mrcthedj

Some friends and I watch 'bad' movies every Thursday night. We have a wheel upon which many bad movies have been placed and the wheel is spun and the title it lands on is the one we watch. We have a rule that somebody can press a panic button after 20 minutes if the movie is unwatchable.

This movie has been sitting on the wheel for some time. Most of us dreaded the day the wheel would land on it. Well, it finally happened. Our one friend who likes musicals was excited. But even he understood this might not make it past the twenty minute mark.

So, the movie started and something became clear right away:

This is a movie for people with some sort of cat fetish. I'm not insulting people who like cats. I like cats. They kill rodents. They're wonderful little beasts. No, this movie is for people who not only have some thing for humans dressed as cats, but for humans who practice their fetish while using some sort of substance that gives everything a soft edge. I don't know if I explained that correctly, but I just know I couldn't help but think the filmmakers were trying to recreate some psychedelic experience they had at Burning Man or Coachella or wherever people are doing that sort of stuff these days.

I did my best to tolerate the movie as much as possible. It starts with a seven minute song about...Gallico cats? I couldn't quite tell.

Then we get to a plus-sized cat that rubs her legs for a good amount of screen time. Then the rodents and roaches show up and it became clear my brain would vacate my skull through my ears if I continued watching it.

I wasn't alone. Another member of the group insisted we shut off the movie and spin the "Good Wheel" (the wheel we go to after a bad movie has not passed the 20-minute test, a wheel with movies we know don't stink). The good wheel landed on De Palma's Blow Out and the evening was saved.

I love to watch Ana de Armas on the big screen. She's a reminder that one of the things movies do is exalt beautiful women. She's not the greatest actor to ever walk the earth, but it doesn't really matter.

I also enjoyed the first John Wick movie. I like 'dumb action movies,' and these movies more or less fall into that category, but this movie took 'dumb' to amazing depths. The screenplay was atrocious. Terrible dialogue, right out of a box of Screenwriter Cracker Jacks. The acting was beyond awful. Poor Anjelica Huston looks like an inter-dimensional being from the third season of Twin Peaks that is thoroughly confused by the inane dialogue she's been asked to read. It's clear she had no desire to do this picture beyond the paycheck. Keanu is especially Keanu in this one. He delivers his dialogue as one might expect someone freshly awoken from a coma might attempt to repeat something told to them decades earlier.

The movie moves at a breakneck speed, which means you spend about and hour and fifty minutes watching explosions, gunfire, and dozens of people dying on screen, most of whom are given no personality whatsoever. The result is that the action becomes tiresome. A good action movie knows how to divvy out the action scenes in such a way as to make each action sequence fresh and exciting. By the 'climax' of the movie, I was ready to walk out. I didn't because I paid too much money not to endure the entire movie.

This may be the worst movie I've watched in a theater since Highlander II, back in 1991.

There are three positives to mention, but I will only mention two as the third would be a spoiler.

1. Ana de Armas is, at all times, wonderful to look at. Even when she's flipping around dodging knives and bullets, she still looks beautiful.

2. The photography is fantastic.

That's it. Only watch this if you can see it for free.

So what happens when an ego-maniacal pop-diva fights a ticking clock to nail a pop-music comeback? Mayhem. Also, it's in Nigeria. But the characters are pretty on-par with the dirty-pool business of pop music anywhere.

The whole film is a series of on-edge moments, as frenetic as Lagos traffic. At the center of this melee of egocentrism and envy is NK-a studio tech dripping with jealousy. He's at odds with Ello (our heroine), who starts off completely unlikable, but has a nice little redemption arc.

There's a docudrama feel to this film, although I believe it's fiction, and not based on a true story (hard to tell in some parts). Cool lighting, and some great performances. Chinonso Young gives a standout performance.