Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are
to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal.)
In The Fade:
makes a nice change, that it's dead dad and son motivating mum rather
than dead mum and daughter motivating dad. And this looks really quite
promising.
Winchester - The House That Ghosts Built (Teaser):
fascinating setting, plot to get the owner declared batty… isn't that
enough without having jump-scare ghost hijinks too?
24 Hours to Live:
same old same old same old. Even Crank looked more fun than this,
and that was just manly grunting and occasional gunfire.
Den of Thieves:
and talking of manly grunting and occasional gunfire, here we go round
the cops and robbers path for the 5,000th time.
Permanent:
horrible people are funny, ho ho.
I, Tonya:
how do you blow up a few seconds of incident into 90+ minutes of film?
Stretch it out to the aftermath, and lose the people who remember the
original media circus, or stretch it to the lead-in and worry that
everyone knows how it ends? Or both?
Age of Kill:
oh, one of those. Captive woman as motivation, second woman as
decoration, just like Commando, but Commando was more than thirty
years ago. And had a more challenging plot.
Serpent:
ah, the obvious way to fix a troubled marriage is to go somewhere
horribly dangerous and isolated. And then make it all go wrong. (Don't
phones have, you know, screen locks?)
The Shadow Man:
not forgetting the vital monster power of "hide in itty bitty place
until heroine has taken her clothes off". Meh, jump-scares.
Mayhem:
seems like an even more blatant excuse for violence porn than The
Belko Experiment. If it works, great, but it needs more than a
trailer will show.
Fifty Shades Freed:
meh. Everything is perfect except it isn't… except it is.
On Wings of Eagles:
we have met plenty of variants of this kind of story before. Will this
one work? Will it say anything that the others haven't? That's what I
look for, and it's a thing that trailers rarely tell me.
Slamma Jamma:
basketball as redemption, standard sports movie template, it would
appear.
Sherlock Gnomes:
seems like heavily genericised wainscot fantasy. You could plug in
funny animals or Minions and barely have to change the script.
Stratton:
oh no, he's a soldier who doesn't play by the rules. Not seen that one
before. Generic bad guy is only slightly more generic than generic
good guy.
The Post:
newspapers! Weren't they great! Until they sold themselves to the
advertisers and nobody cared any more.
Game Night (Teaser):
oh, right, "you're not going to know what's real and what's fake",
that's new. Really, it's new. Why don't you believe us? Because we
stole our best joke from an episode of Firefly?
Hostiles:
post-traumatic Civil War western. Christian Bale hides behind the
whiskers.
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