SWITCH.
Dec 30, 2020
2/10
Now you might assume that I'm probably not the kind of person predisposed to like this film. Daniel doesn't have fun. He writes pages waxing lyrical on a film like 'Roma' that starts with a five-minute sequence of someone cleaning up dog poo, or 'A Hidden Life' that's 60% glorious shots of landscapes. But hey! I can have fun! I loved 'The Meg'! I lost my mind in the first Transformers film! When The Rock rode up a tsunami, avoiding an oil tanker that then took out the Golden Gate Bridge in 'San Andreas', I was on my feet in the cinema cheering! This film though? This isn't fun. It's too loud, too hard to follow, too bonkers to be appealing, and not anywhere near bonkers enough to be charming or good for a laugh. It's a film that basically yells at you for an hour and a half in the most aggressive, hyper-masculine way, and leaves you feeling like you've been stuck in a corner at a party for three hours having some guy tell you all about the screenplay he's going to write that will finally, finally be a good video game adaptation and never taking the hint you want a drink or a pee or a change in conversation or to run screaming from the room. I went into Paul W. S. Anderson's latest film (the guy who made 'Mortal Combat' and 'Death Race', not 'Boogie Nights' and 'Punch-Drunk Love') totally prepared to have a blast, but it gave me no time, space or inclination to do so. And then this stupid film that doesn't know whether it wants to be a bad 'Godzilla' or a shitty reimagining of 'The Dark Tower' has the audacity to set itself up for a sequel! (But hey, we're in the End Times, so it only makes sense that we would get a sequel to this trash instead of another season of 'Mindhunter'). I'm sure some people are going to get a kick out of this saga about Artemis (Hunter, of Monsters, titular) fighting big asshole spiders and being the saviour white woman to a far more impressive person of colour and crying over some ring (it was for “forever“, remember). For me? The whole thing is too loud and aggressive and dull to be the best kind of dumb fun.
- Daniel Lammin
