Blueghost

What makes a classic Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon funny is the inventiveness of the Coyote, and the lengths he'll go to get some bird meat in his stomach. He's "wily", somewhat flamboyant, overly confident and eager for his schemes to work. This short has none of this.

We laugh when Wile E. Coyote's elaborate schemes fail and backfire. Some times the backfire is painful, but we laugh at his far reaching creativeness to combine several inventions into a giant ridiculous plot or contraption, and then winds up harming him instead of the Road Runner. But there's none of that here.

What we get in this short is Wile E. Coyote being smacked around and walloped without rhyme or reason, other than he tried to get the road runner (yet again) but it's more or less just a failure for the sake of being a failure. And so we see him get hit, smacked, walloped, and so forth without the wily coyote's inventiveness. Without his "super genius".

In short it's just violence for the sake of it, and it's really not funny in the least. You don't see Mister Super Genius overly confidant only to suffer some comeuppance due to bad planning or the laws of physics not cooperating. You see an animal getting smacked around for the sake of it.

It's not funny. The Coyote is not creative. He's not inventive. He's used as a ragdoll as he goes from one painful episode of getting hit to another.

Mister Matthew O'Callaghan, you're no Bob Clampett, Frank Tashlin, Chuck Jones nor Friz Freling. How you got handed this assignment, much less become a director, is beyond me. I think Jones said it took three years to get a short done, from concept to being put up on the screen. These look like they were thrown together on a weekend. There about as painful to watch as the Wile E Coyote actually getting hit. They're dull, not thematic in the least (the coyote wants to live in previous EPs, and so does the road runner), regardless of how dynamic they look.

Please pass the torch.

I botched another chance to be with loved ones during this film, and so I'm done. The movie itself was the usual post 1990's over the top SFX stuff with a lot of plot and scenery.

Cruise plays the rogue intel officer who only does jobs he thinks are worth doing, and a rogue AI starts the film off with a disaster that tries to put fear into the audience.

The truth about AI is that it's only as smart as the hardware allows it. Ask any flying insect about where pollen is, and then ask it to explain its family history and you'll get a baffled look from the critter. The film assumes human like qualities from the electronic menace, which I suppose in theory is possible, but all programs require a power source and the hardware to support it. That's basic computer building 101.

Even so the film uses a lot of software references to push the plopt forward. In the old Connery era James Bond films the devices where there to give an ego boost to the Bond loving audience. See Bond outsmart the bad guys with his Aston Martin DB5 oil slick, or exploding briefcase. Here the software is both a helper and a menace, with some humans throwing in their two bits.

There's a lot of deceit and double backing and double and triple guessing on the part of the characters as to what to do. If there were a real AI that had "gone rogue", then like all bugged software you would see errors pop up. But we don't get that in this film. We get a lot of Cruise doing highly dynamic green screen work, a lot of martial arts from both men and women, and a good amount of gunplay and more than one car chase, all of which is capped off by a train sequence.

You know ... I came to dislike movies way back when I was a kid in the 70s, but could still enjoy them as mindless fun. This film kind of goes back to those James Bond, Man From Uncle, Mission Impossible, I Spy days of movie and TV yore. It's meant for a younger audience than myself, and designed to emotionally prepare said audience for the challenges of facing a possible nemesis that, again in theory, doesn't have any feelings but a sense of programmed purpose.

The film looks good, but with no linger cinematic moments. The sound was overly loud, the music was okay enough. And the tricks of the spy trade were fun and inventive.

If I had a criticism it was that the fight scenes are out of late night kung fu theatre from the 1980s and 1970s. During the 60s and 70s Taiwan a few other Asian nations film industries made lots of martial arts' films, and they got aired late at night on broadcast TV. All of the fights were perfectly choregraphed, and I felt like a teenager again with a slice of pizza and a can of coke watching the old tube TV at 1AM. But, it is a movie, and you can't take it too seriously.

I sat through the overly loud previews and Noovie promos before the actual movie, and figured that that was that. I really can't say too much more than what I stated in my opening paragraph. I really tried, but it was after all only a movie.

I've been extremely negative about films. The supermajority of them are simply psychiatric rehabilitation formulas. The main character is on the fringes of society, helps society meet a challenge initially for himself, but gets rewarded with the girl, town recognition and money at the end.

It's both very refreshing and somewhat disappointing that a film comes along that breaks that mold and tells an old fashioned war story. True, the main characters go through some psychological transformations, but the primary thrust of the story is the plot even though one character is radically altered at the end.

So in this regard it's still a character driven story. In screenwriting courses we used to get pounded into our skull "what the main character needs", and write that. Again, in this sense the main character is the focus, but he must bring the plot to a resolution, and it is for a moral imperative, at least in a war fighting context.

Technically this film really puts a lot of other war films to shame. For whatever reason todays' World War 1 films far surpass other war film offerings. The special effects are superior, the art direction with costumes, sets and props really outdo a lot of other violent movies. Go figure.

There're a few over the top and "oh come on" moments, but unlike a lot of films that try to include all demographics, this one doesn't play around with what's at steak and what values win wars and which ones get people killed.

A lot of WW1 films I've seen have shown the battlefields as brown chewed up stretches of mud, but here we get quite a bit of greenery as well as battle scarred tracks. But the empty artillery shells, the half buried bodies, the ashes the muck and everything else really show just how horrible mass slaughter really is.

I'm tempted to call it a heart felt film, but there are no tender warm moments here, or rather very few of them. And those very few tender moments show just how horrible it is when nations clash.

The film is designed to be one take, one cut, but if you pay attention you can see where some edits may have been made. And even though I called the film plot oriented, it is driven by a plot, but is really a story driven film and not so much character driven in spite of the character exposition.

A really good film about the first world war. Deep, gritty, not overly dramatic, a bit much at moments, but otherwise a really good watch. Check it out.