TheElderBrother

There are too many great actors who take roles in colossally terrible films just because they are desperate for the cash, and prove that their heyday is long over and that they have no respect either for cinema as a whole, or their incredible part in making it one of the great art forms during the twentieth century.

In the 21st century it is becoming a digital landfill full of rotting ideas that should never have been recycled, and performances that you not only saw and heard but smelled a mile away.

Enter DeNiro. He is is writing the last days of his career in film the way some people write punchlines to terrible jokes.

And right alongside him, another stunning performer hollowing out his hard won brand, Jamie Foxx. The teeth, people. Whoever dressed him should be sued for deliberately trying to sabotage the movie.

Not that we expect a lot from Amazon, but this may be a new low.

No spoilers here, though. If you're determined to see something absolutely terrible, watch it yourself. Clint Eastwood's nepo baby son, Scott, has a speaking role, so he's moving up in the world about as fast as John Leguizamo is cascading downwards. His last good flick was John Wick, and was barely in it.

The movie's a train wreck. The acting is bad. Everyone is competing to see who gets to chew which scenery, and the dialog is just dumb.

Don't watch this. Watch a good movie. The forced repeated watching of Tin Soldiers will one day be punishment for shoplifting in less enlightened countries.

At some point, and it is taking a whole lot longer than I think is reasonable, the 50% or more of western audiences who identify as center right are going to start punishing shows that indulge in the incessant, tedious army of straw men approach to characterizing politics. In the first episode they depict a political figure speaking about the problems of illegal immigration in the U. K. in terms that are pretty reasonable, and the writers can't help jabbing at the guy and branding him a fascist anyway. I would be more surprised if it was the BBC that produced the show, but this is Apple+.

Then again, I guess that should not shock me since Apple+ is doing its level best to keep its fat corporate thumb on the same scale.

Gary Oldman is hilarious. I hope when I hit that age I'll be unapologetically drunk, farting, and still the best at what I do. That man could play my mother and be more convincing than she was. I keep looking at him and marveling that the same guy was Winston Churchill, Sid Vicious, Commissioner Gordon, George Smiley, Dracula, and Drexl the pimp from True Romance all in one career.

And he did all of those pretty well. (The Dracula flick was awful but he was still pretty good in it.)

So I'm still watching and hoping it redeems itself, but the show is indulging in The Message a bit heavy-handedly. Hollywood is soon going to have real competition from streaming services and production houses that make more than enough right leaning entertainment to make the old regime irrelevant to much of its audience, so it needs to learn to mind its collective manners.

Slow Horses had such potential and its producers are wasting it. Yes, it got great reviews and plenty of support from some quarters. Those reviews and those quarters seem to be weighted a bit heavily, so if you're one of those terrible fascists they keep talking about, you may find Slow Horses incredibly aggravating and impossible to follow without a thick skin.

I hate watching actors who haven't bothered to learn anything about a foreign language perform a character who speaks that language, but speaks as though he's just guessing what English would sound like if spoken by, for instance, an imaginary French cartoon character.

And I really hate having to listen t that for two hours.

That's about all I have to say about his movie. Crispin Glover is now playing a caricature of himself, and not a particularly endearing one.

Oh, and here's another detail. This is a gunplay movie with the same cartoon-level understanding of guns and gunplay.

If the producers put as much effort into writing the story and the actors put half the effort into acting the parts as they all put into slathering on ten minutes' worth of vanity production company cards at the beginning of the credits, it might be vaguely watchable.

But sadly, no.