UNCHARTED, HARPOON, and THE WITCH

 

UNCHARTED, HARPOON, and THE WITCH

 

Two movies. Yeah. Tom Holland Mark Wahlberg are in UNCHARTED, which is based on a video game (?). The movie starts off well enough and the two are engaging but about 42 minutes in, it feels…inauthentic, which is the opposite of how it felt in the first 30 or so.

 

The jokes which were fine in the first 30 minutes aren’t any longer and the twists and turns feel illogical and forced. The action isn’t even that great either, the fights not being all that well done and maybe too fast speeded up?

 

There are a few wtf moments like a dance club under a church and at least two great set pieces which the movie bases itself around (it’s not enough though) including two old pirate ships (?) hoisted in the air by helicopters and the payload of a plane AND the stars being dumped out the back.

 

 

 

 

Tom and Mark are infinitely watchable in this buddy movie but it also felt as if Mark’s character might be falling for Tom’s but this is never explored.

 

The women in the movie are either betrayers or evil killers or both. That may be because this is from an older game and before the DIME’s UP ME TOO movement? Either way, I’m okay with it because in this age of “women rule over all” and are basically “gods” I say go for it and make women surprise us again. I don’t need hero women in every movie or TV show I watch, just as I don’t need hero men in every movie and TV show I watch. The women feel, even if the men do not, as if they’ve stepped from a James Bond movie: all sneaky, cold hearted, distant yet lying, sneaky, snarky, and downright killers and liars. I’m okay with that. The men are more from INDIANA JONES despite Nate calling Chloe Indiana Jones. He’s more like Jones than she is.

 

Tom’s action sequences are watchable but honestly it felt as if I were watching a Peter Parker/Spiderman relieved of his powers and he has to get out of physical confrontations some other way…like avoidance and using guns, most unSpiderman like but also a sort of let down as we’re sort of expecting him to BE like Spiderman.

 

Also: is there an R version of this: did Chloe and Tom’s character Nate really sleep in the hotel room and not have sex?

 

Either way, the movie is just barely watchable. It’s visually okay but most movies now are. It’s also actually visually stunning in the foreign locations and cinematography.

 

It must be tough to make a movie at sea but there are so many of them, it doesn’t feel all that special any more. HARPOON, the title being a running “joke” that one of the characters keeps correcting another that she’s using the wrong term to refer to a spear gun. Munro Chambers from DEGRASSI is excellent in this but so are his fellow cast members.

 

The trio play a man, his girlfriend, and his best friend and the two men have had sex with the girl which causes problems, shall we say.

 

Calling this a horror movie is…well, a stretch but these days, the things that pass for horror are just people being horrible, rather than any creativity and originality. Here we get the whole drawing of the straws to see who will die to keep the others surviving, the infected body part that needs to be cut off (and it does get off but not when and where you’d expect), eating and drinking things you never should, and a major twist I didn’t expect which almost saved this movie.

 

Horror movies have become predictable and lazy and this movie does that Hollywood thing of bringing your emotions up and down and for this character or that character to divert your attention from the truth but it is really about people just being selfish, insane, and making bad choices, like, throughout the entire movie. There’s one place where the trio re-bond their love for each other and it gives us hope for them but it’s even more horrible a movie when they turn on each other again. And it ends pretty much how anyone who’s watched on modern horror movie might expect it to, despite that already mentioned twist.

 

The “horror” moments come from the narrator (and maybe the girl) as he explains all the fears of doing something at sea (a redhead on a ship is deadly, killing a sea gull and/or bringing it on board is not recommended, a man named Jonah on a ship is bad luck), many of them not memorable or even that interesting. One of the tales, from Edgar Allan Poe, is related by the girl and given a black and white recreation and then recreated again as she then relates the true story it was based on. Why?

 

Seagulls not being killed also featured in the equally awful and repugnant THE LIGHTHOUSE (where Robert Pattinson’s character has his innards eaten out by gulls after he brutally kills one for no reason and where someone goes insane…perhaps two someone’s).

 

The movie is certainly NOT boring and not really all that cliché at times but most of it is …just grim, depressing, and meaningless. Frankly, maybe it’s my age or where I am at this point in life but these kind of films, are the kind I do not need to see any more. They don’t feel like horror films but horrible films about horrible people you really DO NOT want to spend ANY time with. The film and others like it are repugnant and are barely horror films at all. They border on crime drama and psychological trauma films but they really don’t even measure up for that. Again, the acting in HARPOON is strong and yes, there is gore but gore does not make a movie good. A good reason for being might be a great start. Unfortunately, this doesn’t have that.

 

Another horror movie that’s equally disgusting is THE WITCH, which I finally watched. Why? Why watch it, I mean? Do yourself a favor, don’t. Again, maybe I’ve just viewed too many horror films and don’t appreciate anything about them at all (the last really good ones I saw was probably ANNABELLE, THE VISIT, and maybe the more ANNABELLE with the werewolf and Samurai statue and maybe there were a few others on Netflix?) but THE WITCH is old hat.

 

Sure, the filming and location work is stunning, though most of the night shots are far too dark to see much. BUT why do I want to watch a family overcome by religious insecurities (their own and that of the town that outcast them) and who have imprisoned themselves by their own religious and idiotic beliefs? AND why do I care about the evil that dominates them as a result, which sort of proves they were right to regard their older daughter as an evil being of the devil? AND as a review, far better than my own, stated, the themes of THE WITCH aren’t as much all over the place as confused. If freedom is the desired end result of witchcraft, then it has not been achieved by the witches as they seem enslaves by THEIR religious beliefs and have to kill babies, have sex with young boys (yes, this is controversial but somehow this idea seemed to go unchallenged by critics and audiences!) and then have them die horribly after they show up nude at their family home, and use fire to kill innocent children in a burn. In addition, they have to use a black goat to talk through. Ewl.

 

Again, it’s difficult to identify with any of these characters or even feel for them. They’re lead astray by evil, by their own insecurities and perhaps by their own stupidity. And this has all been done before and probably better: BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN and others. Most of these movies leave you with a horrid feeling and they’re highly negative and not even a bit entertaining. I’m not sure why we make them or watch them.