Mini Reviews: Identity (2003), The Bourne Legacy (2012) & The Last Witch Hunter (2015)

I do love a good mystery/thriller! It’s hard to hunt this kind of movie down because once you know there’s a big twist, you find yourself trying to work it out, so when a work colleague mentioned Identity (2003) and said it ‘was a bit of a weird one’ I yelled for them to say no more and watched it that very night. It’s a brilliant movie about a bunch of strangers who all find themselves trapped at a motel, which is creepy enough until one by one they all get murdered.

It was an entertaining watch, and I didn’t see the twist coming, but my real complaint is that the twist came too early, and the actual ending itself was pretty unnecessary. Still, a good movie and I’d recommend it to other fans of the genre.

It took me far too long to watch the original Bourne trilogy, and with the latest movie on the horizon, I thought it was about time I watched The Bourne Legacy (2012). Plus, it’s got Oscar Isaac, so that was a selling point. (Spoiler Alert - That was a bit of a Cabin in the Woods moment for me, doh). I think my fiance enjoyed this more than I did, but it was an entertaining watch on a rainy weekend evening, with some great action scenes that had me on the edge of my seat and a little twist I wasn’t expecting either.

If nothing else, it’s got me really excited for Jason Bourne later this year!

It’s family movie night. We’d been planning for the last 2 weeks to watch Everest together. At the last minute, my Grampy decides Everest looked boring (argh!) and suggests we watch The Last Witch Hunter (2015) instead. Well….I do always say that I’ll watch any movie once. I didn’t even realise it was actually set in the present day, which cheered me up a little. It’s the kind of fantasy movie my 14 year old self would have loved, obsessed over actually, but now, it just wasn’t enough. It was entertaining at the time, but 3 weeks later I can barely remember it.

Which made me feel like a total snob when the credits rolled and my family gushed about how amazing it was. Well, they are the same family who hail San Andreas one of the greatest disaster movies! Sorry…

Thursday Movie Picks: Storms/Adverse Weather

It's Thursday! Time for Movie Picks. If you're new to this, Thursday Movie Picks is a fantastic series hosted by Wanderer at Wandering Through the Shelves, where each week she picks a theme and we all choose 3 movies that we feel fit.

So, this week’s theme of Storms/Adverse Weather seems oddly fitting, as whilst I’m typing this it’s raining really quite heavily outside. No, wait, it’s actually snowing now! It’s not sticking though, sadly. Man I’d love to build a snowman right now.

Anyway! The three movies I’ve picked this week aren’t actually about a storm per se, but they do have very memorable storms within them. This was a really difficult week to whittle down to just three movies.

This was funny timing, as I watched Identity just last week, and so you’ll see my review soon. It’s an interesting, quite compact mystery/thriller about a group of people who find themselves stranded at night at a motel in Nevada due to, you guessed it, a particularly nasty rainstorm. The rain is that heavy it’s caused huge floods around the roads, leaving the group with nowhere else to go. Of course, things get tense as the group is murdered one by one, and the darkness and heavy rain really helps to build the suspense during those scarier scenes.

Time for some silliness. If you aren’t familiar with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), it’s the story of a young scientist whose inventions constantly fail. That is, until he builds the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator, or FLDSMDFR for short. Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? Well, the FLDSMDFR has the ability to turn water into food, but an accident sends the machine hurtling up into sky, inadvertently causing it to rain cheeseburgers! Things turn worse when a tornado formed of spaghetti and meatballs tears through the town.

You can’t talk storms without mentioning the God of Thunder himself, Thor. Subsequently, I can’t talk Thor without mentioning that scene in his original movie, titled Thor (2011), funnily enough. Forgive my girlish ways, but the scene at the crash site at night where Thor creates a storm as a distraction to take back his hammer Mjolnir is memorable indeed. Especially when the rain made everything all muddy and slippy, and the fighting ensued. Phew! 

Oh, and in true British fashion, there are blue skies outside now!