Solo: A Star Wars Story Review

It's time again to dive into another Star Wars review! This time we are here to discuss Lucasfilm's second modern spin-off movie and first one that feels like a real spin-off as "Rogue One" felt more like Episode 3.9, leading right into "A New Hope," as opposed to being a true side story. This is also the Star Wars movie that heads into theaters after a whole ton of well-publicized productions issues that led to a director switch in the late hours of production, but no delay in release date, meaning they chose to rush the production to meet the scheduled release date right in the middle of a crowded summer instead of delaying to December where there would've been a lot less competition. All this certainly didn't help the fact that a lot of people were skeptic about this project to begin with. A movie about a young Han Solo, which obviously forces them to recast this beloved character? And topping it all off, Rian Johnson's addition to the saga just five months ago in "The Last Jedi" caused all sorts of controversy. That bitter taste that some had is still fresh in the mouths of many fans as they've not yet had time to wash that out. Put this all together and it means millions of people have had their torches and pitchforks ready before the trailers even came out. No pressure, Ron Howard.

Before we dive in, let's do a recap of my Star Wars thoughts. I've already spammed my Facebook and Twitter friends with various Star Wars stuff in the last couple of weeks, but in case there's people from other places reading this review, or you are coming to this post from the future, I will repeat it again. I love the original trilogy. I always have for as long as I can remember given that all my family were also huge Star Wars fans. "Return of the Jedi" was my favorite growing up, but as an adult I don't think that one holds up quite as well and I've instead gravitated towards "The Empire Strikes Back" as my favorite. I enjoyed "The Phantom Menace" as a 10-year-old kid in theaters. As an adult, it's as boring as tar until Darth Maul shows up. I never liked "Attack of the Clones." I think "Revenge of the Sith" is the best of the prequels, but it's always felt extremely rushed and thus there's a lot of wasted potential. The special effects in the prequels don't hold up and the acting across the board is atrocious, minus perhaps Ewan McGregor. I loved "The Force Awakens" and I loved "The Last Jedi" even more. Didn't care for "Rogue One" much and it's only soured on me the more that time has passed. Those last three opinions apparently make me a horrible person, but who cares.

If you want more details on any of those nine films, just ask me and I can elaborate. Or you can use the little search bar on the top right of this blog, right under the logo, to search out my reviews for all of them because I have reviewed each one in great detail. If you know how to use Google to search specific websites, that might be even easier. As far as "Solo" goes, I was as nervous as the rest of the world when it was announced. It didn't seem like best idea. The production issues I mentioned made me more nervous, but I was crossing my fingers that things would all work out because there's plenty of examples of movies that went through production Hell that ended up being great movies. I still think they should've pushed this back to December. Not only would that have given them more time to work on the film and more time to advertise, but they would've made more money in a fairly open December as opposed to a crowded summer. But ultimately after the advertising started to kick in, I got more and more excited as the release date got closer and I made the decision that I didn't expect as much from this film. It didn't need to be an epic masterpiece in order to please me. I just wanted a fun side adventure and that's exactly what I got, so I left the theater pleased.

As far as this review goes, unlike my previous nine Star Wars reviews, this WON'T be a spoiler review. In those reviews, I felt like anything I said would be a spoiler, so I just threw up the banner and dove right in to all the juicy details. That didn't feel necessary this time around, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, feel free to move forward. Although I will say that if you're committed to seeing it, just go see it and come back and read this review afterwards, because I will talk about basic plot details. If you don't want to know any of that, then don't read. Another reason for doing a non-spoiler review is that there's a whole lot of skepticism this time around, so I'm going to try to convince you fence-sitters to jump on in and enjoy this ride. If Disney and Lucasfilm have offended you, your family, your dog and all of your ancestors all the way back to Adam and Eve with what they've done with the new movies and you've vowed to never see another Star Wars film ever again while also committing to spending the rest of your days violently attacking this franchise and everyone involved, then I'm going to be blunt and tell you that I have zero desire to talk to you about Star Wars because I think you're being dumb and ridiculous. 

Onto the movie. I want to say this movie takes place somewhere around 10 years before the events of "A New Hope." If you've figured out the exact timeline, then I would love to hear, but the specific time frame is not completely necessary. It's after "Revenge of the Sith" and before "A New Hope" and there's a significant gap of sorts as this doesn't do what "Rogue One" did by leading directly into "A New Hope," thus leaving some space in case they want to continue further down this story arc in the future. We begin this movie with a bit of romance between Han and Emilia Clarke's Qi'ra. There's a lot of strong chemistry between the two of them that really makes this work. Yet as they are running away from a certain group in this lawless environment, Han manages to escape while Qi'ra gets caught. Ridden with guilt and driven by love, Han's only goal in life at this point is to find a way to return to her so they can escape and live together in peace, but this turns out to be much easier said than done as we then jump three years forward into the future where the majority of our story takes place and still no luck. In order to get back to where he wants to be, Han accepts a certain job with Woody Harrelson's Beckett and his little gang, which leads him into this life of being a scoundrel.

I will be the first to admit that this isn't a great movie. But again, I wasn't expecting it be. The biggest thing that holds it back from being a great movie is that the narrative of the movie doesn't feel completely polished. If you look at the typical three-act structure that movies are supposed to follow, this does have a beginning, middle and end, but it's not very smooth as for the most part we are bouncing from scene to scene without much of a clear direction as to where we are going with the story. Scenes are just kinda happening as Han and company are thrown into various situations that they have to find a way to get out of. A lot of the individual sequences are extremely fun on their own, but I spent much of the movie confused as to the overall direction of the film. This is where I honestly think that seven additional months would've greatly helped this production. Instead of rushing to completion to make their own deadlines, they could've had more time to iron out the script and polish up the movie so that we could have a better story that would grab more people and give us a reason to care instead of throwing all the weight on the shoulders of our characters or hoping that the various moments are strong enough to please audiences and keep their attention throughout.

Speaking of characters, though, a lot of the weight is thrown on their shoulders and they all managed to pull through in glorious fashion. The biggest question of all is how does Alden Ehrenreich do as Han Solo? I've said for a long time that my enjoyment of this film might hinge on whether or not I am convinced that the man I'm seeing on screen is the same character that Harrison Ford has made us all fall in love with over the past 40 years. The answer is that Ehrenreich does a fantastic job. The only critique is that he doesn't have the same voice as Harrison Ford does so there are times in the film where he doesn't sound like Han Solo does in previous movies. But outside that, he nails this character. He has a similar facial structure as a young Harrison Ford in "A New Hope." Major props have to be given to the makeup and hairstyling people as well as the costume designers for making him look like Han Solo. But a lot of credit to Ehrenreich himself for capturing Han's personality and mannerisms. At the same time, you can tell that he's not trying to mimick Harrison Ford. He manages to make the character his own, helping us enjoy this incarnation of Han Solo who doesn't have all the experiences that the Han Solo we know already experienced.

In this sense, I feel that "Solo" mirrored "A New Hope" in a way as that movie was our introduction to young Luke Skywalker. By the end of the original trilogy, Luke is a completely different person, almost unrecognizable in comparison to when we initially saw the whiny, almost unlikable Luke at the very beginning. Young Han Solo in this movie reminded me a lot of young Luke in "A New Hope" and I'm glad that we have 10 years or so between "Solo" and "A New Hope" because that gives Han room to grow as a character before he becomes the person we knew at the beginning. Speaking of transitions from one actor to another, I feel it's appropriate to mention one transition that already happened that few are talking about, that being Chewbacca. Peter Mayhew returned to reprise his role in "The Force Awakens," but only partially because he's not in the best health. Joonas Suotamo played a Chewbacca double in that movie and has since completely taken over as he's been on his own in "The Last Jedi" and now "Solo." It's been such a seamless transition that I don't know if everyone knows a transition happened, which means Suotamo deserves a lot of praise for being able to perfectly recapture the magic of Chewie with his personality and language.

On that note, the introduction of Han and Chewie is a great moment, I think. Their chemistry throughout the movie is what helps make this movie so enjoyable, especially in sequences where I didn't know what was happening with the story itself. The fact that Suotamo and Ehrenreich are able to perfectly recapture the magic that Peter Mayhew and Harrison Ford had in the original trilogy speaks high praise to both of them. Rounding it out with our third old character being recast, we have the absolute gem that is Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian. One could argue Ehrenreich as Han, but there are zero arguments that I've heard when it comes to Glover as Lando. He looks like a young Lando. He sounds exactly like Lando does. The hairstyling and costume design people again do a great job of getting the appearance down. And Glover does a perfect job of capturing Lando's personality and mannerisms as a younger version of the character that we see introduced in "The Empire Strikes Back." And the fun part of this is that Donald Glover is also currently No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with his song "This is America," credited under his musical alter ego of Childish Gambino. I'm not sure when the last time we saw such a multi-faceted star like this.

In addition to our old characters that we've known and loved for years, played brilliantly by new actors, there's a whole host of new characters in this movie that are equally as likable and are thus arguably the glue that holds this thing together. For those of you who loved "Rogue One," sorry to throw more salt on the wound, but the biggest reason why I was unable to love that movie is that I felt no connection to the new characters outside Jyn Erso. Both "Rogue One" and "Solo" have different narrative flaws, in my opinion, but I put "Solo" ahead of "Rogue One" because I did care about the characters here. And not just the old ones, but all of the new characters I found fascinatingly developed and portrayed brilliantly by the respective actors. There's a handful of these new characters that have small roles. And I actually loved all of them, too. But specifically I enjoyed the new additions of Woody Harrelson as Beckett, Emilia Clarke as Qi'ra and Paul Bettany as Dryden Vos. All of them are fascinating new additions to the Star Wars saga and I would love to learn even more about them in terms of where they came from and what will happen next. I also loved not knowing how their characters would turn out in the movie.

That leads into the final main point I want to make in this review. There's a lot of mystery with what's going to happen with all of the characters. We obviously know that Han and Chewie are going to remain trustworthy best friends. We also know that Han and Lando are going to become friends, even though "Empire" suggests some drama in their backstory. But we have no idea how these new characters are going to play into Han Solo's life outside maybe knowing that the star-crossed lovers of Han and Qi'ra aren't going to have a happily ever after given the whole Han and Leia thing. The movie kinda sets up one character as the "villain" of the movie, but given that they're all outcasts and scoundrels in this lawless time period of the Galaxy, you have no idea who to trust and who to fear. The ambiguity of who is the one that is the real villain is one that I found fascinating. My mind also toyed with the idea that perhaps none of them are the villain or all of them are. Thus even though the journey felt a bit rocky with the unpolished story arc, it led to a finale that I genuinely loved as I had no idea what was going to happen, which is again in stark contrast to "Rogue One" where I knew exactly what was going to happen because the outline is in the crawl of "A New Hope." 

There's a lot of specific details regarding this story that I have not even touched, but I promised a spoiler-free review, so I'm going to leave it at that. I could do a separate review where I discuss all of the spoilers and potential theories of what's going to happen next if they continue this story arc, but I don't see that as necessary because I have given you enough to give you an idea of how I felt. I didn't go into this movie with high expectations. Yes, I was nervous for a long time, but after seeing the trailers, I became more and more excited, especially when I settled on the idea that I just want a fun adventure out of this film. I didn't need for it to be on the same level as the original trilogy or even what I personally feel about "The Force Awakens" and "The Last Jedi." With Disney owning Lucasfilm, I envision that the eventual goal will be to have Star Wars on the same level as the MCU with two to three movies per year and several TV series also moving forward. In that case, much like with the MCU, not every movie needs to be a masterpiece. We can have simple, fun adventures like "Solo." In fact, I think that's the exact direction they should go with these side stories in this gigantic universe. It's a solid direction and I'm excited. Thus I will happily award "Solo" with an 8/10.

Deadpool 2 Review

After getting punched in the gut by "Infinity War," Fox had rather good timing with their release of "Deadpool 2," because after going through something so emotionally wrenching, we now get to kick back and relax with a "Deadpool" sequel. As far as my quick opinions on the original "Deadpool," there is a lot to love about that movie, namely the fourth-wall-breaking social commentary that Deadpool adds throughout the film that gives you gut-busting laughter from beginning to end. I also appreciated the fact that the movie was revolutionary in terms of teaching Hollywood that if you have a good movie that people want to see that is boosted by good marketing, the MPAA rating really doesn't matter. If a comic book character was written a certain way, you don't have to water that character down or spice that character up in order to achieve the desired rating that you think will make the most money. You can do the character justice as is and people will show up. Yet unlike many, I wasn't necessarily caught up in the novelty of seeing a proper Deadpool movie. I had plenty of issues with the film stemming in what I call origin-story-itis that I hoped a sequel could improve upon with that out of the way. I'm happy to tell you that "Deadpool 2" mostly does just that.

When I say "Deadpool" suffered from origin-story-itis, the specifics in that case were a bit of a tricky balance as what they did was completely necessary due to the fact that Deadpool's origins were completely screwed up in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." I don't hate that movie like most of the world does, but when it came specifically to Deadpool, that was perhaps one of the most embarrassingly awful introductions to a popular comic book character that this world has ever seen. Thus when they decided to do the "Deadpool" movie, they were required to spend a good portion of the movie on the real origins so that the world could be properly introduced to this character. There was no getting around that. And yes, they did tell the origins in a clever way as they started the movie in the middle and then spent the first half of the movie bouncing back and forth from the present to the past, so that we weren't spending 100 percent of the time on the past. But still, I found this setup to the character a lot less interesting than when we were in the present with him all suited up and ready to roll, thus the narrative balance of the movie wasn't completely in sync for me even though I was rolling around in laughter at the humor in the movie as I love fourth-wall breaking.

The second part of this origin-story-itis is that it's often not wise to introduce your protagonist's main arch-nemesis in the first film. Thus origin stories often introduce more of a throwaway villain for the hero to face right off the bat while they're in their early stages of herodom. After the character has successfully established themselves as a hero in the origin story after beating this first villain, then the franchise is ready to move forward with the major drama of that hero in the sequels. In the case of "Deadpool," we have Ajax, played by Ed Skrein, as our villain. And I only knew that name because I looked it up. Ed Skrein does a fine job with the role, but the villain is simply not memorable. I felt he was a throwaway villain whose purpose was solely to serve as a placeholder while they waited for the sequel for someone bigger and better. Thus in both of these cases, I feel "Deadpool" compares quite well to "Guardians of the Galaxy." Since no one knew the Guardians before the film was announced, that first movie had to spend a major portion introducing us to all of the characters. On top of that, they also had one of Marvel's worst villains in Ronan. Yet both "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Deadpool" were absolutely hilarious, making them fun, rewatchable movies despite the narrative flaws stemming from origin-story-itis.

I bring all of this up for a very specific reason and that's because how you think of "Deadpool 2" will most likely depend on whether or not you agree with my assessment of "Deadpool." If you are in agreement with me that "Deadpool" was a funny movie that had some significant flaws that left the door open for a sequel to be even better, then you will most likely agree with me that "Deadpool 2" delivers on the potential of it being an improvement. Or at least you might agree that is just as good. On the flip side of that, if you were one of those people who have loved the character of Deadpool for years and were crying tears of joy that he finally got justice done to him in the form of a gloriously R-rated movie, then I think you're going to like "Deadpool 2," but I don't think you'll conclude that it hits the heights of its predecessor. I'll admit that part of the reason that I wasn't necessarily elated with the idea of a proper Deadpool movie is that I'm not part of the crowd who begs for R-rated films to be made and am disappointed when something ends up as PG-13 instead. Raunchiness, language and excessive blood and gore are not requirements for my entertainment and I'm not disappointed when they are removed. But I can often tolerate them if they have a purpose to the film.

I've now gone through all this setup without having talked about this actual movie at hand and that's mostly because I feel like I'm walking on glass when I talk about it. The marketing campaign for this movie was excellent. Not only did they make Deadpool fans extremely excited to see the movie, but in hindsight, the meat of the of the plot is completely absent from the trailers. We got a lot of Cable and X-Force stuff in the trailers and I had a good idea of how I thought they were going to integrate that, but I was mostly wrong. What we got instead was a movie that was surprisingly emotional and family-driven. Deadpool jokes towards the beginning that this is the perfect family film and in an odd, twisted way, he ends up being exactly right. Although the warning he gives right before is valid because you shouldn't take your kids to this movie. I still facepalm at stories I heard of parents taking their kids to see the original, then complaining at the movie for exposing their children to such content. I mean, did you NOT see the rating on your ticket that you purchased? Anyways, while this is not a kids film, family is the theme. Deadpool wants a family, but said opportunity gets ripped away from him until he learns to discover a new sort of family. It sounds cheesy, but it works. 

There's some opening jokes that had me rolling in laughter, especially after seeing and loving "Logan" last year. But then we have an opening sequence that actually punches you in the gut, almost negated the previously stated idea of this being a relaxing film following "Infinity War." But then when the actual opening credits roll, we are reminded that this is in fact a Deadpool movie where the main focus is comedy, thus the hilarious opening credits do a great job of easing the audience back into a state of relaxation as we prepare for what the rest of the movie has in store for us, which mostly involves a kid named Russell, the kid with the fire abilities that we are introduced to in the trailers. Drama happens there that builds the emotion of the film, then Cable arrives and things start to get real. And much different than I was expecting, which was a pleasant surprise to me. Unfortunately I do have to be honest with the fact that the movie gets a bit clunky in the process of this setup. The flow of the film isn't the best in the first several sequences. The movie felt like it was bouncing around a bit and the story seemed to just be happening, if that makes sense. Instead of having a polished narrative flow, the movie kinda just wandered around without much focus.

Even though the humor was great, sometimes the movie tried too hard to be a comedy and wound up sacrificing story in favor of humor instead of having a natural balance between the two. And finally, the movie didn't quite know what to do with all of its characters. There's multiple examples of this, but the biggest one is Negasonic Teenage Warhead. We learn she's a lesbian, which I was fine with, and her girlfriend was pretty awesome, but the movie had no idea what to do with them as they didn't really serve a purpose and thus they became more of a side thing. All of this did a great of reminding me that this was David Leitch who directed this movie. Him and Chad Stahelski teamed up to direct "John Wick," which was amazing. Then they separated, which resulted in Stahelski to do "John Wick: Chapter 2" on his own while Leitch did "Atomic Blonde." The John Wick franchise never missed a beat as the second one was just as good while "Atomic Blonde" had moments of greatness, but was mostly just bland and stale. In my mind, that showcased to us who the better of the two directors is and unfortunately we got the lesser of the two with "Deadpool 2." Yet this being a more collaborative effort from Fox and company, I feel the others around Leitch did a good job of helping him get back on track.

The obvious answer as to who saves this film and elevates it for me is Ryan Reynolds, who proves once again that he was born to play Deadpool. Even in sequences where the movie felt a bit clunky, he still owned every scene he was in, which happened to be most of the movie given that it's his movie. In addition to playing Deadpool, Reynolds also helped write the film and there are so many moments where you can tell that he had his hand on a huge part of the script and dialogue. Not to be forgotten, though, when it comes to the cast is that of Josh Brolin. The man is having himself a really good month at the moment as his turn as Thanos in "Infinity War" has him etched in stone as one of the greatest comic book villains of all-time. And now he follows that up with Cable, who has a unique relationship with Deadpool in this movie, which takes a twist I wasn't expecting. Nevertheless, Brolin and Reynolds bounced off each other perfectly in the film. Topping things off, the kid named Russell is played by Julian Dennison, the troubled kid from "The Hunt for the Wilderpeople," a movie that you all should see if you haven't. And we have Zazie Beetz as a character named Domino. I don't want to say much about them, but they are definite highlights and I'd love to see more of them.

There is a moment in this movie where any clunkiness is recovered from, characters evolve, the humor and story become mostly well balanced, and the result is an absolute blast that I simply can't talk about. I also appreciated the fact that, despite having the door wide open for them to do whatever they wanted, the movie is fairly tame when it comes to the raunchy humor. Instead of bathing the movie in debauchery just because they can, they only make certain jokes when they feel it's appropriate for the moment. Yes, the movie gets very graphic and bloody in terms of violence and is loaded with language, but it's really not a raunchy comedy, which I appreciated. Deadpool is constantly funny throughout without feeling the need to rely on sexual-based humor to make people laugh. When push comes to shove, though, what ended up standing out the most to me comes from the bizarrely perfect soundtrack which is highlighted by the song "Tomorrow" from the musical "Annie." That song is one of my favorites as there's a strong sense of optimism despite the current miserable situation. In ways I can't say, that's the whole theme of "Deadpool 2" and it's rather beautiful. Add in the comedy and action and "Deadpool 2" delivers a solid 8/10 from me.

Movie Preview: May 2018

As was expected going into April, summer came a bit early this year with the late decision by Disney to bump "Avengers: Infinity War" up a week to April 27. Said decision resulted in the largest domestic opening weekend ever of $257.7 million to fall in April. Add in another $24.7 million for "Infinity War" on Monday, April 30, and that was enough to push April 2018 over the edge as the first April to cross the billion mark with $1.02 billion. Although that $282.4 million that "Infinity War" earned in April was only 27.7 percent of the total gross for the month, meaning the rest of the slate helped out greatly, especially the $149.4 million total for "The Quiet Place," $78.5 million of "Rampage" and $53.5 million of "Blockers" as well as great holdovers from both "Ready Player One" and "Black Panther." Now we move onto the first official month of the summer where we're going to mainly sit pretty for a couple weeks while "Infinity War" continues to rake in all of the money, but then we'll kick things into high gear with two major franchises set for huge openings, which should lead a rather busy and exciting summer. The May record is $1.14 billion set in 2013, which may have been reachable had "Infinity War" not jumped up a week. But as is, that record is most likely safe for another year.

May 4th - 6th-

The biggest question of this first weekend will be how much "Infinity War" makes in its second weekend. The best comparison are the previous two Avengers movies. The original 2012 movie fell 50.3 percent in its second weekend while "Age of Ultron" fell a steeper 59.4 percent. Using both movies as the range for "Infinity War" this weekend, that will leave it somewhere between $105-125 million for its second weekend. The all-time record for a second weekend is "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" with $149.2 million. Although that movie was a December release, hence the light 39 percent fall from its opening weekend. If "Infinity War" can manage to top the $111.7 million of "Black Panther" from earlier this year, it will claim second place.

As far as the new releases for this weekend, leading the pack will be the Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez comedy remake Overboard. The original 1987 movie was directed by Garry Marshall, also known for "Pretty Woman" and "The Princess Diaries" among others, and starred Goldie Hawn as a stuck-up rich girl and Kurt Russell as a lowly, poor carpenter. When Goldie Hawn suffers amnesia and her real husband decides not to take her back, Kurt Russell decides to claim her as his wife, thus forcing her to live a life in poverty with him. In this remake, the roles are flipped and Eugenio Derbez is the spoiled rich man whereas Anna Faris is a lowly carpet cleaner. When Derbez suffers amnesia, Faris comes up with a plan to take him in as her husband, forcing him to live a life in poverty. This remake isn't getting very good early marks from critics at just 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but the original wasn't necessarily a critical darling, either. Tracking metrics have it playing similar to, or ahead of, Derbez's previous film "How to Be a Latin Lover," which opened to $12.3 million in 1,118 at nearly this same exact time last year. With "Overboard" opening in 1,623 theaters, if it were to follow a similar per theater average, that would equate to $17.8 million for this weekend.

Hoping to compete for a place in the top five will be the Charlize Theron drama Tully. The advantage that this movie has is strong critical reviews with a certified fresh score of 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The disadvantage is a lower theater count at just 1,353 theaters. "Tully" chronicles the pains and struggles of motherhood, especially for women in their 30's and older, who, as the trailer talks about, often feel like they have disappeared into the background, thus feeling rather worthless at times after such vibrant and active lives they had in their 20's. Charlize Theron plays one said mother in this movie who has become overwhelmed with life, as she has to raise her several kids almost on her own while her husband is extremely busy with his work. This leads her to eventually accept her wealthy brother's offer of hiring a nighttime nanny named Tully to help her out with her responsibilities. The movie is directed by Jason Reitman, who also directed "Juno," "Up in the Air" and "Thank You for Smoking." Given that this is more of an adult-targeted drama, said audience are not necessarily known for rushing out opening weekend, meaning this could be more naturally backloaded, especially with Mother's Day around the corner.

The final movie of the weekend is the movie with the highest theater count of the three, yet the movie that might make the smallest dent and that is Bad Samaritan. This is a movie that was initially scheduled for an April 27 release date, but when "Infinity War" took that date, Electric Entertainment smartly decided to swap and take this May 4 release date instead. But in the vein of this initially being a late-April throwaway movie, we have a horror/thriller that might have a hard time finding an audience. The movie is about a pair of young robbers who steal a man's car and intend to rob his home only to find a woman held captive in the home. David Tennant is the biggest name in the movie as the man whose home is being robbed while the other actors in the movie are lesser known. The movie is directed by Dean Devlin, producer of "Independence Day," "Stargate" and other Roland Emmerich films while having directed last year's "Geostorm." Distributor Electric Entertainment will be experimenting with their first film opening in wide release, as "Bad Samaritan" hits 2,007 theaters, after their only previous two films include "LBJ" (659 theaters) and "Blackaway" (11 theaters).

May 11th - 13th-

It'll be an uncontested third weekend at No. 1 for "Infinity War" this weekend again as following the trajectories of the first two Avengers movies would land it somewhere between $52-67 million. Although this weekend will provide our first potential sleeper candidate of the summer as Melissa McCarthy's Life of the Party debuts. Ever since "Bridesmaids" in 2011, every comedy that McCarthy has led has opened to at least $20 million, making her one of the safest comedy bets around at the moment when it comes to box office. This movie has her playing a middle-aged mother who decides to go back to college with her daughter to finish her degree after her husband suddenly asks for a divorce. The mother/daughter banter throughout the movie could very well be timely for this weekend with Mother's Day on Sunday. "Life of the Party" will again reunite McCarthy with director Ben Falcone, who she's been married to since 2005. Falcone previously directed "Tammy" and "The Boss," which opened to $21.6 million and $23.6 million respectively, so there's a good bet as to where "Life of the Party" could also debut. "Tammy" went onto make $84.5 million while "The Boss" wasn't quite as lucky, landing at $63.3 million, which is still fairly respectable, though.

The other movie is another Mother's Day themed movie, albeit with a polar opposite angle from "Life of the Party" and that is Breaking In. This movie sees Gabrielle Union playing a mother who takes her kids to visit the home of her father, who has recently passed away, only to experience a home invasion where a group of guys take her kids hostage and make certain demands or else none of them will make it out alive. So we essentially have a home invasion thriller with Gabrielle Union fighting like a mother to protect and save her kids. The movie is directed by James McTeigue, who directed "V for Vendetta" in 2006, although he hasn't done much of note since. A better name to point out is producer Will Packer, who has produced a long string of hits. When it comes to "Breaking In," perhaps the most notable Packer-produced thrillers include "No Good Deed" and "Obsessed," which opened to $24.2 million and $28.6 million respectively. That mark seems like a best case scenario as there's a lot of potential comparisons here, ranging from "Unforgettable," which tanked by opening to just $4.8 million, or medium hits such as Halle Berry's "Kidnap" ($10 million opening), "When the Bough Breaks" ($14.2 million opening) and "Proud Mary" ($9.9 million opening).

May 18th - 20th-

After two full weeks of Hollywood letting "Infinity War" dominate at the box office while providing some smaller options for attempted counter-programming, we have our next major summer blockbuster and that is fellow superhero movie Deadpool 2. This is a movie that was initially set for a June 1 release date, but Fox decided to release it the weekend before "Solo: A Star Wars Story" instead of the weekend after, which was the domino that caused "Infinity War" to in turn jump up a week to April 27. "Deadpool" was a movie in 2016 that took a huge risk. Prior to that, R-rated superhero movies did exist, but they were few and far between while being on the smaller end of the scale in terms of size. The mindset of Hollywood was that you couldn't release an R-rated superhero movie and have it make money. It had to be PG-13. Thus the huge risk for "Deadpool," which turned into huge reward as the movie opened to $132 million on its way to $363 million total, basically proving to Hollywood that as long as you have a well-marketed, high-quality movie, the rating doesn't matter. "Deadpool 2" has gone all out with its marketing. That along with the good will from the first movie should help it get to an opening similar to that of its predecessor.

There should be plenty of laughs to go around this month. In addition to "Overboard," "Life of the Party" and "Deadpool 2," another option for audiences will be Book Club. Despite the high level of competition when it comes to comedy this month, this movies seems like it's in decent shape because its target audience seems to be the older, senior crowd who probably don't have much interest in "Life of the Party" or "Deadpool 2." The movie stars four of Hollywood's beloved senior actresses, Diane Keaton (72), Jane Fonda (80), Candice Bergen (71) and Mary Steenburgen (65), who play lifelong friends who decide to read "50 Shades of Grey" in their book club, which in turn stimulates their desires to reinvigorate their own love lives, despite their age. The movie is directed by first time director Bill Holderman, who is known for his work as a producer, most notably for the movie "A Walk in the Woods" in 2015, which starred Robert Redford and Nick Nolte as two long-time friends who decided to hike the Appalachian Trail. The box office for that movie might be a good comparison for "Book Club" as "A Walk in the Woods" opened to a modest $8.2 million, but held fairly well to end up with $29.5 million.

The final movie of this weekend is the first movie in May to be targeted specifically at family audiences and that is Show Dogs. While "Peter Rabbit" was a huge hit for families earlier this year, the market has been a little sparse since then as "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Sherlock Gnomes" performed decently in March, but not great, and "Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero" was more of a blip in the radar in April. So the market is probably ready for another family hit, especially as school comes to a close for kids. The problem is that, even though the market is ready for another hit, the options on the table still have to be appealing and the reaction to the trailers for "Show Dogs" haven't been very nice to say the least. The movie involves a police dog going undercover with his human at a dog show in order to help advert a certain crisis. The movie comes to us via director Raja Gosnell, who previously directed "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" and both live-action Scooby-Doo movies, so he seems to be an expert at these sub-par live-action kids movies involving talking animals. Granted, kids are pretty nice and forgiving as critics, but it's still the parents buying the tickets and they might choose to save their money for the likes of "The Incredibles 2" and/or "Hotel Transylvania 3."

May 25th - 27th-

Last, but certainly not least, we have just one movie opening on the final weekend of May, but it could be the biggest one and that is of course Solo: A Star Wars Story. The conversation surrounding Star Wars has certainly been an interesting one over the last few months as "The Last Jedi" did a great job of completely dividing fans, causing the conversation to turn from friendly chatter to heated debates, feeling almost political in nature. That combined with the fact that the idea of a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford has never been a well-received one among fans. Add in all of the production issues this movie has had with the firing of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller late in the game, turning to Ron Howard as a replacement, and this all means that Lucasfilm has an uphill battle to climb with this movie. However, lest you think this movie is poised to flop, allow me to remind you that it's going to take a lot more than one controversial film to push away all Star Wars fans. Despite a small portion of fans claiming they will forever boycott Star Wars, people will show up. Even the much maligned prequels all made over $300 million at the domestic box office. Early tracking for "Solo" has it at the pace of "Rogue One," which opened to $155.1 million.

Avengers: Infinity War Review (SPOILERS)

With "Iron Man" having been released on May 2, 2008, this week will officially mark the 10-year anniversary of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What initially started out as a risky venture in setting up a superhero cinematic universe has paid off as the most lucrative reward in movie history as this past weekend saw the Marvel Cinematic Universe cross $15 billion worldwide with no signs of slowing down, especially not after "Avengers: Infinity War" just broke the records for highest grossing opening weekend both domestically and internationally, passing "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and "The Fate of the Furious" respectively. Yet all previous 18 movies have built up to this point. The Infinity War. The first infinity stone, the Tesseract, showed up in the end credit scene of "Thor" in 2011, playing a key role two months later in "Captain America: The First Avenger." Thanos first showed up in the next movie in May 2012 in the end credits scene of "The Avengers." This tells me that the Infinity War story arc has been in the works from day one, or at least shortly thereafter. Now following 10 years of build up, the first half of this story is finally here and the only way to talk about it is to do so in a spoiler review. Turn away now if you don't want the secrets of this movie spoiled.

I technically can't say I've been with the MCU since day one. I was on a mission for my church from 2008 to 2010, meaning I never saw "Iron Man" or "The Incredible Hulk" in theaters. But I quickly caught up when I got home and starting with "Iron Man 2" in summer 2010, I have seen all of them in theaters, usually on opening weekend. I don't consider this that major of an accomplishment. When you're a fan of a franchise and it only takes two to three trips to the theater to keep up, it's a rather easy task to have seen all 19 movies. If you're a more casual fan or you never really venture out to the theater and thus you haven't seen every MCU movie, then that's where this gets a bit tricky because "Infinity War" is NOT a standalone film. Sure, you still might be able to enjoy the action sequences, laugh at the humor and appreciate the crazy finale, but there's a really good chance you might be completely lost in regards to the story if you've missed significant parts of this journey. Specifically, I'd say every Phase III movie is necessary to see in order to completely appreciate "Infinity War," those movies being "Captain America: Civil War," "Doctor Strange," "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," "Spider-Man: Homecoming," "Thor: Ragnarok" and "Black Panther."

From that point, there's even more back tracking, because most of those Phase III movies are fully appreciated only after seeing their Phase I and Phase II predecessors. What this means is that "Infinity War" is a movie for the fans. Usually I don't like using that phrase because "this is a movie for the fans" is often a cop-out used by people to condescend towards those who didn't like a movie that they did enjoy. I got that thrown at me by some DC fans when I gave "Batman v. Superman" a negative review, which I found really annoying because I AM a DC fan. In fact, I grew up with DC more than I did Marvel, so to say that I'm not a true fan because I didn't like that movie made me want to slap some people upside the face. But yet I say "Infinity War" is for the fans simply because it's best appreciated upon seeing every previous movie in the MCU and might fly right over the heads of those who aren't caught up. If you have seen every movie and you happen to not like "Infinity War" because of all the death and destruction or for other reasons, then don't take offense to my statement. I'm not saying you aren't a fan. You're allowed to not like this movie and still like everything else in the MCU. I just hope you take the time to understand why this is my new favorite movie in the MCU.

While I am a big fan of the MCU, I always hesitate to label myself as a Marvel fanboy. The term fanboy often comes with a negative connotation that infers said person refuses to say anything bad about the franchise and will thus blindly praise every movie in that franchise as the best thing since sliced bread. When it comes to Marvel fanboys, that often means also hating everything DC has done as if this is a sporting match where you have to pick one or the other because cheering for both teams doesn't often make sense. I've always hated this. Why can't we enjoy both? If DC figures out how to make more movies like "Wonder Woman" and less movies like everything else in the DCEU, then I will gladly ride both of these franchises. Thus you shouldn't see my high praises of "Infinity War" as me being a Marvel fanboy who always blindly praises everything they do. That's not true. In fact, it was "Wonder Woman" and "Logan" that made my top 10 last year, not "Thor: Ragnarok" or "Spider-Man: Homecoming," even though the latter two would've been worthy choices. And I was highly critical of both "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" and "Black Panther." More than many, anyways. So I'm not just going to automatically praise everything from Marvel, despite what it may seem.

In fact, I had major questions going into "Infinity War." First and foremost, they had been spending all this time hyping up Thanos, yet all I saw was another random, powerful baddie who wanted to destroy the world just for the heck out it and had done nothing but sit on a throne in brief moments of screen time he actually got up to this point. I was done with that type of villain. I need depth. I need emotion. I need proper motivation. With Marvel's track record of villains, I wasn't sure that they were going to be able to deliver on this to the level that I wanted them to do. I was worried that Thanos would just become another Ultron, which would be especially disappointing this time around with how much they've been hyping this guy up. If Thanos wasn't Marvel's best villain, or at least in the top three, this might be a disappointing venture. Also, I wanted this movie to be dark and grim. Knowing that this was the first half of a two part story, I wanted this to be "The Empire Strikes Back" of the MCU. Not only did I want Thanos to potentially be on the level of Darth Vader in terms of villains, but I wanted him to win. I wanted him to get all six infinity stones and use that infinity gauntlet to wipe out the Avengers, leaving them broken, torn apart and hopeless.

I know that might sound sadistic, but I felt that this is what Marvel needed to do in order to give this movie the emotional impact needed to make this movie 10 years and 18 movies in the making worth the wait and the hype. Then we can get our happy ending in part two next year, which will be more satisfying of a victory in the process. One that the Avengers actually had to work harder than ever for. This is a high bargain to ask from a movie, especially one that has been mostly pleasant comfort food for a good majority of the previous 10 years. Demanding that out of a movie was setting myself up for failure, especially because I didn't believe that they could do it and I was ready to be super critical. I was excited. But not as excited as I should be with all this baggage I was taking into the movie theater. Yet this, my friends, is exactly why "Infinity War" is the best movie in the MCU and one of the best superhero movies ever made. Because they did it. I didn't think they could. But they did. I've been reeling all weekend. I've been emotionally traumatized. I feel like I got punched in the gut and beaten with a baseball bat. Yet in a weird, sick, twisted way, I've enjoyed it. It's resulted in one of the most unique and rewarding cinematic experiences of my life.

Yes, this is a spoiler review, but that doesn't mean I'm going to talk about every single aspect of this movie. This is a 149-minute long movie with perhaps more characters jammed in than I've ever seen, meaning I can talk about this for hours and practically write a book on this blog if I were to cover everything. But I'm not going to. What I will do is speak opening about the aspects of this movie that I felt need to be mentioned. Like the fact that we start this movie off with a bang in learning that Thanos has wiped out all of the Asgardians. Or, well, half of them as Thor later states in the movie. This was a phenomenal way to start off the movie. It does make the ending of "Thor: Ragnarok" a bit sad when you know what's coming next for them. But it sets the tone for this entire film. At the end credits scene of "Ragnarok," we saw them come face to face with Thanos' ship, likely because Loki stole the Tesseract before Asgard itself blew up and that Tesseract is exactly what Thanos is looking for. We learn immediately that Thanos is absolutely ruthless as he then boards their ship, kills half of them, including Heimdall and Loki, scares Hulk into hiding for the rest of the movie, steals the Tesseract, leaves Thor badly hurt, then leaves as if he's done something noble.

My biggest question there is WHERE'S VALKYRIE?!?!?!?! If she's among the dead Asgardians, that might be upsetting to me because I wanted a lot more from her in the MCU. But as we don't know her fate, I won't hold that against this specific movie. I do think it's a noble death for Loki. As the god of mischief, he's been wavering from day one and has caused a lot of pain and destruction. Yet in "Ragnarok" he finally seemed to come around and his arc is finished in a heroic way as he nearly kills Thanos right there, but his blade is stopped inches from Thanos' throat and then is choked to death by Thanos. I think this is a great way to finish off Loki's arc and sadly I hope they keep him dead, otherwise I feel that might compromise this moment. Yet along those lines of Loki nearly stopping Thanos, that ends up being the theme of this movie. Both the Avengers and the Guardians come so close on so many different occasions, yet Thanos ends up coming out on top in each situation, adding to the painful, emotional beat down that that movie gives the audience. The other thing that this opening scene accomplished was making me uneasy for the rest of the film. If they're willing to kill half the Asgardians, with Loki included, then no one is safe.

Thus for the first time ever, a movie in the MCU has stakes to it. I understand the reason behind Marvel not wanting to kill off major characters because that means any future story with said character can no longer be told. But at the same time, that's also why a lot of these films have becoming more lightweight entertainment. There may be danger, but you know that the heroes of the movie are going to overcome the danger, evil is going to perish and all the good guys will live happily ever after. Not so in "Infinity War." If they're willing to kill Loki right off the bat and potentially Valkyrie, too, then suddenly no one is safe. Instead of going into each battle with Thanos or his minions ready to be entertained by another action sequence, I went in really nervous because each give battle could be one characters final moment on screen. I figured people with movies coming up might end up being safe, like Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and Black Panther, but I felt like anything could be on the table with our original Avengers or any of the sidekicks to anyone, thus I was nervous, adding a ton of emotional weight to every battle sequence, especially the ones with Thanos actually involved. Could this be the end of Iron Man? Captain America? Thor? Hulk? Black Widow? I didn't know.

Interestingly enough, the way it turned out wound up being the exact opposite of what I was expecting with all the new members getting killed off and the old members surviving, but I'll get to that in a bit. Thanos needs to be discussed at this point. Now, I don't think we've learned everything about Thanos at this point. And I'm not sure why exactly he's made it his mission to obtain all the infinity stones and destroy half the universe. But so far I buy into it. One of the most fascinating things about him is that I think he genuinely believes that he is doing the right thing. Regardless of the reason, he feels like he needs to bring balance to the universe and he's going to do whatever it takes to get that done while not feeling any sort of guilt or remorse while also not feeling necessary to wipe out everyone. He almost kills Thor at the beginning, but when Loki agrees to give up the Tesseract, he lets Thor go free. He almost kills Iron Man at the end, but when Doctor Strange agrees to give up the Time Stone, he lets Iron Man go free. Even then, when he's about to kill Iron Man, he tells him that, "I hope they remember you." Yes, that line was in the trailer and I thought it was going to be done in a mocking tone, but it turned out to be a respectful gesture for a formidable opponent.

That whole mindset from Thanos really fascinated me and helped me buy into his motivations while also being scared of him due to the fact that he was willing to kill any of my favorite Avengers if they got in his way, more out of duty rather than power and vengeance. What officially put me over the top in regards to Thanos is the scene with him and Gamora. Darth Vader went from ominous presence in "A New Hope" to fascinating character in "The Empire Strikes Back" when you learn that he cares for his son Luke. Thus Thanos draws parallels to Darth Vader on that level because he became even more interesting once we learned how much he cared about Gamora. After Gamora takes Thanos to the soul stone following Peter Quill's failed attempt to kill his girlfriend on her request when Thanos uses the reality stone to turn Quill's bullets into bubbles, it is revealed via Red Skull, which was a shocking revelation that he was still alive, that in order to obtain the soul stone, you need to sacrifice someone you love. This is the point where Gamora starts laughing because she's convinced that Thanos is like Voldemort by being incapable of loving. OK, she doesn't reference Voldemort. But that's what I was thinking. And I was with her. Gamora is safe and Thanos' plan has failed.

Yet in one of the most powerful moments in the movie, we suddenly see Thanos shed a tear. I gasped in horror because I suddenly realized what is going to happen. Gamora, a character I really have come to love, is toast. Sure enough, Thanos apologizes to her and throws her off a cliff. And doing so destroyed him inside, which caused me to feel for him a bit because he just lost his daughter due to the fact that he felt it was his duty to collect all of the infinity stones. I didn't expect to empathize with Thanos in this moment, especially not after he just killed one of the best Guardians, who I don't think is coming back, but I did on a certain level. Suddenly this big baddie was more than just a crazy villain who wants to destroy half of the universe, but he actually has a heart. He didn't care for much. But he cared for Gamora. And that was proven over the fact that he was rewarded with the soul stone after this sacrifice, which he wouldn't have received if that was a fake sacrifice. After this moment in the movie, Thanos now had four infinity stones, the purple one that he got before the movie began, the Tesseract that he got from Loki after killing the Asgardians, the reality stones that he got by burning down the Collector's planet and the soul stone that he got by sacrificing Gamora.

Thus we are left with just two stones for him to collect, the time stone that Doctor Strange is protecting and the yellow stone that's in Vision's head. There's a lot of different story arcs that lead up to the point of Thanos obtaining these final two sequences and I'm going to breeze past all of it. There were a lot of characters to follow, a lot of humor that was cleverly implemented in and a lot of action sequences that I really enjoyed. What I will say about all of this is that it reminded me of a Star Wars movie in the way this whole story was told with various parties at different parts of the galaxy while we took turns bouncing around to all of them. Star Wars does this with a lot of fancy swipes and fades and although "Infinity War" didn't do any of that style of editing, it almost felt like it did. I was most impressed with how the Russo Brothers balanced all of this story telling. They risked the movie becoming overly bloated with too many characters and too many story arcs, but as they've shown previously with "The Winter Soldier" and "Civil War," they're pretty good at this storytelling and have continued to maintain a high level of quality with increasingly more characters to balance with each new project Marvel has put in their hands.

Long story short, we are left with two final battle sequences, one on Titan with Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Star-Lord, Drax and Mantis taking the battle to Thanos and nearly manage to remove the Infinity Gauntlet until Star-Lord screws everything up when he learns that Thanos killed Gamora. I know a lot of people are giving Star-Lord a lot of crap for losing his temper like this, but I personally think it makes him one of the more human characters in all of this movie, making him extremely relatable. You definitely feel for Star-Lord and I'm sure everyone can relate to a moment where they acted irrationally upon learning something devastating. This also adds yet another moment in the movie where the heroes almost won, but then came up short. Later in this sequence, our other emotional moment is where Thanos nearly kills Iron Man. This moment nearly wrecked me because I honestly thought Iron Man was gone, but then Doctor Strange succumbs and gives up the time stone in order to save Iron Man. But does he succumb in a moment of weakness? I don't think so. Remember, Doctor Strange saw every possible outcome of this battle and I'm guessing he saw that Iron Man was necessary to beat Thanos and that the time stone needed to be given up.

This leaves us to our final battle. While everything in the previous paragraph is happening, we also jump around to everyone else gathered in Wakanda in what has to be one of the most epic battle sequences in any superhero movie and possibly any movie overall. While the other battle is very improv, this one is very strategic and organized, but involves so many different characters doing so many awesome things, After nearly countless epic moments in this battle, there are two moments where the Avengers almost win that again add to this emotional beat down when they come up short. The first is Scarlet Witch finally agreeing to sacrifice Vision in a super sad moment because I finally bought them as a couple. When Scarlet Witch successfully destroys the infinity stone in Vision, I thought that Vision wasn't going to get the final stone. But then he uses the time stone, making useless Scarlet Witch's sacrifice and kills Vision himself. Ouch. And finally, Thor soars in with Stormbreaker, his new awesome axe, and nails Thanos right in the chest. I thought Thanos was dead and suddenly panicked in trying to figure out what happens in the next movie. But nope. Thanos then says, "You should've gone for the head." Thanos then snaps his fingers and all is over.

And this leads me to my final point. This movie began with Thanos desiring to obtain all of the infinity stones, balance the universe by destroying half of everyone living in it, then relax on his own place after successfully completing his mission. And he succeeds. That final shot is a very somber moment that leaves everyone watching completely wrecked. But all the death coming before it is rather shocking as half of the people start to disintegrate. Victims of this disintegration include Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Falcon, Bucky Barnes, Mantis, Drax, Star-Lord, Groot, Nick Fury and Maria Hill. None of these people are actually dead. The Avengers are going to find a way to reverse this. I don't know how, but they are. But still, even knowing that none of them are dead for good, this didn't diminish the sadness of the situation as each new person gone broke my heart, but none more than Spider-Man as he nervously hugged Tony, saying, "I don't want to go." Surviving members include Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, War Machine, Okoye, M'Baku, Rocket and Nebula. We don't know about Shuri because she was off screen and Ant-Man, Wasp or Hawkeye because they weren't in the movie.

I'm certainly excited to see how this all turns out. It pains me that we have to wait a whole year until the currently untitled "Avengers 4" will finish us off. There is a lot of pressure for them to complete this the right way without diminishing what they accomplished in "Infinity War." As such, as I expect everyone who disintegrated to come back, especially because some of them, like Spider-Man, have movies on the schedule, part of me hopes that those who died before the disintegration remain dead, thus meaning the stakes set up in this movie were real. In other words, Loki, Gamora and Vision I think are dead forever. But we shall see. However, even if the conclusion of this arc isn't as good, I don't think that diminishes what the Russo Brothers accomplished with this movie. Both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Dark Knight" are two penultimate films that are nearly perfect movies, and two of my all-time favorites. Even though "Return of the Jedi" and "The Dark Knight Rises" didn't live up to those movies (though both are solid films -- don't get me wrong), they didn't ruin the legacy of their predecessor. At the very worst, that's the case we're looking at here. As I am sticking to my guns that "Infinity War" is the best MCU film, I think it was a given that I'm giving it a 10/10.

Rampage Review

I heard word of a certain superhero movie opening last night that one or two of my friends are looking forward to. But you didn't really want to hear my thoughts on that, did you? Thus it makes perfect sense for me to now release my long-waited review of another superhero film in its own rfight from earlier this month, that of Dwayne Johnson saving Chicago from three mega-sized, blood-thirsty animals trying to destroy that city. Truth be told, I do have reasons for not seeing this one right away when it was released two weekends ago, despite me being a lot more excited for it than I probably should've been. But those reasons aren't important. I finally saw it this past Tuesday and I am getting my review out now so that my mind can be completely clear before going into "Avengers: Infinity War" right after posting. Thus if you're wondering and were wanting me to be honest, I did not see "Infinity War" last night because of the NFL Draft. But I'm sure I'll have a lot to say about it after seeing it in a bit, so you'll just have to be patient there. For now it's time to discuss giant monsters attacking Chicago and Dwayne Johnson trying to save them. This coming from the director of "San Andreas," a fellow guilty pleasure movie for me starring Dwayne Johnson, that time fighting an earthquake.

"Rampage" is based on an 80's arcade game, thus categorizing this as another attempt at a video game movie, a genre of film that really hasn't worked out too much. Either Hollywood has had an extremely atrocious run of horrible luck, or video games simply don't translate that well to the big screen. Personally I think it's a combination of the two. Sure, we should let video games be video games and movies be movies, but certain movies like "Assassin's Creed" and "Warcraft" SHOULD'VE worked out cinematically, but whoever was in charge of those projects simply showed a whole ton of incompetence in how to make a good film. There's plenty of other examples of that, but those are the two fairly recent examples that come to mind. I do feel like Hollywood should just move on from this and stop trying to make it work, but since they're not going to give up, we'll just have to take it one movie at a time. And quite frankly, 2018 hasn't been a bad year for video game movies thus far as "Tomb Raider" and now "Rampage" have been decently enjoyable films, as long as you know what you're getting into going in. Sure, neither of them are masterpieces, so don't expect that going in. But both films are the sort of movie where you can turn off your brain and enjoy.

The original premise for the "Rampage" arcade game was quite simple. You as the user control one of the three giant animals and you're goal is to destroy the city before the government comes in and stops you. That's it. No, I haven't actually ever played it, or even heard about it before this movie was announced, but I read up about the game and talked to friends who have played it. It seems like a rather enjoyable game that's good for killing time if you have nothing else to do. So how does this translate into a 107-minute long movie when there's hardly enough content to work with? That's an excellent question. One that the filmmakers didn't seem capable of cracking. They came up with about 20 minutes of quality film with the animals attacking the city while Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, the government and others stormed into stop them, giving us a fantastic finale. But it was rather obvious that they had no idea how to properly set this up as the final product showed signs of them completely giving up on doing something that was actually worthwhile to start things off. Either they wrote a quick first draft of the screenplay and went with it without reading through it a second time or were presented with a ton of ideas that were all bad, so they settled on one of them.

That's what it felt like, anyways. Thus I have to make things abundantly clear that this is a really bad movie. There's no mincing words there or trying to talk myself out of it. This is a bad movie. We'll get into more of why I am giving it a pass anyways, but let me tell you why this is bad. This is a movie based on a very simple arcade game. They could've made the premise of the movie simple, but this is anything but simple, so allow me to give you the cliff notes version of this setup. In the universe of this movie, a certain corporation back in the 1990's came up with some sort of genetic editing wherein they were able to combine genetics from several different animals to come up with a sort of serum to create super animals, but the government decided to ban it for good reasons, so they decided to take their experiments into space where in the present day we have a certain ship where most on board have been killed by a giant, mutated rat. The lone survivor scrambles to escape from this rat and successfully does so with three canisters of this serum, but her escape pod blows up in the atmosphere, sending the canisters, which are powerful enough to survive the atmosphere, shooting to earth like asteroids, where they land and end up infecting a gorilla, crocodile and wolf.

That seems like an unnecessarily complex way to set up this idea of three giant animals. I suppose the filmmakers felt they needed to come up with some sort of explanation to why the animals are giant and why they are attacking Chicago when in reality this movie would've been better with no explanation. If you paid money to see three giant animals attack a city, is it really going to be a huge dealbreaker if there's no explanation as to why this is happening? I don't think so. But speaking of unnecessarily complex, that explanation that I just gave you us just the beginning. Crammed into the first two-thirds of this movie are so many different subplots that becoming extremely distracting and annoying. I didn't care about any of it. I just wanted to see Dwayne Johnson fighting giant animals. But the movie tried to make me care about all these other characters and subplots and I just didn't buy the. The worst of which were the two villains of the movie, the brother and sister duo of this company who were responsible for the creation of the serum and thus came up with a plan to attract all three of them to where they were in Chicago so they could do something with them. What were their motivations? I don't know. What was their end goal and why? I also don't know. 

There was some really bad writing when it came to those two, yet they were the focus of a good portion of the movie. On top of the really bad writing, the acting from both of them were quite cringe-worthy. And speaking of cringe-worthy, we also had the government subplot. The lead dude of whatever branch of military this was that were on a mission to stop the creatures did a great job with his acting, but there was so much stupidity in what they were trying to do. They tried over and over to use military forces to stop them, but it wasn't working. Despite that, they kept going with the attack instead of trying to come up with a plan that would actually work. A certain plan they may have worked was to recruit Dwayne Johnson and his new girlfriend Naomie Harris. Dwayne Johnson being an animal expert who saved and raised the now giant albino gorilla and Naomie Harris who worked on this genetic editing stuff before getting fired for reasons I quickly forgot after the movie tried to explain. But no, instead of the government recruiting these two to help them, which is where I thought this was going, the government is out to get them. So Dwayne Johnson and Naomie Harris are flying solo in avoiding the government and saving Chicago.

There were flashes in the first two-thirds of the movie of awesomeness. Those flashes came when we actually focused on these three animals in their various parts of the country getting infected and fighting off whatever was in their way. And there was a good relationship with Dwayne Johnson and his gorilla that I bought into. Speaking of Dwayne Johnson, both him and Naomie Harris gave it their all in this movie, making every sequence with them enjoyable enough. But there were just too many subplots and too many annoying characters that bogged this experience down. However, if you are willing to wade through all of that, the movie does reward you by finally becoming the movie you thought you were getting yourself into when it started. The three giant animals converge into Chicago, Dwayne Johnson and Naomie Harris successfully avoid all the obstacles, and the military is in full out attack mode. From there on, the movie is a blast. And by that, I mean it's "Sharknado" levels of fantastic. The movie owns up to its ridiculous premise and has a lot of fun with incredibly stupid silliness that often had me rolling over in my chair in laughter and enjoyment. There's a lot of specifics that I want to mention, but I suppose I'll keep this review spoiler free.

A recommendation for this movie is fairly easy, I feel. This is probably a movie that should've debuted on the Syfy Channel instead of Warner Bros. spending over $100 million on putting it in theaters. There's a lot of sequences that are flat out cringe worthy and they take up a majority of the first two acts of the film. And sometimes the CGI is Syfy quality as well given that there were moments where it looked like Dwayne Johnson in front of a green screen or fighting with CGI animals that were put into the shot after the fact. Granted, that's what happens in every monster movie. But a monster movie like this needs to convince me that the monsters are actually there, which this movie only did sometimes, which is another comparison to Syfy movies. However, the recommendation is this. If you like dumb Syfy movies like "Sharknado," then I think there's potential that you might enjoy this quite a bit. If you haven't seen it in theaters yet, I wouldn't bother. Instead, I would recommend waiting till this comes to DVD or Netflix because then you have the power to fast forward and quickly get to the moments of the movie that really matter. A grade for this is tricky since I admit that it is a bad movie. But since the finale really entertained me, I'm going 7/10 for "Rampage."   

Isle of Dogs Review

All you have to do to get me into a seat to see a new Wes Anderson film is to simply inform me Wes Anderson has a new film coming out and I'll be stoked. You don't even need to show me a trailer or tell me what the movie is about. The man just has such a unique style and sense of humor that he's practically his own genre of film and all of the movies that I've seen from him have been enjoyably quirky and just a blast to experience. If you've never seen a Wes Anderson film, do yourself a favor and check out his filmography. You'll be glad you did. You can check out his nine-time Oscar nominated film "The Grand Budapest Hotel" that gave Anderson his first nominations for best director and best picture, or you can check out some of his earlier films such as "Rushmore," "The Royal Tenenbaums," "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Moonrise Kingdom." Or maybe you can just dive right into "Isle of Dogs," because this is very much a Wes Anderson film in about every way. If you have seen and loved Wes Anderson's previous films, then get to a theater as soon as possible to see "Isle of Dogs" as it shouldn't surprise you that he's conjured up yet another brilliant work of art. In fact, this is one of my favorite films in this still young 2018 and I imagine it will remain a bright highlight.

One thing I really appreciated about the marketing of this film is that they managed to not tell me much about what this was about. We were given some vague, yet intriguing trailers about a boy wandering around on Trash Island looking for his dog. So I wasn't even sure what I was getting myself into when I went into the theater. Certainly this had to be more than just a boy searching for his dog for 100 minutes, right? That didn't make me nervous at all because I have a lot of confidence in Wes Anderson. Curious would probably be the more appropriate word. Turns out my suspicious were correct. This is actually a fairly layered, complex film with a very deep story arc that they left a complete mystery in the marketing. I won't spoil the film, but I do have to talk about it in order to tell you why I loved this so much. If you already love Wes Anderson and you know nothing about "Isle of Dogs," feel free to close this review and go experience the complex, thought-provoking magic that Anderson has presented in this movie. Yes, the movie is about a boy searching for his dog. But the bigger, overarching plot involves a futuristic, fictional Japanese city where everyone loves cats while the leader has banned all dogs, exiling them to Trash Island. That's our plot here.

Thus on the surface we have a story that will have dog lovers in tears as all of these dogs have been sadly dumped on this island, left to fend for themselves while the humans don't care if they all die. After this sad introduction, said dog lovers will then be cheering for this young Japanese kid as he rebels against the government to go search for his own pet dog that has been dumped onto the island that he loves. This will then lead to quite the quirky, enjoyable adventure with this kid and the main group of dogs, voiced by Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray and Jeff Goldblum. Then on top of that, one will also be rooting for the secret team of scientists on mainland Japan who are trying to come up with a cure to this dog flu, which is part of the reason why the dogs have been exiled. In addition to these scientists, there are other groups of secret dog lovers who are trying to start a revolution of sorts to stop this evil tyranny from the current regime. Yeah, that's a lot more than the trailers told you about this movie, but in case you weren't sold solely on the Wes Anderson card, hopefully that will convince you to give this a shot in showing you that this is a deliciously complex film with so much to absorb and take in.

I'm not going to talk about what actually transpires in this film after this initial setup, but there came a point early on in the film where it dawned on me that this is much more than just a film about cats and dogs. There are a lot of films out there that are simply movies about humans and their pets. As an animal lover myself, these simple stories often capture my heart and make me miss my old pets growing up. Off the top of my head, I can immediately think of "Old Yeller," "Homeward Bound" and "Air Bud" as examples. We even have last year's "A Dog's Purpose" that was decently enjoyable. If that's all "Isle of Dogs" was about, there would be a good chance that I would still enjoy it. In fact, there's certain heartwarming moments that I loved specifically because of the relationship between the boy and his dog. But rather than being strictly a movie about cats and dogs, "Isle of Dogs" is a movie that uses cats and dogs as more of a metaphor for government as a whole as well as various social issues. The first thought that came to my mind was that this could be Wes Anderson making a strong, yet subtle statement about our current regime here in the United States with the tyrannical Japanese leader representing everyone's current beloved president, Mr. Donald Trump.

As I began to think about that, my mind was immediately blown. I was like, "Whoa!" Yet as I thought about that even more, it also dawned on me that there probably isn't just one big political statement that is being driven home here. The oppressive, tyrannical government of Japan could probably be applied to a lot of different government regimes, past or present. Meanwhile, in terms of the dogs and the cats, they could apply to various social issues. Perhaps the dogs being oppressed could represent any race or sect of people in our day who are oppressed or maybe even various ideals or philosophies that are being rejected by the populous while the cats are the exact opposite. They could represent the various racist or sexist ideas or philosophies that society often clings onto while the small group of dog lovers in the movie represent the people pushing for change, acceptance and and an overall progressive society. Reject all of those evil cats and learn to accept the dogs in your life that you have discarded. Maybe this idea will make real cat lovers angry, but the movie isn't literally saying all cats are bad. The cats are just the metaphor as cats are generally the more self-centered pets while dogs are the more loyal and humble pets.

Thematically I think this movie is genius. It's a true work of art as we get deeper into the story and learn that this is almost an allegorical tale instead of just a cute movie about dogs. But in terms of said work of art, on a technical level this is an awe-inspiring masterpiece as this is all done in the stop motion animation style, meaning all of the characters and the scenery were literally built from hand while every small movement from each character or background object had to be done shot by shot. If you're unfamiliar with this stop motion animation process, do a quick YouTube search and it'll completely blow your mind how excruciatingly difficult this process is for even the smallest and simplest of scenes. Then you watch an entire film like "Isle of Dogs" that is so detailed with everything that your jaw might literally hit the floor as you think of what went into crafting this film. All of this had me mesmerized for the entire run time. Yet that wasn't the only thing that had me mesmerized. The score throughout the movie is brilliant. It almost felt like one continuous song that was quite progressive in the construction of it that started with simple drum beats and slowly kept adding various sounds and instruments throughout.

Combine these masterfully crafted technical aspects of the movie with a creatively deep themes and metaphors surrounding these lovable characters and the best way to describe "Isle of Dogs" is that it's a brilliant work of art. If you're one of the many that are constantly complaining that Hollywood has no original ideas, then make sure you expand your horizons from the typical big blockbuster affair and go see a movie like "Isle of Dogs" because there's actually a lot of filmmakers out there like Wes Anderson that do have their creative juices flowing and are constantly showcasing it in their films. "Isle of Dogs" is unique, it's creative, it's heartwarming, it's hilarious, it's shocking, it's a bit brutal and graphic at times, it's honest and it's very thought-provoking. Even though it may seem like I have covered a lot of this movie, there's a ton here that I haven't even touched. A lot of twists and surprises throughout. A lot of different story arcs that are beautifully woven together. A lot of classic Wes Anderson moments that will have you rolling around in your chair as he takes you on a wild ride that you didn't think a movie about a boy and his dog could take you. It's definitely a top-tier Wes Anderson film for me that's worth your time and money. I'm giving "Isle of Dogs" a 9/10.

P.S. - This is not a kid's movie. I'm not saying don't take your kids. That's up to you. I'm just going to say use caution. This is a PG-13 movie that earns its rating, thus I would say this is an animated film directed at adults and fans of Wes Anderson rather than kids, which I think we need more of rather than having the stereotype that animated movies are for kids only.

Trek: The Movie Review

Actual footage from my personal Pioneer Trek in 2004. Not footage from this movie

Pioneer Trek. It's a Mormon thing. That's the tagline of this movie, which is about the only thing the movie gets right when it comes to Trek. This is a by Mormons, for Mormons movie, as the filmmakers themselves have admitted, so I don't expect anyone who is a non-Mormon to even look at this review. Unless of course you thought by the title that this was some sort of Star Trek review. I mean, when I search this movie on Google or IMDb, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is at the top of the list of things the internet thinks I'm searching for for. As fun as it would be to do a review of that movie, it's Pioneer Trek we're looking at here, not Star Trek. If you happen to be a non-Mormon and you are wondering what in the heck Pioneer Trek is, let me give a brief summary. In the early days of the Mormon church, which was organized in 1830, there was a lot of persecution. The early saints were driven from their homes on numerous occasions, causing them to cross the plains on foot, traveling from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and eventually to Utah over the course of about 15-20 years. A popular tradition today for Mormon youth is to do short reenactments of that where we dress up like pioneers and walk with handcarts for a few days. Pioneer Trek.

When I say brief summary, that's the extremely brief summary. Obviously the history of the Mormon church is a very long, complex history that I don't care to detail in this review, but the general idea is that they traveled west, often walking with handcarts carrying their stuff. I think in general it's a good idea to remember and honor your ancestors, regardless of what your current state of life is, so in the Mormon church, Pioneer Trek is one good way to remember the sacrifices that our ancestors made. Believe me, hiking in the mountains pulling a handcart behind you for just four days is tough work, even when your church leaders have everything meticulously planned out with plenty of food and water as well as ready medical attention if anyone needs it. You get to the end of that four days and you're ready to go back to your own house with your own family and live your normal life. But generally it's a very positive experience that makes you appreciate your ancestors who went through what they did over the course of several months or years. It was just a four-day reenactment for me. But for them it was life. If they ran out of food and water or got sick, there wasn't always a truck driving behind them ready to bail them out. They had to do their best and move forward.

I promise I'll get to this movie in a second, but the idea of this movie coming out sparked an interest in myself to go back and reflect on my personal experience with Pioneer Trek. The Trek that I went on with my stake was from June 29 - July 2 in 2004. I was 15 years old at the time. Don't be too impressed that I remembered those dates. All that means is that I saved my journal from that experience. I went back and read my thoughts at the time and watched the 55 minute DVD that they made of it, where someone took video footage of our Trek and added interviews of my peers talking about their experiences. I found it to be a really great experience to go back and read my thoughts and watch that DVD. I haven't done that in a long time, so doing so after so many years was pretty special. In fact, the pictures in this blog post are not of this movie that I'm reviewing. I took screenshots from my computer of said Trek DVD while I was watching, because I thought it would be fun to add those to this review. For me, this was a life-changing experience that I never forgot. Being only 15 years old at the time, it was a great way to shape my testimony. I especially loved listening to the testimonies of all my old friends from 14 years ago after this experience.

Actual footage from my Pioneer Trek. This is 15-year-old me

For sparking this desire to go back and reflect on my personal experiences, I really appreciate this movie. It also gives me a platform to talk about a personal experience that I had 14 years ago that I've not talked about much since. But if I'm being perfectly honest, a part of the reason why I immediately went back and watched my own Trek video and read my journal was to purge from my mind this awful movie that I had wasted $5 on. Normally I don't have a problem writing bad reviews, but in this instance I feel horrible doing so because these guys followed me on Twitter. I don't think it's because I'm a fancy movie person. I think it was because I was tweeting during General Conference and whoever was managing their Twitter page went about following people who were tweeting about Conference, which is a smart move on their part. Thus when they followed me, I tweeted to them that I was going to give this movie a shot and write a review of it. And they liked that tweet. So I decided to be a man of my word and fulfill my promise. Which means those people who made this movie could very well be reading this review right now. It's one thing to write a bad review that only your friends will read. But when the filmmakers themselves could be reading? Yikes. That is a bit intimidating to me.

All I can say if the filmmakers are reading this review is that I hope they appreciate honest feedback. I do keep in mind when it comes to locally made films that they're at an unfair disadvantage without the resources available to a normal big-budget Hollywood production. They often can't afford to hire major Hollywood actors or a professional Hollywood movie crew to make it look like a perfect Hollywood film, so it's unfair to judge in the same level. Even if said local filmmakers are rich and can afford to finance the whole thing, you can't spend $50 million making the movie because you're not going to make that much money in return. On the high on the things, "Meet the Mormons" made $6 million, while "The Saratov Approach" made $2.1 million and "Once I Was a Beehive" made $732,655. And those are movies that all had huge, positive buzz in the Mormon community. At the same time, though, all three of those movies were also made with the same handicaps as "Trek: The Movie" had. Or at least those last two were. "Meet the Mormons" is in a slightly different category with the Church itself making and financing it. But despite extremely low budgets, "The Saratov Approach" and "Once I Was a Beehive" were two quality films.

I think one of the biggest problems for "Trek: The Movie" was the idea itself. As you can tell, I loved my Trek experience. As do millions of other Mormon youth. But without even seeing any footage, how many of you would be intrigued at the idea of a Trek movie? I know I was concerned. That doesn't seem like a topic that translates well into an interesting big screen experience. I mean, most of Trek constitutes hours of walking while casually talking with your fellow handcart peers about life. How do you take that and transfer it into a traditional three-act movie structure that manages to keep the attention of the audience for an hour and half? I think the idea the filmmakers had was to take the idea and turn it into a Mormon version of a John Hughes-style high school drama. I suppose that sounds like an interesting idea in theory. But again. How do you translate that idea into an actual movie script that works? The correct answer is that you go talk to the people who put together "Once I Was a Beehive" and figure out how they did it. Because they talked the subject of Girl's Camp and somehow magically transformed that into an amazing Mormon film. In fact, that movie is one of the reasons why I had the confidence to purchase a ticket to this movie. Maybe it can work again?

Actual footage from my Pioneer Trek. I'm not in this picture

I suppose it could work with the right team in place. If you have an experienced Mormon filmmaker like T.C. Christensen who knows just the right strings to pull when it comes to pleasing his target audience, you could've made this work. But the director of this movie is a man by the name of Alan Peterson whose previous IMDb credits are highlighted by two extreme political documentaries called "Hillary: The Movie" and "Hype: The Obama Effect," both from 2008. So, political propaganda films to a Mormon teen movie? That's quite the transition. Not quite the experience I look for with films like this. And the screenplay was written by David Howard, the guy who wrote "Galaxy Quest"? Well that's an idea. Apparently he's done nothing since "Galaxy Quest," though, in terms of writing screenplays. And the other credited writer is a man by the name of Jongiorgi Enos, who acted in a few Mormon movies, such as "Brigham City" and "The Testaments," but this apparently is his first time writing a major screenplay. Now if this writing and directing team with no prior experience in this genre actually works out, then props to them. But when the entire screenplay is an outright disaster and the direction is awful, you look back at that and suddenly it all makes sense. They could've used a different writing crew on this one.

Now I don't know if any of the actors in this movie are going to find this review or even really care about the opinions of a random movie blogger. But they're the ones I'm actually going to compliment. Austin R. Grant, Joel Bishop, Stefania Barr, Clint Pulver, Ryan Mitchel Brown, Spencer Loftus, Avery Pizzuto and Spencer Marsh are the major players in this and they all did a fine job with what they were given. But it's that last part that's the problem. What they were given to work with. This is an awful representation of Trek from start to finish. It's so bad, that it's hard to come up with specific examples as to why, but I suppose we'll start at the top. This is supposed to be a Pioneer Trek for this whole stake. I know not all stakes are the same, but I imagine that if stake leadership made the decision to do a stake Pioneer Trek, there's going to be a lot of planning and preparation put into said Trek for months in advance. And if you have 100+ kids going, you're going to have more than five adult leaders going with them. And all the leaders are going to be well prepared as to what they are doing. Here we have the main leader who is written as an oblivious man to all of this, as if he was asked to lead a few days before, and the other leaders are exaggerated to the extreme.

So said leaders are taking this large group of kids up the mountains five minutes to a place where it looked like all the kids could walk home if they wanted to. Their handcarts are practically empty. And they aren't fed anything. Like, seriously. They walk for half the day and when it's time for lunch, they get a single orange. Then we have one of the drill sergeant leaders yelling at them every five minutes. This isn't Trek. Just look at the pictures I've provided of my real Trek. That's what Trek is. This Trek is just a joke. I don't know the personal backgrounds of these filmmakers who wrote this, but it looked like they had no idea what actual Pioneer Trek was like. At least I hope that's the case. If they ever volunteered as leaders on a real Pioneer Trek carefully organized for months in advance by stake leaders who wanted nothing more than to give the youth in the stake a life-changing experience, then that's even more embarrassing because at the very least this movie should've been able to capture what Pioneer Trek was actually like. I mean, maybe I just went on the most celestial Pioneer Trek ever, but I'd be willing to bet that anyone who loved Trek will watch this movie and be confused as to how off this is. It's the type of movie that could be watched for the sake of laughing at it for the wrong reasons, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style.

Actual Footage of my Pioneer Trek. I'm at the back right

Then we have the curious case of the youth involved. Now again, I think the actors themselves did a good job at what they were given, even though most of them looked like they were at least in their mid-20's as if this were a college Singles Ward going on Trek instead of youth aged 12 to 18. But how they were written was embarrassing. Granted, I can't say everyone involved in going to Trek with me back in 2004 were jumping for joy, but I think for the most part we all had a good attitude about it. All of these kids, and I mean all of them, were written as snobby, annoying teenagers who were dreading this experience. We had a long sequences of the exaggerated, mean adults lining them up to check to see if they snuck stuff in that they weren't supposed to, and all of them had candy, food and electronic devices hidden everywhere and were completely brokenhearted that they had to give them up. And nearly all of them continued to be extremely annoying throughout the whole movie. I think the only "normal" teenager portrayed in the movie was the girl who was playing the non-member. The rest of them were written as a exaggerated Mormon teenagers who drove me crazy, with little realism and way too many romantic subplots.

So yeah, when the whole setup is bad, that's a problem. This is supposed to be a good movie about Pioneer Trek, but the leaders were incompetent, the setup of the Trek itself was way off in terms of accuracy and all of the teenagers that are leading the way in this movie are written as exaggerated Mormon teenagers who all hate the idea of this Pioneer Trek. But OK. Fine. Maybe this is just a really poor setup. Maybe I'll get used to the characters and get something out of this movie in the final two acts. Well, they tried. The major storyline involved our main kid who was lacking in faith because one of his friends died a year previously. There was potential there. But even that fell flat. And the final act of the movie involves them getting lost in the woods because one of the girls got sick since these incompetent leaders decided to starve everyone, so the only normal leader had to drive her home in the truck, while leaving our rebellious main kid in charge of everything. Logically that had me screaming inside, dramatically it all fell flat, spiritually it felt artificial instead tear-jerking, and comedically it was just cringe-worthy. I tried to be patient with this movie, but it was bad to begin with and just kept spiraling downward to the point where I wanted to walk out.

After I left the theater, I didn't want to write this review. I didn't get the impression that many people had even heard about it and I certainly wasn't hearing any buzz after it's first week in theaters. I think this is a Mormon movie that will disappear from theaters rather quickly, so I was thinking that I could get away with just keeping my miserable experience to myself and no one would know any different. But there's a few reasons why I decided to write this. First, I said I would on Twitter after this movie's Twitter page followed me. Second, I honestly had a great time looking back and remembering my personal Trek and I'm glad I had a platform to discuss that for a bit before diving into the actual review, which is why this post is longer than my normal reviews. Third, if any of my other Utah friends saw these previews and were curious about this movie, I'm here to rescue you. Don't waste your time and money on this movie. There's plenty of other good Mormon films that you can watch, with "The Saratov Approach" and "Once I Was a Beehive" being my two prime examples. Yeah, I know, it's an uphill battle making this low-budgeted Mormon films, but for every one of them that succeeds, there's movies like this that don't make it. My grade for the movie is a 3/10.