Showing posts with label Geostorm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geostorm. Show all posts

Saturday, May 12, 2018

There's Real Potential In Bad Samaritan That Fails To Get Realized


Despite being a dopey B-movie thriller from the director of Geostorm, there's actually an interesting sociopolitical idea at the center of Bad Samaritan that deserves a more thoughtful movie to inhabit. When one boils down Bad Samaritan to its most basic elements, what we have here is a cat and mouse game whose protagonist is an Irish immigrant while our villain is a white male American who acts arrogantly to everyone who comes near to me and who has his status as a foe reinforced by how he threatens to report immigrant workers to immigration services. This is an intriguing hero/villain dynamic built on real-world elements that, unfortunately, becomes a background detail (and one undercut in effectiveness by certain elements in the film we'll talk about later) for a far more generic thriller.


Sunday, October 22, 2017

Silly Fun And Disaster Mayhem Are In Short Supply In The Rote Geostorm

The erratic weather patterns of planet Earth, which have only grown worse and more deadly as the years go by, have finally caused the various nations of the world to come together to conjure up a solution for these weather-related problems. Their remedy arrives in the form of a system of satellites, nicknamed Dutchboy, that hover above Earth and control the weather. Natural disasters are a thing of the past and the man behind designing Dutchboy, Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler), is a hero. Unfortunately, Jake Lawson is a rowdy guy who doesn't respond well to authority and him mouthing off to a U.S. senator ends up costing him his job.