Comedy

Review by David Baldwin

Suze (Michaela Watkins) has lost her purpose in life. Her daughter Brooke (Sara Waisglass) has just left home to go to school in Montreal, her ex-husband is having a child with his new wife, and all she has to look forward to is menopause. That is, until she is asked to care for Brooke’s injured ex-boyfriend Gage (Charlie Gillespie) who just attempted suicide and cannot be left alone.

Did I mention Suze cannot stand him?

It is not the most uplifting of pitches and it certainly is not shot in any unique way (though I will never not smile when I watch movies shot in Hamilton), but Suze is actually quite the wonderful little Canadian dramedy that is equally as funny as it is moving. I watched it late at night, assuming I would turn it off after 20-minutes and ended up watching right through until the end. It has a way of sucking you in and staying with you, even in its most cringiest of moments.

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Image Courtesy of Netflix

Review by David Baldwin

Stephanie Conway (Rebel Wilson) has just woken up from a 20-year coma. Prior to that, she was one of the most popular girls in high school and the captain of the cheerleading squad. Now, she is a 37-year-old woman who is desperate to finish her senior year and become the prom queen she felt she was always destined to become. Of course, things are not the same in 2022 as they were in 2002, and it will not be easy for Stephanie to just reclaim her throne as the most popular girl in school.

Hijinx ensue of course, with rivalries, potential suitors, “woke” teenagers and activists, elaborately sexual dance routines, underage drinking, Deep Impact, Steve Aoki, and the senior prom all factoring into the story powering Senior Year. If that sounds like a bit too much going on, well, it is. If it sounds like it has a “been there, seen that, done it, threw out the t-shirt” kind of vibe, then you are very much on the right track. If it sounds like the funniest film ever made, then we may need to reconsider what you think is funny.

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Image Courtesy of Vortex Media

Review by David Baldwin

A hot shot young Hollywood agent named Jordan (Jim Cummings) is in the middle of planning his wedding to Caroline (Virginia Newcomb) when he receives an anonymous letter in the mail. He opens the letter and discovers an invitation to a hotel for a sexual encounter. He disregards it immediately, but comes back to it and ends up going through with it. Racked with guilt and curiosity, Jordan begins looking into the why and how he was targeted — and quickly becomes ensnared in something so much bigger than he ever could have imagined.

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Image Courtesy of Vortex Media

Review by David Baldwin

As Defining Moments opens, it defines itself as “a point in your life when you’re urged to make a pivotal decision, or when you experience something that fundamentally changes you.” It is not particularly deep, but it sets the stage for what is to come in Writer/Director Stephen Wallis’ tale of love and sadness amongst a group of interconnected individuals experiencing those profound Defining Moments in their own lives.

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Image Courtesy of levelFILM

Review by David Baldwin

Casi (John Boyega) is an idealistic public defender in New York City. He wants to believe in the system, even though he knows it will keep failing him and his clients. On the verge of being disbarred, he takes on the case of Lea (Olivia Cooke), a former client and someone Casi happens to have a crush on. She has gotten mixed up in a scheme to steal an impounded car that is stashed with heroin and has her own motivations for wanting to be involved. As Casi begins seeing signs of impending universal destruction, he decides to get involved too.

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Review by David Baldwin

Every time I see or hear the name Jean-Claude Van Damme, I chuckle to myself. I did not gravitate to his work nearly as much as I should have growing up in the 90s, but the work of his I did watch (specifically the ludicrous Die Hard riff, Sudden Death) was a whole lot of fun. Although he was a total blast to watch in more recent fare like JCVD and The Expendables 2 — where he hammed it up as the lead villain — he has not been nearly as prevalent or visible in the ensuing years trying his best to remain relevant. The same cannot be said for a few of his 90s competitors, but then the ‘Muscles from Brussels’ was never as wildly popular as some of those guys.

Which is a shame, since he’s an actual fighter and could probably kick the shit out of all of them (or at least look super cool doing the splits during the fight in a way literally no other man on Earth can). And he has one of the best last names for an actor ever.

I mention all of this because The Last Mercenary is not so much a return to form as much as it is a deliberately over-the-top play on those ridiculous 90s action thrillers. Even in saying that, it’s more of a parody of those kinds of movies than an actual proper entry in the genre. Van Damme plays Richard Brumère (aka ‘The Mist’), a legendary secret service operative who vanished into thin air nearly three decades ago. When his son Archi (Samir Decazza) is falsely accused of being an arms dealer and drug trafficker, Brumère comes out of hiding to protect him and help clear his name, all while evading the French authorities who desperately want to take him into custody.

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Review by David Baldwin

Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) has just been accepted to film school. She is positively ecstatic at the thought of moving away from home and bonding with “her people”. Most of her family is excited too. Her father Rick (Danny McBride) however, just does not get it. They had a great relationship when she was younger, but now it is strained, and only gets worse when Rick insists he drives her and the rest of the family from Michigan to California in time for the first day of school.

Then a robot uprising happens – and humanity’s last hope suddenly lies with the Mitchell family.

That sounds like a wild description and The Mitchells vs. The Machines somehow becomes even wilder than that before the end credits roll. In some instances, it becomes downright chaotic and completely unhinged. And I loved every single minute of it.

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Review by David Baldwin

A group of supervillains dubbed the “Miscreants” has been terrorizing the world since the 1980s and Emily Stanton (Octavia Spencer) has devoted her life’s work to developing a formula to create superheroes to fight against them. She has just finished perfecting a treatment – only to have her former best friend Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) accidentally inject herself with it. Now the pair must learn to come together again in order to save Chicago from the group.

I am not sure what I expected from Thunder Force, the fifth collaboration between McCarthy and her Writer/Director husband Ben Falcone. This film has a higher concept hook than their previous films, yet somehow is about what you expect it to be – a lame superhero movie with a few fun moments and a whole lot of world building nonsense. It takes a bit too long to really get moving (blame the endless training montages), but fans of McCarthy’s work will likely enjoy her commitment to every pratfall and asinine moment Falcone asks of her. Should it do well, I have no doubt Netflix will spin the film into a franchise that digs a whole lot deeper into the mythos behind the Miscreants and likely brings new superheroes into the mix to fight alongside McCarthy and Spencer.

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Review by David Baldwin

Shook and unsettled. That was how I felt after watching Promising Young Woman back in November. I rarely feel either of those emotions watching movies nowadays (especially during a raging pandemic when so little is genuinely knocking my socks off), and after it ended, it felt like entire scenes were seared directly into my brain. I kept thinking about Writer/Director/Producer Emerald Fennell’s debut feature for weeks on end, and kept coming back to what an incredible achievement it was to behold.

I finally received another chance to watch it again this week and hoped it was all hyperbole or something I was just remembering differently. I thought I would feel less shook knowing exactly where it was going. Less unsettled. But those same scenes and moments just struck harder. They echoed and reverberated more powerfully. I still felt the ground give out below and the wind get knocked right out of me. That is what kind of an unforgettable and uncompromising experience Promising Young Woman is. It makes for one of the very best films from last year – and one that might even be hard to top this year too.

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Review by David Baldwin

I had the opportunity to watch 6 Underground in the theatre last week, and tried my best to start writing the review on the train ride home. But with every word I typed, the more I got distracted. My pounding headache did not help, nor did the burning smell in the train car I was sitting in. It was so awful, so putrid that I could taste it. While it was not ideal conditions to write a review, I feel like it was an apt comparison to watching a Michael Bay film. Especially one like 6 Underground.

It is not that I dislike Bay as a filmmaker. Yes, I hate the very existence of the majority of the Transformers movies (and was so burnt out seeing the first four in theatres that I still have not even bothered to watch Transformers: The Last Knight, or Bumblebee for that matter), but I really dug Pain & Gain, have a special spot in my heart for Bad Boys II and absolutely adore The Rock. For me, that specific film is one of the best the 1990s have to offer – and it remains one of my absolute most favourite action movies ever. The cast, the score, the editing, the pulse pounding thrills. Literally everything in that movie is working on overdrive, and I feel like Bay has not been nearly as precise, nearly as dialed back nor as in tune with the macho-action bullshit as he was when he was making The Rock back in 1996. Everything since has just been so excessive and overdone. I admire his tenacity, but the majority of his films have become the punchline in a bad joke.

And I mention this all in a long-winded preamble to say that I actually really wanted to like 6 Underground. The trailer was slick, the action looked suitably ridiculous, and my feelings on Ryan Reynolds as an actor have been in constant flux since Deadpool.

So why is it that watching the film felt so exhausting? Why did this film, clocking in at 2 hours and 7 minutes, feel substantially longer and more drawn out than Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which clocks in at 3 hours and 29 minutes? How can that possibly happen?

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