Time for this week's trio of Xtra-vision rentals. And I'll just say it straight out: this was a thoroughly mediocre bunch. I wasn't really looking forward to watching any of them, but I wasn't dreading any of them either. And they all pretty much met those neutral expectations. So if this comes across to you as a boring week, it's only because it was. :)
First up is Broken City.
The plot follows Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg), a former dirty cop turned private eye, who's hired by the Mayor of New York City (Russell Crowe) to find out who his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is having an affair with. After he seemingly finds the answer, things get even more complicated.
Honestly, I have very little to say about this movie. It was middle-of-the-road, it was mediocre, and it didn't leave much of an impression on me at all. I'm not entirely sure why, though.
Maybe it's the familiarity of it all. As the film progresses, it gets increasingly predictable, and the ending packs no surprises at all.
I do kind of like how Billy turns against the mayor halfway through the movie, but I just didn't care for everything that followed. The mayor's grand scheme just comes off to me as a cliché.
Also, there are two action sequences in the second half, and they're both incompetently filmed.
In any case, I simply didn't care what was happening throughout the movie, and I just found the whole thing bland and forgettable.
My rating: 45%.
Secondly, I Give It a Year.
A newlywed couple, played by Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall, are told that if they can make it through the first year of marriage, they'll be set. Nine months down the line, the hardships of marriage are starting to take their toll, and they're both cheating on each other.
Now, because this is from the co-writer of Borat, I'm surprised I didn't go in expecting to hate it: I had heard it was good. But, during the opening scenes, the Borat similarities definitely showed, and my heart sank. A lot of the humour is derived from being straight-up crass, especially with sex jokes. But, to my surprise, the movie as a whole wasn't painfully unfunny, like I'd expected: for most of it, I was just sitting there indifferent.
But now let's talk about the film's message. Through most of it, I was thinking the moral was for married couples to embrace each other's imperfections, not hold them against them. But (spoilers here, sorry) the ending completely reverses this by turning it into an admittedly hilarious joke where they're as joyful about the idea of a divorce as they should have been about the marriage. Some might say that this shamefully promotes infidelity, but I don't think that's meant to be taken as a serious moral: it's all just part of the writer's twisted sense of humour.
But overall, it's not very funny or emotionally satisfying. So again, I'd just sum up this one with, "Meh."
My rating: 50%.
And finally, Mama.
Honestly, I only saved this one till the end because it was the one I'd heard the most talk about, not because I thought it'd be the best of the three or anything. In fact, as it turned out, quite the contrary: this is the only one that I actually didn't like. Now, don't get me wrong: it's not horrible. It's just conspicuously flawed and uninteresting.
The plot revolves around two little girls who've been living alone in the woods for five years, and share an apparently imaginary mother figure, which soon starts to cause havoc with the couple that takes them in. The main driving force of the movie is to solve the mystery of who this "Mama" is.
As you can probably guess, my main problem with this supposed horror movie is that it's just not scary. Well, there is one fantastically creepy moment involving one of the girls silhouetted in the shadows of a hallway, but that's it. None of the jump scares made me jump, and it's a little hard to develop atmosphere when you're constantly being distracted by painfully obvious CGI!
I also hated the girls' aunt, Jean. She's just the typical one-dimensional type of antagonist that I think is a complete waste of screen time.
I do like how one of the girls gradually turns away from Mama and warms up to the adoptive mother, but it's otherwise not a particularly compelling film – again, especially in terms of horror.
My rating: 45%.
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