this film looked so great and the cinematography here is very good.

            The acting in this film is also transcendent above the acting in the other Marvel films. Andrew Garfield is fantastic here. Emma Stone is great as well. Stone and Garfield have excellent chemistry with each other. Jamie Foxx and Dane Dehann are also fantastic here. This cast really helps sell some of the more cheesy and unrealistic parts in the script of this movie.

            Marc Webb’s direction here is good. He does a great job with the actors and the characters, an alright job with the pacing, a good job with the camerawork (except for one action scene of shaky cam), and although he does do very well with the tone he does do a good job with everything else.

            There is also good comedy in this movie. Andrew Garfield has mastered the wit of Spider-Man and the all of the comedy is very well-written.

            Overall, this is an alright movie. The narrative here is not good, and the villains are poorly done, but with Marc Webb’s direction and this cast’s performances, the film is executed well. It is a great-looking film that I enjoyed. I think of this film positively.