scorpion_amd13

I enjoyed this film a lot more than I expected I would. I did expect it to fail because the Resident Evil storyline works for the campy series of games, but it translates extremely poorly to the big screen and this has been scientifically proven beyond any shadow of doubt by all the previous installments, including the previous reboot. That being said, hearing the Resident Evil gaming crowd complain that this is not a 1:1 with the game is the one thing that gave me real hope for this film. The end result is an overall enjoyable experience because it keeps the good aspects of the games (the diversity of the monsters and the encounters, plus a very dark and oppressive atmosphere), but tells a story that actually belongs in a film, not a game. Things aren't perfect, however, and there are a couple of things that really bothered me: 1) the humor and 2) character stupidity. While the funny bits really are funny, they only serve to detract from the horror of the setting and this hurts the film a lot in the long run. I won't spoil it, but there's this awesome scene in a sewer that had the mother of all potential, that got destroyed from the outset because fart jokes were apparently too attractive to say no to. As for the second part, there were easily at least a dozen times during this film where I was questioning both the sanity and the competence of the characters on screen. I don't mean the courier guy with just enough IQ to drive from point A to point B, I mean, the PhDs and scientists and top-dollar security portrayed. This is really bad script writing and should've been resolved in the early stages, but I guess writing a story where the end times happen despite the best intentions and competent efforts of all involved is too great a task for some 20-somethings to pull off. Or the entirety of Hollywood, for that matter. That being said, Austin Abrams did an absolutely excellent job bringing Bryan, the main character, to life. Bryan isn't the smartest person in the room and you can tell that throughout the film. In his case, that's perfectly fine. Bryan has flaws, but does his best to overcome them and, while I won't spoil the ending for you, I feel like it was extremely appropriate. The visuals are also excellent overall and the monster design, while nowhere near original, is very appropriate and it reminded me of The Thing in places. My personal impression is that if they removed any reference to Resident Evil, removed all the humor and wrote the script to account for intelligent characters, this film would have easily been amazing. As is, it's still a good one.

This is probably the most historically ignorant version of Dracula yet. Wallachians didn't look and behave like medieval French. While they were Christians, they didn't have Catholic priests in Orthodox churches. And the absolutely ridiculous armors... The only good parts of this... whatever the eff this is, are Christoph Waltz and the parts it stole from Bram Stoker's Dracula. This thing should be forgotten and consigned to oblivion. The 2025 Nosferatu film is vastly superior in every possible way.

The one and only thing this "movie" has going for it is the anti-Trump message. The rest is absolutely atrocious in every way possible or imaginable. The characters are all, with no exception whatsoever, unidimensional cliches that can't and don't evolve even a single bit throughout the "movie's" entire runtime. The cast are criminally misused, with a script that allows no depth and no variety and absolutely cringe-worthy characters and lines 99% of the time. The action scenes are the worst in the industry and the music manages to be grating, uninspired, torturous and mostly divorced from what is happening on-screen, all at once. But the worst part is that they took a script that barely had enough in it to cover a 45-minute episode and stretched it until it covers a 160-minute runtime... This is absolutely unforgivable, as every last single scene drags on far longer than it ever should, until the viewer is thoroughly bored and begging for the sweet release of death. I love slow movies, that give the viewer time to enjoy what is on the screen. But this atrocity of a movie has nothing to show and drags it on far longer than should ever be legally allowed. It's excellent for falling asleep to and nothing else. Hands down the worst "movie" of the past decade.

This film is quite enjoyable for anyone looking to turn their brains off and enjoy an action comedy, but be warned that thinking while watching may ruin your experience. The first half was overall excellent and mostly in-line with the tone of the first film. It really starts to struggle once the arch-villain is presented because they are far too cartoonishly evil and cannot be taken seriously as a threat. The first film had a villain whose motives were not only easy to understand, but fit perfectly with the chosen theme of the Russian mafia. Not so with the second movie, where the main villain seems evil for the sake of being evil and as one-dimensional as they come; add this character's weird dancing, which only manages to make one wonder if the writer wanted to invoke the Joker, be funny, or just had a stroke. On top of that, the film's pacing for the second half was rather bad and you definitely get the impression that the writer was either forced to heavily modify the writing or didn't know what they wanted to get out of it and just pasted together whatever scenes they felt would be cool. This being said, I did not regret seeing this film and it definitely did the job of keeping me entertained. A plausible villain and better pacing for the second half of the film would easily add two more points to the overall score.

This movie suffers from a sort of identity crisis: it doesn't know if it wants to be horror, a comedy, or both. It's too funny to be a genuine horror, which is too bad considering some scenes are genuine horror that horror fans will enjoy. Without getting into spoilers, the main villain was... too funny. What the villain does and can do are worthy of true horror, but the villain itself is... too comedic - not in a good way, either. The villain reminds me of Longlegs, but the villain portrayed by Nic Cage was nightmare fuel indeed. Not so with the villain in Weapons. That being said, I don't regret seeing this movie. Most actors played very well and I can't say I was bored. Weapons would have benefited a lot from going all in on either comedy (and it has huge potential there) or horror (again, huge potential).