Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Role-Playing Maims

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The key to a successful Dungeons & Dragons campaign, as I understand it—my knowledge derives not from personal experience, but from pop-cultural representations in shows like Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks, and Community—is the careful blend of imagination, collaboration, and luck. Honor Among Thieves, the new wannabe D&D franchise-starter directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio), possesses each of these qualities in moderate measure, as though it’s distributing a maximum allotment of points across various attributes. It’s mildly creative, a little fortunate (in the current environment, a non-superhero fantasy epic feels positively refreshing), and boisterously cooperative. It is the last of these traits which rescues it from the crowded bucket of corporatized slop, turning yet another soulless IP extension into a passable diversion.

If that sounds like faint praise, remember that we’re talking about a big-screen adaptation of a fucking board game. Yet the pleasure of RPGs lies in their facility for assembling friends around a table (Daley got his acting start playing one of the nerdy gamers on Freaks and Geeks), so it’s fitting that this Dungeons & Dragons functions as an ensemble heist picture. Sure, there are presumed easter eggs in the form of fancy artifacts, mighty creatures, powerful enchantments, and exotic locations. (As the title promises, we begin in a dungeon before eventually meeting multiple dragons.) But most important, there is a motley gang of roguish outlaws, banding together to accomplish a common purpose. Read More

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John Wick: Chapter 4: Sit Back, Relax, and Destroy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4

During one of the many, many fight scenes in John Wick: Chapter 4, an antagonist named Caine issues a call for expediency: “Let’s get this shit over with.” I hesitate to quibble with Caine, not least because he’s a deadly assassin played with balletic grace by Donnie Yen, but his directive here isn’t just grouchy; it violates the very spirit of the franchise. The John Wick pictures are creatures of excess and extravagance. Their hero may be a ruthlessly efficient killer, but the movies which sustain him are fueled by elaborate martial artistry and ornate mythology. They don’t get shit over with; they deliver some of the craziest shit imaginable.

Chapter 4, the latest, longest, and (potentially) last installment in the series which began in 2014, capably fulfills the franchise’s extremist imperatives, even as it subtly interrogates them. Or maybe not so subtly. It’s been nine years and four films since a group of Russian thugs killed the wrong guy’s puppy, and the plot hasn’t really changed ever since; John is still angry, still hunted, and still—as played with soulful physicality by Keanu Reeves—meting out retribution via manifold means and gruff precision. The prior episode, the bonkers and gloriously operatic Parabellum, essentially finished where it started, with a bloodied but unbroken John vowing revenge against the sinister cabal known as the High Table. Chapter 4 continues this endless battle—a rather lopsided duel in which one person wages war against what seem to be thousands of expendable henchmen (when someone asks John how many people he needed to kill to reach a certain point, he responds, with characteristic curtness, “A lot”)—but it also contemplates the existential toll that time and death have levied on the bearded man in the bulletproof suit. Read More

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Stop Citing Rotten Tomatoes

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Scenes from Zootopia, Paddington 2, and Citizen Kane

Ratings are currency. The brunt of criticism, whether you’re writing it or reading it, is words, and words are work. In our entertainment-glutted present, when countless pieces of art compete for your precious time—there is always a new show to binge, a new game to play—people crave a shorthand to cut through the noise. And so, regardless of the specific metric—four stars! C plus! 9 out of 10 fireball emojis!—ratings function as a useful communicative shorthand, crudely but efficiently reducing a critic’s detailed ruminations to a digestible letter or number. Set against this quant-obsessed backdrop, it’s understandable that Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation giant which assigns a “score” to every movie that’s meant to convey its percentage of positive appraisals, has grown to dominate contemporary cinematic discourse. But while the site’s cultural ubiquity may be explicable, it’s also unfortunate, because Rotten Tomatoes is fucking awful.

Actually, it’s worse than awful; it’s meaningless. And even worse than meaningless, it’s distortive. Rotten Tomatoes purports to answer a straightforward question (“Hey, is this movie any good?”), yet in the process it misleads viewers and, more crucially, reframes discussions. The lifeblood of criticism is conversation: the dialectical exchange of opinions and the robust expression of ideas. Yet under the dominion of Rotten Tomatoes, the score doesn’t supplement criticism; it replaces it altogether. It has acquired the fearsome power of language, supplanting the very words it claims to summarize. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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Oscars 2022: Everything (Everywhere) Is Fine

Jeremy BeckOscars
Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, and Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once

It could have been worse. That may seem like a low bar when judging the quality of the Oscars, but considering that the prior two years were disastrous—first the Steven Soderbergh-produced telecast that ended with a tribute to Chadwick Boseman which misfired spectacularly when he failed to win Best Actor, then the… incident involving Chris Rock and Will Smith—a carefully cultivated mediocrity felt like a win this time around. As host, Jimmy Kimmel was hit-and-miss, alternating between winning one-liners and groaning bits. (Thankfully, he kept Slap Discourse to a minimum, even as he tossed off one of his best quips in service of it: “without a hitch, and without Hitch.”) That unevenness extended to the presenters (the usual blend of funny and forced), the speeches (some tremendous, some tedious), and the song performances (yay “Naatu Naatu,” boo Son Lux). Everything averaged out to fine, and when it comes to the Oscars at this point, “fine” is something I can live with.

As for the movies themselves, the big winners were Everything All at Once, which scooped up seven Oscars—including six of the so-called Big Eight, which I believe is a record (I’m too tired to research it)—and All Quiet on the Western Front, which totaled four. (In fact, only one other film took home multiple prizes; more on that later.) Because the Academy tends to save its highest-profile categories for later in the evening, All Quiet appeared to be positioning itself as a Best Picture threat, especially when it ripped off three straight victories midway through the show. But that was a mirage; this was always Everything Everywhere’s night, from boisterous beginning (welcome to the stage, Ke Huy Quan!) to triumphant end. Read More

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