Tony Scott could take even the messiest script and make it extremely watchable. In Days of Thunder, the flop sweat is almost literally oozing off the screen, and the editing is nothing short of chaotic but Tony Scott somehow pulls it all together. Nowhere near as entertaining as Top Gun but, then again, few things are.
Disjointed, baggy and I’m not sure it actually has anything new to say. Barely anything more than just a collection of stock military vignettes. Emotional states fluctuate from scene to scene, making the whole film feel incredible schizophrenic which on the one hand is possibly intentional but on the other hand, has the effect of making it really difficult to engage with the characters or the story.
All this being said, it’s interesting to see how much this film almost single-handedly influenced the aesthetics of war movies and video games for at least a decade.
I can’t overemphasise what a big deal this film was in my family when I was growing up. I was too young to get most of the jokes (loved the pratfalls though!), but it was nearly constantly on in the background every weekend, embedding itself in my DNA through osmosis. So watching it now, this film I haven’t thought about in 30 years, is a really strange experience. All of the lines and even the delivery of the lines are bubbling up from my subconscious ahead of time. I’m finally old enough to get the jokes and there are some top-class bangers, but the film never once made me laugh because I knew the lines by rote. Very strange!
Even stranger was the wave of nostalgia that washed over me while watching this was unreal. It was like finding my childhood comfort blanket again. The feeling of safety and warmth. That was really unexpected from a film with a close-up of a half-naked Swedish woman dancing in an office. Wild stuff.
The wheels have come fully off the bus here. It doesn’t feel so much like Fuqua and Washington have forgotten what brings people to an Equalizer film, but more that they just aren’t interested in making that film any more. There are still occasional flashes of greatness here, like the brief first-person perspective of the assult whose aftermath we’re introduced to at the beginning, but for the most part this is more The Talented Mr McCall than badass action film.
Massively disappointing.
It all kind of falls apart in the last half hour, but I’m still a total sucker for Parker’s unfussy style.
Also, maybe watching this in 2025 wasn’t the best move? Can’t help but feel like maybe we’re not as far from this as we think.
I’ve seen a lot of people complain that Flow felt like an extended video game cutscene. And it’s true that the film is in conversation with videogames. Specifically the work of Fumito Ueda, whose sparse, barren worlds hint at but don’t explain their history which allows you to project your own emotions and interpretations onto the story.
If you’re going to copy anyone, copy the master, right? Flow does all this along with the added difficulty of telling a complex story through the believable gestures and motions of a range of animals. This is every bit as magical as the hype would have you believe. A remarkable achievement.
One of the most disappointing git diffs I’ve ever seen.
I thought maybe I’d enjoy Martin McDonagh’s schtick a bit more when he wasn’t wrapping it in some diddley-eye patronising Irish bullshit. I guess not!
Sam Rockwell was terrific, though.
Now it’s very possible that I was just in a bad place watching this, because I’m seeing a lot of very high scores for this film and I just can’t relate.
I mean, intellectually I understand that it’s a significant achievement to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online and I understand intellectually that the juxtaposition is supposed to be hilarious. But something about this film rubbed me the wrong way. What I saw was a pair of charmless craic vacuums with no understanding of the medium latching onto a cheap gimmick that would have worked better as a series of TikTok clips instead of a full movie where everything feels contrived and inauthentic (the soliloquys were delivered more believably than a lot of the supposedly natural dialogue, like the “oh what do we have here?” finding the theatre at the beginning).
It also doesn’t help that the film is stuck between a rock and hard place ‐ viewers need a certain level of fluency with the game to be able to understand what’s going on, especially considering how disjointedly the whole thing has been put together. But on the other hand, too much fluency and you realise how much of the game’s bonkers anarchy has been left on the table, and how anaemic and dull the end result is.
God bless Parteb, the agent of chaos in the whole thing ‐ the true spirit of GTA:O ‐ and the only thing that made me laugh in the whole movie.
Even more disappointingly, there’s another story here: two out-of-work actors during lockdown, struggling to find work, struggling mentally and emotionally. They finally find a project to keep them occupied, to keep them connected with other people and get them some industry recognition. A better film would have spent some time interrogating this but for the most part it’s completely ignored in Grand Theft Hamlet.
A hugely missed opportunity. Disappointing.
Gina Trapani has put together a beautiful web-first memoir/memento mori. So simple, so clever.