Hello, it’s me, The Blog Complainer and I have been busy at the movies. I have watched four movies in four days. I already made a separate review for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie so check it out if you’re interested. Right now I’ll be giving my thoughts on the other films I saw this week. This should be interesting!

Movie one is called Ride Like a Girl. (Great title.) An Aussie film that follows the trueish events of Michelle Payne and her journey to becoming a successful and famous female jockey.

Some people I know have been begging me to review it since it came out and, don’t worry, I am happy to report that Ride Like a Girl is as whatever as I thought it would be.

There is definitely some good stuff about it. I like the character of Michelle Payne. Teresa Palmer did a great job of portraying her. Despite being annoyingly arrogant, Michelle Payne is a good role model for young women as she’s very determined and keeps on fighting despite the high stakes the movie nicely sets-up. You could almost say this is a feminist’s dream movie.

Most of the other performances are not too bad, but none stand out against the lead. The cinematography is okay and there are some decent shots. The only thing I really remember is little Michelle riding a horse with a painfully obvious fake sun in the background. It looked like it belonged in a bad kids movie, which leads into my negatives.

This movie is rated PG, which isn’t really a good sign as the movie feels very toned down. As someone who’s very familiar with Australia I can tell you Aussies are foul mouthed. This whole movies feels like there’s a giant kiddie filter over it, which is annoying as certain scenes are ruined because it feels too light to take seriously. The easy going feeling also makes me feel most of the events didn’t really happen.

It’s not a bad film by any means, but it’s a movie I bet I will forget. It’s a light, fluffy, feel good movie for kids, older people and no one else. Just let me know when the edgy version of Ride Like a Girl comes out and I might give it higher than a 6.

Gemini Man I was only excited to see because of how awful it looked in the trailers. Now that I have seen it it’s still really bad, but not as entertaining as I would have liked.

This is an Ang Lee movie, which was a bit of shock as I’ve only heard of how great his movies are. I would still like to check them out some day, but this is a real departure from some of his previous movies as this is so flawed.

From what I’ve heard Ang Lee is a visionary man and loves to push film making technology to it’s limit. So this film features de-ageing technology, which is so revolutionary that 3 other films this year have already done this. A bit late, but de-ageing of other Will Smith is sometimes okay and sometimes laughably bad.

As for the rest of the movie there really isn’t much to say besides it’s a boring action movie, with a messy plot and a terrible script. Will Smith isn’t too bad at playing himself and the clone, Clive Owen played a throwaway bad guy and Benedict Wong was a complete waste of time. The movie is quite long and there are unnecessary scenes that don’t go anywhere or it’s a character repeating what we just heard 3 minutes ago. There’s a clone Will Smith, I already knew that, but thanks for reminding me for the 75th time.

It’s quite an inconsistent movie too. It’s a serious movie with awfully inserted comedy banter throughout. It doesn’t work and it’s not even funny. The action can range from okay to down right ridiculous. Again I just wish it stuck to one or the other because the really absurd action in this movie is very funny and I wanted more of that!

Gemini Man is a mess. You’ve got the stuff you associate with an Ang Lee film and the boring studio action movie all together and it does not work. Here’s a happy 3/10. Gemini Man is disappointingly not worth your time.

Our final movie Hustlers has been making the rounds for praise coming from critics. We’re in the Oscars period so despite many people, myself included, thinking the Oscars are a joke we still feel the need to guess who they should give their awards to. (Old habits never die I guess.)

Hustlers is a pretty good movie filled with great performances, great directing, it’s very colourful and it features a really good empowering story of these stripper ladies conning the greedy corrupted Wall Street businessmen. It was engaging all the way through as the movie does a really good job at making these women seem like normal flawed people, which is something that you don’t really find in many movies anymore.

The movie focuses on all these different women coming together and supposedly becoming like a family but I didn’t feel it. The two leads stole the movie while everyone else felt like an after thought. Constance Wu was really good as our somewhat conflicted main character, but Jennifer Lopez was incredible. This is a surprise to me as all of her previous movies have looked terrible. Her character Ramona was the best written because despite being a very selfish big headed person, they managed to make her quite sympathetic. She’s very low key so it’s hard to say how I really feel about her actions.

Hustlers feels reminiscent of a Martin Scorsese movie, but the director, Lorene Scafaria, really makes it her own by making it charming and giving the movie it’s own voice. I also like the song choices in this movie as they all fit nicely with the tone. I enjoyed the vibrant exotic atmosphere of the strip club as it feels like it’s own character.

My only drawbacks are that it takes a while to get the ball rolling, some characters probably could have been dropped and it can be a bit slow. The only thing I found annoying is at the very end when they introduce this condition that a character apparently had the whole time and it’s the cause of the downward spiral. This is only mentioned at the very end and it felt contrived.

Let’s wrap this baby up. Hustlers is the best movie out of the four I watched this weekend. If this movie interests you I recommend a watch and my score is a solid 8 out of 10. I’m out of things to say so I have been The Blog Complainer, signing out.