Salma Hayek takes the lead role in the very dark and bloody Everly. The movie was released last year but I have only just heard of it.

 

Anyway, this movie got quite mixed reviews. Personally I enjoyed it for the most part but I can understand those who did not.

Everly is a hooker who finally snaps and kills her ex-partner's henchmen in her flat. Realising what she has done, Everly holes up in her apartment in readiness to fight the other gang members her ex will send her way.

I would carry on with the plot but that is pretty much all there is to tell. As you can imagine this is a film full of gun fights and explosions as Everly slugs it out with gangsters. The fight scenes are a great watch and intentionally funny in places.


If you are looking for a story with substance though you will not find it here. While Salma Hayek makes a nice piece of eye candy for the guys and pleases their inner-five-year-old's list for shooting and things going boom – it's a film that will not appeal to anyone else.

The film does attempt to be quirky at times but there parts just left me more confused than anything else. There is definitely a Quentin Tarantino style the film makers were going for with Everly but it's not quite there.

While Tarantino indulges in random quirky characters or moments in his movies (usually anyway) he tends to make them have some serious relevance to the plot – e.g a main character. Everly on the other hand can get away without them.

Everly is an extremely gory film and not one to watch on a Sunday afternoon with the family.

It gets 5/10 from me.

Movie Review: Snowpiercer

This week I have watched a little known 2013 movie called Snowpiercer. Set in the future, the film is about the last train in the world after the planet freezes. 

Snowpiercer travels on a non stop loop of the world while the passengers live on in a self-sustained eco-system. But the film is about the disgruntled second class passengers (who are kept in squalid conditions) who embark on a revolution to get to the front of the train. 

Before I go any further I do appreciate the initial concept is very farfetched and raised a lot of questions. Well if you were expecting those and basic engineering questions to be answered at all…you’d be completely and utterly wrong. But once you move away from that and only focus on the class struggle of the film - which is the entire purpose - it actually is pretty solid for a movie.

Also, for such an unknown film, this has a lot of famous people in it. Chris Evans (Captain America) plays Curtis, the leader of the underclass; his mentor is John Hurt and his sidekick is Billy Elliot. With such big names starring in the movie and also giving great performances, it’s surprising this film wasn’t as big as it was. 

The action is pretty much constant and the settings in each carriage are impressive. One carriage is designed to look like a school while another is an aquarium. You genuinely don’t know what to expect until the characters get there. 

Snowpiercer however is not for the faint hearted. It is very gory and does not cut away from brutal deaths or injuries like most films do. This is not something you should watch with your kids.

Snowpiercer gets 7/10.

Rubber Movie Review

Happy Friday everyone! It’s time for another film review this week, but to be honest this is probably the strangest I have ever reviewed. 

This week I have been watching Quentin Dupieux’s 2010 box office flop, Rubber. So what’s the premise you ask? It’s about a tyre that kills people. Seriously. This tyre comes to life and kills people by using its psychic powers. Now you’re probably wondering why any studio ever agreed to make such a film. The answer? I have absolutely no idea. They must have been smoking something illegal. 

But as strange as it sounds, it is not actually a bad film. Now before you think I’ve been smoking something too, I’ll explain why. The film opens with a sheriff climbing out of the boot of a car and addressing the camera. In this introduction, actor Stephen Spinella explains that cinema history is filled with examples of things that happened for no reason, for example, like why ET was brown coloured - there’s no reason for this. He explains that Rubber is a homage to these random moments in cinema history. With that set-up, the killer tyre’s rampage begins. 

Rubber is obviously not a film to be taken seriously but at the same time it’s not hilarious either. I thought it would have gone further to make fun of other classic film moments or genres, but it fails to capitalise on these. That’s very disappointing after the “get out of jail card” it gave itself at the beginning. 

There’s also a strange subplot going on where the sheriff tells other characters half way the film that none of what they are doing is real. There is also a group of people “outside the film” as it were, though on site, watching the movie through binoculars at a distance. The film cuts regularly to these people, but as to the ultimate purpose of both ideas, the movie offers no answers. It’s not funny, it’s just confusing. 

Rubber was interesting. I would not say good but nor would I say it was bad either. If it had been funnier then I think it would have been much more positively received. 

It gets 4/10.

Pacific Rim Movie Review

So I saw Pacific Rim at the cinema and thought I’d check in to leave my thoughts on the film.

So let’s get to it. If you haven’t seen the movie or watched the trailers you should still be able to guess what it’s about just by looking at the poster outside the cinema. Unless you’re blind. Huge robots’ fighting giant monsters is pretty self-explanatory.

In the near future a dimensional tear appears in Pacific Ocean. Giant monsters start to pour through and, being angry at mankind for no apparent reason like all monsters are, they start to destroy cities. The world’s answer to this is to build giant robots to kill them. Yes, that old chestnut.

The premise is quite silly but once you get over that this is quite a fun movie. The graphics are very impressive and the fight scenes are nothing short of epic.

One of the only problems with Pacific Rim is that at times it tries to take itself too seriously. Which, considering what it’s about, is impossible to do. I ended up not caring about any of the characters, nor did I learn any of their names. The filmmakers try to ram a lot of sad back stories down your throat in the first hour and it just doesn’t work, simply because you’re counting down the minutes to the next robot-monster smack-down. Which let’s be honest, that’s the only reason why anyone would want to watch this film. Also, the characters are either clique stereotypes or have no personality whatsoever. 

Names? You want names. Erm…you’ll find none here. 

Also the film has some strange bits that not everyone will notice when watching it the first time round. For example, at the start of the film, the leader of the robot defence program is told that the plug is being pulled. He gets told that the governments of the globe will only continue to fund the robots for another eight months.

Why eight months? Are they already four months into the new financial year or something? This isn’t explained. It just seems like such a random number. 

Also, the reason the robot program is wound-up is because the governments are building giant coastal walls to keep the monsters out. But these aren’t finished yet. Why would they retire their only line of defence before the new one was finished? And there are a few others which I won’t go into here or else I’d spoil it. 

If you like Godzilla movies (except that awful 1998 Hollywood version) and rock-em-sock-em-robots, you’ll enjoy this.