Bad Boys for Life (2020)

The machismo of the earlier movies didn't appeal to me so I haven't seen them, and I suspect a fondness for the two buddy cops, Will Smith's Detective Mike Lowrey and Martin Lawrence's Detective Marcus Burnett, is necessary to care less about their antics in this third action movie of the series, one that features numerous return characters I didn't know and adds new details to the detectives' backstories that are meant to be surprising but are not surprising if, like me, you don't know any different.

★★☆☆☆

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I Am Legend (1999)

The virus in the 1971 Charlton Heston film adaptation of Richard Matheson's book turned people into eloquent cloaked albinos about as terrifying as the "Street Countdown" participants of that IT Crowd episode, so this much more recent adaptation is already winning by featuring truly terrifying monsters, the Darkseekers, whose cgi may be wonky but whose rapidly increasing intelligence really does pose a problem to Robert Neville, the last-man-on-Earth immune to the virus and humanity's last chance at a comeback, played by Will Smith, looking as good as he ever has and with a bottom lip that should have won an Oscar for its role in this post-apocalyptic scifi blockbuster.

★★★☆☆

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Suicide Squad (2016)

A government intelligence agent hits upon the bright idea of assembling DCEU villains to fight future "superhuman terrorists" but the moment these unbriefed and unwilling criminal metahumans are released from Belle Reve prison, problems erupt of the sort a slightly more forward-thinking person could have anticipated, and compounding these problems is the pervading sense throughout the movie that someone forgot to ask Batman and The Flash whether they weren't too busy to step in and the fact that it turns out the only things apart from a bomb required to overcome a many-thousands-of-years-old Enchantress are not scales, sharp teeth, fireballs and psychosis, but an ability to swim, throw and shoot at close-range.

★★☆☆☆

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I, Robot (2004)

Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics are used as the philosophically interesting starting point of what you might hope is a Kubrikesque meditation on sentience, but Will Smith's Detective Spooner, investigating what might be murder committed by a robot, is a wise-cracking action hero of a distinctly Schwarzenegger type ("Control, Alt, Delete, A.I. mofo," he doesn't say but very well could as he sends a bullet through yet another metallic skull); although the flimsily plotted action garnered an Academy Award nomination for its special effects, it is hard to work out exactly what is happening in many of the cgi-heavy scenes.

★★☆☆☆

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Concussion (2015)

The story of Bennett Omalu's important work establishing the links between American football and brain injury works best as a human drama between people who prefer to 'leave things alone' versus those like Omalu who can't, and the movie offers food for thought about the ability to causally link specific behaviours to brain trauma, but the not always convincing framing of the movie as a corporate thriller and some Hollywood flourishes towards the end are a disservice to this fascinating drama.

★★★☆☆

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Focus (2015)

*VAGUE SPOILER ALERT*

Good chemistry between Will Smith and Margot Robbie, and an Ocean's Eleven (Twelve, Thirteen...) sophistication make this movie's high stakes game of grifting and double-, triple-, quadruple-crossing, enjoyable despite gaping plotholes that leave you wondering why he didn't take the bag of money and what would have happened if he hadn't simply fled...but that is all part of the con, I suppose.

★★★☆☆

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After Earth (2013)

Delivered with such import that it is no fun at all, this scifi has Will Smith remotely guiding his son through a series of uninteresting challenges on an abandoned Earth, most of them resolved before you've even thought to care and even Jayden Smith, the son, shakes off some of the life-threatening encounters (with monkeys, extreme cold, poison leeches...) with glib lines like, "That sucked," which in the end was my sentiment exactly. 

★☆☆☆☆

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The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

A man hits rock bottom trying to onsell the luxury medical items he has unwisely invested in, splitting with his wife in the process and ending up sleeping rough in subway toilets with his young son, but none of these social horrors is enough to dent the film's faith in the American Dream and the idea that determined men (for example, Will Smith) achieve happyness so long as they eventually gain employment in the corporate world.

★★★☆☆

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Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

With an elaborate lie, Will Smith ingratiates himself with affluent Ouisa and Flan Kittredge in this pretentious, wordy, tragic, and ultimately cathartic treatise on the human condition, inspired by a real New York professional interloper -- and I love it!

★★★★★

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