Movie review: "Mile 22"

directed by Peter Berg
written by Lea Carpenter

For years now, director Peter Berg has collaborated with Mark Wahlberg on dramas about American tragedies. Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and Patriots Day all took real-world events as their subject matter, with varied but generally positive critical reactions and widespread popularity. Clearly, Berg and Wahlberg have a comfortable relationship, so although the former previously failed to craft a successful summer blockbuster with 2012's Battleship, a new action film from the duo still had potential, especially given Wahlberg's continued box office success.

However, Mile 22 suggests that Berg should have stuck with what was working, as he struggles to find a story compelling enough to compensate for the lack of real-world inspiration. More importantly, the film features some shockingly bad editing, and lacks even a single visually coherent action scene, instead waiting not even a second between cuts. The basic responsibility of any action movie is to ensure the audience can follow the action, and in that sense, Mile 22 is perversely inept. Considering that fundamental failure, it hardly even matters that the film also has an unlikeable protagonist and terrible dialogue. All anyone wants from an action movie is clear, comprehensible action, and this film can't even deliver that.

Movie review: "Mute"

dir. by Duncan Jones
written by Michael Robert Johnson and Duncan Jones
Duncan Jones has, allegedly, been trying to get Mute made for some decade and a half. Presented as a sequel of sorts to his excellent 2009 sci-fi film Moon, this new film represents Jones's return to science fiction after the critical failure of his video game adaptation Warcraft. Given the pedigree of Jones's previous work, it's not hard to expect that this would show him regaining his footing after that brief stumble, but it's also a relatively safe career move. That it was Netflix who ultimately distributed it could indicate that it was too challenging for the traditional studios, but it could also simply indicate that the project wasn't coming together.

Netflix's willingness to let filmmakers do whatever they like allows for ambitious projects to gain a mainstream pedigree, but it also means they have a low standard of quality. In Jones's case, there's a reason the major studios wouldn't touch this: if Mute is a passion project, it's hard to see where the passion is directed, as this is a droning, persistently generic neo-noir project, and while it's admirably committed to its scattershot ideas, those ideas are overwhelmingly derivative, gracelessly grafting a Blade Runner ripoff aesthetic to a tediously creaky mystery. The downfall of Netflix's approach, it would appear, is that there's nobody to tell a filmmaker when their efforts just aren't working.

Movie review: "My Little Pony: The Movie"

dir. by Jayson Thiessen
writ. by Meghan McCarthy, Rita Hsiao, and Michael Vogel

The appeal of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comes from a combination of factors. Aside from its lighthearted tone and cute art style, its characters are surprisingly three-dimensional, and its best episodes can be quite funny as well. This show's cult following didn't come out of nowhere, and much of it comes down to the show's main themes. To me, the most important part of Friendship is Magic's appeal is that so many of its stories revolve around the main characters needing to move past their own insecurities. This show does an excellent job with audience identification, even outside of the target audience, simply because it fleshes out its protagonists and treats them with empathy.

On the other hand, My Little Pony: The Movie is asinine and derivative, and while there's several factors in its overall sloppiness, perhaps the greatest is that it trades the show's stories of insecurity for slapdash adventure cliches, seemingly assembled at random. What little remains of the show's soul is scrambled by the slapdash execution, which is too busy hopping from formula beat to formula beat to sufficiently develop even one of its characters, and it's all brought down by a truly wretched sense of humour. Perhaps it would be difficult to make a My Little Pony movie which really taps into the show's main strengths, but on the other hand, there's no reason it had to be this bad.

(note: spoilers follow)