Avatar: Fire and Ash — Smoke and murk

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) • View trailer

2.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for action violence, bloody images, profanity and dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.21.25

James, James, James.

 

Why give editing credits to five people — not including you, as the sixth — if you won’t let them do their jobs?

 

Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Jake (Sam Worthington) realize that their sky-faring Na'vi
clan may not be enough to combat the newest assault by Earth's Resources
Development Administration forces.

Calling this film tedious, at a butt-numbing 195 minutes, isn’t sufficient. This slog also is repetitive, insufferably boring and — as we ultimately approach the climax — completely predictable.

Meaning, no dramatic tension.

 

As was the case with 2022’s second film in this ongoing series, director/co-scripter James Cameron spends far too much time on tight close-ups of slow, thoughtful takes; and half-baked lines delivered with artificially measured, melodramatic pauses and intensity.

 

Granted, the production design and SFX work continue to be jaw-droppingly amazing; this truly is a marvelous example of imaginative world-building, down to the tiniest detail of flora and fauna. 

 

The underlying environmental message also continues to be welcome, and increasingly timely. It’s impossible to watch Pandora’s massive, ocean-going tulkun — pursued and killed by rapacious Earthers, in order to harvest amrita, a substance in the creature’s brain with the medical power to halt human aging — and not think about how our own Earth’s whale population has been hunted to near-extinction.

 

Events resume where the previous film concluded, with Jake (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their family — Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), young Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and adopted mysterious daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) — now fully embraced by the ocean-going Metkayina clan headed by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and his wife Ronal (Kate Winslet), the Shamanic Matriarch.

 

Lo’ak is haunted by the recent death of his older brother Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), who perished during the previous film’s climactic melee. In typical teenage fashion, Lo’ak disobeys his father’s orders, chafes at often being left behind, and also has distanced himself from Tonowari and Ronal’s daughter, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), much to her sorrow.

 

The latter is a shame, since the developing relationship between Lo’ak and Tsireya was one of the previous film’s high points.

 

Avatar: The Way of Water — Waterlogged

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for strong violence, dramatic intensity, partial nudity and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.23.22

Well, it happens to the best of us.

 

James Cameron has run out of ideas.

 

Realizing that their presence puts the entire Na'vi clan in peril, Jake (Sam Worthington,
far right) insists that his family — from left, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Neytiri (Zoe
Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) — must leave their
home, and move far away, to another part of Pandora.

There’s no shortage of opulent, eye-popping imagination in this long-overdue sequel to his 2009 hit; this is sci-fi/fantasy world-building on a truly monumental scale. Every frame could be extracted and admired, for the meticulous detail and all the “little bits” that you’ll likely overlook during first viewing.

That said, sitting through this semi-slog a second time, won’t ever make my to-do list.

 

Writer/director Cameron, with a scripting assist from Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, has basically recycled the first film’s plot, along with — thanks to cloning — the exact same primary villain: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He and his elite team of kill-crazy mercenaries have been transformed into “recombinants” : artificial 9-foot-tall avatars embedded with the memories of the humans whose DNA was used to create them.

 

The character template has broadened a bit, and the setting has shifted from the forest-dwelling Omatikaya Na’vi clan to the ocean realm of the Metkayina clan. But the conflict is identical: Earth’s nasty-ass Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns in force, this time determined to colonize all of Pandora, as the new home for humanity.

 

“Earth is about to become inhabitable,” RDA’s Gen. Francis Ardmore (Edie Falco, appropriately callous) intones, “so Pandora’s natives must be … tamed.”

 

And, as if this bit of déjà vu all over again weren’t enough, Cameron’s climactic third act includes a re-tread of Titanic’s ultimate fate … except, instead of a sinking ocean liner, our heroes wind up scrambling about the shifting decks of a 400-foot-long attack vessel, as it slowly slips beneath the sea. Heck, we even get the same “climb this way … now this way” scramble involving two key characters.

 

All that said, this still could have been a reasonably engaging 150-minute film … were it not expanded into an insufferably self-indulgent 192 minutes. Cameron clearly didn’t trust his three co-editors.

 

The second act, in particular, accomplishes little beyond filling time. So many tight close-ups of slow, thoughtful takes; so many half-baked lines delivered with measured, melodramatic intensity.

 

Reminiscence: Not worth remembering

Reminiscence (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, drug use, sexual candor and profanity

Available via: Movie theaters and HBO Max

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.27.21

Ugh.

 

Plodding, ponderous, pretentious twaddle.

 

Not even Hugh Jackman’s considerable charisma can save this one.

 

Nick (Hugh Jackman) and his colleague Watts (Thandiwe Newton) begin a memory
retrieval session with an uncooperative client, who's about to reveal something
that'll come as a nasty shock.

Actually, that’s part of the problem. Writer/director Lisa Joy obliterated Jackman’s charisma, transforming him into a mope with very little in the way of redeeming qualities.

Lineage counts for a lot; my expectations were low, knowing that Joy is one of the key show-runners who turned HBO’s update of Westworld into similarly tedious nonsense with delusions of grandeur. And — sure enough — she lives down to my worst fears with her feature film debut.

 

Reminiscence steals the futuristic Blade Runner look as the setting for an Inception-style dive into a reality constantly muddled by recaptured memories, the “twist” being that we’re often not sure which is which. That’s hardly a novel concept, nor is this clichéd premise helped by the fact that we don’t give a damn about any of these characters.

 

They’re worse than one-dimensional; they’re simply dull. 

 

Joy’s clumsy attempt to further spice this thin gruel with Raymond Chandler’s hard-edged noir sensibilities — as was done so much better in Blade Runner — is laughable.

 

Were it not for the stunning visuals crafted by production designer Howard Cummings and special effects maestro Peter Chesney, this would be a total bomb.

 

The setting is Miami, at some undetermined point in the future. The ocean has risen, due to a climate apocalypse, transforming the city into an American Venice. Water is everywhere; the lower floors of entire blocks of buildings are submerged. (Apparently this hasn’t affected anything structurally, which seems highly unlikely; Joy’s script isn’t long on real-world consequences.)

 

The chasm between the rich and everybody else has shifted onto fraught new territory: those who can afford to live on dry ground — giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase “land baron” — and everybody else. The result was some sort of war, its outcome left vague (along with everything else in Joy’s sloppy narrative).

 

Daytime temperatures are dangerously hot, prompting most people to live at night. Even allowing for this narrative element, Joy and cinematographer Paul Cameron go overboard with dark rooms, darker shadows and even darker streets; it’s sometimes difficult to determine what’s happening in a given scene. (If Cameron had dialed the illumination down a bit further, we’d have been spared having to watch the film at all.)

Doctor Sleep: Ultimately a yawn

Doctor Sleep (2019) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, dramatic intensity, profanity, disturbing images and nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.8.19

When asked how he can stand to have so many of his books and stories ruined by bad movie adaptations, Stephen King is fond of quoting James M. Cain, who faced the same question in the wake of his novels being sanitized — to the point of absurdity — by 1940s and ’50s Hollywood morality standards.

Against his better judgment, but forced by dire circumstance, Dan Torrance (Ewan
McGregor) once again finds himself in the malevolent hallways of the dread Overlook Hotel.

“They’re not ruined,” Cain growled, pointing to his bookshelf. “They’re all right there!”

King can point to a much larger shelf, and it would be overstating to claim that director/scripter Mike Flanagan completely botched his handling of Stephen King’s sequel to 1977’s enormously popular The Shining. The first two acts of this film adaptation are impressively faithful to the 2013 novel.

The third act is something else again. 

It destroys the good will Flanagan has built up to that point, while demonstrating the arrogant hubris of filmmakers who believe that all books — and plays, TV shows, whatever — are ripe for “improvement.”

I’m not referring to the judicious trimming required to condense (in this case) a 528-page novel into a 151-minute film. Flanagan skillfully removed a couple of supporting characters, nipped here and tucked there, and trimmed the extensive attention paid to a hopeless alcoholic not yet ready to become sober (while retaining the issue vividly enough to make its point).

No, I’m much more troubled by Flanagan’s decision to completely re-write the ending, while simultaneously indulging in a mean-spirited viciousness wholly at odds with the tone of King’s book. The result is simply wrong, although intriguing from an analytical point of view: Flanagan’s first two acts honor King’s text, but the ill-advised third act plays more like a clumsy sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s’ 1980 adaptation of The Shining … which also screwed up its source material.

(Flanagan should have learned from previous mistakes, given his equally failed 2017 handling of King’s Gerald’s Game.)

A prologue finds young Danny Torrance and his mother relocated to Florida, only a short time after the events in The Shining: as far removed as possible from the freezing, claustrophobic Colorado snows that surrounded the dread Overlook Hotel. But its phantasms still haunt Danny, until the kindly specter of Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly, regal as always) teaches the boy how to deal with such vengeful shades.

Flash-forward several decades. Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor), long tortured by his “shine,” has succumbed to the alcoholism that helped transform his father into the monster so easily corrupted by the Overlook’s supernatural residents. Constantly fleeing from bad situations, Dan hops a bus and randomly steps out in bucolic Frazier, N.H. He soon encounters Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis), who senses all is not right with this newcomer. Dan responds to this random act of kindness, late one night, by knocking on Billy’s door and saying the three magic words: “I need help.”

Hobbs & Shaw: Dumb & dumber

Hobbs & Shaw (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for relentless cartoon violence and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.2.19

Too loud, too preposterous, and too bloody long.

This isn’t a movie; it’s a pinball machine, with two-legged combatants randomly rolling around an obstacle-laden playing field, savagely bumping into each other for no particular reason.

With the fate of the entire planet resting on their shoulders, Shaw (Jason Statham, driving)
and Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) get ready for a rather improbable lassoing stunt.

The so-called director of this mess, David Leitch, graduated from stuntman to stunt coordinator over the course of two decades; succumbing to delusions of grandeur, he turned director for Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2 and this sorta-kinda entry in the Fast and Furious franchise.

All three films have the same thing in common: They’re soulless, live-action cartoons operating under the delusion that relentless mayhem compensates for a complete lack of plot and characterization.

It doesn’t.

Bravura action scenes work best when they’re an explosive surprise amid a story that has built tension, drama and emotional gravitas. (Consider the Matt Damon Bourne films as excellent examples.)

Leitch’s approach is akin to a diet of nothing but ice cream. No matter how much we enjoy such dessert as the delicious conclusion to a savory meal, being force-fed nothing but ice cream for 135 butt-numbing minutes — the length of this cinematic travesty — isn’t merely tedious; it becomes acutely painful.

In fairness, Leitch can’t take the sole blame; this misbegotten script comes from Chris Morgan and Drew Pearce, who deserve some sort of chutzpah award for having been paid for this utter absence of anything resembling an actual story. The 135-minute result actually is rather impressive, for its vacuousness.

Dwayne Johnson’s whup-ass and Jason Statham’s martial-arts beatdowns have been lots of fun in the past, and — goodness knows — both have starred in their share of brain-dead clunkers (Skyscraper and The Meg, respectively, in the recent past). In many cases, the two action stars have skated by via droll ’tude and sheer force of incandescent personality; they’re usually a lot of fun to watch.

That said, I suspect Hobbs & Shaw will task the patience of even their most ardent fans.

The Meg: Waterlogged

The Meg (2018) • View trailer 
1.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, profanity, bloody violence and fleeting gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.10.18

Those with a fondness for 1960s TV shows will recall that director/producer Irwin Allen was responsible for several of the most laughably atrocious sci-fi shows ever unleashed on the small screen: Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Having successfully "tagged" the megalodon with a homing device, and now able to track
it, our plucky monster hunters — from left, Mac (Cliff Curtis), Jonas (Jason Statham),
Jaxx (Ruby Rose), Suyin (Bingbing Li), Lori (Jessica McNamee), DJ (Page Kennedy)
and little Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai) — wonder what to do next.

This movie plays like a standard-issue Voyage episode with delusions of A-list grandeur: same ludicrous script; same wafer-thin, cardboard characters; same inane dialog; same jarringly inappropriate attempts at humor. We even get nods to key elements from the Irwin Allen playbook: a sleek underwater craft that looks strikingly like the Voyage flying sub; and a precocious kid who seems far more intelligent than most of the nearby adults.

(With no offense intended to Billy Mumy, Shuya Sophia Cai’s Meiying is a lot cuter than Will Robinson on his best day.)

And when director Jon Turteltaub and his three writers — Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber — aren’t mimicking Voyage, they’re ripping off Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Same underwater-whatzit-towing-a-floating-platform shot. Same ocean-bound jump scares. (I’m surprised nobody here said “We need a bigger boat.”)

The Meg is yet another entry in the recent wave of U.S./Asian co-productions, in this case Warner Bros. aligned with China’s Gravity Pictures. As was the case with Pacific Rim: Uprising and Skyscraper, such collaborations give us not the best of both cultures, but the worst. Enduring lazy, sloppy, lowest-common-denominator Hollywood junk is bad enough; watching it intertwined with equally vapid Chinese pop-culture elements is a special sort of torture.

This is the nadir of summertime popcorn adventure, bereft of even the faintest semblance of reasonable behavior by anything approaching a credible character. The Meg is a live-action cartoon, which I suppose can be enjoyed on that level, if viewers are willing to check expectations at the box office.

But don’t expect anything better than the Syfy Channel’s deservedly maligned Sharknado series. Much of Monday evening’s sold-out preview audience spent a lot of time unleashing eye-rolling snickers of contempt.

The Meg began life as a 1997 novel by American science-fiction author Steven Robert Alten, who built it into a franchise that has produced six more books as of this year’s Meg: Generations, with another expected in 2019. (The mind doth boggle.) This film’s script borrows very little aside from the first novel’s basic premise: that the Mariana Trench is much deeper than believed, because its “bottom” actually is a cold water layer that covers a hitherto undiscovered sub-ocean, populated by all manner of strange creatures.

Including a massive prehistoric shark known as a megalodon. (An actual creature, as far as we know; a model of megalodon jaws can be viewed at the American Museum of Natural History.)

10,000 B.C.: Too primitive

10,000 B.C. (2008) • View trailer for 10,000 B.C.
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and perhaps too harshly, for prehistoric action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.7.08
Buy DVD: 10,000 B.C. • Buy Blu-Ray: 10,000 B.C. [Blu-ray]


I don't care if the screenwriters are trying to be historically accurate; this movie needs dinosaurs.

Desperately.

After falling into a pit trap, D'Leh (Steven Strait) discovers that he's sharing it
with a greatly annoyed saber-toothed tiger. But the tiger is entangled as well,
and — against his better judgment — our young hero decides to free the beast
and hope that it won't devour him.

Or it needs something. I'd settle for Raquel Welch or Carole Landis.

That's the primary issue: Despite all the golly-gee-wow technology that turns its third act into a breathtaking visual spectacle, the story at the heart of 10,000 B.C. is so retro that it creaks as badly as its juvenile "Me Tarzan, you Jane" dialogue. The special effects notwithstanding, I'd have to say that both 1940's One Million B.C. (with Landis) and 1966's One Million Years B.C. (Welch) were far more entertaining.

Like George Lucas before him, director Roland Emmerich has based his career on re-invigorating Hollywood's golden age of action-adventure serials. Emmerich's early efforts were impressive: Stargate made enough of a splash with genre geeks that it spawned not just one but two TV shows, one of which continues even now; Independence Day was a hell-for-leather riff on War of the Worlds that proved far more fun than Steven Spielberg's way-too-serious remake of the H.G. Wells classic.

Heck, I even enjoyed Emmerich's update of Godzilla, a film that probably would have been far more successful if Sony hadn't tried to persuade us that it was the cinematic equivalent of the Second Coming.

But Emmerich's spectacle began to outstrip his story sense with The Day After Tomorrow, which played like one of the hokey disaster flicks so popular in the 1970s and '80s.

And while 10,000 B.C. isn't quite a disaster, it's also nothing to write home about. Calling this prehistoric ramble "dull" probably overstates the case, but the film takes a long, long time to reach its conclusion.

The primary faults lie both with the script and the starring players. The former — credited to Emmerich and Harald Kloser — is insufferably primitive and simplistic; the latter scarcely register on the screen. Thank goodness for New Zealand actor Cliff Curtis, who makes a strong impression as the seasoned warrior who guides our callow protagonist; absent his involvement, we probably wouldn't care about any of these characters.