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Reviews
Manifest (2018)
Painfully long
First season of The Manifest was intriguing and it kept me interested . Although acting was very poor for most actors, it wasn't enough to keep me away. Then second season started and it was a bit like more of the same , characters kept having some predictable dialogues and it started to be boring but , by then I thought that the third season would close the story ... oh but I was wrong !! Third season came and it got worse , with new bad guys (or girls), and trying to have a bit of shock on the story , but they kept it going to a final a very long fourth season ... 20 episodes of senseless things, and I'm not talking about God and religious motives behind all of the story, but about the way they are caged on a detention center, the way they have a hole on wall to come in and out without anyone noticing it , the way the villains always get away on the most unlikely situations and hell, why not, the final judgment scenes where God was hesitanting : "should I punish this? Let's hear what people around have to say ...". The Manifest tried to have it all: a Lost-like enigma , familiar drama , turnarounds on the story , action, romance , spying , conspiracy , science, theology , but in the end it failed mostly because of poor acting but most of all, because it was painstakingly long...
Kaleidoscope (2023)
Too much pretentiousness for nothing special
I really tend to dislike movies and tv shows who try too hard to look cool - Kaleidoscope falls into this category trying to be smart, trying to be funny and trying to build an element of both surprise and shock. The idea that every viewer has a different experience because they will see the episodes on a different order it's also a bit of a promise that honestly has nothing special in it. Acting overall is good mainly because of Esposito and Rufus Sewell, other characters are a bit hollow and there's not much to tell about them. The story is also kind of a deja vu, something that we've seen hundreds of times but always trying hard to be cool, many times on the musical choice, on the deaths and injuries and on the colors (many times psychedelic and many times with some red or blue tonalities). I don't dislike the story itself, I really like Esposito and Sewell, but I really feel that its over made, it's trying hard to repeat a wasted formula and it fails miserably in that aspect. Nevertheless it's not a waste of time so a solid "ok" and not even reaching a "good" rate.
Click (2006)
Dig beneath and feel it
This film is one of those movies I think it got swallowed in the middle of Hollywood's avalanche of releases and being the main actor a not so popular actor at the time, it was immediately rated as a goofy comedy by many, who saw it on the tv later on while cooking a meal and looking at it without paying attention , or was simply discarded. I confess that I watched it a bit like when I first saw "Big" : I was going to see a light comedy that i would forget after 15 minutes, but I was wrong ! Although the movie's plot sometimes is taken to comedy and entertainment, this movie is all about it's message and it is a very powerful message . You get it deeply as life goes on and in fact it makes you think when, on a Monday morning you wake up dreaming about next weekend : don't loose the 5 days in between ! They are part of your life and if you don't pay attention to them or you don't live them, go figure out how many days you really enjoy in life !! Again this is not a brilliant movie but the way it portraits the feeling of wasted years in your life it's what makes it so special.
Better Call Saul (2015)
A Prequel that goes further in time
Designed as a "Breaking Bad" prequel, "Better Call Saul" is not only that but also goes beyond "Breaking Bad" on some Black and White parts and entire episodes, where you get to see what happens after the end of the original tv show. The overall concept is brilliant and gets deep into Saul's personality showing a cold blooded and twisted person with feelings but overall with ambition and childhood traumas. It not only shows how cold he can be, but gets deep into other characters as well , with some memorable moments and memorable villains as Lalo Salamanca and the inevitable Gus Fring. Counting the whole seasons of both this and Breaking Bad, this is probably the most balanced, elegant and yet violent tv show ever made. I would rate this as a 10, but I can't , because the original show was more intense and shocking ... but "Better Call Soul" despite being a bit slower, it's still one hell of a show !
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
No expectations : guilty of charge
When I saw the trailers of Top Gun Maverick, I thought that the only thing they could do is to spoil a movie which got me so thrilled when I was a kid . I saw the same rivalries , Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle without helmet, a girl, a game on the beach, a song in bar and i thought that they would be so glued to the old ideas that this movie wouldn't make a stand on it's own, but when I started watching it I forgot all those thoughts and the only thing I can say is that I had a lot of fun! Younger people who saw it will never get the good thing which makes this movie so good and that is , to have a past and be such a nice legacy . It's not perfect, hell no ! It's flawed and very predictable, it thick's all the boxes of the first movie and yet it manages to do what is was supposed to be : an homage to the original movie and two hours of entertainment and action. I wouldn't rate it as high as the first movie although this is much better made, and very well put together but I consider it as one of the best unpretentious movies of the year.
Walker, Texas Ranger (1993)
The Chuck Norris show
Let me start this small review by explaining that by todays standards and without Chuck Norris this would be rated as "zero" - acting is poor, writing is not plausible , lines are cheesy or ridiculous, characters are not developed at all (well, Walker has some story behind him but you can't call that character development), the episodes are repetitive, and I could keep on going with negatives, but you get the picture. So why I'm I rating it with an good score ? Because i can't avoid loving scenes like the one that they are playing a baseball game and when Walker hits the ball, not only it's the best strike of the match (of course), but the sound effect they put on the scene it's godly !! Got to love that ! Walker is not only a story about a Texas Ranger with Cherokee blood, but the story of a semi god that lives amongst us ! But I also can't avoid loving ALL the awful romantic scenes with Cahill , and that every single time they enter some place to ask questions, there's always a fight ! I can't avoid loving the fact that every villain knows martial arts and that after a brief gun fight they always end up fighting with their fists !
These days we see so many pretentious tv shows, trying to be clever, trying to fit the whole world on the characters , but there aren't many show with such a superstar as Chuck Norris, doing his thing, the way he wants, being that good or bad, and lasting a whole 9 seasons !
No Time to Die (2021)
Don't they understand ?
I'm a huge James Bond movies , some call it 007, but 007 it's nothing without James Bond, opposite to "it's just a number". If producers, 007 owners, think they can recreate the formula, softening the agent , making him a woman, making it more vulnerable , they're missing the point... and that's hard to swallow !! I've never seen Bond's movies because they where believable, and this movie at least keeps this side of 007's legacy with a highly unlikely story, but the whole structure fans demand is not there : no fabulous opening scene (people loved that end of a mission as a starter for a new adventure), no real Bond girls , no more of those Bond seducing dialogues, no real tension between him and the villain (which is so boring this time)... How I miss Daniel Craig on "Casino Royale"... This was indeed a very poor ending to his participation with sun shining on the start of the movie (probably the best scenes are right there), and then going dark, gray and boring as hell...
If they want to change it this much why don't they start a new era with a 008, 009, whatever name they want to give it and abandon the Martini, the music and start a new story instead of destroying such a good legacy...?
Vikings (2013)
Fourth season ruins everything
When an entertaining and action packed tv show has the need to go with the flow and add a pack of Viking women taking the power , then everything is getting so wrong ... at least on credibility side. Then what more to add than a lesbian relationship? Good (the director says ). What more ? Add a lot of slow motion ceremonies to create a more artistic show ? Why not ? Invading a Muslim city without any opposition ? Sure, why spend time on preparing that ... and why does the main character gets so much older than all the other characters ? By fourth season he looks finished but all other characters still look as old as the time it took to shoot the seasons . I don't know the remaining seasons, but fourth season is so poor and unfortunately it's also very long . I still give it a 6 star because the visuals are great and I like Viking stories .
Fistful of Vengeance (2022)
So poorly written and so talentless
The Wu Assassin tv series was already poorly made, but I could not predict that this sequel movie would be so bad. Dialogues are terrible , all lines are the worst I've seen recently with reused jokes , predictable conversations and all of that going along with an idiotic storyline. The Wu Assassin most of the time looks like simply an above average fighter but nothing special . The characters are ALL bad, even the ones who came from the tv series , the new ones are even worse ! Fighting scenes are nothing special , I would even say they are boring and show absolutely nothing new. I only give a two star rating because of an exception : there is a fight with some "camera rotation", constant slowing the speed and getting back to normal which I found funny (more funny than properly well made), and I really found that to be the only moment where I felt not terrible for watching this.
Safe (2018)
Entertaining but a bit rushed sometimes
I have found this mini series to be very entertaining and the stories of both the murder and the disappearance to be mysterious enough to keep me engaged until the last episode . The small parts of the party shown with more and more pieces on every episode gave us both more clues but also more questions and that added to mystery and also gave a nice support to all the twists and turns we can see during the show. Acting is good enough , I'm not a native English speaker but I can reckon Michael C Hall is not doing a great British accent , but who cares ? There's not background on his past so he may even be a guy who lived his childhood or youth in the States so that's not a reason not to like him!! If I have a complain it that sometimes things seem a bit rushed or forced , just to make the story move further , like on two or three occasions where people start having what should be private conversations in front of other people, almost saying "here you go, another clue for your investigation". Also I would like some characters to have a better development, specially the ones involved in the central story that leads to everything, but being a mini series I guess they ran out of time... and probably the director thought that by developing them a bit more it would give away too many clues.
Safe is a very enjoyable show , not the best of the year , not even close but kept me engaged and entertained from first to last episode.
Snowpiercer (2013)
Hurry, there's so much to tell but so little time
The story of this movie is creative: a train built to save mankind from extinction from a frozen planet - the train can never stop and has a circular route around the world and it's full of survivors , but somehow it travels with a tail section full of some renegade people who now and then try to take over the train. It's kind of a poor vs rich train where some have an wealthy life and some live in misery eating some kind of bars made with insects ... The movie has some interesting parts , it's a bit steampunk and a somewhat dark environment, but it's flawed as a movie can be :
- why keep a problematic tail section full of angry, badly fed and potentially explosive people ? There's kind of a justification near the end but it feels like the worst idea in the world to run a train which is supposed to be the last chance for humanity survival...
- running the whole train from tail to the locomotive has way too little resistance and it's kind of a "walk in the park"
- why going to the locomotive is so important to the tail section people ? It's not like they know how to run the train ...?
- and some characters appear from nowhere, trying to defend the train but there's nothing to know about them like that fierce guy who starts shooting through windows and killing even allies... who's that Terminator ? Have I felt asleep for a while and missed something ?
- the "tribe" which appears on the front of the train are ...? Junkies who their drugs have been stolen and want them back ? How poor is that train's defense ...
- and of course, the use of people as mechanisms... whoa ... it gets way too far with that ... and explains why the kids where taken and that the tail section after all is a spares provider and also used as a controller for overpopulation...
You (2018)
It's fun to watch but the wow factor is gone
First season was really interesting to see because the spectator knows that the main character is a strange guy but then they start to know how dangerous he can be to get what he wants . The finale was shocking but rewarding at the saber time. After the first season the story wasn't less interesting but we had to face kind of a deja vu, with all those twists and turns that lead to murders again. Ok, had fun nevertheless, and the finale was also nice. Third season had too much of everything and trying to turn him into almost a victim was the way to make things interesting but well, it wasn't . It has some nice characters, many fun moments but it was a "part 2" of season 2 which had another fine ending but without any wow factor . I've heard there's a season 4 coming but I fear that there's no way the quality will get to season's 1 or even 2 levels...
Glória (2021)
Great story with great production
Gloria is a slow burning espionage tv show which takes place in Portugal during the 1960's. By then it was still ruled by a fascist dictatorship and was mainly a county with a very outdated culture, a society where amongst the poorer people women had no liberty and even on higher society stratuses we could witness something similar . The story shows much of that culture and time, but it's also a very good espionage story , with crime, suspense, intrigue and some action.
Acting is appropriate, I wouldn't say it's superb , but it doesn't fall below par ... and the story is very engaging, I found myself very curious on knowing what would happen next . Yes, it's a bit on the slower pace but that's perfectly fine for me, a person who loved the slow paced True Detective show.
Gloria deserves some praise because it comes from a country of a very old movie culture which unfortunately was dominated by tedious and ethereal films during some decades . I hope this is the first of many Portuguese tv shows in Netflix because it doesn't fall short in any department when compared with similar shows from other countries .
Another Life (2019)
Kept losing interest but overall it survived until the end
I admit that this series started ok, with some premise of humans trying to reach for an alien species but the story went a bit too far and by the end there where hundreds of species out there in space but for centuries they haven't contacted us in any way although they where pretty advanced . There was a lot of problems and a lot of "trying to make everyone happy": a woman in charge (in fact multiple woman in charge ) - check. Asian people ? Check. Fat guy? Check. African people - check . Homossexuals - check. Want a non-binary ? Check. A disabled soldier ? Yes, check. A threesome with a woman and two man ? Sure. Check... I don't have problem with trying to be good for everyone but makes things less credible. I'm writing this on a after thought because they where treated correctly along the series, and you can easily forget that, which is a good thing. The story had nice episodes and also some "fillers", specially two episodes where the crew got intoxicated and was imagining things... The aliens where so powerful, they could do so many things and yet they where patiently waiting for humans permission to takeover the planet ... and their intentions where absolutely never clear and sounded a bit vague. They exist in a non-physical form, and where in fact some kind of software but we never got to know who made them, or if they turned from physical into that non physical form... But it's not all negative though... i liked most of the first season story and drama , second season although threw more variety, more aliens and then overall bigger and more complicated situations to deal with , lost a bit of that spaceship life which I liked on first season, and turned into a less claustrophobic story, which I found less interesting. The special effects where nice , not brilliant but I liked them anyway.
Is it really a good tv show ? It's kinda passable, but it's entertaining if not taken too seriously . Hope there's not a third season - the closure was nice and light and honestly , i don't think people will want to know more about the Salvare . 6 stars which I converted to 7 because I think current rating is too low.
Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer (2021)
Superb for a perspective of an European
Let me say that, if I was American I'd probably give this one something between 8 and 9 because I wouldn't have the surprise factor, but I'm from Portugal and although I was born at time I was around 10 so I ended up not knowing about this carnage. I liked that it's the investigator's perspective, because it kept the mystery and we could see the perspective of an investigation and the anger and anxiety they suffered for almost half an year. Didn't knew how the killer looked like and it was also a revelation, made on the right moment. It's a heavy, intense and dark documentary but it's soften by the detective which seems like a person with a huge heart. He's part of my rating . I was shocked by the whole carnage but i got even more shocked by the women which sent him photos : he's a tragedy but those woman were also a shame for human race ...
Lucifer (2016)
Brilliant moments on a long boring journey
I liked Lucifer a lot at moments: funny characters, good actors, clever jokes and some action and romance along the way.
My problem with the show is that the investigations got too repetitive, using the same formula again and again. Sometimes I had to skip parts of the episodes because the story was stuck and I felt I was watching fillers. This went on and on, and the formula has repeated itself for 5 seasons ! The last season was different, but also very bad with that time travel situation... time loops are complicated, and this one sounded completely absurd and the end of it was a big mess. I also felt that by half of the story some characters had nothing else to show and their stories got bland making their participation almost a burden to the story writers.
Lucifer should have had less investigations , less episodes, less fillers and a better ending, and because of that I will forget it's story although I will keep some brilliant moments in my mind...
Clickbait (2021)
Entertaining and engaging but with poor acting
When the actor which in my opinion made the best job appear mostly in one episode, the you got the idea of how poor the main actors performance is. This is the case on "Clickbait" - best actor is the main character of episode 6: simple but effective. Looked real. The show itself is well thought and it's well produced: has different perspectives of what happened and has a main character on each one of the eight episodes. This one you can see it without the fear of a cancellation: it's a mini series! Story has a very nice flow, things happen sometimes in a not very believable way (police overall does a poor investigation but family is way much better at it), but honestly I didn't care much about it: it's a story of something which could happen on modern days , with an example of a stolen identity. My biggest complaint is the acting: below average ( the Pia character is annoying and has a terrible haircut !!) but most of the actors don't do a good job . The final episode had an unnecessary hostage situation and that was the other thing I felt that could have been different, but all and all I found Clickbait very entertaining, different from other tv shows I've recently seen and it still deserves some recognition regarding some weaknesses.
Homeland (2011)
Homeland managed to never lose it's entertainment
Some tv shows have highs and lows, get into an evident lack of ideas and some of those in the end are still very satisfying . Well, Homeland doesn't reach the impact of some Game of Thrones, Dexter, Lost or Breaking Bad but it keeps it's quality always at a very good level (in fact Breaking Bad is my all time favorite series because it managed to have premium quality from start to end). After the 4th season I thought Homeland would be going downhill, in fact part of the 3rd and 4th seasons where the lowest points on the series, and I was one of the lucky persons who kept watching and got even more addicted to it. They had to make some concessions with the motherhood of Carrie but they managed to keep her daughter as part of the story with more or less relevance. They managed to add super interesting characters and make them gain relevance .... I know, it's not a perfect TV show, i know they had some criticism about some portrayal of Muslim, but it would be criticized no matter what...
For a very good quality all over the seasons Homeland has to be seen as one of the all time great tv shows.
Messiah (2020)
Please take seasons of other shows and give them to Messiah!
In case you don't have a clue why interesting and good TV Shows are cancelled and bad shows keep going on forever, just take a look at this single season of Messiah: good filming, good actors, artistic scenes and some more realistic when portraying Middle East environment. The plot is intriguing and the story keeps you attached to your seat from start to end with not fillers or episodes that you could throw away like happens even on great shows like "Lost" where sometimes you could feel the story was not evolving . No, Messiah's story goes from one interesting situation to the next one but unfortunately all we got left was a huge bunch of holes and unexplained situations because the show got cancelled. It's a shame that Netflix does this over and over again : fortunately the end is not so bad , I don't know if the script was adapted but it doesn't seem so - it looks like the finish of a season which would leave us with mouth watering for the next one... but it turned out to be kind of an Hitchcockian closure (well I'm stretching a bit too much but it was a nice twitch anyway ).
Messiah is a very good TV show, with some very distinctive characters and I wish that we could see more things like this instead of a huge number of other shows like "Shooter" who was not so bad on first season but turned into a mess on the two next seasons . With the quality of this script I believe that Messiah would have kept a good quality for at least one more season...
Man of Tai Chi (2013)
And the winner is (you guessed right)
A fighter who doesn't want to become evil and starts turning into an evil person because he doesn't follow the "path " of it's sensei - check. A fighter who doesn't want to kill at first but almost kills someone and change it's mind on the last moment - check. A bad guy with which the good guy has to fight in the end - check. A bad guy who is bad because... - check. A girl who loves the good guy and with which he is prone to be with by the end of the movie - check . Something or someone which the good guy has to fight for - check.
This movie has all clichés and some poor acting, but it still has some good choreography's and some variety on fights and it has plenty of them. It also has some cgi parts, which are way too evident but ok, they help in the action... and in the end, it's an ok movie but nothing like some write about like Keanu Reeves is the new Coppola. Not even close!!
The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf (2021)
It's not totally bad but there's little to cheer about
Well I haven't read books and I am not a franchise fan , nor I'm aware of the full extent of "the Witcher's " universe, but I'm watching the tv series and I'm find it very enjoyable (although a bit confusing), specially because of Cavill good work. I started to watch this movie with some expectations then, and because I liked "Castlevania", but I got disappointed by a story which developed a bit too fast, with a poor script and weak lines for the characters. I know it's an animation movie , but it's for adults, so what's with those childish and futile dialogues ? Animation was nice , action is good (although the Witcher's seemed hugely powerful and yet they seemed not to use their powers fully on the last battle), but after all the movie was running too fast and things never settled up.
I feel that after all the work put on animation (which is the best part of the movie), the guys on the drawing desks didn't deserve such a weak story... and neither did we.
Open Water (2003)
Interesting enough
This movie has to be seen without expectations and I've heard both good and nasty things about it so I was curious. The story is simple and the cheap production and amateur camera didn't pose a problem to me since it brought a sense of realism to the scenes. Dialogues are a vulgar conversation between a couple who is on trouble and has both moments of anger and companionship, and in fact that's better than citing Hamlet or being into a deep thought about life while being in a difficult situation surrounded by sharks .
I can't blame much of the movie for it's simplicity, in fact what many people hate about it , it's the reason I give it a positive score and review: if this was a movie with top end actors and high production I would say it was bad and a waste of resources!
The ending was a bit on the unrealistic side but all and all it was a way of not repeating what we know it was coming.
For shark movie fans who want blood and very explicit carnage scenes I don't recommend Open Water - it is NOT a shark movie, for all the others with an open mind about a simple and amateurish movie, just give it a try out of curiosity.
The Marine (2006)
Meaningless and senseless old fashioned action movie
This movie seemed to be made so far in the past and with all kind of predictable things you can imagine . Senseless all the way, implausible, with almost nothing new to see.
Fighting scenes are nothing special, simple choreographed and no wow factor. Explosions ? Yes you get a lot of them, the old Commando fashion way we saw back in the eighties... and we even got to see a line saying something like "this guy doesn't die, he looks like the terminator", and then a good close up on the eyes of Robert Patrick, who played the T-1000 on Terminator 2. Too much for me (or should I say too little??)
A passable movie, forgettable with only one scene I think I will remember : the villain woman death (much better than all other deaths on the movie!!!).
Elysium (2013)
Promises a lot but delivers too little
Let me say in the first place that Elysium is not a bad movie: it has very good special effects, it has Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and a bunch of another good actors and the plot is interesting. So with all this attributes and the fact that Neil Blomkamp tries to build another story with lots of political and society paradigms, we had a base to have a good science fiction movie. And then we start watching Elysium and after some interesting 10 or 15 minutes we can't stop have a feeling of Deja Vu with a world divided into rich people who could fled to a huge space station on Earth's orbit and the poor people who didn't have a choice but stay on a decayed planet with polluted air and everything falling into ruins . Besides that, it's like the world is a single city and the management of the world is on that space station - people who live up there have splendid technology to cure humans in a couple of seconds and yet on Earth what is left is like technology from 100 years in the past... That's one of the first flaws - it's not likely that if the technology was available there would be no way to have it also on Earth... and it's wonderful because it cures cancer amongst every other disease and can also rebuild a face destroyed on a explosion ! Well, Earth is left with too little , it seems that all engineers , all scientists, all everything went up to Elysium and no one builds roads, buildings, anything , and yet there is food, electricity, etc... Besides that, every single character is deprived of any development or depth - emotions are scarce, many appear on flashbacks and only by the end of the movie, there's a bad guy, a very bad guy that is bad just because it's bad : name one bad thing he can think or do and there you have it. Is there any need to make this kind of hollow villains ? And Sharlto Copley's acting is more annoying than menacing! By the end of the movie we then start having some "lessons" to learn, the poor win against the evil rich and powerful people and we learn that three mercenaries can threaten an entire space station full of robots that on the start of the movie seem to be so effective on targeting humans . Two other awful moments is when three spaceships try to reach Elysium and one manages with ease to get there, and also in the last part of the movie it happens again: if it took some kind of bomb it would be so easy to destroy the entire station but well, defenses seem to be on the weak side.
All these flaws are big but not big enough to take some entertainment from Elysium and Matt Damon apart from the disaster of dialogues given to most actors, has an acceptable performance. Just forget the "moral of the story" stuff and think of this as a simple science fiction movie with no pretensions to be anything more than that and you will be ok.
Boyka: Undisputed IV (2016)
It's a fighting movie and a good one!
People sometimes tend to look for some qualities on movies where those are not supposed to exist . A fighting movie is mostly about... the fights! This is at least half of the movies rating and only for that this one (as previous two) would get a 5 out of 5. It's not an Ong Bak, but the aesthetics and the choreography is great to watch and give a spectacular show. Then there's all the other things that will sum up to give it the remaining rating: we're not expecting some Oscar performances, usually all actors are unknown, except for the main characters , but this movie had some acceptable performances and the story was not bad at all. Ok, we know the hero who is forced into fighting to help someone is a very old cliche (Steven Seagal made an entire career doing that), but nevertheless it has some depth, it has no boring moments and yes, we want excuses to see as many fights as possible... and they nailed it ! Boyka Undisputed IV is one hell of an entertaining fighting movie and should be watched and rated according to that.