Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.12

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) — 6/10
2. Death Becomes Her (1992) — 8/10
3. Superman (2025) — 4/10
4. Plane (2023) — 6/10
5. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) — 6/10
6. Secret Headquarters (2022) — 5/10
7. Outbreak (1995) — 8/10
8. John Rambo (Rambo) (2008) — 7/10
9. The Running Man (1987) — 6/10
10. Invelle (Nowhere) (2023) — 8/10

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) — 6/10

I can’t tell whether this movie is just cheesy or whether it’s the motion interpolation that makes it look cheesier. It looks like a damned video game.

The story starts with a dinosaur eating a scientist as it almost breaks containment. That was 17 years ago. In the modern day, we get intro titles that explain that dinosaurs are only thriving at the equator in no-go zones. The last brachiosaurus in North America breaks out and into the city where it’s been kept, but lies dying.

In the foreground, we meet Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) and Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), who explains everything that we learned in the titles all over again. They then meet up with Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who runs a dinosaur bone museum and who explains the company’s goal of finding giant dinosaurs at the equator in order to harvest their blood to get some sort of coronary drug.

This matters less than making an awkward scene of waiting for him to acquiesce. It’s just the same lame jokes with not-even-snappy repartee.

Next, they’re on an island to meet Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who decides to back out of participating in the whole mission. Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein) joins the team, rounding out the mercenaries who couldn’t care less about the dinosaurs and just want to do the mission and survive. This is also par for the course. His shirt is even tighter than Johansson’s and he’s showing more nipple.

Holy shit, this acting is terribly phoned in. Jesus. Scarlett Johansson is fucking terrible. Mahershala Ali is also utterly awful, without chemistry. Ali is perhaps better than the others but it’s all so wooden. Am I getting too old for this shit? Or are these movies just getting more terrible?

Next scene is a group of fools on a sailboat, with an over-the-top asshole who is very obviously going to be the first one eaten by a dinosaur. This is interminable and these people suck. It feels like a soap opera. Completely shockingly, a giant mosasaur rams and capsizes the sailboat, dumping everyone in the water and trapping the asshole boyfriend Xavier in the cabin.

The mercs decide to answer the distress call of the sailboat before they go pick up dinosaurs. This means, of course, that will get more chances at having kids get into danger. Also, we’ll get more of asshole Xavier, which should be fun.

There are two people who occasionally speak French. It is not explained why they do this. The father is the only one who realizes the danger his family might be in. The rest of the young people act as if their rescuers owe them an in-depth explanation. This takes a back-burner to the mosasaur showing up and the mercs swinging into action to extract blood from it. They manage to spike it despite the incredibly bad trigger discipline on Zora’s part.

The good doctor expresses the perfectly sane and rational opinion to Zora that they should probably not turn over the blood samples when they’re done.

LOOMIS: Hey.
ZORA: Hey.
LOOMIS: What if we don’t?
ZORA: What if we don’t what?
LOOMIS: Well, what if we get the samples and we don’t give them over to a company that makes a lifesaving drug and then prices it so 99% of the planet can’t afford it? Science is for all of us, not some of us. Have you thought about that?
ZORA: No, I guess I haven’t.
LOOMIS: Well, then maybe you should start.
ZORA: Maybe you should stop.

They don’t let those communist thoughts linger too long on the screen (else it would have gotten an NC-17 rating). So, some anti-communist dinosaurs attack again. The whole family ends up overboard, with the merc boat crashing into James-Bond-looking islands. The mercs also all jump ship, except for Duncan, who crashes with the ship. The famly is miraculously reunited and they’re all trapped on the Isla Nublar. Um, also they lost Bobby first (no surprise there) and then another Merc lady.

Duncan, Krebs, and Loomis have some fun conversations, swerving dangerously close to expressing very communist-sounding things for a big-budget, dinosaur-action movie.

There’s this one, where Loomis questions the premise that the primary consideration in any situation is one of fiduciary responsibility rather than morality.

DUNCAN: Ideally, you don’t try weird genetic shit at all.
KREBS: Well, they learned that the hard way. Any that were malformed or just too damn hard for anybody to look at, they left them here.
LOOMIS: Well, that’s inhuman. Why not just euthanize them?
KREBS: The average cost of a created species is $72 million. What would you do? Kill it and have to tell your bank or just carry it forward under R&D?
LOOMIS: What would I do with mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective? Is that really the question?

Or this one, about how Loomis (the scientist) would like to die.

DUNCAN: I hate the jungle. I try to avoid it now.
LOOMIS: Why is that?
DUNCAN: You can’t see three feet in front of you, and you always know you’re being stalked. And the only place to hide is underwater. I refuse to die in the jungle.
LOOMIS: My dream is I die in a shallow sea and I’m buried quickly by silt.
DUNCAN: That’s beautiful.
LOOMIS: It’s the best chance of being fossilized that way.
DUNCAN: (laughs) You’re a weirdo.
LOOMIS: Thank you.

Or, finally, Loomis’s opinion that humanity thinks that it’s in charge of the planet but it’s up to us to stay in the climate zone that it offers.

“LOOMIS: We don’t rule the Earth. We just think we do. I mean, sure, we’re changing the environment, but that makes us the ones to worry about, not the planet. When the Earth gets tired of us, believe me, it will shake us off like a summer cold. Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9% of them are now extinct. Survival is a long shot.”

This movie is so uneven. There’s a relatively nice shot of them walking through lush greenery that reminds me of Kong: Skull Island—even though Skull Island looked so much more real[2], it still evoked a response—and then there’s just a stupid, cheaply filmed scene of Xavier taking a leak in the forest for five minutes and almost getting eaten but then not getting eaten.

This is pretty weird, though, as they’ve now encountered a dinosaur well-known to the scientist but they were also told that the island was full of mutant cross-breeds. How did the gentle giants survive for 20 years? There are literally hundreds of the things, stretching to the horizon. How is there still so much greenery when those things must eat their own weight in vegetation every week?

The next great adventure is to get a boat from under the nose of a T-Rex. This whole scene is fraught with needless silliness, cheap effects, and plot discontinuities. Where did the paddle come from? How is the boat still inflated after an 8-ton bite chomps it?

The mercs are now rappelling a 500-foot cliff, with Zora pretending like it’s the easiest thing in the world and the good doctor being quite expert, despite his complete inexperience. They’re in an aerie to collect the final blood sample.

ZORA: You’re a very impressive nerd, Henry.
LOOMIS: (chuckles)
ZORA: What would the alternative be?
LOOMIS: To what?
ZORA: To handing the samples over to ParkerGenix.
LOOMIS: We open-source it. We give it to the whole world. A bunch of people create the medicine, nobody owns the patent, everyone has access, and tens of millions of lives are saved. It’s all of us, not some of us.
ZORA: I don’t make any money in that scenario.
LOOMIS: Oh, no, you’re broke as hell.
ZORA: Yeah, I don’t love that part.

Everything works out in the end, except for the final French merc was eaten. They have the samples and Zora is totally in love with Loomis.

Flash back to the family where their inflatable boat has not only not been damaged by having been attacked by a T-Rex, but the paddles were both still in the boat, even though she had clearly left them in the shed miles back. They happen upon an abandoned base. The mercs arrive soon after.

We’re now treated to another interminable scene that is basically a replay of the kitchen scene in the first Jurassic Park. The doctor manages to get the helicopter’s attention with a flare but it flies right into the clutches of a truly gigantic dinosaur. The effects are comically bad. The good guys get into a tunnel complex and make their way to the shoreline to a boat. The bad guy is driving across the island as well, in a car with a howling car alarm. Zora joins the others just in time to save them from a dinosaur in the tunnel.

Just as they’re all about to be eaten by the ugliest dinosaur ever, the loud car appears and saves them all. As predicted, the briefcase falls with the arm attached. Loomis retrieves it. Also as foreshadowed in an utterly predictable and ham-handed manner, Duncan sacrifices himself to save the kids. You know, because his own kid had died. It’s all so predictable and insipid. They play a bunch of dramatic music to make it seem like a holy experience but it’s just dumb.

I don’t really want to be that guy but how did the father’s leg fix itself? Like, he was limping heavily with a cane before and now he’s just fine, like nothing had happened. Did he go to a hospital? Did I miss that?

With no explanation whatsoever, Duncan seems to have survived. I guess the dinosaur wasn’t hungry. Now they’re on a boat that’s very quiet but that has two giant outboard engines that the father had used a pull-cord to start..[3]

Anyway, they have the case of three dinosaur-blood samples and they have the doctor with his beautiful open-source vision of letting all of mankind benefit from it. He gives Zora the choice and she says “we’ll give it to everyone.” The end.

Look, I’m not gonna completely spit on a movie with an obviously pro-socialist ending. Good for them. It’s not getting an extra star for it because it was a shockingly poorly made movie for it being 2025 and it having cost $225M. The shabbiness of the CGI for that amount of money is breathtaking. They got scammed. You could practically see the white outline of the people in the boat in the final scene. The light on their faces didn’t even begin to match the background. What is going on? Are they really not capable of making a better film? Was it the motion-interpolation? Watch Kong: Skull Island; it was much better.

Death Becomes Her (1992) — 8/10

This movie is about scheming and conniving. It is about eternal youth. It is about the unfairness of a world in which women are led to believe that they have only their looks on which to get by.

We start at a musical starring Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep). It is not doing well. Only famous plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) stands up to offer an ovation. His fiancé, writer Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) is an old friend of Madeline’s. They have a fraught relationship, mostly because Madeline is a fractious, jealous, and venal bitch. She is jealous of Helen for her closeness to such a vaunted plastic surgeon.

Despite his denials to Helen, Ernest quickly breaks off his engagement and marries Madeline. Seven years later, Helen is fat and living with dozens of cats. The police break into her apartment for failure to pay rent. The take her off to the boobie hatch, where she spends several long months, talking only about Madeline. Seven more years later and Helen is back and she’s fabulous. Unfortunately for Madeline, she is less fabulous and feeling her age. Her marriage to Ernest is a disaster. He drinks all the time and calls her a monster with the staff. He is now a mortician to the stars rather than a plastic surgeon.

Madeline sees how gorgeous Helen looks at her book party and is driven to desperation—desperate enough even to call on Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini), who offers her a youth serum for a tremendous fee. She reveals that she is 71 years old although she doesn’t look a day over 30 (Rossellini was actually 40 at the time the film came out). Madeline agrees nearly immediately, quickly enjoying her new youthful looks and new youthful body (Streep was 43 at the time the movie came out).

Meanwhile, the no-longer-fat and now-incredibly vivacious Helen (Hawn was an incredible 47 years old at the time the movie came out) has once again seduced Ernest and has convinced him that he should not only leave Madeline but that he should kill her. She has a whole plan laid out. It goes horribly awry when Madeline’s incredible bitchiness clashes with Ernest’s drunkenness and sullenness to make him push her down the stairs, where she breaks her wrist, her arm, her legs, and her neck. She is not, however, dead, as confirmed by a doctor (Sydney Pollack).

After the hospital staff has taken a passed-out Madeline to the morgue, Ernest rescues her and takes her to his studio, where he “fixes her up” with his mortician’s tools. Helen shows up just in time for Madeline to shoot her point-blank with a shotgun, blasting a hole in her midsection and sending her flying backwards into an indoor fountain. She comes to after a bit because, well, she’d taken the same potion from Lisle seven years prior. They fight and finally reconcile and discover that they need Ernest to fix them up.

Now they realize that they need him for continued maintenance, they can’t let him leave, as he’d intended. They concoct a plan to drug him, take him to Lisle, and force him to take the potion of eternal life, so that he, too, can live forever. When he refuses to drink, wanting to turn his life around, they knock him out more conventionally and take him to Lisle.

Ernest awakens in Lisle’s castle, with Isabella Rossellini spectacularly nude and languorously exiting a large, gorgeously lit, indoor swimming pool. She is deeply interested in having him take the potion, as she has seen his skill at restoration, and is interested in having him around when she inevitably dies.

Ernest refuses the potion and escapes, but heads into a giant party where all of the attendees are Lisle’s clients. They would all most likely be interested in having his services around forever. Ernest escapes again, exiting at the roof and trying to crawl across its loose tiles. He falls onto a drainpipe and is about to plummet to his death. the ladies find him and exhort him to drink the potion before he falls. instead, he drops it to the courtyard below. He follows it soon after, plummeting through a stained-glass window into the pool room, but surviving.

The ladies make a pact to take care of each other, painting each other’s asses, forever.

The epilogue of the film is at Ernest’s funeral, where we learn that he restarted his life at 50, taking up mountain-climbing, marrying, having children, and founding charities for children and marriage-counseling around the world. The two ladies are of course there, in veils and looking more than disheveled. “You’re gonna need some more bondo.” They look very much like Instagram influencers in the final scene, where they’re all spackled up after 37 years of maintenance.

They’re all quite wonderful in these roles. I had forgotten how long the movie took to get going. The first murder is easily halfway through the film.

Superman (2025) — 4/10

This movie is so cheesy. It is a child’s movie. The four-year-old could follow the plot. It would be clapping its pudgy little hands like it was Cars 3.

There’s a nigh-omnipotent Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) calling out moves to have his robot defeat Superman (David Corenswet). Then the ethnic guy goes out in the street to see if he’s OK. Now, Clark’s in the office with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo). They discuss the things that you expect them to discuss. I’m not even going to mention stupid Krypto. There is a subplot about Boravia, which is attacking Metropolis to try to kill Superman, I guess?

Lois knows that Clark is Superman. They meet back at the apartment, where Clark is cooking. Lois wants to interview Superman but sweet mother of God does that scene take a long time. I guess people love how Lois Lane treats Superman as a hostile witness. So girl-boss.

When she irritates him to no end, he decides to leave, after which she whines that he’s being a baby. Why are you shutting down? Man, I hope that tail is worth it, Kal-El. It’s almost certainly not.

Now Lex Luthor and his little army of superheroes—the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría, who is atrocious) and some Ultraman thing—just easily gets access to the Fortress of Solitude—like in literal seconds, with the door opening right up for them without hesitation.

This isn’t even a plot; it’s just stuff happening that a four-year-old would think is cool. Lex Luthor can just kind of do whatever he wants whenever he wants. I can’t believe people thought that this was good. It’s trash. It’s for children. And it’s even insulting to their intelligence. Everyone involved in this thing should be ashamed of themselves. This is fucking embarrassing.

There’s a black-guy-in-a-flying-wheelchair superhero. I can’t even believe I just wrote that. I can’t believe that they’re not taking the piss. If this were The Boys, I’d know that they’d be making fun of how woke everything’s gotten. In this movie, I probably missed where they casually mentioned that he’s also a gay socialist.

Superman just saved a squirrel. It got five seconds of screen-time.

Nathan Fillion plays a very strange-looking Green Lantern.

Lex Luthor plants fake news and everyone believes it immediately. OMG YAWN.

“I know those computer forensics guys. There’s no way the message is fake.”

OMG YAWN.

Like, things just happen because they need to happen.

Also, Lex Luthor has teleportation devices. They are accompanied by rock music. I am going crazy. Nicholas Hoult should be ashamed of himself. He is doing such a terrible job.

This is a stupid, stupid movie.

Did we stop even trying to make movies that look like things? Oh God, now they’re going to ruin Frank Grillo’s reputation on the altar of … what? Who is this movie even for?

Did anyone else notice that Mr. Terrific’s little dance of destruction with his little robots was nearly a beat-for-beat rip-off of any of the times that Yondu whistled his arrow of death through dozens of enemies. The one time on the ship, after he’d been laid low? Yeah, that was awesome. Mr. Terrific ticking a box? Not so much.

Lois has 100% access to all of Lexcorp’s financial records with no doubt in her mind that they are correct. This, after she yelled at Clark that she “questions everything”. That lasted about six seconds. Jimmy has a source that knows that Superman is being held in a pocket universe, with a special alien who can make kryptonite … meanwhile a guy named Mr. Terrific (black dude in a wheelchair) put nanobots in Superman’s bloodstream …

I can’t do this. I can’t describe every stupid element of this stupid plot.

The movie ended pretty much as you might imagine: Lex Luthor loses, Krypto defeats Luthor, Mr. Terrific closes the dimensional rift (WTF?), Superman’s reputation is saved while Lex Luthor’s is destroyed. The plot to carve up a poor country is foiled by the League of Justice (or whatever, I mean who cares?) and Lois and Clark are all good again. The end. What a shitshow. Either this movie sucks ass or I’m incapable of enjoying anything anymore. Maybe a little of column A, a little of column B.

Plane (2023) — 6/10

I had just watched and reviewed this movie in March 2025 but my father-in-law had it on, so I watched it with half-an-eye while I was doing something else. I think my original review of 4 was a bit harsh. In that review, I compared it unfavorably to Sisu but now, I’m comparing it to the trash-heap that was Superman, so it suddenly looks endearing and charming.

You can still tell that Gerard Butler filmed most of his scenes alone, on a green screen. But he’s so charming and earnest that it somehow works. The final shot of him on the stairs of the plane, with the camera panning upward to take in the plane, nicely centered in the shot? It’s kind of a nice coda.

Maybe I liked it better in the original English, I dunno. Maybe I’m just a moody sonofabitch.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) — 6/10

Callie (Carrie Coons) takes her two kids to a house she’d inherited from her father. They’re forced to stay because they’ve been thrown out of their apartment for failure to pay rent. Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) shows up to see what they’re up to. For the unitiated, this is the first “callback”: she played the secretary in the first Ghostbusters.

The kids slowly discover the ghost-hunting implements in the home of their grandfather. Ok, not Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), who’s chasing Lucky’s (Celeste O’Connor) tail but Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) joins up with local boy Podcast (Logan Kim) to investigate. They end up joining forces with Grooberson (Paul Rudd) to open a ghost trap that they’d found, releasing an ancient evil that their grandfather had kept there. The monster takes up residence in a local mine that had been dug into some ancient ruins.

Phoebe seems to be communicating with her grandfather Egon Spengler’s spirit, who’s helping her rebuild his arsenal of ghost-hunting equipment. Trevor manages to get the Ectomobile going again. Their first target is Slimer, who they snag using the Ectomobile and all of its gadgets. They are pulled over and arrested for having damaged half the town. Sheriff Domingo (Bokeem Woodbine) gives Phoebe a phone call. She calls the Ghostbusters. Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd) picks up the phone.

Phoebe, Podcast, Trevor, and Lucky head to the mine to investigate further, finding Ivo Shandor (J.K. Simmons) in a sarcophagus, although he looks pretty good. There is a giant pit of souls kept under control by an automated mechanism that fires five Ghostbusting guns.

Callie discovers her father’s lab—which Phoebe had already discovered—and is taken by one of the monsters. She becomes Zool (Sigourney Weaver’s role in the original). The Key-master is, naturally, Grooberson. They meet up and get it on. The kids meanwhile put on Ghostbuster uniforms that somehow fit them really well, collect the rest of the equipment, and then head to the cave complex, where Callie and Grooberson are lining up to call Gozer (Emma Portner).

Phoebe and Podcast try to catch Gozer in a ghost-trap. Phoebe distracts Gozer with absolutely terrible jokes while Podcast opens the trap. They disable Gozer, freeing Callie from her possession by a dog-ghost. They’re outtathere.

Gozer tracks them back at the house, where Phoebe executes her grandfather’s plan to finish Gozer///but it fails, at least at first. Until the original Ghostbusters—Ray Stantz, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson)—show up and attempt to save the day. Gozer throws them back again. Phoebe joins forces with her grandfather’s ghost (Bob Gunton) and the other three to turn the tide, with Trevor powering up the towers to finally trigger Egon’s revenge, filling thousands of buried traps at once with ghosts.

This movie is actually quite pretty, nicely filmed. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was better than expected. It still wasn’t great but I thought it was going to be terrible. I kind of liked Podcast. The end was much too schmaltzy and self-indulgent but the first 95% was pretty good.

I dinged it for leaning much too hard into the nostalgia and continuity bullshit. The movie was nearly a beat-for-beat remake of the original and they brought back any and all cast members who are still alive and made a fucking hologram of the one guy who’d already died.

Just make a good movie. It doesn’t have to dovetail with the arbitrary decisions made in a movie made forty years ago, a movie no-one thought would ever, ever lead to more movies.

I watched it in German.

Secret Headquarters (2022) — 5/10

So Jack (Owen Wilson) has a kid Charlie (Walker Scobell) who he keeps abandoning. After the latest abandonment, Charlie finds his father’s secret fortress—because his dad’s the Watcher or Watchman or whatever. Charlie and his three friends spend a long time investigating all of the cool shit that Jack has in his secret lair—it’s a ton of shit, like an endless pile of CGI stuff that doesn’t look too bad.

There is a group of bad guys run by Argon (Michael Pena) that is trying to catch the Watcher. When the kids use all of his stuff in the open and turn off the signal blockers, these people finally figure out where he lives and they hunt them down. They have no idea it’s kids, though.

While the kids are all making goo-goo eyes at each other or using the Watcher’s toys to make themselves play baseball better, the soldiers infiltrate the Watcher’s bunker.

The kids and the soldiers fight over a glowing ball. The Watcher shows up in the nick of time to save the kids, who’d just been captured but had also managed to capture the power ball and send it through a wormhole to one of their lockers.

They get the ball back after a showdown in the school with Argon, who ends up being banished to another dimension (killed?) and the energy ball being destroyed. The ending is lame but anyway, it’s not made for me: it’s for kids.

P.S. The new van is just a shameless product-placement for VW. The old van was so much cooler than that anemic piece of shit.

Outbreak (1995) — 8/10

We start off somewhere in Africa, in a village that serves as a base for what look like American mercenaries or soldiers. A helicopter lands and two people in hazmat suits investigate the area. They reassure the desperate soldiers, sick with what turns out to be hemorrhagic fever, and then leave. Soon after, a plane drops a package by parachute. It is an incendiary bomb that wipes out the entire village.

Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) works at a virology lab with Robby Keough (Rene Russo). The lab has extremely lax and movie-style mask discipline, with some people in full hazmat suits standing right next to people wearing short sleeves and masks. These people invariably take their masks off before they leave the room. Sometimes the room doesn’t even have a door and there are people standing outside with no masks on. After COVID, this will never look normal again.

Sam gets news that he is to go to the center of a viral catastrophe to investigate. He leaves his big, slobbery Saint Bernards with Robby, who isn’t going. Sam meets up with his team, which includes Major Salt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Casey Schuler (Kevin Spacey). They are under the direction of General Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman).

They get to the area in their full, yellow, hazmat suits. Schuler vomits in his suit nearly immediately. He desperately pulls his helmet off, with Sam screaming at him not to. Dr. Benjamin Iwabi (Zakes Mokae) steps into the room to let them know that the virus is not spread via aerosol—it’s not airborne.

Back in the lab, they isolate the virus. They discover that the “Motaba Virus” is back. This is the virus that they’d eliminated at the beginning of the film. And now they begin work on an antiviral, I guess?

Jimbo Scott (Patrick Dempsey) is smuggling Rhesus monkeys out of the lab, so that’s probably bad. After releasing the monkey, he flies somewhere and he is incredibly sick on the plane. A little boy asks if he can finish his half-eaten cookie. His mom saves him from that horrible fate. Jimbo arrives and falls into the arms of his girlfriend, who tongue-kisses him deeply, just before he collapses. The proprietor of the pet store where Jimbo had sold the Rhesus monkey collapses in his store and later dies in the ER.

We see more and more people who exhibit behavior that has nothing whatsoever to do with a post-COVID world: they go everywhere while deeply ill. They look horrific and they still casually mingle with dozens of people. They all completely ignore how sick they are, until it’s too late and they’ve infected dozens more.

Billy Ford’s boss General Donald McClintock (Donals Sutherland) is in the mix, working hard to cover up what’s happening and to make sure that nothing can be traced back to them. He was in charge decades ago when they eradicated that African village. He’s looking for a similar solution here, even though it’s spread to the U.S. of A.

The outbreak spreads. Soldiers are called in. Nighttime. Trucks screech to a halt. Soldiers jump from them. A helicopter flies overhead. Dawn. Mist. A line of emergency vehicles crosses a bridge. A siren 🚨 blips. High-tech jeeps drive through intricately built military camps, draped in weapons nests and camouflage nets. This is pretty great cinema.

Some families try to escape quarantine. The army hunts them down and kills a whole truckload before the others give up.

Sam confronts Billy, telling him that the virus now has airborne transmission. They’re now reluctantly working together but Sam is highly suspicious of Billy’s treatment, grabbing a bag of it to give to Major Salt for analysis.

We see a sick mother picked up from her home by alien-looking soldiers in gas masks. She is collected with other sick people and quarantined in a building, where they are almost certainly going to be well-cared-for. There are a lot of dead people around. The soldiers all seem fine. Casey Schuler can find only infected people. Somehow, they’re all not infected yet. They’re still trying to find patient zero, trying to track down where this came from.

Schuler walks into something and rips his outfit, but he covers it up. Later, they discover that Billy’s anti-serum is a closely held secret that actually cures the original Motaba Virus but they’ve only verified it works on monkeys.

Schuler start to code out but they’re trying to bring him back. While they’re treating him, his spasms knock Robby’s hand loose and push the needle she was holding into her own finger. She’s now in trouble, too. Sam confronts Billy about the anti-serum. Why didn’t they use the anti-serum when it would have stopped everything? Because they wanted to keep the perfect biological weapon for themselves. Billy talks about how it was a totally awesome idea that they were forced into by the evil of their enemies. Bla bla bla.

They’re going to destroy the entire city—just like they did in Africa, a long time ago. Sam and Salt steal a helicopter. General McClintock orders them killed, but now Billy seems to have grown a conscience and refuses the order. Sam and Salt land in the main city to find out where the imported animal may have come from. After getting information from a very helpful woman at the municipal building, they’re off again to find the ship on which the animals came in.

They find the ship and Sam jumps onto it from the helicopter. The ship is Korean so they have trouble understanding each other but he finds one man who died on the boat, of what looks like a horrible disease. He had a picture of a monkey hanging over his bed.

They’re back in the air. They’re on the ground again. They break into a news station, weapons drawn. They’re going to take over the broadcast and ask people to help them find the monkey. A mom sees the broadcast and realizes that a drawing that her daughter made of her new “friend” was of the monkey.

They manage to tranquilize it and are off again. They run into General McClintock. He and his wingman try to shoot them out of the sky. Salt is flying that little helicopter like it’s Airwolf.

That helicopter also has endless fuel.

They finally land back at the town and start processing the monkey’s blood. Schuler is gone but Robby is still hanging on. Sam has exposed himself to Robby’s virus, to convince her to hang on. Salt finishes the anti-serum and brings it to Robby. It’s working.

McClintock doesn’t care; he’s going forward with the destruction of the town, which also means that the anti-serum will be destroyed. Salt asks why they’re going to destroy the town, even though there’s now an anti-serum? “Die wollen ihren Waffen haben.” Sam and Salt are back in the air; they’re going to try to convince the pilots not to attack the town. Billy reveals to them how they can prevent the bombing run: they have to play chicken with it. The bomb falls harmlessly in the water. Well, not harmlessly; it was a pretty big explosion and probably killed a lot of fish.

Like I said above, this is a quality film with good actors and a great plot. I gotta give it an extra star just for being pretty exciting. I would absolutely watch this again, perhaps the next time in the original English.

John Rambo (Rambo) (2008) — 8/10

We begin in Burma, where a savage civil war is slaughtering civilians. Soldiers dump a truckload of people next to a field, then seed it with a few mines. The civilians are herded across the field, running for their lives. One of them finds a mine. The others make it most of the way but they are gunned down instead. The thing with the mines and the running was just for fun. The outcome was preordained.

Rambo is hunting cobras with local friends somewhere in Thailand. This scene is shot quite nicely. It’s pretty. It seems quite peaceful. It’s calm. Rambo keeps an entire menagerie of snakes and their food, caring for them while Michael Burnett (Paul Schulze) and Sarah (Julie Benz) ask him to take their “church group” to Burma. He refuses to even entertain the notion, telling them to “go home.”

We see scenes of Rambo smithing propellor blades for his boat interleaved with scenes of base cruelty in Burma.

It is raining.

Sarah is back. He tells her that “nothing ever changes,” no matter how naively she thinks that going to Burma and “helping people” will change anything.

Sarah manages to convince him to take them upriver. She is hopelessly naive. She prattles on to him about how he should be curious to see how things have changed in the U.S. since Vietnam. He knows that nothing ever changes.

They meet Vietnamese pirates. Because Burnett opens his mouth too much, they get wind of the boat slinking by. They try to board, and get very excited when they see Sarah. Rambo is forced to escalate. He annihilites all of them with five well-placed shots. It is over in one second. The church people are horrified.

Violence is the only way. Nothing ever changes.

Burnett yells at Rambo for having killed people. Rambo tells him that “Sie [the pirates] hättet sie 50 mal vergewaltigt und euch alle den Schädel abgehauen,” Sarah begs him to keep going because they could help people and they’re so close. “Ihr werdet gar nichts ändern.”

They arrive at their destination in Burma, where Burnett tells Rambo that he’s going to turn him in for murdering those poor pirates because “Töten ist nie das Richtige.” Ok, buddy. Rambo returns to the Vietnamese pirates by boat, while the church group travels overland. He’s there to destroy the evidence.

Sarah’s over here handing out Bibles in plastic bags. They schlepped hundreds of pounds of Bibles through the jungle. Jesus, the ignorance. Sarah looks at all of the amputees and begins to doubt.

A nearby explosion from a mortar attack on the village strengthens the flame of that doubt into a forest fire. Soldiers enter the village, slaughtering children, raping young women, chopping off limbs. One of the missionaries has both of his legs blown clean off. A flamethrower takes care of the building. Snipers and machine guns takes care of the rest of the people, dropping them as they run into the rice paddies. The soldiers find Sarah where she lies in a puddle, largely unharmed and seemingly the only survivor.

The head of the church finds Rambo to ask for his help. The church group dropped off the map ten days ago. No-one else can help.

Back in the smithy, this time to make a knife.

His new mission is to transport a load of mercenaries hired by the church. They are a lovely group of guys, running the gamut from educated to venal to complete asshole who wears his fear on his sleeve, letting it out as overconfidence.

Sarah is bound and noosed in a bamboo cage, right next to the swine.

They arrive in Burma to learn from their two guides that there are 100 soldiers waiting for them. The arrogant SAS asshole says that’s fine. Rambo tries to go with them but is told to stay with the boat, with his men.

The village has been destroyed. Fly-blown corpses lie everywhere, people, animals. Heads are on pikes, bodies hang from nooses. The mercenaries are unsettled.

Burmese soldiers arrive with a load of prisoners. As before, they seed the paddy with mines, drive them across the water, then exhort them to come back when none explodes. They grow increasingly agitated until Rambo appears on a ridge, firing one arrow after another through their heads until they are all dead. He confronts the mercs, daring them to chicken out. “Wer bist du, Bootsman?”

It is night. The rain pours. The mercenaries enter the camp, dropping off one by one into the jungle camp. The Burmese soldiers are engrossed in a dance show. Rambo releases Burnett and a couple of others. He orders a merc to get Sarah. She can’t be found.

The Burmese soldiers storm the stage, tearing off the dancers’ clothes and tearing into them. The Burmese general is about to do the same with Sarah—like, what was he waiting for? Is she too old? Wrong gender?—but Rambo rips open his throat with a single slice of his knife. Although the other mercs have disappeared with the other church-folk—they tried to get them to wait for Sarah but SAS Lewis (Graham McTavish) says “Dein Gott hat dich nicht gerettet. Wir waren das!”—but the sniper Schoolboy (Matthew Marsden) stayed behind to help Rambo.

They are now on the run in two groups: Sarah, Schoolboy, and Rambo, and the other mercs and rescued church-members and a few other prisoners. Lewis steps on a landmine. He’s alive but cannot walk. Burnett fixes him and his buddies carry him.

Schoolboy notices that they’re being followed by troops. Rambo tears a bit of Sarah’s clothes off to wrap around his boot. He takes the claymore from Schoolboy, tells him to fire a shot, and then run for the boat. “Ich komme schon klar.”

He lays a trap with the claymore, right next to unexploded ordinance from WWII. Having lured the men with the dogs to that spot in the jungle, they fall for the bait, triggering an explosion that tears apart half the jungle. The blast wave throws Rambo down a hill.

Schoolboy and Sarah make it to the boat to find Burmese troops beating Rambo’s boat crew, the other mercs, and the remaining church-folk.

Never fear, though. Rambo is back. He takes over the heavy-caliber Burmese machine gun posted atop the hill, laying into the soldiers below. The mercs swing into efficient action as well, taking out soldiers right and left. The battlefield is chaos. Even Burnett is forced to kill a soldier who’d been about to kill Lewis. The rebels appear, taking out more of the troops. Backup troops arrive, both by truck and by boat. Rambo and the rebels take out both. Rambo is there to tear out the Burmese general’s guts, as he’d almost escaped at the top of the hill.

The battlefield is gory, smoky, covered in fire and destruction. Rambo has been hit and only then feels it. Most of the mercs are dead or grievously injured. Schoolboy’s OK but he looks pretty traumatized. Rambo stares down from the top of the hill, thinking “Es ändert nie etwas.”

Sarah has probably learned nothing.

Epilogue: Rambo finds his father’s ranch somewhere in the American West, walking along the road, much like he did in the first film.

I watched it in German.

The Running Man (1987) — 8/10

The movie starts with a crawl that reads,

“By 2017, the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into Paramilitary Zones, rules with an iron hand. Television is controlled by the state and a sadistic game show called “The Running Man” has become the most popular program in history. All art, music and communications are censored. No dissent is tolerated and yet a small resistance movement has managed to survive underground. When high-tech gladiators are not enough to suppress the people’s yearning for freedom… more direct methods become necessary.”

This is really not too far off, except it predicted things a bit early. We’re right on track, though! There’s a cage match scheduled for the White House lawn in June of 2026. I used to think that Trump might be taking the piss, but now I think he really believes all of his own nonsense. You know his fans do. The con man’s not supposed to drink his own Kool-Aid but here we are.

Anyway, where were we?

The first scene shows officer Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) refusing an order to slaughter 1,800 people.

“Ben Richards: Food riot in progress. Approximately 1800 civilians, no weapons are evident.
Dispatcher: Proceed with plan Alpha. Eliminate anything moving.
Ben Richards: I said the crowd is unarmed! There are a lot of women and children down there, all they want is food, for god’s sake!
Dispatcher: As you were, Richards. Proceed with plan alpha. All rioters must be eliminated.
Ben Richards: The hell with you! I will not fire on helpless people! Abort mission, we return back to base.”

Well, well, well. Another prediction come true. Absolutely spot-on. Instead of slaughtering starving people in California somewhere, we’re treated to day after day of nearly identical scenes from Gaza, where I fear that there aren’t too many guys like Ben Richards who refuse to follow orders to slaughter civilians, when “all they want is food”.

Eighteen months later, Richards is in a work camp, from which he engineers an escape with Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre). Richards finds that Amber (Maria Conchita Alonso) has moved in to his brother’s apartment, who’d been relocated for “re-education.” He coerces her into trying to travel to Hawaii with him, on her travel pass. She gets away, screaming, and the police descend on him.

In jail, he meets Running Man show-runner Damon Killian (Richard Dawkins), who coerces him into joining his show the next day (by threatening Laughlin and Weiss, who’ve also been captured).

Ben Richards kills the first stalker, Subzero (Professor Toru Tanaka), sending shockwaves throughout the network: this is the first time a stalker has been killed. Ok, sure, this is supposed to establish Richards’s bona fides as “the one” but I’m just wondering how boring this show was, when the “victims” never made any headway before. Was the most popular show in the country just hours of costumed psychos beating the hell out of poor people? Never mind. I hear it. Of course that’s what it was. Proceed.

Meanwhile, after having turned Richards in, Amber starts having doubts about how the Bakersfield attack actually went down. She starts to suspect that the government might be lying to them in order to shape the narrative.

She pretty easily infiltrates the video archives of the TV network, and pretty easily finds exactly the video that she’s looking for. The door wasn’t even locked. I’m OK with this, actually! We needed her to find the footage so that she posed a threat, so that her gorgeous jump-suited self would be sledded down to the content mines with Richards. I’m not even mad.

Richards meanwhile is tearing a swath through the stalkers. Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch) fatally wounds Laughlin but falls to Richards soon after. Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth) is next. Richards lets him live, though, because he’s totally incapacitated.

Weiss discovers the satellite-uplink code—oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you: that’s what the resistance was looking for, so that they can broadcast the “truth” to the world, as if they didn’t already know that they’re living in an authoritarian dystopia. They just don’t care—and has Amber memorize it. Can you imagine? These days, she would refuse to take on such a difficult task during such a stressful situation. Can’t she just take a picture of it? Are they harassing her because she’s a woman?

Weiss doesn’t make it.

Fireball (Jim Brown) dies next.

Richards and Amber get to the resistance headquarters, which is also mysteriously in “the zone” where the game-show films.

Richards refuses to fight Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) unless it’s a fair fight. The network instead fabricates footage of Captain Freedom killing Richards and Amber. Nearly 40 years later and here we very much are. Authoritarians are nothing if not predictable.

They upload the truth, kill the remaining head honchos, and kiss on national TV before ending the broadcast. The end.

Invelle (Nowhere) (2023) — 8/10

This movie looks hand-drawn; it may very well be. It is black-and-white sketches with a lot of cross-hatching. There are only occasional specks of color, like Nonna’s kerchief or the bit of tissue sticking out of the boy’s bloody nose while he’s playing checkers with the older man. Or there’s a golden apple on the table in another scene. The jumpy animation reminded a bit of George Plimpton’s style. Some of it must have been rotoscoped.

It tells the story of a boy and his family during WWII. The Germans are coming. The Germans are here.

The boy is in a field with his dog, a Dachshund. The dog is alert. The boy wakes slowly.

Where were you? We looked for you everywhere.

[…]

Speak up. I can’t hear you.

“Nowhere.”

Wind soughs through the grass, around the boy and his dog.

Rain begins to fall. A storm gathers. Thunder. The rain intensifies. Clean. Falling without wind.

The credits continue to roll as the rain fades; a woman sings a cappella.

I really like the pacing and the fractured storytelling. It was a relaxing movie. I could watch it again. The voices were all excellent.

We watched it in the original Italian with Italian subtitles.