CHRISTOPHER ROBIN and THE MEG musings
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
What a weird movie. The first half seems like it was made for the people who grew up with Winnie the Pooh and friends, like myself. As the movie progressed, I got flashbacks of watching the animated movies/shows back in my preschool days. That half of the movie was very nostalgic, and got a nice boost in that respect from its idyllic post-World War II setting. It gets surprisingly dark for a Pooh movie, and I would have loved it if they delved deeper into Christopher’s psyche. Ewan McGregor gives a solid performance, and Hayley Atwell is amazing in the limited screen time she gets, while her character is extremely underwritten.
Once the movie seems to end, the story keeps chugging along, and becomes less interesting and fun as a result. There’s action just for action’s sake and is very unbalanced from a pacing standpoint. It’s also weird that there’s no “hey, wait a minute, am I really seeing this animal from my childhood 30+ years later?” moment or any instance of distrust in his own mental health. That’s clearly what this movie isn’t going for, as it is content in letting these adorably animated characters traverse around the Hundred Acre Wood and London. There’s a lot of cute antics (albeit with shots that could be misinterpreted as being from a horror movie), but doesn’t coalesce completely in the end.
RATING: DIDN’T WASTE MY TIME
(Refer to my ratings system HERE!)
THE MEG
Oh boy. I expected to have a good, silly time with this movie and I did get that to a point. But campy movies like FAST FIVE or SKYSCRAPER at least have a fun factor where it seems like they actually care what the end result looks like. THE MEG stars Jason Statham and Chinese star Li Bingbing amongst other, as they sleepwalk their way through the movie. The rest of the cast are admirably diverse, but it distractingly feels like diversity just to have diversity, although they are given tons of screen time, as the shark is used relatively sparingly.
To their credit, the filmmakers do seem like they try to give the characters and story a little bit of heart, but the script is incredibly horrid and proves to be too much of an obstacle to overcome. There are lines of dialogue that made me cringe, and wonder who the hell let that make the final cut. I get that this is exactly what the people involved were going for, I just wish they tried to give it some kind of importance or had something to say. This movie is big, dumb, obviously made for foreign markets and really not worth it for the camp spectacle of it all.
RATING: I HATE MY LIFE
(Refer to my ratings system HERE!)
