Enola Holmes 2 (2022, Harry Bradbeer)

Enola Holmes 2 runs a long two hours and nine minutes, but the movie actually leaves a bunch on the table. For example, antagonist David Thewlis has history with both Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mama Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter), seemingly separately, but the film never gets into it. Thewlis is phoning it in, gloriously biting off scenery in giant chunks; he can do this part—and well—effortlessly, which is good because director Bradbeer’s not great with actors.

Everyone in Holmes 2 is solid, however. Millie Bobby Brown is a fine lead, except whenever Bradbeer doesn’t know what to do, he has her wink at the camera or break the fourth wall. It’s cute—but for the first and most of the second act, Brown could just be narrating the adventure straight. She opens the film narrating, and there’s always something; why not just go all the way?

Cavill’s effortlessly charming and more than willing to make room for his younger costars, to the point he’s just taking up space. He’s constantly around in this one like they wanted to make him work for the sequel bucks, but they don’t give him anything to do. The film reveals a bunch about Enola Holmes universe versions of Sherlock Holmes mainstays, but mostly just as gags or Easter eggs. It’s awkward world-building.

Louis Partridge is also back as Brown’s love interest, a young lord trying to fight the good fight against the blue blood stuffed shirts. Partridge never really gets anything to do in the movie. He takes a while to show up, then is sort of around, but also not. He’s perfectly good, and he and Brown get some fine teamwork moments, along with romantic ones, but he should’ve been in the movie more. Or less.

Just like Bonham Carter and Susan Wokoma. Wokoma shows up out of nowhere in the late second act like she wasn’t going to be in the movie, but then they needed a combination action and heist sequence, so suddenly Cavill brings her in. Except when she shows up next, it’s with Bonham Carter, and Cavill’s detached from that whole sequence. It’s like the supporting cast is tagging in and out. Got to keep them around, even if they won’t have anything to do until—presumably—Enola Holmes 3D.

The film kicks off with an affable but uninformative recap of the first film. Netflix is assuming you’re binging both pictures. Since the first movie, Brown has gone into business for herself but not seen Partridge, Cavill, or Bonham Carter much. She’s going it alone. And she’s going out of business, right up until adorable street urchin Serrana Su-Ling Bliss shows up at her door looking for her missing sister. Bliss and her friends are matchstick girls, and it certainly seems possible they’ve stumbled into the rich British people killing poor ones for profit.

Ah, capitalism.

It ends up being a semi-true story, which screenwriter Jack Thorne (with story co-credit to director Bradbeer) does an atrocious job integrating. Too many important things in Holmes seem shoe-horned in, with Bradbeer assuming Brown making a joke or Cavill grinning will cover. The film’s a case study in charm only getting you so far.

Decent, thankless supporting turn from Adele Akhtar as Enola Universe Lestrade, and an excellent bit performance from Sharon Duncan-Brewster as another unappreciated Victorian woman. Hopefully, they’ll bring Duncan-Brewster back too.

If Enola 2 had been twenty minutes shorter, it probably would be more successful. The mystery investigation goes on about ten minutes too long. But then it also needs another twenty minutes in the first act, probably. Thorne and Bradbeer don’t flop, but they need more substance for the cast. Not everyone can chaw sets like Thewlis.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Kong vs. Godzilla is a rather bad film. Director Wingard is bad at every single thing the film tasks him with. Kong expert Rebecca Hall and adopted daughter Kaylee Hottle going to the Hollow Earth with pseudo-scientist burn-out Alexander Skarsgård? Terrible. Teens Millie Bobby Brown and Julian Dennison teaming up with kaiju conspiracy podcaster Brian Tyree Henry? Somehow worse. Giant CGI ape fighting giant CGI lizard? Even worse.

Wingard directs the giant monster fight worse than if he were doing a pro-wrestling homage. Wingard does have some homage in vs., just never good. Like when Kong jumps Die Hard-style or knocks his shoulder back in like Lethal Weapon. Or when there’s a Twister reference. The movie’s a smorgasbord of unoriginality, tied together with bad acting—Skarsgård is godawful, but the rest of the main cast is tolerable (Hottle is probably even good under the circumstances and it’s clear Dennison needs to fire his agent and get a better one). The main supporting cast—actually, just the supporting cast, there are only like ten people in the movie, the rest are collateral damage. But gazillionare inventor Demián Bichir? He’s real bad. Eiza González as his merciless daughter? She’s worse.

If Wingard had a sense of humor and tried to do vs. campy, it might work. Even with the terrible acting. But he doesn’t have a sense of humor. However, he’s not overly serious because serious suggests some kind of thoughtful and there’s no thought in the direction. As bad as some of the acting gets and it gets painfully, absurdly bad, Wingard’s clearly responsible for at least twenty-five percent of it. The script’s really bad too, so maybe twenty percent to the script, which means the cast is only like half responsible for their lousy performances.

And some get it worse than others. Like Brown and Henry. The movie’s giving them some very bad material. There’s not really anyway to make gold out of it.

The CGI is good. Nothing Wingard does with the good CGI is good, but the CGI is good. Outside being an eighties action hero, Kong has some personality (he’s pals with Hottle). Godzilla gets none. It’s hilarious they’ve got Godzilla first in the title this time because Godzilla is a very special guest star.

Luckily, Godzilla vs. Kong doesn’t start strong and have a stumble. It starts low and sort of flops around in the mud without ever getting on firm land. In fact, considering the affordable-to-license sixties songs they accompany Kong with because apparently composer Tom Holkenborg can’t handle a full score, it kind of improves. The songs are terrible. Holkenborg at least tries. There are a few moments when Holkenborg manages to find wisps of potential in whatever Wingard’s going. The wisps wisp away, but still. There are a couple almost good narrative beats thanks to Holkenborg.

No one else involved achieves anywhere near as much.

There’s a lot of bad ideas in Godzilla vs. Kong, a lot of silly ideas and a lot of bad ones (not to mention ones they ripped off from Toho’s post-2000s Godzilla movies—and Kong doesn’t get a creator credit, which isn’t cool). But with all obvious ability in the CGI—minus the shots where they have to match with whatever cinematographer Ben Seresin’s shooting with a lot of glare to hide the composite—it should’ve had some spectacle.

It’s not so bad the giant monkey fighting the giant lizard isn’t the most visually engaging material in the movie. But if the acting and writing and directing of the “plot” weren’t so paltry, the kaiju fight would definitely take backseat. Wingard’s fight scenes for the monsters are so bad, only him being worse at the rest makes them better in comparison.

Godzilla vs. Kong is the pits.

Enola Holmes (2020, Harry Bradbeer)

Enola Holmes is a solid vehicle for the proposition of lead Millie Bobby Brown as a movie star—she infrequently narrates to great effect, in a manner far more Ferris Bueller than John Watson (more on the infrequently in a bit). But as almost anything else the movie fizzles.

Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes? He’s not very smart even though he’s supposed to be super-smart and he’s likable but not good. He actually doesn’t have enough to do to be good or bad, so likable is about as much as Enola allows.

Most of Cavill’s scenes are opposite Sam Clafin—as brother Mycroft (so basically Enola Brown is Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes’s previously unmentioned younger sister)—which is good for Cavill, because even though his performance is broad and based on him being charming and having a good smile… Clafin’s just a caricature British jackass. He’s not even smart in Enola continuity.

Holmes family mom Helena Bonham Carter—in a somewhat pointless cameo, mostly in flashbacks—kicks off the present action when she abandons Brown as a kind of sixteenth birthday present. It doesn’t make sense and it’s not supposed to make sense because then you won’t show up for the sequel. Enola is based on a young adult novel series by Nancy Springer, which is swell, but screenwriter Jack Thorne does a terrible job plotting a two hour movie.

It’s like Thorne doesn’t understand how subplots or vignettes work so there’s a very herky-jerky plot involving mean boarding school teacher Fiona Shaw (who’s weirdly hot for Clafin) trying to turn Brown into a proper lady and not the badass proto-inclusive feminist Bonham Carter has been raising her to be and then Louis Partridge’s young lord.

So, Partridge—who’s generally fine, albeit mostly because Enola has got Brown in a movie star performance and then a lot of mediocre performances—has run away from his life of luxury and Brown ends up helping him on her way to London to solve her mother’s disappearance. Except then Brown—and the movie—decide since Partridge is in trouble, let’s focus on him so the second half (right up until the sequel-set up epilogues) is all about Partridge and his family troubles.

In other words… it’s all about the dude. And Brown mooning over him is awkward.

Everyone except Clafin and Shaw have a good scene—including Frances de la Tour, who doesn’t end up doing so well after a strong start, and especially Susan Wokoma, who’s fantastic if literally used as a diversity token.

Bradbeer’s direction is mediocre at best. It’s often like he didn’t tell Brown when to look at the camera for Ferris narration and when not to look at the camera for it, so she’s always glancing directly into the lens. You’d think editor Adam Bosman might edit around it but no, he leans into it. Though, technically, Bosman’s editing is easily the worst thing about the filmmaking.

Giles Nuttgens’s photography is fine. Boring but fine. Okay music from Daniel Pemberton. Great production design from Michael Carlin and costume design from Consolata Boyle.

Enola is a bad star vehicle for potential great star Brown and okay enough a potential sequel wouldn't be unwelcome. Just less about the boys.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

I wonder if, much like that one immortal monkey divining Borges’s dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, one could assemble a list of all the action beats in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which are mostly from Aliens and Jurassic Park 1 and 2, and arrange them to figure out the story to this film. Once the film hits the second act, I think it’d be more—I’m forgetting the stuff with Vera Farmiga, which is more out of a Mission: Impossible or James Bond. I’m sure Borges’s immortal monkey could do it, but I guess there is something more to director Dougherty and Zach Shields’s script than just stringing together the action scenes, fitting in the right amount of product placement for the studio (turns out it’s a lot and then a lot times twelve), and making sure there enough possible toys. See, you don’t just get Godzilla merchandise from this one, there’s also the other monsters, plus the stupid giant-sized stealth bomber-thing the good guys fly around in because Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a desperately joyless adaptation of a crappy eighties Godzilla cartoon.

Complete with annoying teen Millie Bobby Brown running around. Brown’s not just a mechanical engineer and accomplice to premeditated omnicide, she also knows how to run a ballpark sound board, which is maybe her most impressive trait.

She’s daughter of mad scientist Vera Farmiga (hashtag feminism), who has betrayed Monarch—the good guys with the giant flying fortress who tell the governments of the world to eat it while they study giant monsters, called Titans because someone wanted a trademark and this Godzilla movie tries as much as it can to forget Japan exists so you know they’re not calling them kaiju—and teamed up with eco-terrorist Charles Dance to release all the giant monsters who will once again rule the Earth.

But Brown’s also daughter of Kyle Chandler, who left Farmiga and Brown because their other kid died in the first Godzilla—unseen and stepped on, confirming it did kill a bunch of civilians but whatever. Chandler lives a simple life with a nineties movies alpha male cottage on a lake where he studies wolves nearby. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with Farmiga raising Brown in isolation at the giant monster facilities around the world.

As bad as you think Dougherty and Shields can get with the script, they somehow manage to go even lower. And not just when they’re reusing quotable lines from Alien and The Abyss. It’s all the time. They’ve got nothing good going on here. Nothing.

Obviously things don’t go well with Farmiga’s plan to give the world over to the monsters because it turns out they used frog DNA in the… sadly, no. Nothing quite so good. They really do just hinge it all on Farmiga’s ability to deliver a mad scientist speech and she fails at it utterly. She’s terrible, Brown’s terrible, Chandler’s pretty bad (his part is written as a Die Hard part for Bruce Willis, which would be amusing if Chandler were acting it that way, but he’s not), Ken Watanabe is downright hacky, Sally Hawkins somehow manages not to know how embarrassed she should look during her thankless scenes but someone doesn’t, which just makes it more embarrassing. Not to mention the stunt cameos.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, more than anything else, reminds of the first American attempt at a Godzilla, not because of plotting, but because of the film’s inability to tell an honest scene as well as the stunt casting. Zhang Ziyi gets… one hell of a thankless part, but she’s better than Hawkins for sure. Zhang’s as good as it gets in Monsters. Same goes for—shockingly because the part is so atrociously written—Bradley Whitford. He’s got the scientist slash medical doctor slash airplane pilot slash submarine pilot maybe part. It’s a really poorly written part, but Whitford manages not to be too bad. It’s the function of his part to make the film worse—kind of like how, in addition to being terrible, Thomas Middleditch literally has this recurring thing about making O’Shea Jackson Jr. seem either stupid or dickish. Jackson’s playing one of the soldiers, Middleditch is some useless company man (Monsters basically thinks Paul Reiser is the good guy in Aliens), Jackson’s Black, Middleditch’s White, Jackson’s likable, Middleditch’s a dipshit… it’s bad. And weird. Because Middleditch is apparently going to go on to become Chandler’s offscreen bro. They act like they’ve had a big bonding thing throughout, even though they never have any real scenes together because the script’s terrible and no one has any real scenes.

Unless you count the Joe Morton going and looking for someone scene. Joe Morton and David Straithairn somehow get through this one unscathed. And CCH Pounder. It’s very nice to see her in something… especially since she’s in the first scene so you could just turn it off after she’s done.

Also bad is Aisha Hinds. Not sure how much of it’s her fault but whatever her agent convinced her was going to happen because of this part… the agent was incorrect.

Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible music from Bear McCreary. There’s not even a lot of it. It’s sparse. But ungodly awful when it comes in. The movie ought to give some kind of warning so you can steel yourself.

Umm, what else. The editing’s not good, but Dougherty’s direction is awful so it’s not like there’s much the editors—all three of them—could do. Lawrence Sher’s photography is similarly not noteworthy. Monsters’s “mise-en-scène” is broke—Dougherty doesn’t know how to direct a single scene in the movie, giant monster or not—so what’s Sher going to do to fix it. What’s anyone going to do.

There are a handful of other things—okay, maybe a dozen but then like five things (plus the dozen)—I’d really like to enumerate but I can’t. If I list these silly, silly things, it might encourage someone to watch Godzilla: King of the Monsters because it would seem like you couldn’t not have some kind of fun with the goofy things on the list. I don’t even want to tease them.

So instead I’ll just mention Doughterty’s “Brodie Bruce” type obsession with kaiju banging—Mothra and Godzilla are (apparently unrequited) soulmates but there’s a good chance Monsters is implying Ghidorah bangs Rodan. It comes up in a lousy attempt at a joke but then at the end the plot perturbs in just the right way for it to seem like a thing, even if it’s just the movie being cheap or expedient or whatever.

Once upon a time, Charles Dance wore a t-shirt with “Cheaper than Alan Rickman” on it, referring to his casting in a film. King of the Monsters—the entire production, the entire cast, the entire crew, everyone, everything, every frame—is wearing a “Cheaper than Alan Rickman” t-shirt.

It’s an astonishingly silly movie and it’s mortifying the filmmakers weren’t able to at least make a fun, astonishingly silly movie.