Will Smith

Men in Black II

Just a couple of weeks ago I posted a trailer for “Men in Black II” and said that I somehow missed it this movie altogether. And here I am, holding a copy of “Men in Black II” in my hands. Not that I was looking for it in particular, but I got it via a concerned reader of this blog. Thanks Alex.

The film is a sequel to the first part and is very similar in a lot of ways. It is a light entertainment with a few bits of sci-fi in it. Both Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are in it. With quite a few aliens and big guns.

This part however is not as good as the original movie. It tries to be, but it’s not. It is entertaining and funny sometimes. But it’s much weaker in every way – less action, simpler story, etc. I still enjoyed watching it and it also made want to watch the first film again.

Overall, 3 out of 5. Watch it if you have nothing else in your queue, but don’t spend any time looking for this movie. Don’t expect much either, and you’ll probably enjoy it.

I Am Legend

I went to see “I Am Legend” with a few friends of mine. Some of them saw the film before a few times, but decided that it was worth another view anyway. That pushed my expectations up a bit. But. The film was indeed worth it.

Here are the things that I liked, in no particular order:

Will Smith. He is a good actor. It just that most of the times he has to do those rather simplistic roles. But in this one, you can see the talent. He does really good.
Visuals. There are some really cool images in the film. In fact, it’s the visuals that create the bigger part of this movie. There is some excellent photography, which could have been easily transformed into still images and paintings.
Drama. There seems to be no shortage of movies about viruses, zombies, and the end of the world. However, so many of them fail to create the drama around the events. Broken families, numerous victims, and blood rivers seem to be present everywhere. But rarely they are used to create the horrific sense of sadness and pity.

Of course, there were a few things that sucked in this movie. I’m not going to go through the details on these, since they aren’t worth it. However I’d like to mention the zombies. I think that the choice of rather cartoon-ish characters was wrong. More “realism” in this area could have made the movie almost perfect.

I’d give it a strong 7.5 out of 10, and a recommendation to watch it, even if you are not a fan of the sci-fi end of the world horror. It’s pretty good.

Shark Tale

I’ve just got disappointed by “Shark Tale“. Despite all the hype around it, it turned out to be pretty boring and badly drawn animation. It had no realism like “Finding Nemo” did. Fish here were walking on two leg-like fins, used another two hand-like fins to do stuff, and had ugly faces on top of their bodies. These all loked nothing like fish. For some reason also, I don’t get it why they moved half the time vertically and half the time horizontally. Oh, and there was no water at all. I mean there was not a second with an ocean surface, and there was only a few bubles to make you beleive some liquid was involved in the environment.

First half of the movie I was thinking that I didn’t like it because I’ve already seen “Finding Nemo”, which is way better. But than I realized that it is not the reason. The real reason is that this movie sucked.

Bad animation on top of the beaten usual story is something that has no entertainment. Ok, there were a couple of jokes that made me smile, but they were by far not enough for the hour and a half. That’s a pity, it could have been funnier.

5 out of 10.