With all the movies out there, some of them surely have to be terrible. My job is to make sure you don’t waste any time on them so here are my dumpster fires this week:
1. Sherlock Gnomes – Let’s set the story straight here. Elton John and David Furnish’s film company Rocket Films wanted to make a delightful animated garden gnome family movie driven by John’s own catalog of music. So, where do they go to for source material? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a depressing tragedy. So, after the bland glazing that was Gnomeo and Juliet, now we tackle another literary story above all the children’s heads with Sherlock Gnomes, an obvious paycheck project for the Johnny Depp, providing the voice of the title character. An improvement on the first film? Nope, just another bland hour and a half that you will never get back and your kids will forget about it within a week.
2. Race – If you’re digging into what’s new to Netflix you’ll come across this biopic about Jesse Owens, a black American runner who competed in the Berlin Olympics right before Hitler’s shit hit the fan and World War II kicked off. While Stephan James does a well enough job in the lead role, a miscast Jason Sudeikis and an underutilized Jeremy Irons make this feel like a dull made for television movie that underwhelms. Given the importance that Owens had on the progression of black athletes, he deserved a far better on-screen representation.
3. Pride And Prejudice And Zombies – Yes, I know this belongs on the “Duh, Steve, we know!” list but with the over saturation of zombies in our pop culture, I feel this is just a due diligence so you don’t mistakenly click this when it debuts on Netflix in a couple of days. First off, I despised the novel, a shoehorned story of the undead into Jane Austen’s classic book by one of the worst current Hollywood writers, Seth Grahame-Smith. The film version, however, is a bigger wasteland of crap than I could have believed. Filmmaking goes out the window as we just have beautiful waifs, both male and female, who mumble their way through a dreadful 108 minutes. I went through the press screening of this so you don’t have to. Call me Movie Jesus I guess.
Steve Stebbing 