The film exists largely to be replaced by the next shiny thing in the MCU conveyor belt.
The film feels like it’s content to check off to-do notes and scratch the viewer’s nostalgia itch.
Across Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.
When the film isn’t suffocating itself with world-building, it’s wholly given over to corny fan service.
The Tomorrow War is little more than a clunky, Nolan-esque exercise in instruction-manual cinema.
While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking.
Its scenes wildly escalate to a fever pitch at the drop of a hat, before then ending, more often than not, with abrupt violence.
The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.
The extras on this edition of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom feel almost as dully prescribed as the film itself.
Throughout the film, director J.A. Bayona draws on the childlike fear of things that go bump in the night.
Throughout Avengeners: Infinity War, rapidity (of dialogue and drama) is mistaken for actual rhythm.
The film at one point offers the finest sustained act of emotional storytelling to grace a Marvel production.
Monogamy, Passengers suggests, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.
The film never surrenders to the abandon of its action, and as such never feels like it shifts out of first gear.
It can’t tell whether it wants to be junk food or not, lovingly poking fun at some Hollywood tropes while shamelessly indulging others.
At its best, it forgets to be a Marvel movie, casting off corporate shackles to let its freak flag fly.
This manic, loving parody of toy bricks and the pop culture associated with them receives a fittingly overstuffed disc from Warner Home Video.
Appreciation of the film lies, perhaps aptly, in the pieces built on a pillaged foundation.
The breadth of Vince Vaughn’s gregarious persona has never been given free reign by any director and this certainly isn’t the game-changer.
Her is rich in alternately wry and depressing details about the human condition.