Tag / chris mckenna

by Jaime Rebanal

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – Review

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The original Jumanji hasn’t particularly aged very well outside of Robin Williams’s role but the premise alone having been based on Chris Van Allsburg’s book of the same name has always remained an inventive one. In the film’s best moments it feels like an inventive take on the obsession with gaming by juxtaposing said dangers as a reality to really test how prepared its unsuspecting players truly are, but at its worst it also feels relentlessly dark, and these moments only make clear the film’s age more than anything. Now that we have a film taking on the same idea but placing it all in the world of a video game, the least I can really say about Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is that I’m already signed up to actually play a video game of this sort.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Spider-Man: Homecoming – Review

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I was never a fan of Spider-Man growing up, the comics never grabbed me and I was never a fan of either film franchise whether it be Sam Raimi’s original trilogy (minus Spider-Man 2, which I do really like) and Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man films. The idea of a Spider-Man film being made now as another entry for the Marvel Cinematic Universe sounded even less appealing to me, with the lack of a real impact of Tom Holland’s own presence in Captain America: Civil War (which was already difficult enough to sit through) and the especially dreadful marketing. Now that an entire movie was set to be centered around him during the prime of his own life at high school, within the homecoming period – maybe it would be about time something more would strike me that would have me attached to Spider-Man’s arc like Spider-Man 2but I’ve expected a tad too much afterwards was what I thought. It was purely Spider-Man the way I’ve always seen him, just angsty and uninteresting.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Lego Batman Movie – Review

✯✯✯½

Kind of like The Lego Movie in a sense that it would not be easy to expect something along these lines at first to be half as good as it was, but it manages to succeed in bringing good fun. The unexpected success of The Lego Movie was one among many of the decade’s biggest surprises for it managed to capture a certain playfulness in itself that in turn created a product far better than it really had much right to be, but with The Lego Batman Movie now focusing on DC characters, one can only have enough of Will Arnett’s Batman impression filling up the final product. Turns out what I got was exactly what made The Lego Movie work nearly as well as it did although probably not to the same degree of effectiveness as said film, but maybe the same sort of fun.

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