Skyscraper

The tallest, most wooden, most hollow character in this action is - surprise! - not The Rock (who is actually quite charismatic, always, and even in a dopey exercise like this) but the elaborately cgi-animated 'Nakatomi Plaza' that is this action movie's title-skyscraper 'The Pearl', a cloud-puncturing phallus full of stupid hi-tech with no purpose to exist except for a silly movie "house of mirrors" showdown - so, while the action movie starts strong, the minute it enters the hard-to-fathom cgi insides of The Pearl, things plummet into a void.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Black Adam (2022)

The acting's a bit wonky in this one, not just from the kid (but from the kid in particular) and it features a bunch of cheap-working superheroes collectively called the Justice Society that most audience members won't know or care about (the group includes a particularly unhelpful 'swirling wind' girl and her sidekick, a lumbering dope who grows to giant size but can't think of anything to do with this skill to help out), but check it out: the tone adopted is interesting, Dwayne Johnson's title antihero behaves in a most unsuperherolike fashion, mercilessly killing bad guys in a cgi fury, and it is also interesting to think about how this fits with other episodes of the so far mostly lugubrious DC Universe series of movies.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Rampage

Chris Pratt, I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a dinosaur wrangler, I mean a primatologist, who has developed a special friendship with a velociraptor, I mean a gorilla, but when a mutagen is released on Earth that causes the gorilla and several other beasts to mutate into city-wrecking colossi, it takes the white-shirted hero, himself a big mutant cinematic monster, to overcome the dinosaurs, I mean, the genetically-mutated animals and the fact this B-grade Jurassic Park action blockbuster is all based on an arcade game series is unimportant except that it sort of helps to explain the movie's pair of villains, a remotely located pair of buffoons so dastardly they make Lazy Town's Robbie Rotten seem like Hannibal Lecter.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

By the time some fun stuff arrives - cliffside martial acrobatics, Mission: Impossible-style infiltrations of black tie events and the fast and furious flashbacks that made G.I. Joe: the Rise of the Cobra such unexpected fun - you'll have been burned by a dull boysy first hour where men chortle about their "girl" conquests, snigger about "girls and their guns", leer at legs and you will have already decided Hasbro's action doll franchise needs to stay in 2013.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Baywatch (2017)

22 Jump Street showed it is possible to simultaneously send up and update a 90s tv show on the big screen, but the promise of this big screen update of David Hasselhoff's unashamedly dopey 90s tv soap lasts just ten minutes before an erection joke plunges the tone into a deep skull-against-a-rock dive off a jetty from which it can't be revived; two loooong hours later, all that has been achieved is an overlong episode of the tv show with the attempt to justify the big screen treatment consisting of waves of adolescent humour that really could have seen the movie more successfully released as Police Academy 8: Officers on Beach Patrol.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

This frequently very funny third movie shelves the old board game of previous Jumanji episodes and launches the series into the digital gaming age, sending four teens into an immersive virtual adventure where their avatars Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black must overcome jungle dangers, teen insecurities, a lack of clearly articulated game rules and objectives, and a poorly defined bad-guy game boss in order to survive Jumanji and get home.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Other Guys (2010)

Early on, hot-shot buddy cops, the sort of beefcakes that traditionally tear up the silver screen in action movies, die being stupidly heroic and into their macho places step desk cops Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, a pair of Prius-driving, Little River Band-appreciating, wooden gun-bearing, bickering man-children, so the not very funny running gag here is that as a buddy cop movie, this drags its feet and is no The Nice Guys, no Central Intelligence, no Jump Street.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Central Intelligence (2016)

A refreshing change from the laugh-free Judd Apatow-style gross-out comedies that dominate cinemas, this hilarious comedy is about the coolest kid and the most bullied kid in school reuniting in adulthood to fight crime; it is refreshingly free of genital references, features terrific performances from its two fantasic leads, and as well as being frequently very funny, it is also very touching in its portrayal of a man-child still haunted by the bullying he was subjected to in high school.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS