The Jumanji 2 trailer is out (and I completely nailed it!)

As much as I dislike blowing my own trumpet (okay, not strictly true: I’d blow it 25 hours a day if I could), I am going to say, here and now – and I swear I won’t mention it ever again – that I was totally on target when I took a guess at the storyline.

You might remember that the cast tweeted a couple of shots from the film set a while back, and the interweb lost its collective shit.

Why the hell, said the Politically Correct Police, is Karen Gillan running around a mosiquito-infested jungle in shorts with her midriff out? I mean, what sensible heroine does that?

Lara Croft, I replied, to no-one in particular.

Each of the four is playing a character in a computer game, and Karen is playing a send-up of the Tomb Raider. I mean, if the name Ruby Roundhouse wasn’t a clue that this is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, then I don’t know what else they could have done short of posting the script on the movie’s website.

Well, the trailer is out and … well, it’s probably best if you see for yourself.

I guess the take-home from this is that it’s probably best to wait until production is actually done before piling in and tearing the movie to bits. A little patience and you stop bloggers getting smug when they’re proven right, and as we all know, there’s nothing worse than a smug blogger.

Transformers: The Last Knight. (A film of two halves)

I say a film of two halves, but it was more like a film of two thirds – and then another third.  Most of the film plods along at a sedately pedestrian pace, dipping into history here and there to fill in a back story that provides a little relief from the drawn-out ramble to the inevitably epic finale. And what a finale it was:  a cacophany of car chases, massive gunfights and expensively CGIed global devastation that raced and meandered like a torpedo with a bent propeller until you finally reach a conclusion that leaves the door swinging wide open for another movie.

The best thing I can say about the film was that it was okay. It was an inoffensive kids’ flick that you’d probably forget about as soon as you left the cinema, if not for the ringing in your ears.

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Mark Wahlberg turned in his usual workmanlike performance as the male lead, and I think any problems I had with Laura Haddock as the hyper-intelligent and hyper-stunning Oxford professor (I wonder if she knows the hyper-intelligent and hyper-stunning Oxford professor who appeared in The Mummy) were probably to do with the direction. Continue reading “Transformers: The Last Knight. (A film of two halves)”