Review: The Invisible Man (2020)

Directed by: Leigh Whannell
Written by: Leigh Whannell
Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Harriet Dyer, Aldis Hodge
IMDb Link

From the moment the film allows the ocean's waves to crash against empty space, thundering in to the cinema's space and revealing the film's invisible title, The Invisible Man becomes a uniquely intense experience, isolating us within the sights and sounds that our lead experiences, and deftly foreshadowing one of the film's most intense moments in the process.

The film follows Cecilia (Moss), who manages to escape her abusive and controlling ex-boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and as she struggles to re-adjust for fear of him finding her, she learns that he has committed suicide, and left his fortune to her, under the condition that she commit no crimes and be found to be mentally stable. Of course, once she signs for the fortune, a series of events that grow in magnitude and tragedy happen to and around her, and in case the film's title wasn't enough of a giveaway, there's more going on here than can be seen.

The obvious nature of Adrian's looming threat is one of the film's most-repeated strength: the film is constantly setting up ideas ages in advance of actually executing on them, broadcasting its intentions to the audience, knowing that they, like Cecilia, will be helpless to stop anything from happening. Even the most innocuous transgression, before Cecilia even receives the news of Adrian's death, isn't without purpose, as Cecilia's sister Emily (Dyer) betraying her trust to come visit her at the house of Emily's ex-husband James (Hodge) is the key to Cecilia's location being revealed in the first place. It's the sort of thing that reinforces the audience's place inside Cecilia's perspective, and allows us to believe and understand her, even at her worst, despite Adrian's escalating actions that see her drawn up as a danger to herself and others.

Of course, that reinforcement requires a strong foundation to work, and thankfully Moss as Cecilia offers one of her best performances, capturing every mood and swing with a heartbreaking reality as she becomes more and more isolated by the man who wants to control her life above all else. There's a perfect little juxtaposition between the slow transition from the depressive to the elated, to the paranoid and manic, and the veneer of understanding we are afforded from watching it all unfold from her perspective, and Moss walks that razor-thin edge between lucid desperation and the crazed lunatic Adrian paints her as perfectly, both strengthening our belief in her and the callous cleverness of his actions.

All of this is presented with a backdrop that shows Whannell's best directing to date (although I still say 2018's UPGRADE is his best work in terms of writing). Shots are cleverly framed to convey a need for a character within the empty space on-screen, clicks and whirs occasionally underscore the corners of the soundscape, and there's never a point where a scare is rushed for the sake of an easy scare, instead carefully layering on pieces of information, building tension so appropriately painful that we're almost begging for the scare to happen so we can be released from it, and that release happening, at the best of times, with screeches that are diagetic. Whannell also hasn't lost his comedic streak, thankfully, the moments of violence and gore actually coming as a welcome counter to the film's otherwise meticulous approach to horror; even what is arguably the film's darkest moment isn't without a tinge of comedic surprise, as a laugh is stifled before the true horror of the situation is realised. It's really excellent filmmaking all-round.

The Short Version: Whannell and Moss are at their best here, creating an experience that is often that much more enthralling for how agonisingly restrained it is; there's an understanding of how tension builds that's rare among recent horror films, both in how it puts us in the main character's state of mind and how it waits for the right moment, and it allows The Invisible Man to create its biggest scares out of empty space and slow camera movements.

Rating: 8/10

Review - Birds of Prey (2020)

Directed by: Cathy Yan
Written by: Christina Hodson
Starring: Margot Robbie, Rosie Perez, Ewan McGregor
IMDb Link

The trajectory of the DCEU has been fascinating to watch. After the significant failure (both critically and financially, at least relative to their competition) of the Snyder films, pieces so grimdark that they were ashamed of their comic book origins, it's neat to see the ways in which Warner Bros. has pushed so hard in every other direction to find a new identity, from the epic scale of Aquaman to a more grounded and human approach with Shazam! (that actually told a story that got to the heart of what it means to be a hero), to the truly insane and cartoonish style of Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) that finally embraces the comic book background of its story.

In an effort to get over her break-up with the Joker, Harley Quinn (Robbie) blows up the old Ace Chemicals plant where both of their villain origin stories began. Such a public declaration draws the attention of Roman Sionis (McGregor, playing things as delightfully and excessively camp as possible) - also known as Black Mask, who wants her dead, and now no longer fears facing the wrath of the Joker. In order to get out from under his threat, Quinn becomes involved in the hunt for a diamond stolen by Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco, in her first film role), a young pickpocket who takes a shine to Quinn. The titular Birds of Prey are introduced over the course of the film: Renee Montoya (Perez, played with a slightly obnoxious knowing wink), a hard-boiled detective building a case against Sionis; Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollet-Bell, who does well with what she's given), also known as Black Canary, a singer/driver for Sionis who cares for Cain; and Helena Bartinelli (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the best of the bunch after Robbie), also known as Huntress, a mal-adjusted assassin with a Vendetta against some of Sionis' people.

It's a bit of a jumble to assemble the ensemble, as none of the girls have enough screentime to really flesh themselves out, but the constant background noise of Robbie's high-energy performance combined with the slick and colourful action setpieces that become increasingly cartoonish as the movie goes on are amusing enough to keep things from getting stale, even as my mind occasionally slipped thoughts of comparison to the current Harley Quinn animated series (which handles Quinn's growth as a character way more effectively but doesn't have quite the same speed and style in its fight scenes). The action really is the highlight in this movie, toeing a fine line between silly and cool; bone-crunching, body bursting fights that are covered in glitter, and as it escalates to the inevitable conclusion that has all the girls fighting together, flitting between literal slapstick, little moments of camaraderie ("do you need a hair tie?"), and some good, old-fashioned R-rated violence, the film is enough of what it wants to be in order to work, despite a few of the awkward steps it takes to get there.

The Short Version: Birds of Prey is a lot like Harley herself: an energetic mess that's easy to like.

Rating: 6.5/10

The 5 Best Movies of 2019 that Star Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage is one the greatest actors working today; a man with a unique and eccentric acting style that leads to performances that are always, at the very least, memorable, and, at the best of times, transcendent. However, ever since some, shall we say, "irresponsible" investments (although I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't also get an actual dinosaur skull or a copy of the first Superman comic if I could) the man has been working as an actor almost non-stop to pay off his debts, acting in at least five films every year for the last few years, and starring in a total of six* in 2019. This has led to him acting in a lot of things that might charitably be called "films".

*Note: Colour Out of Space isn't out in Australia yet and actually looks like an excellent flick, so I can't really talk about it, which is a shame, because it has such a low bar to clear in order to become the best Nicolas Cage film of 2019.

If you're wondering why you've never heard of any of these, it's because they're all straight-to-VOD B-grade schlock, and none of them are particularly good. Often the most these types of films can offer is a memorable enough Cage performance to end up on silly lists like this one, so my reactions here are largely going to be based upon how I measure his presence and type of performance in the film; I call it the Cage Rage Gauge.

5. Running with the Devil

Nicolas Cage I can understand, but they somehow roped Laurence Fishburne in to this as well. Each plays a drug runner, but they are two very different people: Cage plays a fastidious chef who supports his family and treats all of his work professionalism, while Fishburne is a perverted drug addict who neglects every aspect of his life, including his daughter. Both men are hired by their boss to escort the next load of cocaine after the last couple have come in light and cut with other drugs, with Cage given the responsibility of figuring out who's responsible, which, surprise surprise, turns out to be Fishburne. During their trek, Fishburne leaves Cage to die, but Cage survives and has Fishburne hunted down, but Cage gets murdered in the end by a DEA agent fed up with the system that perpetuates the war on drugs just because people like Cage are otherwise respectable citizens. That last part doesn't exactly come out of nowhere, but it's just one of many elements in the film that somehow bloat a movie that's only 100 minutes long; I didn't even mention the subplot involving Clifton Collins Jr. as a small time drug farmer, which is itself just the beginning of the journey the drugs take to get from South America to the US. 

It seems like the film tries to include all of this stuff to give a perspective on the war on drugs that looks at the lives of as many people affected by it as possible, going so far as to show every price point of the drugs at each step it takes towards the US, but despite its attempts to give the whole thing a sense of style, calling every character by a title ("The Agent in Charge", "The Cook", "The Man", etc) and trying to give as much importance as possible to the escalating details about the drugs, the film never seems to become in any way interesting. It's somewhat competent and consistent in its direction, but for every cut-throat betrayal and sickening reveal of corruption, it can't quite coalesce in to a engaging experience, beyond its final moment.

Cage Rage Gauge: Abysmal. Cage is barely in half the movie despite being a headliner, and his performance is the most understated on this list. He gets one scene where you'd think he'd have a chance to really cut loose, but he just hisses a few words through clenched teeth and then tries to look intimidating while walking on crutches. Fishburne is much more entertaining here, although calling anything in a movie I fell asleep watching (twice) "entertaining" is a bit of a stretch. 

4. Primal

Cage plays an exotic animal hunter who's managed to captured an extremely rare white jaguar (ironically, the film is produced by Lionsgate), and intends to sell it to the highest bidder, but his trip home is hampered by the inclusion of several military men aboard the same cargo ship, transporting a government assassin who went rogue (played by Kevin Durand). Obviously, the assassin gets out and lets out all the animals, including the jaguar, so Cage has to work with the soldiers to capture both safely. There's also an awkward romance subplot between Cage and the military doctor (Famke Janssen) sent along to help the assassin with his seizures. The romance coaxes Cage towards ostensibly caring more for the animals he captures, which ties back in to the whole "who's really the beast?" thing the film has going on with the parallel between Durand's assassin and the jaguar. The film is oddly sympathetic to Durand's plight, a man made the way he is by a government that wanted to use him as a tool of destruction, but apart from that, the film is, much like Running with the Devil, frightfully boring. It's overall basically ok (for a cheap and derivative B-movie), but despite the more focused story, the film is never particularly engaging, mostly relying on imitating familiar action story beats in order to pretend something exciting is happening. If I hadn't made this list, I would have forgotten about it as soon as I'd finished it. 

Cage Rage Gauge: Pretty Terrible. He's in most of the movie this time, at least, but apart from a couple of over-enunciated words he doesn't offer the sort of expressive performance you'd hope for. Once again, he's outshone by another member of the cast, this time by Kevin Durand's bouncy psychosis, which is the only fun in the film.

3. Kill Chain

It's a story about a (shocker) chain of kills that lead to Cage's hotel one fateful night. An assassin kills another assassin who's then killed by a corrupt cop who steals the assassin's pay but is killed by a jealous madame after giving the pay to his girlfriend, who winds up hiding in Cage's hotel before another fight and then a shootout ensue. It's a convoluted series of tenuously connected stories that serve as an excuse for Cage to go all noir, serving up cheeky one-liners and generally looking broodingly in every direction while the film occasionally gets sexy around him. A more memorable experience than the previous two, this one at least has the decency to revel a little in it's exploitative, B-grade nature.

Cage Rage Gauge: Actually kind of alright. He isn't in enough of the film, and he doesn't have any outbursts, but the film offers a few fun moments, including a pretty decent scenery-chewing monologue and a couple lines of absurdly hilarious dialogue

2. Grand Isle

This one isn't the best movie on the list, in fact it might be the worst, but it's easily the most memorable. A young husband and father named Buddy tells the story of how he ended up in a police station, bloodied and bruised and with the body of another man in his truck. It involves this man, down on his luck and struggling to make ends meat, working for an afternoon for Nicolas Cage, fixing a fence before a hurricane hits the little old town of Grand Isle. Cage is a former Marine, discharged for an injury, and he respects our Buddy for his own service in the Navy, although a few barbs about their respective differences are thrown back and forth. It all seems relatively ok until Cage's wife gets mad at him for forgetting their anniversary, and takes it out on him by hitting on Buddy and taking advantage of the situation once the hurricane sets in and he has to stay the night with them. A few devious turns later and it turns out that they're keeping people in their basement and breeding them because they could never have children of their own, and the dead man in Buddy's truck was one of the men they'd captured.

This movie throws everything at the wall to what will stick, and in the process it's just kind of an insane mess that's so hilarious to watch unfold that you can't help but appreciate the film for how bad it all turns out. There's even a performance by Kelsey Grammer of all people as the small-town detective trying to get to the bottom of the case, who speaks in a Southern drawl that would put Foghorn Leghorn to shame, but the film doesn't even have the genius to put him next to Cage until the very end, in a hostage situation/shootout that sees Cage in his Marine uniform call-out the "system that doesn't give a sh*t about me or my fellow Marines". The confrontation is really limp compared to the sheer insanity that preceded it, and the military angle is too poorly explored to feel like the culmination to anything. 

Cage Rage Gauge: Insane. Cage gets a few choice lines that are hilarious in both writing and delivery ("when was the you time you had your... uh, cock, um, sucked?") and the confrontations between him and his wife are almost funny enough to distract from how terrible everything else is.  

1. A Score to Settle

Don't get me wrong, this movie is as bad as the rest of them, but this film finally seems to understand exactly why an actor like Cage is appealing. A father fresh out of prison meets his son and tries to make up for lost time, but seems torn between that devotion and his lust for revenge. Cage paces himself through a lot of turmoil here, knowing just how quiet to keep in order to make his outbursts feel that much more expressive. What's more is that the rest of the film has this strange, amateurish passion that I can't quite put my finger on, like this was everyone else's first film and they were just happy to work with him. The son is the personification of this; he's kind of awkward and never feels natural when he speaks, but this sort of works in the movie's favour, the strained relationship of the characters masking the performance. Of course, then the movie has to go ruin itself with a nonsense twist that reveals the son was dead the whole time and that Cage has been hallucinating him. Admittedly, this revelation is well foreshadowed, and it leads to the best scene in the movie, but it's also really dumb; there's a scene where Cage goes and saves his son from a drug den, but who is he saving if his son isn't there? It's not enough to have a relatively intriguing juxtaposition between thirst for revenge and the catharsis found in moving on, no, we have to have some insane twist that essentially forces the film to its conclusion and leaves Cage standing as the only decent thing about the film.

Cage Rage Gauge: Perfect. Cage gets to express a full range of emotions here, and does so with a gusto that's so cartoonish it loops right back around to being believable, even despite the film's ridiculous twist. You'll never hear the word "beef" the same again.

So, what did I learn?

I suppose there are some unifying themes between all these movies; each one seems fed up with the system, expressing this through a character that represents a group that's used by it (a DEA agent, an assassin, a Marine, etc.). I was also reminded that you can't cage Cage, you have to let him be free to express himself in the way that feels the most "Cage-y", otherwise his performances are as flat and boring as anyone willing to sell their name for a paycheck. Seriously, if your movie's going to be an otherwise inept or completely forgettable experience, you may as well try to get the most out of what Nicolas Cage can do. A Score to Settle wasn't the best film on this list because it was the most well-made, it was the best because, despite everything else about the movie, Cage was allowed to be Cage.

Review - Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Directed by: James Mangold
Written by: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, Jason Keller
Starring: Matt Damon, Christian Bale
IMDb Link

There's a reason the "Classic Underdog Story" is a Classic.

Carroll Shelby (Damon) and Ken Miles (Bale) are two men who don't want to change. Shelby's a former racer whose hypertension means his early retirement in to sales and management. Miles is an extraordinarily talented racer who self-describes as "difficult" with people and whose financial trouble means that he has to give up his passion. Fortunately for them, when Ford needs people to build and race a car that can beat Ferrari at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Man endurance race, Shelby's clout gets them both noticed and quickly working with a blank check to do what they do best and hope that it's enough. The story also layers in colourful human drama, as every corporate suit with an opinion tries to force the men to compromise their work; they may be good men with a passion for racing, but they are unambiguously working for bad men who want to sell cars, caring more about corporate imagery.

For the most part, the story is exactly as expected at every turn; each twist and turn a staple of the sort of story this movie is trying to tell, from the perfectly timed complications with the vehicle, to the moments when Miles' aforementioned "difficulty" creates problems for him with the suits, while Shelby tries to balance appeasing them and working with Miles' pure racing ideals. Thankfully, this movie is also fantastically put together, so it gets away with playing each and every story beat as it does because it knows why these stories work and why they're worth telling, and it makes the few moments that aren't expected (such as Miles' wife being just as mad as he is in the best way) feel earned and meaningful, like the they couldn't quite fit in to the molds of the tropes so they were left  in because they were genuine. The human drama both on and off the track is so thoroughly well told that it hardly matters if you can see each turn a mile off, and a lot of that has to do with the performances.

Damon is a perfect fit for Shelby, giving a very human performance as he navigates the his own morals through the amorality of the corporate world, and he's just cheeky enough to not be a total straight man. Bale is a bit more animated than Damon, offering a small but noticeable contrast that's reminiscent of some of his best work, a single-minded person expressed through his eccentricities and the bonds he shares with the people he loves: the best scenes are his, from his introduction to quiet moments with his son, to the sheer elation he shares with only himself in the car as he tries to navigate and understand his own emotions. Other characters are one-note but effectively performed, particularly Josh Lucas as Leo Beebe, a smarmy executive who acts as a constant thorn in the sides of Shelby and Miles. the embodiment of the corporate pressure our heroes face, one dimensional but too infuriating to be forgotten.

What's really memorable about the film, between all the human drama that propels the story, is the racing. There's an immersion to it, the way the engines roar electrifies the body and the camera's constant weaving between cars as it tracks Miles' every step towards victory glue the eyes to the screen, searching as Miles does for each opening, feeling the heart skip a beat as the brakes screech as he tears around each corner or dodges another pile up. It's incredibly well directed action, and more importantly it ties back in to the investment in Miles as a character, these scenes not just banking on the stakes it sets up but also allowing us a few moments to understand a man who seems to have trouble understanding himself.

The Short Version: It's as excellently crafted as it is comfortable, telling a familiar story of men triumphing in the face of the impossible, backed by understated performances, incredibly immersive racing sequences, and an incredibly wholesome bond between men who can't change. It's the perfect movie to take your dad to see.

Rating: 8/10

Review - Knives Out (2019)

Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Starring: Ana de Armas, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans
IMDb Link

Just as Rian Johnson's first film, Brick, celebrated the noir genre through a near-perfect reconstruction with a modern twist, Knives Out is a reminder of what makes mystery stories so fun and engaging, while updating the genre fare with a couple of brilliant and quirky ideas.

A rich murder mystery writer has slit his throat, but an anonymous client seems to think that there's more to this than suicide, and the eccentric detective (Craig) they've hired seems to agree, especially since every member of this man's avaricious family could be a suspect. To say more would be to give away too much of the story, and as it's a mystery that ruins the fun, but I do want to talk about a couple of things that may enter spoiler territory, so if you want to go in to the story unfettered by more, just skip to my summary and know that I absolutely recommend this film as one of the best of the year.

What makes Knives Out so utterly engaging is its choice of perspective: both whose we view the movie from and how such things can change. On its own, such a story would only be genre-savvy, but we see the story outside the perspective of the detective: the audience surrogate seems also the perpetrator, and such a decision elevates the film to new heights as it plays such a revelation both for tension and for humour in Johnson's own delightfully off-kilter way. But this idea of perspective shifting the meaning of the story gets taken even further in some of the film's more subtle touches. I love the way each family member, when telling the story of their father's birthday, imagine themselves by their father's side as the cake is placed in front of him, how treating his nurse as "one of the family" to some is little more than using them as an example as they postulate some racist tirade, to how nobody seems to be clear on where said nurse is even from, or who actually voted to not let her attend the funeral. The stories are so deliberately inconsistent, and while it can sometimes feel like very clever window dressing, it all ultimately plays back in to the key themes of the story.

All of this is of course helped immensely by the hammy, archetypal performances of the colourful cast. Everyone here commits to the slightly ridiculous and yet inalienable humanity of their characters; the family is filled with terrible people who behave excessively, but they're always strangely believable. I'd be here all day if I talked about every one of them, so know that each of them is worth talking about while I get in to a couple of my favourites. Jamie Lee Curtis is a highlight here as the eldest daughter, a delight to watch in the most extra of pink power suits, at once the apotheosis of all the greed and power-mongering that runs in the family, and yet the most clearly stricken by the death of her father. Her son, played by Chris Evans, is the most vindictive, uncaring, brutally sarcastic dickhead, and he definitely seems to be having the most fun in what is the second-most entertaining performance in the film. The only one that bests him is Craig's detective, Benoit Blanc, whose hilariously silly caricature of an accent is the mere icing on the doughnut of a man who simply cannot stop talking them by film's end; his is the purest form of puzzling joy that this movie goes for. That said, Ana de Armas is the heart and soul of this movie, her performance the closest to real to keep the audience in her head-space, with the clever juxtaposition of the flaws and strengths of her character reinforcing her most important moments: her caring and her inability to lie seen as weakness by the rest, the perfect foil to keep people on her side and yet perfectly inept to deal with this situation, and Armas handles each challenge excellently.

The Short Version: Cleverly written and masterfully framed, Knives Out supports a colourful cast of characters with a rollicking mystery story whose originality lies in its style of telling, twisting as much with its use of perspective as it does with its dizzying plot.

Rating: 8.5/10

Review - Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer
Written by: Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin
IMDb Link

Zombieland was one of the best pieces of Zombie fiction to come out of that glut of content the subgenre received in the late 2000s-early 2010s; the "Double Tap" became a meme, the actors all went on to have prestige careers. Before all that, though, the film was wickedly funny, and the running trope commentary felt like a breath of fresh air as the content began to pile up around the subgenre like dead bodies.

Unfortunately, it's been ten years; Zombie content has continued to shamble on, the commentary of the first has grown stale, and Zombieland: Double Tap seems content to spend its time remembering how good the first one was rather than doing anything to really move the story or the characters forward.

It's been 10 years in Zombieland as well, and now Tallahassee (Harrelson), Columbus (Eisenberg), Wichita (Stone) and Little Rock (Breslin) have moved in to the White House. Comfort and close quarters has strained the family, and it's not long before Wichita and Little Rock hit the road again, only for Wichita to return when Little Rock takes off with a hippy poser (Avan Jogia). Meanwhile, Tallahassee and Columbus come across a dumb blonde stereotype named Madison (Zoey Deutch), whose only role in the story seems to be to play to the stereotype and sleep with Columbus to create some easy tension between Columbus and Wichita. The rest is a fairly fun road trip movie that includes a stop-off with Tallahassee's counterpart Nevada (Rosario Dawson) at an Elvis-themed hotel, and a few new types of zombie that only really fill in a couple of gags.

There's nothing here that's particularly bad, but none of it's particularly good either. The laughs aren't as consistent, the new characters aren't anywhere near as funny as the filmmakers seem to think they are, and the theme are basically the same as the first, but replace the word "family" with the word "home" as a roundabout way of getting the characters essentially back to where they started. As the same time, the film is incredibly comfy: references to the first are always welcome and even make for some of the better bits in the movie, and the jokes that aren't funny also aren't aggressively unfunny. The whole experience is very easy to lean back with and somewhat enjoy, and it's rarely less than that, but also never more than that.

The Short Version: Like warmed up leftovers of really nice meal: you know you've had this exact meal but better, and yet there's not much to complain about.

Rating: 6/10

Review - 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Written by: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Sophie Nelisse, Corinne Foxx, Brianne Tju, Sistine Stallone
IMDb Link

I'm pretty indiscriminate when it comes to creature features, especially shark movies, so if you're like me and you're always up for a slightly trashy shark movie that's clearly seen a lot of other shark movies, you'll probably find this somewhat entertaining.

The movie is essentially The Descent, but worse and with sharks. Two step-sisters are having a hard time adjusting to one another in their new home in Mexico, so they escape with a couple of friends to a secret watering hole that has an ancient Mayan temple recently discovered beneath. The girls go to explore the temple, things gets claustrophobic, and one of them accidentally causes a collapse that traps them in the temple, so they have to explore further to find another way out, while discovering that they are in the territory of a breed of Great White Shark that has evolved to use sound over sight.

The story actually 'works' in the sense that it has a very on-the-nose setup and obvious theme: the sisters aren't getting along (each of them very pointedly says "she's not my sister" within the first ten minutes of the movie) so they have to learn to work together to survive. It's also surprisingly coherent with the first movie's focus on sisterhood as an inalienable bond. Unfortunately, little else is developed, with characters so shallow they can't even be called archetypes; even the one that's supposed to be aggressively unlikable due to their selfishness doesn't have any real energy to her. I'm not asking for much, but you'd think a film that so aggressively pulls ideas from The Descent would also try the whole "likable and sympathetic characters" thing a little harder instead of gratuitously using slow-motion to pad out the running time like a Zack Snyder film. But I digress, this is a shark movie, so I'll talk about the horror.

There's exactly one scare in this movie that's absolutely masterful in its craft. Shortly after one of the girls knocks over a large pillar and causes a massive flood of silt in the water, blinding everyone and cutting off their radio connections. We're stuck alone with the main character, who turns about frantically as she looks for her friends and fumbles with her light. As it flashes around in the water, it shines behind her, and for the briefest moment of complete silence, we see the blind shark pass by. It's an absolutely chilling moment that carries with it no fanfare, and just let's you sit with the knowledge of the horror that could be befall her, as she continues to struggle and search. The tension is set and held when she finds a couple of her friends, now she thinks she's safe, and that dissonance with what the audience knows is exactly the sort nail-biting horror that elevates these sort of films, even as the poor writing highlights who's going to die by how little time has actually been spent developing them. This one moment, the follow-up, and the eventual release of the earned jump-scare is better than everything else in the movie by a mile, even the scene that lifts its ideas directly from The Land Before Time V (seriously; I wish I could find the scene to draw a comparison). The rest of the time this movie goes for horror it quickly gets repetitive, to the point that many of the shots feel exactly the same as the girls scramble from one tunnel the shark is too big to swim through to another, and the impact the sounds these girls make have on the sharks become more and more inconsistent.

The Short Version: Uncaged reaches all the way up to the lofty heights of slightly better than the original. It's contrived but functional, cliche but genre-savvy, and its few excellent scares are drowned out by repetition.

Rating: 5/10