TheRetroCritic

It's 1995, the hairy scientist out of The Lawnmower Man is James Bond, Tina Turner is still kicking ass and the world still believes in Alan Cumming's value as a hilarious comedian.

Yes, Pierce Brosnan is 007 in GoldenEye, the film responsible for one of the N64's most popular game titles and, by extension, Perfect Dark (the better game?). Very quickly, it's easy to see why the studios wanted to cast the actor since The Living Daylights: Brosnan is a good all-rounder: handsome, suave, charismatic, with a good mix of intensity and looseness allowing him to do the old tough, horny hitman bit but also effortlessly deliver corny puns and one-liners that Roger Moore would kill for.

On-a-topp of that (sorry), this is the most convincing action-hero Bond we've seen so far with past incarnations usually settling for skiing in front of blue screens or letting stuntmen filmed from really, really far away do the job.

Brosnan was our Tom Cruise 007, basically.

GoldenEye starts with 007 and 006 (Sean Bean's Alec Trevelyan) on a mission gone wrong, despite Bond's attempts to "stealthily" do his spy business with a massive tank - great scene, by the way. Bond escapes, as usual, and Tina Turner takes over with a cheesy/badass GoldenEye theme song playing over especially ridiculous imagery, setting the tone for the film perfectly. Post-opening credits, however, the film already starts to stumble. The whole car chase with Bond and Famke Janssen's stupidly named Xenia Onatopp is just that little bit lame: not very funny, not very exciting, not very useful. The porn music that plays over the entire scene doesn't help either.

Things do improve radically, though, when some lab in Russia blows up and Bond is sent in to investigate what happened. Everyone seems to be searching for the "GoldenEye" (codename for "macguffin") and it all turns out to be something hilariously big yet somehow well hidden. Alan Cumming is Boris, a double-crosser geek computer hacker (big trope in the 90's) who is this film's comic relief and Izabella Scorupco is the impressively forgettable love interest Natalya Simonova. Like some of the old Connery pictures, not a crazy amount actually happens in the film besides the very cool tank scene from the beginning in which James Bond pretty much destroys the whole of Eastern Europe and a suspenseful Mission: Impossible-style train sequence where it is finally revealed to us who the megalomaniac villain is this time around.

GoldenEye does have a terrific villain and Onatopp, with her killer... legs(?), makes a fun (read: entertainingly a bit crap) hench-woman. It's all a bit Saturday-morning spy show in many ways: the humor is juvenile but, every so often, someone gets torn to shreds in a gruesome, Itchy & Scratchy type of way. The tone is a bit too uneven, frankly, but at least it captures what the James Bond movies boil down to: a live-action cartoon for adults.

While follow-up Tomorrow Never Dies was Brosnan's best outing as Bond, GoldenEye is a ton of fun. It's not one to take seriously for a second: just sit back and enjoy a very good James Bond bounce his way through a silly plot, even sillier characters, and some classic levels - I mean: scenes.

Sorry... N64 flashbacks.

Released directly to Netflix, Thunder Force is a comedy starring Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer about two childhood friends who grow apart but later find themselves stuck together fighting supervillains after picking up superpowers themselves.

With superhero films and TV shows constantly battling it out both at the box-office and on streaming networks these days, more spoofs were imminent so Thunder Force certainly came at the right time. Another collaboration between Melissa McCarthy and director/husband Ben Falcone, the film definitely had potential considering the reliable cast and the fun premise. It opens with a genuinely charming new friendship developing between then high school girls Emily and Lydia, the former a smart, studious kid who is being bullied by other students and the latter, a straight-talking goofball who defends her against said bullies. We see their friendship blossom and then fall apart, which is bittersweet and frankly really well done: you feel for these characters and look forward to them reconciling in the future.

Unfortunately, then the rest of the film happens.

We pick up the characters' story when they are much older as Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) attempts to convince Emily (Octavia Spencer) to attend a high school reunion. Emily now being a world-renowned scientist who has developed a way to give superpowers to people in order for them to fight back against the supervillains (aka Miscreants) who are terrorizing the world. Lydia's first meeting with Emily is, of course, a complete disaster and, long story short, she ends up accidentally adopting the powers that Emily had planned for herself.

Already, the idea of a 50 year-old scientist planning to turn themselves into a superhero instead of using someone who is properly trained to face the real dangers ahead like a soldier, for example, is very hard to buy and, in fact, this flawed idea ruins the Emily character to the point where she feels completely out of place and Octavia Spencer comes off as miscast. This is a shame as a few minor changes to the script could've turned this mess into a clever Tony Stark parody.

This is not the film's only misstep, obviously. Having Emily's power be invisibility might make sense for the character but the film visibly (no pun intended) felt bad not giving a great actress like Spencer screen time so whenever Emily becomes invisible the film makes her... visible but transparent which kinda defeats the point of that power in the first place.

The writing is also all over the place here as Melissa McCarthy's improv often conflicts with the script itself (one second she found her T-shirt in the trash, the next she got it at a concert), Jason Bateman's crab-like villain and love interest is thoroughly underwritten, the jokes mostly go on for way too long and are hit-and-miss to say the least, Spencer and McCarthy don't really work off each other that well comedically and the plot is just ludicrous, and not always in a fun way.

Admittedly, there are some amusing jokes here and there courtesy of the effortlessly funny McCarthy (the raw chicken bit is great) but Thunder Force sadly feels like a missed opportunity that manages to waste both its excellent cast and a superhero spoof premise with lots of potential.

Watch Identity Thief or Spy instead.

The latest entry into the Terminator franchise saw James Cameron return as producer and Linda Hamilton come back to her iconic Sarah Connor role. This instantly gave Terminator: Dark Fate some oomph pre-release but, it turned out, not quite enough to make it the box-office success it set out to be.

The film opens with a new take on Sarah Connor's post-Terminator 2 story as a T-800 shows up and straight-up murders John Connor. Years later, a very different Terminator, a solid and liquid metal hybrid Rev-9 model (played by Gabriel Luna), appears and tries to hunt down young factory worker Daniella Ramos (Natalia Reyes). At the same moment, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an augmented (read: cyborg) soldier from the Resistance in the future also appears. Her mission, however, is to stop the Rev-9 from killing Daniella at all cost. Along the way, Grace and Daniella meet an older, still just as tough as ever, Sarah Connor and they set out to get some help from an unlikely yet reliable source.

The easiest way to describe Dark Fate is to simply say it's Terminator: Genysis but for T2. Genysis went back to the first Terminator movie, younging-up good old Arnie using CG motion capture technology, and rewrote the script on that, and Dark Fate takes a similar amount of liberties with the first, some would say superior, sequel. Things were always going to get very convoluted with a long running time-travel saga like this but these last two films don't feel too complex, they just feel desperate. Piggy-backing on the best, arguably only two good films in the franchise, picking whatever gold nuggets it can pick in order to tell a new story of sorts, banking on that old quality to elevate a current lesser sequel being the overall strategy here, as it was with Genysis.

Unfortunately, every formula, no matter how good, starts to feel tired after a while and the Terminator franchise is exhausted, to say the least.

To be fair, there are some valid attempts in Dark Fate at telling a more coherent story than the last time, with slightly more engaging characters at the heart of it. Or, at least, characters with potential. Mackenzie Davis certainly looks the part as the super soldier protector and Daniella's evolution from strong-willed worker taking care of her family turned badass Resistance leader was a solid, if all-too familiar character arc. Sadly, performance-wise, both Davis and Reyes fail to fully convince in their respective roles, which isn't so much their fault as it is the screenwriters' whose dialog and by-numbers storytelling is lazy throughout. Not to mention the lack of any drama not recycled from prior, better movies.

It's great to see Linda Hamilton back as Sarah Connor but even she is given nothing meaty to work with. Her frankly Oscar-deserving performance in T2 was rich and nuanced. Sarah, in that film, was a beautifully complex, broken mess: a ticking time-bomb one second, a wounded animal the next, a cunning manipulator at times, always a fighter. Hamilton delivered the best performance in the entire franchise in that film and she made it look effortless. Here, she is given Arnie-style one-liners, the exact same bitterness towards the Terminator she used to have, a bunch of guns and that's about it. Plus, Daniella goes through the same emotional arc her Sarah Connor went through in two extremely well written movies, but within an hour of Dark Fate.

Oh and the less said about the T-800's ludicrous new character arc the better.

The action sequences don't impress either and this is, usually, where even some of the least popular films in this franchise excel. Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines boasted some excellent stunts and Terminator: Salvation's gritty future provided lots of cool human vs robot action. Here, admittedly there are some solid stunts in the genuinely fun, yet obligatory it seems, highway truck chase but most of the action just sees overpowered robots and cyborgs bouncing each other around like rag dolled sprites in a video game or a Looney Tunes cartoon. It gets instantly tiresome and the dull night-time and factory settings don't help keep your attention either.

While Terminator: Dark Fate benefits from a simpler plot and some better characters, it's still not good enough to revive what can only be described as a flailing franchise in dire need of a complete reboot, a brand new future-set story or a good long rest. This is a very silly, unexciting and underwritten effort you might want to skip altogether.

Shame.