The Lost City

 The Lost City (2022)

Starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and Brad Pitt

Directed by Adam Nee and Aaron Nee

Written by Oren Uziel, Dana Fox, Adam Nee, and Aaron Nee

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  D-

Jungle

Jungle (2017)

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Thomas Kretschmann, Alex Russell, and Joel Jackson

Directed by Greg McLean

Written by Justin Monjo

***This film is currently streaming via Amazon Prime***

Summary (in 500 words or less):  Based on a true story from the 1980s, Israeli explorer Yossi (Daniel Radcliffe) travels to the Amazon rainforest where he meets fellow adventurers the Swiss Marcus (Joel Jackson) and his American friend Kevin (Alex Russell).  The trio decide to travel into the Amazon jungle on an expedition led by a mysterious Austrian man (Thomas Kretschmann) and find themselves in a chaotic situation struggling to survive.

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating: B-

Movie Review - What If

What If (2014)

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Megan Park, Adam Driver, Mackenzie Davis, and Rafe Spall

Directed by Michael Dowse

I've started many a review with something along the lines of "I'm a sucker for romantic comedies," and this statement continues to ring true with the absolutely charming What If, a tiny indie flick that was released in a theaters for a quick and decisively financially unsuccessful run this past summer.

Who knew Harry Potter himself Daniel Radcliffe had the wit in him to portray a dryly humorous, self-effacing, and hopeless romantic like Wallace, a med school dropout who meets Chantry (Zoe Kazan) at a party thrown by his best friend Allan (Adam Driver).  Upon walking her home, Wallace learns that Chantry has a longterm boyfriend in Ben (Rafe Spall) and wants more than anything else to simply be friends with Wallace whom she's hit it off with right away in terms of their likes, dislikes, and personalities.  The two were made for each other -- it's obvious.  Unfortunately, Chantry really loves Ben.  Also unfortunately, Wallace finds himself falling for Chantry more and more with each passing month, yet he also drifts further and further from being able to tell her his true feelings as they shift deeper and deeper into the "friend zone."

The film of course veers down an expected path which, I was surprised to discover, I found a tiny bit annoying.  I was hoping for maybe a "twist" at the film's conclusion, but writer Elan Mastai chickens out just a little bit.  Admittedly, I would've probably written the same ending as that's what's totally expected of a film like this, but as the flick came to a close I was hoping I'd be in for something a little off the beaten path.  Still, Matsai succeeds at creating two characters whose wit and dry humor are a perfect match for each other and also truly amusing to watch.  Radcliffe and Kazan are both fantastic in their roles, displaying a great amount of chemistry.  While Radcliffe was quite the surprise (I wasn't a fan of the Harry Potter series, so I was impressed here), Kazan proves once again that she's someone to watch.  I thought she was great in 2012's Ruby Sparks (a very different romantic comedy), but I was quite pleased to see her onscreen again as she hasn't done much since then.

Much like the "sucker for romantic comedies" line, I also tend to pull out the "but it doesn't reinvent the wheel" clause more often than I probably should.  That said, it's an apt phrase for What If...but that doesn't really matter.  What If will win you over with two sweet performances and a youthful cast that imbues humor into a story we've certainly seen portrayed many times before.

The RyMickey Rating:  B

Movie Review - The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black (2012)

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, and Janet McTeer

Directed by James Watkins

I must preface this review by saying that it took me nearly two months to get through The Woman in Black.  That's not to say it's horrible (although I'm not saying it's good either), but I started watching this on a plane ride home from London and the little television screen and poor audio weren't doing this ghost story which relies heavily on far-off ghostly images and strange noises any justice.  So, twenty minutes in, I decided that it might be best simply to rent this one once I got home.  Two months later that came to fruition and I finally finished the tale.

I think there's a really good ghost story here -- one of those that you'd tell around a campfire and perhaps genuinely get scared.  In fact, The Woman in Black is an incredibly long-running, well-received, and apparently frightening play in London and I actually thought I might see it when I was over in the UK.  I didn't get around to seeing it onstage and unfortunately something doesn't quite click with the movie.  For only being ninety minutes long, there seems like an awful lot of boring exposition in the first half of the film which drags this thing down horribly.

Lawyer Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is sent to a remote village in England to a huge mansion to find the paperwork needed to sell a deceased woman's estate.  For years, many of the town's children have been dying heinous deaths and Arthur uncovers that the unfortunate occurrences stem back to the decades-old death of the young son of a woman named Jennet Humfrye.  Ms. Humfrye, who is also now deceased, feels that her son's death could have been prevented and has been seeking revenge on the youth of the town.

The huge positive of The Woman in Black is that it doesn't try to be anything other than a genuine ghost story.  There's no blood or guts, just old-fashioned scares.  Unfortunately, those scares are too often foreshadowed by director James Watkins' camerawork or Marco Beltrami's score.  We in the audience are conditioned to know in a horror movie that if an actor is standing towards the left of the screen with a large black space to his right, something is going to pop up in that area.  Sure enough, that happens all too often here.  It makes me wonder how this tale would work on a stage.  I can't help but think that it would be more successful than on film.

Daniel Radcliffe is actually fine, but doesn't exude any modicum of charisma (of course, he didn't do that in the Potter films either).  There's also a nice performance from Ciarán Hinds as the only member of the town to befriend Arthur.  In the end, it's kind of a shame things don't come together because the film picks up quite a bit halfway through and at least becomes enjoyable to watch, but it never really becomes "scary" or even "eerie" which ultimately is a disappointment.

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two (2011)

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, and Alan Rickman

Directed by David Yates

All I can say is that I'm happy the Harry Potter saga is over and done with so I can now never have to watch another moment of this boring fantasy series again.  It's not that any of the movies are godawful, but considering these flicks are supposed to be trips to a fantastical world of magic and sorcery there is a severe lack of creativity and joy onscreen in any of these films.

Picking up immediately where the bland Part One left off, Part Two of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a showdown between Mr. Potter and the evil Voldemort.  I'm not going to get into any additional story description because it all boils down to Good vs. Evil and it's likely not going to be a surprise as to who comes out the victor.  

As stated above, the problem with all of these Potter films is that they all simply seem much too cookie cutter and by the book.  Directors (with the exception of Alfonso Cuarón's take on Prisoner of Azkaban, the third flick in the series) all seem to lack the imagination to make this cinematic series successful and David Yates is no exception.  As a director, he's responsible for not only making the film visually appealing (which this isn't), but also making the film flow...and this film doesn't do that either.

Granted, I think Yates certainly would have been helped had the film been released as a single flick rather than be forced to be stretched out into two parts.  As much as I would have hated the experience, I would have rather had a three hour-and-fifteen minute flick as opposed to 2 two hour films.  Presented in the way they were released, I couldn't help but feel like the editor had to leave stuff in just to pad the running time.

I will say that Daniel Radcliffe whom I criticized in my review of Part One proved to be rather good in this final installment of the series.  This second film is purely his with many the other characters including Emma Watson's Hermione and Rupert Grint's Ron pushed more to the outskirts.  Rather surprisingly, Radcliffe proves that he may well have a career now that his decade as Harry Potter is over.

Take my review of this one with a grain of salt.  This series just never worked for me and although I saw all of them in theaters, they never once transported me into the magical, mystical world of J.K. Rowling's best-selling series.  With the exception of a pleasant theme by film composer John Williams, there's really nothing worth remembering about the Harry Potter series in the slightest.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-

Movie Review - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (2010)

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Ralph Fiennes

Directed by David Yates

I realize that the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series was long, but, while whoever thought of separating the final film into two parts was a financial genius, the split causes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One to be a tremendously boring film that fails on all fronts.  When it finally picks up the pace and actually gets going in the film's final thirty minutes, it's too little too late to redeem itself.

The gist of the whole thing:  Teenage wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) has to find some magic objects and destroy them before the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) gets a hold of them and gains a bunch of power.  Potter's friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) are going to help him.

That's it.  Except for the fact that what's listed above is even more than what happens in the film.  I mention that Potter has to find some magic "objects" with an emphasis on the plural there.  Well, he actually only finds one object...in 150 minutes.  Two-and-a-half hours and he finds one frickin' object.  This intrepid quest really goes nowhere for this whole movie.  Instead, we get a bunch of shots of Harry standing around with Hermione and Ron, all of them looking really sad and worried.  There's no arc to the story and not a bit of an emotional arc with the characters.

Let's face it -- Daniel Radcliffe isn't a great actor.  He's rather awkward as Potter and he's not the least bit interesting to watch.  This has always been the case with Radcliffe throughout all the films, so I'm not sure why I was expecting anything different here.  The biggest problem, however, is that in this film Radcliffe is in nearly every single scene.  In the previous flicks, we'd at least cut away (maybe) to a little Ron or Hermione side adventure...and Rupert Grint and Emma Watson could at least hold our attention because of their charisma.  Here, even Grint and Watson are just dreary.  I realize these characters are facing some deadly and dire situations, but there was hardly a smile cracked onscreen the whole time.

David Yates is a more than adequate director and the most positive aspect of the film is the rather adult, simplistic way it's shot.  However, he (and his cinematographer) bathe the film in dreary dank blues and grays.  It's really not even a pretty film to look at despite some rather interesting settings.

All this being said, I was intrigued by the film's final half hour which utilized some very clever animation techniques to tell the backstory of the Deathly Hallows (this scene was the only one that really worked for me).  Ultimately, Part One ended on enough of a positive note to make me interested in knowing the outcome of Part Two.  However, this film should never have been broken up into two parts -- it's a move that will ultimately taint my decision of Deathly Hallows as a whole regardless of how much I like the final act.

The RyMickey Rating:  D+

Movie Review - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, and Jim Broadbent
Written by Steve Kloves
Directed by David Yates

The Potter movies have never been my cup of tea. My favorite (if you could even use that term) was Prisoner of Azkaban, and I didn't even think that one was better than average. I never made it through more than two of the books, either, so they hold no special place in my heart. So, I wasn't expecting a ton from this sixth movie. And, while it wasn't anything to necessarily rave about, it was definitely the best of the series.

Part of the reason for the winning nature of this flick is David Yates' direction and Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography. The film looks rich and decadent and there were some scenes that really did look beautiful. The muted tones and colors really create an eerie atmosphere, despite the fact that this seems to be the most lighthearted of all the Potter flicks.

It's that lighthearted nature that brings the movie down a bit. It's not that I didn't enjoy the high school melodramatic romances that are going on in this movie, but at 2 hours 45 minutes, I could've done with a ton less of the love triangle of Ron-Hermione-and some other chick. Once again, not like this aspect was bad, but it all just seems like filler...and then, when the really important stuff starts to happen, it feels like it's compacted within the last 20 minutes. Now, this could be what the book is like, too, but it doesn't make it good.

Still, despite my issues with the (lack of) plot, there are some winning performances here. Michael Gambon as Dumbledore is a treat to watch. I also love Alan Rickman's Snape...so utterly nasty that you can't help but love him. The best performance here is from Jim Broadbent. His dim-witted Professor Slughorn is great...a treat whenever he's onscreen. All the kid actors (who aren't really kids anymore) have come a tremendously long way since the first flick, particularly Rupert Grint and Emma Watson. If anyone still needs to work on their acting chops, it's the title character. Mr. Radcliffe is perfectly adequate, but he's such a dud onscreen. This could be an innate problem with the character, but Radcliffe's Potter is just boring.

So, overall, I'm pleasantly surprised with this Potter flick. It's still nothing excellent, but I have hopes that director David Yates can continue the improvements he made in this sixth film in the upcoming two-part finale to the series.

The RyMickey Rating: B-