Another four-movie update this week, as the kids’ school was closed Monday and Tuesday for Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah. There’s an outside chance of a third movie next week because they’re closed Thursday for Yom Kippur, then we probably settle into a more normal pattern.
Jungle Cruise:
I’m actually a little surprised we didn’t get asked for this sooner, but they got around to it. This was basically fine. They’re obviously trying to recreate the surprising success of Pirates of the Caribbean in the “Movie based on a plotless Disney ride” category, but Jesse Plemons’s incredibly hammy German villain isn’t in it enough to match Johnny Depp’s iconic weirdness, and Dwayne Johnson is basically just playing The Rock. He’s charming, so it basically works, but is fundamentally inessential.
Hot Fuzz:
This was actually a bailout movie; after a lot of scrolling through Amazon Prime recommendations, The Pip asked for Dodgeball, figuring that a movie about his favorite game would be good. It opened with a couple of sex jokes and a fat joke, though, and they “Nope!”-ed out of it, so we went with the middle movie of the Cornetto Trilogy.
The Pip left this one once it made the turn from fish-out-of-water comedy to weird horror movie with a black-robed figure doing murders, so he missed the final turn to the cop-movie spoof. SteelyKid said “The first hour was boring, but I guess it set up the characters,” but ended up liking it once it turned bloody.
Deadpool:
SteelyKid has been agitating for this for weeks, and I promised I would watch it this weekend (I’d seen it on a plane some time ago). The Pip was completely out on this (he went upstairs and watched YouTube videos on his tablet), but SteelyKid cackled happily throughout. It’s dumb and bloody but entertaining enough.
6 Underground:
I had actually watched this last year during one of the stretches when neither kid wanted a Movie Night. It came up as I was scrolling through Netflix recommendations, and I described it as “A very dumb action movie with Ryan Reynolds as a snarky billionaire who puts together a team to kill bad guys.” SteelyKid was still pumped up from Deadpool so was in from the minute I mentioned Ryan Reynolds; I was a little surprised that The Pip went along.
There were quite a few points in this where they were doing exposition or what passed for character development, when The Pip turned to me and said “Seriously?” I replied “Look, all the dialogue in this is incredibly stupid, but the action setpieces are fun.” And that’s pretty much all the review it needs.
Bonus Pop-Culture Content:
I watched one more episode of The Chair while biking to nowhere on a rainy day this week, and I’m definitely not finishing that. SteelyKid and I watched the first episode of Only Murders in the Building on Hulu one night after The Pip went up to bed, and I’ll probably watch more of that. That’s the one with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as fans of a true-crime podcast who think they’ve discovered a true crime in their own NYC apartment building. It starts a little slow, but has some promise; going to be a little hard to fit in now that the kids are starting to have regular homework, though, at least until the weather turns and I have to ride the exercise bike more often than not.
Here are some buttons:
And if you want to berate me for letting my kids watch gory movies, the comments will be open.