LeAvantGuardian

Revenge movies being incredible or forgettable boils down to two factors. The quality of the action choreography and original fight scenes, and the ratio of backstory/reason for revenge to actually getting revenge. What made John Wick the pinnacle of revenge movies is how they masterfully build a world during action sequences, spending only the first 1% of the movie establishing his reason for revenge and then taking you for a thrill ride of artfully choreographed violence. Monkey Man sadly is not the Indian John Wick because where John wick does more with very little, Monkey Man conversely takes the opposite approach essentially dividing the film into two acts. The first half of the movie, roughly accounting for 65% of the duration of the 2 hour film consists of backstory, reason for revenge, and without spoiling anything, setbacks.

A successful revenge movie understands that pacing is the sharpest blade. There may be setbacks. But they don't set back the pace as the movie always inches forward towards revenge.

While it is true that it is possible to enhance the satisfaction of revenge by focusing more on the reason for that revenge, this is extremely difficult to do and in almost all cases ends up causing the movie to drag. This was very much the case with Monkey Man, or as my title refers to it - Monkey Marathon.

Monkey Man has elements of what it needs to be to achieve a John Wick level of action film, but it goes in the completely wrong direction. Long form story telling. Drags. The whole first act drags and doesn't need to.

78%

If you accept everything by at face value and don't ask any questions this is a visually stunning and highly entertaining movie. Unfortunately, there are a lot of minor plot holes mostly as it comes down to, "okay, but why? Why would anyone design something this way?" Or, "why would this character do this when there are more sensible things to do?" And a lot of instances where things just happen that way because the plot needed it to. Ultimately it was action packed and exciting but falls apart when you look at it for too long and with too much scrutiny.

I would give this a solid 7 out of 10.

The Meg 2 sadly follows the trend of sequels not living up to the original. The movie is drawn out and the editing for the whole first half makes it hard to see what is happening. The dialogue is really quite bad and the plot id as run of the mill as it gets. The movie picks up after an hour and has some truly fun over the top scenes which ultimately make it worth seeing. They thought they by adding more megs it would somehow make it bigger and better but alas that was not the case. It's not a "bad" movie per se, it just feels like they rushed production and went ahead before they had a worthy script. There is a lot to enjoy with the Meg 2 and it's a ton of fun, but don't expect anything ground breaking here.