Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn flips the Superman origin story, making the baby delivered by spacepod to a couple on a remote farm the villain, not the superhero, but in the end, after the movie resorts to gore - glass shards to one character's magnified cornea and a steering wheel to another character's head - to distinguish itself and pad the runtime, all that can be said is yes, this spacepod boy is a real villain, not a superhero - and that is the extent of it.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Destroyer (2018)

If Johnny Utah grew old, had a kid, got grey hair and wrinkles and in older, less attractive age still hadn't managed to bring Bodhi to justice, you'd end up with Destroyer, a movie which flicks back and forwards between Nicole Kidman's Erin Bell's past (Point Break days of dangerous deep undercover cop work in LA - she's infiltrating a bank robbing gang) and her present (a grim life as a limping sad sack who still hasn't brought to justice the starey charimatic Lord Byron/Bodhi who exerts an influence over others so great, deep undercover police work is necessary (we learn absolutely nothing else about him) - these flashes backwards and forward are timed to distract audiences from implausibilities, improbabilities, gaping holes and nonsense in the plot, meaning this bleak Point Break manages to be a fairly engaging crime thriller.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS