Friday Review: At The Movies

With most of the TV shows we watch finished for the season, we have been turning to movies for our nighttime viewing. Most of these were watched on Netflix or Amazon Prime. One was in an actual movie theater.

Don’t Look Up (2021, scifi, satire, black comedy)- Pretty standard disaster film plot: astronomers discover new comet and amid the celebration learn it is on a collision course with Earth and will cause an extinction level event. It was horrible. I realize they were going for satire, but satire requires a deft hand to pull off well, and this one? It was more like a sledgehammer. It could have been decent, but the “message” (Science good, politics bad, humanity sucks and we deserve to be annihilated) is pounded So Hard, So Often, and So Obviously, that it all just falls on its not-very-funny ass. The cast should have helped: Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalfant. Jonah Hill had some lines that could have been good, but the humor was lost, and so was the impact. Even that cast couldn’t roast this turkey. Don’t Look (this one) Up. Trust me, you have better things to do with your time.

The Ice Road (2021) and Ice Road: Vengeance (2025, action-adventure): Liam Neeson is Mike McCann, who, with his PTSD-suffering brother in the first one, are a truck driving team recruited with two other drivers to deliver life-saving equipment to a collapsed mine with trapped miners over “ice roads”- frozen lakes that make what should be routine cargo hauls life threatening. In the second, Mike is taking his brother’s ashes to Mt. Everest to fulfill the brother’s wish to have his ashes spread there. He stumbles into a plot to dam a sacred river for corporate gain, and gets pulled into helping the son of the village elder keep that from happening. Okay, not great movies, but decently watchable for what they are. Lots of action, a couple minor twists, and the chance for Liam Neeson to show his “particular set of skills”. Looking for entertainment that doesn’t require a lot of brainwork, action, bad guys you love to see get their due, and Liam Neeson doing Liam Neeson? These two fit the bill.

Lucy (2014, scifi, thriller)- Scarlett Johansson is Lucy, a college student in Taiwan, who is sent by her boyfriend to deliver a briefcase to a “businessman” who turns out to be a major drug lord. He kidnaps her (along with three other people) and implants bags of a superdrug in their abdomens, turning them into drug mules. When the bag in Lucy is damaged and the drug leaks into her system, her brain begins to evolve and she is progressively able to use more and more of her brain’s capacity. This should have been an exploration of what and who we as humans could become if we were able to unleash the full potential of our brains. What it actually becomes is a question of how many bodies can we rack up? There’s just a continuous stream of dead bodies, many of which are gratuitous and make no sense, and very little else. Even ScarJo and Morgan Freeman couldn’t evolve this thing out of the primordial sludge. All it left me with is feeling that, no, I don’t want to be able to use more of my brain, since it seems to only make you mean and violent.

Disclosure Day (2026, scifi, action-adventure)- This is the one we saw in the theater. It wasn’t bad. Definitely a Spielberg movie: decent chase action-adventure, clunky in spots, a bit heavy-handed on the “message” at times ( but when isn’t Spielberg?) Good amount of action (car chases, train chases, bad guys shooting at good guys), aliens, corporate/government coverups. Basically, Close Encounters and ET had a baby, and it’s name is Disclosure Day.