JayWolfgramm

The unique moment in history, where the samurai film and spaghetti Western combine. The two already have an entangled history, but this marks the day when one of the 7 Samuri meets one of the Magnificent 7. And just for good luck, let's throw in a Bond Girl and a Bond director.

This movie spends too much time in transit. The movie is nearly 2 hours long, and it could have easily been shaved to a tight 98 minutes. The movie wastes too much time with long lingering shots of our heroes on horseback. They must have figured the Spanish scenery was enough to keep the audience's attention. Sorry to spend so much complaining about it, but it is proportional to how much screentime they spend trying to get to the main point.

The Western movie tropes are used to good effect in this film. There is a great villain, alliances of convenience and a straightforward motivation for our heroes. Charles Bronson can sell some of the dumbest sounding lines but make them sound awesome. And there are plenty of cool one-liners for him to say in this one.

Along with being bogged down with too much filler, there are several story beats and action scenes that are mishandled.

Given the potential of this story, I wish we could have had something better.

How do I describe this show? OK, so, it is a slice of life anime about high schoolers going to school doing their normal thing. But then, the high schoolers that join Haruhi Suzumiya's SOS Brigade turn out to be...special. One turns out to be a time traveller, one is a robot and one is a magical sprite spirit. All of them have come together becuase Haruhi Suzumiya apparantly controls the whole universe, and those three are there to make sure she is happy. Best I can figure, they know that Haruhi is the main character/ literal author of the story and therefore must be entertained. If the series stops being entertaining their world will be cancelled.

So, the series centers around a girl who is trying to make an entertaining series. One episode she'll want to do a baseball episode. Another she'll want to do a murder mystery. The series will dive into the strange and supernatural but most often will handle it in a grounded simple way.

But then, in a bold strategy, the series feels like it begins to troll their own audience. "Endless Eight", a series of episodes so infamous, it has transcended the series itself and become legendary. I'm sure the producers and showrunners wanted to say no to the idea. But Haruhi controls them like that boy in the Twilight Zone.

Consquently, i don't know quite how to rank this series. When it is good it is grand. But when it is bad...it is pretty bad.

I'm not expecting them to recapture the magic that was the first movie. I was just going in for a Greatest Hits with new characters, creepy dinosaurs and some exciting action scenes. Maybe on par with Jurassic Park 3 or 4. Even with those lowered expectations this movie disappointed me.

Not since "Land Before Time" have I rooted so much for the dinosaurs to win. Almost every character on the adventure was unlikable, either from being greedy, self-righteous, annoying or stupid enough to vacation on Monster Island.

And this movie has the nerve to act like "people don't care about dinosaurs anymore", as if making a meta commentary about people not caring about their franchise. These movies make billions of dollars for just showing up.