Mini Reviews: The Maze Runner (2014), Fantastic Four (2015) & Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

Doing overtime at home to pay for our cat Loki's vet bills has meant I've worked my way through a lot of movies recently, which in turn means plenty of reviews to write up! This little set mainly contains movies that Jenna's already seen and reviewed, so it seemed silly to dedicate a whole post to each!  You know I drafted a post for Mission Impossible but never wrote it or posted it?! You didn't?! I thought you did, ha!

I have very little interest in the Fantastic Four series, it’s just never had much appeal to me. However, I won’t miss a chance to see a superhero movie and despite the appalling reviews, I gave Fantastic Four (2015) a go. Boy, it really was terrible. The introduction was alright, although the characters were boring, and the ending was okay, especially in terms of special effects. The main problem was everything else, cheesy dialogue, awful acting and just a boring plot that didn’t flow well at all. I guess Green Lantern isn’t the worst superhero movie anymore, huzzah! I’ll take that as a win. Damn it!!

When the trailers came out for The Maze Runner (2014), I wasn’t bothered in the slightest. I hadn’t read the books, and I was still in awe of The Hunger Games so I wrote this off completely. Curiosity got the better of me though and I ended up enjoying this much more than I thought I would. The tension and now knowing where the plot was going kept me hooked and I was pleasantly surprised. Dylan O’Brien impressed me in Teen Wolf and he makes a great lead in this. I’m quite looking forward to watching The Scorch Trials now!

Although I was very late to the party, I really enjoyed 2011’s Ghost Protocol and when the trailers came out for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) I couldn’t wait. It sounds silly but it’s probably one of my favourite trailers, I think it was the music that did it for me. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the latest mission. Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg have such a great on-screen chemistry, I’d happily watch them together in anything! I got a little lost in the game of ‘Is Isla a good guy, bad guy, double agent, double double agent’ malarky but that’s normal for me, ha.

Mini Reviews: Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Unknown (2011) & Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)

I've been putting off Edge of Tomorrow for ages now, but I did finally relent and watched it just before Christmas. Jenna's already written a full review which you can read here. I really enjoyed the film actually, and I can see why friends of mine really pushed me to watch it! I'm just not a huge Tom Cruise fan; he's the main reason I waited so long. Emily Blunt was brilliant though I thought, I'm liking her more each time I see her. I also wasn't expecting there to be so much humour in what I thought would be a dead pan serious film! Worth a watch for sure.

I was talking about films with my Grandparents the other week and Liam Neeson cropped up. They mentioned seeing him in something good where he was a complete badass (probably not their exact words) and so I said 'Oh, you mean Taken!' No, not that. 'On a plane? Non-Stop?' Nope. 'Did he punch a wolf in the face? Was it The Grey?' Definitely not. It was Unknown! A film which, until then, was unknown to me. (Plenty more where that came from) 

Feeling the need to watch more Liam Neeson we watched it the very next day. Neeson plays a man who, after an accident, suffers memory loss, but it's a little more than that as his memories come back to him, but his wife doesn't know who he is. There's a twist I didn't see until the very last second, and I really enjoyed it, but it just didn't have the wow factor for me.

Sometimes, I just need to watch a fun, animated kids film. Do you ever get those days? I haven't seen Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs all in one go yet, I somehow watched the last half and then the first half about 2 months later. I got the gist though! I know the sequel wasn't for everyone, but it's filled with bad puns and tasty food and that was all I really wanted and needed! It was enough to make me want to watch the first one properly. 

Review: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

I didn't really want to see this film, I've gone right off Tom Cruise since the debacle that was Jack Reacher so I just didn't want to be disappointed again!  Luckily, I didn't judge a book by it's lead actor and went anyway and I'm glad I did...

William Cage (Tom Cruise) is a scared officer, unwilling to go anywhere near the front line until he is thrown in the deep end by General Brigham.  Once in the action, he gets caught in a time loop that wakes him up at the same point whenever he dies.  He then meets Rita (Emily Blunt) who knows what's happening to him and promises him to train him up.  The rest of the film is them working as a team to save the world from an alien invasion, the same day at a time!

I haven't seen this yet, but I will, begrudgingly. A friend at work made a joke about Tom Cruise's film roles, basically saying that he plays the exact same character in everything that he's in. I shouldn't judge him for that, because for me, Liam Neeson could play the same role in every film and it would take a while for me to get bored of that. But still!

Whenever I watch a movie that involves time loops or time travel I have to fight the urge to analyse it to death, looking got plot holes and paradoxes that can't be explained away.  A two hour discussion with my dad about Paycheck with Ben Affleck ruined that film for me, even though I quite enjoyed it initially, I can't watch it now.  Looper is another one that I have analysed to death and never want to watch again because the one major plot hole has ruined it for me.  So I tried to watch this with an open mind and not think about the time loop aspect and just enjoy the film.  That is exactly what I did, I really enjoyed this, it had a twist on your classic alien fighting film in that the bloke is the weak scared one and the woman is badass (which I loved!).  If you had told me last year that Emily Blunt was going to play a badass alien fighter, I would have laughed in your face, but she absolutely nailed it.

There were some great comedy elements throughout and it touched on a complicated romance between the guy who's learning all about the girl and the girl who has only ever known the guy for a day but didn't focus too much on it.  The action sequences were great and not so rushed that you can't see what's happening (a failure of all Transformers movies in my opinion) and they managed to not make it at all repetitive considering the film is a constant repeat of the same day.  When they had to go through the same scenes again they used comedy to make it different from the first time around which I loved.

I promise I'll watch this, once the DVD is out probably, and give it a chance. I know I'll enjoy it once I see it!

Definitely worth seeing, even if you are like me and have lost faith in Tom Cruise, this might just bring you back.