Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021)

The baffling appearance of Ben Kingsley - he turns up about halfway through playing a Shakespearean actor who believes real monkeys were cast in the Planet of the Apes - marks where this, until then by-the-numbers Marvel superhero movie, unravels, descending from that point into a Disney mess aimed at pre-teens involving a massive flying threadworm, ludicrous bow-and-arrow mastery, flip-flopping bad-no-good-no-bad-no-good guys, a headless turwomken (a turkey, wombat, chicken cross) and other cgi Star Wars-style creatures trying to make interesting a lengthy middle stretch of exposition, vague ten-ring powers, and a hero whose martial arts prowess goes viral (but whose friends don't seem to know) and whose early childhood years of training as a ruthless assassin are breezily referenced (but which have no obvious effect upon the present) - all up, a mess of too many hasty, childish ideas in a movie which, like Black Panther, ends without it having been firmly established why the superhero origin story is the lead character's movie and not the movie of one of the other more interesting, more impressive characters (but certainly not that embarrassing Ben Kingsley one).

★★☆☆☆

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Poseidon (2006)

The string of action setpieces that makes up Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, including high-up tightrope walks over flames, underwater traversal of long winding corridors, and crawls through air ducts and elevator shafts, keeps the adventure, um, buoyant, but it is hard to care much given the disaster movie's, um, lack of depth: the uncharismatic group of survivors we follow through the upturned cruise liner are nothing more than faces - a sad-duck daughter of a former New York mayor, the former New York mayor, a stowaway, and a grifter of some sort - and we get no bigger picture of them or of the disaster itself - how, for instance, does the group know which way to go; do any of them have anything they care about back on land; why do they only encounter a next and a next obstacle and not, say, other people, and what is happening at all anywhere beyond their confined-space sphere of action - in the ballroom or in a rescue operation team somewhere, say, or, say, anywhere else in the world?

★★★☆☆

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