Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.15

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

1. Fist Fight (2017) — 4/10
2. Pacific Rim (2013) — 9/10
3. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) — 6/10
4. Equalizer 3 (2023) — 6/10
5. Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994) — 3/10
6. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) — 8/10
7. A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) — 6/10
8. Talk to Me (2022) — 5/10
9. Equalizer 2 (2018) — 6/10
10. Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020) — 5/10

Fist Fight (2017) — 4/10

I really like Charlie Day, whom I know from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but this vehicle is not what he should be spending time on. He plays utterly hapless and gormless schoolteacher Andy Campbell, who’s basically “bully meat” for everyone in his life. The only person who treats him nicely is fellow teacher Holly (Jillian Bell), who is otherwise obsessed with having sex with her hotter students. She’s not exactly a role model, nor is her character particularly well fleshed-out. In fact, the prior description is pretty much all we get. Also, she does and loves meth. Just not at school.

Anyway, Andy’s wife (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) and daughter also dump on and manipulate him, treating him like a farm animal who gives them things. They don’t seem to love him in any way, though they are willing to pretend to as long as he acquiesces to their whims.

Principal Tyler (Dean Norris) is pretty much a self-absorbed asshole, fellow teacher Ms. Monet (Christina Hendricks) is a shallow psychotic, which is a pity because I remember her fondly from Mad Men (season 1, seasons 5-7), security guard Mehar (Kumail Nanjiani) is a thin (metaphorically and literally) and embarrassing stereotype, Coach Crawford (Tracey Morgan) has a couple of good lines but is otherwise and typically wasted, and all of the students are terrible. Strickland (Ice Cube) is the best of a terrible bunch, which isn’t saying much but I feel that he acted far better in this than in other of his vehicles. His scowling countenance worked well here.

This movie was utterly terrible, though, with half-hearted lines and an utterly by-the-numbers plot that really did spend about 90 minutes on the consequences of a single teacher-fight at the end of a single day, while trying to tell some story about the lives of the teachers at the school, I guess? It was so thin. And the humor was so phoned-in. Fack ju Göhte was a goddamned masterpiece in comparison. At least that one had a few admirable characters, if only grudgingly so.

The Wikipedia article describes the plot in excruciating detail. Strickland gets himself fired but Tyler is inept enough to make it look like it was Andy’s fault, so Strickland challenges him to a fight after school. This drives manic behavior on the part of Andy, whose wife and daughter ratchet up the pressure for their own needs. The students take brutal advantage of everything in a Lord of the Flies-like atmosphere. They end up fighting, with Andy taking and dishing a tremendous amount of punishment in a manner so unrealistic that it reminded me of Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was, coincidentally, also a giant piece of trash and a colossal waste of time.

Pacific Rim (2013) — 9/10

I watched and reviewed this in 2013. The review stands.

Watching it over thirteen years later, I now recognize the leads better than I did then. Charlie Hunnam plays Jäger pilot Raleigh Becket, while Idris Elba plays his commanding officer and eventual fellow combatant Stacker Pentecost. I noted Ron Perlman as Hannibal Chau and Charlie Day as Dr. Newton Geiszler in the earlier review, but I didn’t note that Burn Gorman played Geiszler’s assistant Herman Gottlieb.

The Kaiju / Jäger battles are spectacular. As I wrote the first time I saw it,

“The visualization of gigantic robot versus gigantic monster is unbelievably good—unlike in the Transformers films, you can actually see what’s going on, you can feel the sheer weight and inertia of them. I can’t even imagine what this was like in the theater.”

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) — 6/10

I watched and reviewed this in 2019. I was probably a bit too generous with the rating; I would have given it a 6 at most, maybe even a 5 because it was just a bit too hollow.

I watched it in German.

Equalizer 3 (2023) — 6/10

I had avoided these movies because I wasn’t interested in watching Taken but with Denzel Washington. I had judged these incorrectly. The main character is much more interesting than the one in Liam Neeson’s lumbering and vaguely racist series.

I also ended up watching these in reverse order (3, 2, 1) but it didn’t hinder my understanding of the movie at all. It’s not that complicated.

The film starts in Sicily, with most of the dialogue in Italian, even Robert McCall’s (Denzel Washington), who we find deep in the basement of a mafia compound. The head of the family follows a trail of bodies to find him there, with a man to either side, pointing a pistol at his head.

He escapes without a scratch, killing everyone else.

Outside, the main boss’s young son waits for him with a gun, having heard the ruckus inside. McCall can’t shoot the boy, but the boy can shoot him. McCall escapes, quite grievously injured, taking the ferry back to the mainland but eventually passing out behind the wheel at the side of a country road.

Local police officer Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea) finds him there, taking him to local doctor Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone), who patches him up and lets him convalesce at his apartment. McCall begins to know and fall in love with the village. He tips off CIA officer Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) (who he knew from previous films, a fact of which I was completely unaware) to the cellar full of dead drug dealers in Sicily.

The Camorra (crime syndicate) run drugs in the village, harassing everyone and making things much more miserable than they have to be. They kidnap Gio’s family to force him to help them. They throw him a beating as well.

McCall finally gets involved. He warns the field-office head of the Camorra Marco (Andrea Dodero) to leave the village. After the expected refusal, McCall kills him and everyone in his gang. Marco’s brother Vincent, the head of Camorra operation, demands revenge, taking the whole village hostage, and threatening to kill Gio in a public square. McCall challenges him, with the villagers backing him up. Vincent retreats, for now.

McCall takes the fight to Vincent that night, infiltrating his mansion, killing everyone inside, and finally finishing off Vincent with a poisonous overdose of his own drugs. He also uses some of the money he’s recovered from the Camorra to pay back some people’s pension funds, which had been robbed … I guess this is the equalizing part? I dunno. The fighting stuff and inevitability of Robert McCall is pretty cool and well-played by Denzel. I liked that a bunch of it was in Italian.

Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994) — 3/10

Oh my God, this was absolutely awful. I only had it on in the background. I watched it in German. Tackleberry (David Graf), Jones (Michael Winslow), Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), Lassard (George Gaynes), and Harris (G.W. Bailey) are all still doing this thing after seven movies in ten years.

I could absolutely not believe that Russian Commandant Rakov was played by Christopher Lee and bad guy Constantine Konali was played by Ron Perlman. I guess they weren’t doing so well back in 1994.

I can’t describe the plot because this thing was barely discernible as a movie. It had less plot than pornography.

Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) — 8/10

Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) are back, roving the streets of Los Angeles, hunting drug dealers. They happen upon what appears to be a gold-smuggling ring. This puts them on the radar of the South African embassy, some of whose employees are running the Krugerrand-smuggling operation both for personal gain and to evade the sanctions that had been leveled against South Africa for its policy of Apartheid.

With a lot of heat on them—head goon Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O’Connor) breaks into Murtaugh’s house to rig his toilet with explosives—the duo is reassigned to guarding a government witness, Leo Getz (Joe Pesci). Because Leo had (allegedly) done money-laundering for the South Africans, they learn more and more. Riggs, of course, can’t leave it alone and continues to harass the embassy employees, but also trying romance with the lovely Rika van den Haas (Patsy Kensit), which works, unsurprisingly. She opposes the regime and apartheid.

With the increased pressure on them, South African embassy head honcho Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) sends Pieter on a mission to assassinate LAPD. Just holy shit, he cuts a swath through them, just ruthlessly. Most of the people we saw betting in the office whether Riggs could get out of a straitjacket are now dead. (He won the bet because he can dislocate his own shoulder).

Murtaugh only survives because he kills his two assassins with a nail gun, although others manage to kidnap Leo. They capture but do not kill Riggs because Pieter must first tell Riggs that he is not only going to kill his new lady love Rika but also that he had killed Riggs’s wife, the death of whom had led to Riggs’s completely reckless and nihilistic approach to life in both this film and the first one. It’s heavy.

Having destroyed Riggs psychologically, they tie him up—like in a straitjacket, get it? Do you get how the bet before was foreshadowing for how he’s going to escape?—and throw him in the harbor. He settles to the bottom next to the already-dead and wide-eyed Rika.

He’s not psychologically beaten. He’s enraged. They have awakened the dragon. They have sown the wind. Everyone—his wife, Rika, his colleagues—is dead and Riggs will be their avenging angel of death.

Murtaugh weakly tries to talk Riggs out of it but then he’s in. All in. Riggs tears down Rudd’s coastal home while rescuing Leo from it. Then they head to the harbor again to find the shipping vessel with which the South Africans plan to abscond with hundreds of millions of dollars. Those dollars are just stacked in a shipping container, along with a fancy sports car. Other than the car, Murtaugh, and Riggs, that shipping container is full of paper. They are locked in the container but break out using the car, blowing the money everywhere. Rudd is horrified.

Riggs tears a swath through most of the men but gets hung up on the level boss, Pieter, who he lets beat on him for a bit—kayfabe-style—before finally putting him down. He feigns leaving him alive to give Pieter the opportunity to try to shoot him in the back, which he of course takes, but is rewarded by having a shipping container dropped on him.

This cool triumph is short-lived as Arjen Rudd exhibits incredible aim with the pistol from high up on the ship’s bridge to shoot Riggs in the back several times. He drops like a sack of potatoes. Murtaugh is horrified and “revokes” Rudd’s diplomatic immunity on the spot. Riggs was wearing a vest, though, so he’s alive.

This was a favorite at my house. We watched whenever it would come on cable TV. We loved Leo. “They fuck you at the drive-through!” Even in college, my friends and I watched it. “But, but, but … you’re black!” became a catchphrase for a while. We also liked the line “diplomatic immunity … has been revoked.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) — 6/10

We’d already seen the three seasons of the TV show, in which nearly all of the roles were played by others. Here, we are introduced to the Buadelaire children—Klaus (Liam Aiken), Violet (Emily Browning), and Sunny (Kara Hoffman) by Lemony Snicket (Jude Law), who tells their tale. Their house burns down, so they are forced to move in with their closest relative Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), to whom they are escorted by Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall). Before entering the house, they meet Justice Strauss (Catherine O’Hara), who seems much more appealing as a caretaker than Olaf and his terrifying, offputting home.

After Olaf tries to kill the children with a train, Mr. Poe, along with Constable (Cedric The Entertainer) takes the children away from him, for negligence, delivering them to Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), who’s a herpetologist with a specialty in snakes. He is soon dead because Count Olaf, posing as an assistant, poisons him.

It’s on to Aunt Josephone (Meryl Streep), who lives in a house that looks like it’s about to tip into the waters of Lake Lachrymose. The children rescue her but Olaf intervenes and sends her to the leeches. Another guardian down. Mr. Poe shows up again to grant Olaf custody. However, Olaf will not inherit so now he’s trying to marry Violet in a play. Klaus thwarts Olaf’s plans and he is arrested and sentenced to suffer all that he’d made the children suffer.

Mr. Poe takes the children to a giant mansion, but it’s actually their burned-out home.. A letter from their parents appears, as if by magic. It’s a pretty sappy message. Jesus, the girl is just reading for long minutes. This is how you want to end the movie? How odd. Credits are very nice, though. Too bad the stupid British channel I watched it on decided to talk over it and squish them temporarily into half the screen, in order to show adverts for upcoming shows.

I spotted Dustin Hoffman in the audience, as well as Jennifer Coolidge, Jamie Harris, Craig Ferguson, and Luis Guzmán are in Olaf’s troupe.

Talk to Me (2022) — 5/10

This is a horror movie about horrible, obnoxious teenagers playing with a demonic hand that allows them to see dead people. They think it’s hilarious and have one party after another with “the hand,” getting super-high and super-drunk and having a lot of laughs at how horrified the people are who’ve seen the dead. They all take turns, though, so it seems to hit them mostly pretty superficially. I can’t tell whether they think it’s just some party trick or whether they actually believe in the supernatural.

The first quarter of this movie was a bit boring, with too much focus on characters who weren’t really worth developing. The trick with the hand is kinda neat, though. It’s introduced quite well. The young people are insufferable, inexplicably cruel to one another in a nearly sociopathic way but it wins you over with the unique concept.

The middle third is a total waste of time, with far too much focus on Mia (Sophie Wilde), who seemed to be taking a final exam in an acting class.

The final quarter was more interesting because things went off the rails and there were fewer boring conversations.

And then the end was just too obvious. (Guess what? Mia’s now one of the dead coming back through the hand.)

As one review on IMDb put it (I just saw the title when scanning the page): “Good concept; so-so execution.” Another review title was “A short film stretched into 95 minutes.” I didn’t read the full reviews but the titles are fair and succinct summaries.

Equalizer 2 (2018) — 6/10

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is driving an Uber. This is the second outing. (The third is reviewed above.) He’s also working with Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), a former colleague at the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency).

Robert’s just kind of a force for good wherever he goes. He travels to Istanbul to rescue a little girl. He takes a young, artistic man living in his building—Miles (Ashton Sanders)— under his wing. He takes revenge for a young, female passenger who’d been dumped into his car by callous young men.

Susan is killed. Robert contacts her husband, Brian (Bill Pullman), who’d thought for years that Robert was dead, all the while his wife had been working with him. Anyway, they find out that more of their former colleagues are now part of a band of assassins for hire, including Dave (Pedro Pascal). They were the ones who’d killed Susan. Robert is going to kill them all.

However, they start in on him first, finding his apartment with Miles in it, who’d been engaged to repaint it. Robert talks Miles through finding the safe/panic room, helping him evade capture. Miles is a bit surprised about Robert’s preparedness, but only a little. He comes out too soon, though, and is captured by the remaining henchmen.

The big finale is in a seaside town where Robert’s wife used to have a bakery. There is a hurricane coming in. Like, an actual hurricane. It is lashing rain. It is windy as hell. Dave is up on a tower, sniping with an incredible accuracy, considering the high winds. I know you can compensate for wind but not for gusts.

Guess what, though? Robert saves Miles from the trunk of the car, where he’d been stashed, gets up on the roof, and kicks Dave’s ass after a bit of kayfabe. All’s well that ends well. Robert is at peace in his old home. For now.

Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020) — 5/10

This is a straight-to-video movie that takes place in the world envisioned by the original Tremors. Inexplicably, Michael Gross—from the original film and Family Ties—stars in this movie. He plays Burt Gummer, who is self-isolating on an island. This is where the people who need his expertise with “Graboids” find him and convince him to help them.

When he gets to the island where the creatures had been bred and set free, he says “Was mache ich denn überhaupt hier? [What am I even doing here?]” which I feel speaks as much for the actor himself as for his character. Still, he looks pretty good for 73 years old. And goddamnit if he isn’t a pretty good actor who pulls this movie together. This isn’t a great movie by any account, nor is it even particularly good. But, damn if it isn’t an absolute paradigm for how a good actor can hold a movie together, despite its bizarre premise and uneven script.

Like, there’s this part near the climax of the film where he dips close to the ground and whispers at it, knowing that the queen graboid will hear him,

“Du wartest auf mich, oder? [You’re waiting for me, right?]”

Honestly, that was unexpectedly cool for a movie like this. It actually made me a bit sad when he died in the mouth of the queen, sacrificing himself to make sure that she leapt to her death in the trap he’d built out of giant punji sticks and dynamite. Yeah, wild, right?

When the creature blew up, I can’t help but believe that when the others were all glorying, just bathing in the rain of graboid meat that hailed down, they were doing it ironically. Weird, but kinda funny.

I gave it an extra star because the production values were better than expected and it looked like a bunch of the stuff was actually filmed on set or something. The people seemed to really care about being in this movie.

I watched it in German.