In The Grey - My Take (Spoilers)

 

I went into this expecting some pleasant action and eye candy. What I got was a movie that was surprisingly smart, slightly snarky, twisty, and tightly told. And entertaining. It was refreshing after the series of duds I've had lately.

I had my doubts when I saw it was a Guy Ritchie movie but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and two hours of my time. I'm glad I did. It has an "Ocean's Eleven" pacing at the start, right down to the on screen captions as they describe what they've done for planning. Steal from what works, right?

The woman is a lawyer who specializes in recovering large unrecoverable debts for an equity-type company. She uses not-quite-legal tactics when all other avenues have been exhausted. She's got Henry and Jake as her team (I'm not going to bother with character names), who then do all the wet work. She handles the courtroom and such.

Where does the money come from to set all this up? A very large up front payment from the equity-type company in return for her taking the job. The woman who is hiring her is slimy, as expected from an equity-type executive working her way up the building to higher ranking jobs. Needless to say the two women don't like each other.

Henry does intelligence, Jake does hands-on. The two of them have built up a strong partnership and are completely devoted to the woman lawyer. It's revealed later she got them out of a Chinese prison and they've worked for her ever since.

Between the two of them they set it up so the woman lawyer can go to the evil billionaires island to get the money, and get out. Unlike the last person who tried. They set up three different extraction scenarios and have their own team to do all the work. Of course the evil billionaire controls the island, the police, etc. plus his own private security wet work team.

As the billionaire refuses to pay, she goes after him in court and gradually starts impounding and otherwise getting injunctions against his businesses. She goes after his toys first - the private jet and yacht. Both needed to get on and off the island and meant to piss him off. It works. There's also a scene after the initial meeting where he sends a lot of goons out to kill her but they all get mowed down by her guys/team.

One interesting part here is that it's left ambiguous as to whether or not Henry and Jake are a couple. They dip into it but not enough to say for certain. They may just have worked together long enough that they have that kind of banter. I liked how they left that .. in the grey.

There's an escalation of meetings and court stuff until the evil billionaire gives in and agrees in exchange for her returning all his stuff. She agrees. They part ways. She lets the woman at the equity-type firm know the deal is done and to give him back his stuff.

Smash cut to three months(?) later and the woman lawyer is now in the desert somewhere. Exposition wise she's on the phone trying to get her payment. Both of her companions end up dead and the evil billionaire's head of security bundles her into the SUV. Before they do that she activates the tracker in her watch that she's still wearing.

This was an unexpected twist. The job was done. Normally the movie ends here. But nope. Now there's the issue of the woman lawyer at the equity-type company screwing both of them over. The evil billionaire plans on using the woman lawyer as leverage, only for her to say she also didn't get paid so she's useless for that reason. He leaves her in prison, not happy with not having her for leverage.

Now it's a prison breakout. Henry and Jake scouted the prison for the original job. All the unused equipment is still scattered around the island. They use the plans from earlier in the movie to make it happen. The bad guys are a teeny bit smart in this movie but still rely on cannon fodder for the big shootouts.

Henry and Jake don't accompany the woman when she leaves the island. They kidnap the evil billionaire, put him in a shipping container, and send him to the US.

Henry and Jake try to explain to the woman at the equity-type firm that it's in her best interests to keep her end of the bargain. Then the woman lawyer comes in and drops the big bomb of the evil billionaire turning state's evidence against the equity-type firm for making knowingly illegal loans, specifically her making them. And how the woman lawyer has talked to the bosses on those higher floors about it. She leaves and the phone rings for the woman at the equity-type firm, implying she's going to get called onto the carpet.

Anyway.

The action was tight and mostly believable until the big explosions started. Henry and Jake work well together and they played it convincingly on the screen. Their absolute devotion, and their team's absolute devotion, to the woman lawyer is a weak spot in the story but it's a small weak spot. There's good banter between Henry and Jake, and I'm a sucker for good banter. They're pretty to look at as well.

As I said I was pleasantly surprised by how much I like this movie. I will probably watch it again at home at some point when I need some mindless entertainment, and eye candy.

Obsession - My Take (Spoilers)

 

CW: Pet death, self harm

I'm going to say I'm not the right audience for this film. It's really geared towards the same audience as "Iron Lung".

As I did not like "Iron Lung", I didn't like this movie either.

The premise is a fairly standard one and it's either an official or unofficial tagline: "Be Careful What You Wish For". There's nothing wrong with the premise. It's a good premise. But if you know the premise you know the entirety of the story.

This one has the more common variant of wishing for someone to love them. This is never a good idea. Anyone who has read/watched these knows it's a bad idea and why. This follows in that track. Imposing your wish on someone else leads to them being, shall we say, conflicted.

I will say that this movie does a decent job of hauling the story through beginning to end. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This movie concerns a group of four friends: two guys and two girls. Because I don't care enough to look up and continue to try to remember their names I'll be using placeholers.

Guy 1 likes Girl 2 and is too hesitant to tell her. He's concerned that he'll lose the friendship that they've built over the years. Guy 2 is helping/pushing him to do it, except not at their weekly bar trivia night because he likes that night and doesn't want it to get weird. Great friend, I know.

Guy 1 goes home and finds his cat dead. The poor thing got into his meds somehow and that was that. He picks up the scattered pills and puts them back in the bottle, back in the medicine cabinet. *cough cough Chekov's Gun cough* He then puts the cat in a garbage bag and scrubs the floor where it was. Lovely.

Talking to Girl 1 on the phone she tells him she dropped her crystal necklace down the drain. They're casually chatting, as friends do. He goes to the local metaphysical shop (because I honestly do think every city has at least one of them - we do) and the uninterested clerk points him to a display of crystal necklaces. While he's trying to figure out one to buy he sees a display of "One Willow Wish" for $6.99. Abandoning the crystal necklace idea he buys one.

He doesn't want to go to trivia night but also won't tell his close friend group "Hey, my cat died today and I don't feel like going out for trivia" so he goes. He tries to tell Girl 1 what he's feeling and Guy 2 confession-blocks him. Guy 2 is a bit of a dick. Girl 2 is background at this point.

Guy 1 drives Girl 1 home. He's on edge and forgets to give her the wish that he was going to do. Instead of doing that he reads the box while she's walking from the car to her house. Break to get your wish, one wish per person. He makes the fateful wish for her to love him more than anyone else in the world. Oo. Mistake.

Now we get into her working through the mental changes as the wish settles in. She's swinging between herself and what he wants. Or at least what he said. They end up at his place for a platonic night. He gets up and looks at not-Reddit to find out if the wish thing is true. He gets mixed answers. It's not-Reddit. That happens.

M'kay. I'll tighten this up. She gets more and more obsessed with him and he realizes that obsession is, quite frankly, terrifying. She harms herself a few times as she tries to get him to say that he loves her as much as she loves him, being jealous, etc. The other friends are concerned.

One scene that stands out is when he goes into work and she doesn't. She stands, staring at the door with a rather creepy smile, and it's quite obvious that she pees herself while she simply stands. When Guy 1 gets home he finds her there and she's vomited on herself for some reason. He keeps looking down, saying he'll clean up the mess, and as he takes her to the bathroom to clean up they show that she's voided from all three holes as she stood there.

Oh. And she does things with the dead cat. Because obsession.

Guy 1 calls the number on the box to find out if he can change his wish. Nope. The only way to break the wish is for him to die because the wish centers on him. He tucks that one away.

Girl 2 gets him out of the house in the middle of the night to talk to him. She tells him that Guy 2 and Girl 1 have been hooking up occasionally for the last couple of years, while Guy 2 knew Guy 1 was infatuated with her. Then Girl 2 talks around that she's more suited to him. She really is, to be fair.

Girl 1 has followed him and the predictable happens after he leaves the car.

Guy 1 goes back to the store and buys another wish, after a brief moment of not finding them where he expected. He gets one and recognizes the voice from the phone to the new clerk he's talking to. He tries to use the wish but it won't break. It really is one to a customer. He goes to Guy 2 and begs him to make a wish that Guy 1 had never made his wish. Guy 2 shows who he is by wishing for a billion dollars and money starts raining from the ceiling.

Finale! Guy 1 goes home and finds Girl 1 has done .. things to Girl 2. Guy 2 shows up in excitement about his wish and catches a bullet in the forehead for being there. Guy 1 gets away to the bathroom and tries to screw up his courage to use said gun on himself. He can't but eventually does slam down the whole bottle of pills that killed his cat. *cough cough Chekov's Gun cough*

As he's sitting there his face smooths out and he eagerly goes back to Girl 1. She's found the second wish he bought and used it, obviously to make him love her as much as she loves him (her common wailing refrain). Alas, the pills take hold. Because he's dead she's free to remember everything she did while she was under the influence of his wish. Fade to black.

Her using the wish on him was a nice touch. I'll say that.

The acting carries this movie and they do a pretty good job of it. It's not as transcendent as the reviews are trying to say. The actress for Girl 1 does carry the crazy well but she's not a "Scream Queen" as she's being dubbed. It's one movie. The characters all project what they're supposed to project.

As I said earlier, once you know the story you know how it will unfold. The ending can vary and I think they chose a good one for the pace of the movie. It does build nicely and doesn't focus too much on gross things. Too much. But honestly it's not as good as the critics want it to be. But people for whom it's targeted seem to like it.

I have a feeling there's going to be more of these two kinds of YouTube movies in the near future. The two that are out have done oddly well. So we'll see more until the format crashes.

The Sheep Detectives - My Take (Spoilers)

 

I saw this as a Screen Unseen, which was on a Sunday afternoon instead of the normal Monday Evening. Given that, the rating, and the (estimated) run time it was pretty obvious that this was going to be the movie.

First and foremost - I do not like Agatha Christie books. I just don't. There's a reason why I stated this.

The movie is very much Agatha Christie coded. That's fine since the premise is that the shepherd reads the sheep books very much in the Agatha Christie style. Given that it should be pretty obvious that I wouldn't like the movie. And I didn't like the movie.

There's lots of CGI sheep with some celebrity voice actors, who aren't really noticeable as to who they are. To me that's a slap in the face for voice actors but hey, what do I know? Except that this movie spent a lot of money on celebrities when they got no real return from them.

The bungling police officer was flat out annoying. Seriously. They swung the pendulum way too far to make him ineffective. I can suspend disbelief but this was a bridge too far. An inexperienced police officer in a small village isn't going to be doing a murder investigation without experienced help. Maybe that's just me but if I were part of that village I'd be screaming for them to get a real detective in there.

As with all Agatha Christie stories there's the cast of potential murders, etc. In this case there's also CGI sheep who are working to solve the crime. They end up dropping clues in front of the police officer's face to move the story along.

There's also a substory about discrimination but that's kind of a distraction. There's no value in it nor does it have a darn thing to do with the story itself.

Anyway. Everyone's potential motives and secrets are revealed, the police officer stumbles along the path the sheep provide, the murder is exposed after the steps they took to disguise themselves. Yippee.

It's not a bad movie. It's just not a good one for me. I didn't like much of anything about it, to be honest.