Keanu review

KEANU:

KEY & PEELE’S STYLE OF COMEDY SHINES PERFECTLY ON THE MOVIE SCREEN…AND THERE’S A CAT!

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: *** out of 4

WARNER BROS. PICTURES AND NEW LINE CINEMA

Keegan-Michael Key (left) and Jordan Peele (right) ready to battle some gangsters and save their cat, Keanu

            Comedy superstars, Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele, Tomorrowland, Freaks of Nature) and Jordan Peele (Key & Peele, Children’s Hospital, Wanderlust) hot off their hit Comedy Central sketch series, Key & Peele now takes their goofy lowbrow humor to the big-screen in Keanu. Now just because there’s a cute little kitty in it, does not mean it’s a movie to take your little kids to (Seriously Parents, Don’t!), this is a Key & Peele comedy movie that has a cat in it, you name it, vulgar humor, drugs, sex, celebrity cameos, gang violence, and of course a reference to “Liam Neesons” but don’t worry it’s all played for laughs.

            The humor and likability of Key and Peele shine on the screen perfectly, with an absurd but comedic plot to boot, hilarious side characters, and an adorable sounding kitty cat to the point where it becomes funny. Usually these elements lead to a laugh out loud comedy for me, and it didn’t disappoint.

            The film follows Rell (Peele) an ordinary man who’s trying to get over his girlfriend dumping him and his quirky cousin, Clarence (Key) trying to keep his marriage with his wife and daughter on the right track. One day Rell finds a cat on his doorstep that he decides to keep and calls him Keanu (and yes, they make the joke you’re probably thinking about in the film!).

            Rell and Clarence go to a movie theater to see the latest “Liam Neesons” movie one night, but they soon realize that Rell’s door was opened and his cat had gone missing. Our two oddball heroes learn that Keanu has been taken by a gang of drug dealers so they decide to pose as drug dealers to get Keanu back from one bad Muthafucka named Cheddar (Method Man).

            What follows is what you’d expect, goofy hijinks, tripping out on drugs, encounters with a ruthless Mexican drug cartel, car chases, Rell’s weed guy, Hulka (Will Forte-30 Rock, MacGruber, Nebraska) in a car trunk with a live snake, and getting kidnapped by a pair of assassins known as the Allentown boys (Also played by Key and Peele).

            Overall, Keanu delivers exactly what you’d expect if you’re a fan of the Key & Peele TV series, although nobody messes with the Batmans in this movie (Although Zack Snyder messed with the Batmans with Batman v. Superman!). The film blends Key & Peele comedy, cute little cats, gang violence, drugs, and goofy and over the top hijinks perfectly and I can guarantee it would be very hard to watch this movie and not laugh once.

            The best parts of the movie is the chemistry between Key and Peele, you can’t deny seeing them work off each other in terms of comedy is both lowbrow and strangely charming at the exact same time, proof these guys got mad talent. I honestly think these guys are a lot funnier than Family Guy in terms of lowbrow comedy, don’t get me wrong I like Family Guy, but lately I’ve been getting more laughs with Key and Peele’s humor, even with a cat running around.

            Just seeing Key and Peele, two quirky oddballs hanging with a group of ruthless gangs is as funny as it sounds, and you eventually see the gang members’ softer sides during the film, you will believe drug dealing gangsters can sing.

            This is by far one of the best comedies I’ve seen so far this year, and I’m hoping this will lead to more comedies starring Key and Peele together, dick jokes, drugs, and all. It’s Key and Peele comedy brought into full force on the big screen with a cat, it’s a comedy that will make you “Meow” with laughter.

Ratchet & Clank review

RATCHET AND CLANK:

RATCHET AND CLANK SAVE THE GALAXY AND VIDEO GAME MOVIES!

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: *** out of 4

GRAMERCY PICTURES

Two unlikely heroes, Ratchet (left) and Clank (right) ready to save the day in Ratchet & Clank

            Video game movies have quite a long history, don’t they? And rarely are they ever good, don’t get me wrong there are good movies about video games like the 1982 cult classic, Tron, its 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, the 2007 Donkey Kong documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and more recently the 2012 Disney animated feature, Wreck-It Ralph. However, movie adaptations based off a specific video game franchises range from being either mediocre or just plain awful, you name it Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Resident Evil, and the entire career or director, Uwe Boll, and now we’re getting a live-action/CGI movie about Sonic the Hedgehog, ugh!

            Thankfully director, Kevin Munroe (TMNT), Rainmaker Entertainment, and Insomniac Games joined forces and created an CG animated feature based off one of the most iconic PlayStation video games of all time, aside from Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, and Uncharted. That’s right folks, Ratchet & Clank has gotten the movie treatment, with writers and developers who worked on the original games brought in to bring the world of Ratchet & Clank to the big screen, but does it pay off? That’s definitely an affirmative!

            The film’s animation beautifully captures the style of its games, the writing and humor feels right out of the game, the voice acting is spot on with James Arnold Taylor (Final Fantasy X, TMNT, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), David Kaye (Batman: Arkham City, Resistance, Transformers: Robots in Disguise), and Jim Ward (The Fairly OddParents, Ben 10, Destroy All Humans!) reprising their roles as Ratchet, Clank, and Captain Qwark, and it’s just an overall well-made retelling of the first game’s story, with plenty of new elements brought in to make it fun for everyone, gamer or otherwise. Because let’s be honest, if I wanted to see the cutscenes from the first game, I’d go back to playing the game, it’s different enough to stand on its own while delivering plenty of fan service to those that played the games and grew up with it (like myself!).

            The film follows Ratchet, a Lombax ship mechanic, living on the Planet Veldin with his mentor, Grimroth (voiced by John Goodman-Monsters, Inc., Transformers: Age of Extinction, 10 Cloverfield Lane) who always dreamt of doing great things and becoming a hero like his childhood icon, the “Greatest Superhero in the Galaxy”, Captain Qwark who leads a team of heroes known as the Galactic Rangers, who specialize in saving planets when needed. After being rejected by Qwark due to his list of past illegal activities, Ratchet hopes one day he can become a hero and prove to the Galactic Rangers that he’s the right candidate for a member.

            Meanwhile, the evil chairman of the Blarg empire, Chairman Drek (voiced by Paul Giamatti-Sideways, Win Win, The Amazing Spider-Man 2) with his second in command, Doctor Nefarious (voiced by Armin Shimerman-Star Trek: The Next Generation, Seinfeld, Batman: The Brave and the Bold) and his robot henchman, Victor Von Ion (voiced by Sylvester Stallone-Rocky franchise, Antz, Creed) are creating an army of robots and a “Deplanetizer” laser cannon (Basically it’s like the laser on the Death Star from Star Wars) to destroy all the planets in the galaxy and create one giant planet consisting of pieces of each planet, all for the sake of Money, Moolah, Bolts. The conveyer belt malfunctions and ends up creating a little robot known as Clank who manages to escape Drek’s fleet and makes his way to Veldin where he meets Ratchet.

            Ratchet and Clank team up along with Captain Qwark and his Galactic Rangers, Cora (voiced by Bella Thorne-Shake It Up, Wizards of Waverly Place, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day), Elaris (voiced by Rosario Dawson-Men in Black II, The Rundown, Unstoppable), and Brax (voiced by Vincent Tong-Death Note, Storm Hawks, Iron Man: Armored Adventures) to stop Chairman Drek and Doctor Nefarious from total Galactic Annihilation.

         Overall, Ratchet & Clank is a breath of fresh air in terms of how to bring a video game to the movie watching crowd, the film doesn’t shy away from what the game offers and it totally embraces itself, almost like a legit fan film. The movie is filled with several jokes, visual gags, and even references to other PlayStation games like Jak and Daxter and Sly Cooper.

            But even if you didn’t know who Ratchet & Clank were, the movie stands on its own quite nicely, it retells the story the gamers already know but still stay fresh and new, the characters are developed well, the humor feels like the writing from the game, and it’s just a whole lot of fun.

            Besides the original characters, the new characters they brought in are a lot of fun, Cora is the typical butt kicking female Ranger, Elaris is the geek, Brax is the brute (basically he’s the Raphael of the group), and even the new voice actors of familiar characters are great. I think Paul Giamatti is a fine replacement for Kevin Michael Richardson who originally provided Drek’s voice in the game, hard to say which one I prefer, I liked them both a lot, but Kevin gets more points for the nostalgia.

            This could easily be one of the best video game movies ever made, it has a perfect balance between fan service for fans of the games and being an entertaining movie on its own. To me that’s what a film adaptation should be like, because while I liked movies like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, I felt that was a movie that’s strictly for people who have played the games and the everyday movie watcher would probably be confused when watching it.

            This however, you can just come in with an open mind, bring your entire family, whether they played the games or not, and just have an exciting and fun night out with this movie, and I hope it sells well. People, let’s all make this movie a hit and set a new standard for how a video game movie adaptation should be like, I know I’m not done watching it, this movie brought me back to being a little kid back in 2002 again and any movie that can do that is doing something right.

The Huntsman: Winter's War review

THE HUNTSMAN: WINTER’S WAR:

NOT SO FAIR THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: ** 1/2 out of 4

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

(from left to right) Queen Ravenna, Eric the Huntsman, Sara, and Freya in The Huntsman: Winter’s War

            Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Charlize Theron (Monster, Prometheus, Mad Max: Fury Road) as the Evil Queen Ravenna, but unfortunately you don’t get much of the badass villain queen in this follow-up to the 2012 hit, Snow White & the Huntsman. When Snow White & the Huntsman came out in 2012, it was a hit at the box office, but the reviews were mixed respectively, honestly I thought the film was okay, nothing great but it wasn’t terrible either, Kristen Stewart, despite having a lot of hokey acting in the film, she was much more tolerable to sit through than in the Twilight films, and then there’s the badass Charlize Theron as Ravenna and the charming Chris Hemsworth (Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Cabin in the Woods, Rush) hot off his Thor performance takes on the role as Eric the Huntsman.

            I agree Snow White & the Huntsman has a lot of problems, but the action sequences, cinematography, special effects, and performances by Theron and Hemsworth were enough to keep me entertained from the beginning to end. Between that and the other Snow White related film that came out in 2012, Mirror Mirror, I thought Huntsman was the better movie between the two, it re-invented the classic fairy tale and grew it up.

            Due to the film’s success, we now have The Huntsman: Winter’s War, part prequel, part sequel, and features Theron, Hemsworth, and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End) reprising their roles from the first film. Kristen Stewart’s Snow White however was scrapped in Winter’s War and in her place we get two new badass female characters including Emily Blunt (Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Sicario) as Ravenna’s evil sister, Freya the Ice Queen, and unlike a certain animated musical, she does not sound like Idina Menzel and is much more aggressive, and Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Martian, Crimson Peak) as Eric’s love interest and master at archery, Sara.

            So judging by all the talent brought in for this follow-up to an adequate movie, The Huntsman: Winter’s War should be amazing, right? Well, sadly, it’s at the cost of less action and thrills than its predecessor.

            Don’t get me wrong, there are action sequences in it and the climax near the end is a lot of fun, but compared to the action in the first movie, it’s strangely lacking. Not to mention there are quite a few plot elements that don’t really go anywhere, yeah, it’s sad that the one with Kirsten Stewart is actually better than the one with three badass and talented female leads.

            Before the events of Snow White & the Huntsman, the film follows the evil Queen Ravenna (Theron) learning that her sister, Freya the Ice Queen (Blunt) is engaged in a forbidden affair with the Duke of Blackwood and carrying his child. Suddenly after birth the Duke kills the child, thus causing Freya to go into a blizzard of a rage, kills him with her long-suppressed ice powers, and abandons the kingdom and builds a solitary ice palace in the North (And no she doesn’t sing when she does this!).

            Freya spends her time murdering anyone who opposes her and amasses an army of children and trains them so their hearts will be forever hardened. When her Huntsman, Eric (Hemsworth) and archer, Sara (Chastain) fall in love when love is forbidden in her kingdom, she separates them with an icy wall, thus resulting in Sara being stuck in the palace with no means of escape.

            After seven years have passed, Ravenna is dead and Snow White is now queen of the kingdom (Yeah, little spoiler from the last film!), Eric eventually reunites with Sara and dwarves, Nion (Frost) with his half-brother Gryff (Rob Brydon-MirrorMask, The Trip, Cinderella (2015)), and two female dwarves, Doreena (Alexandra Roach-The Iron Lady, Cuban Fury, Testament of Youth), and Bromwyn (Sheridan Smith-Hysteria, Quartet, The Big C) who accompany them on their journey to stop Freya from using the Magic Mirror to bring Ravenna back and take back the kingdom from Snow White.

            Overall, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a significant improvement over Snow White & the Huntsman in terms of its casting, but the story and lack of action makes this follow-up fall flat. The film focuses too much on the romance between Hemsworth and Chastain, granted it’s better than Hemsworth’s chemistry with Stewart from the first movie, their dialogue together gets really hokey at times and it just makes you wish the action would get started sooner.

            Not to mention, the film does not have much Queen Ravenna, which is a shame because she was basically the highlight of the first movie and she had a lot of screen time. Here, she’s only in the beginning, before the climax begins, and during the climax, which is really lacking and a waste of a great talent.

            But with that said, Emily Blunt as Freya is badass, she’s more of the highlight in this film and a different type of performance for Blunt. Usually I see her as a hero or love interest, it’s really a breath of fresh air to see her portray a villain, though I would have liked more screen time of her and Charlize Theron together because they make the movie.

            Chris Hemsworth is charming as always, Jessica Chastain kicks ass with her bow and arrows, Nick Frost is funny at times, and when the action sequences do get going, they’re usually very epic, especially the climax. Besides the action, the cinematography, like the first film is gorgeous, especially the sweeping shots of the mountains.

            But again, it’s a shame this movie isn’t better than Snow White & the Huntsman, I’m not calling it terrible or anything, but in terms of story and action, it feels like a big step backwards, you’d better off seeing The Jungle Book instead.