The Angry Birds Movie Review

About five or six years ago I read an article that said an Angry Birds movie was in development. Anyone I mentioned this to refused to believe it because the market was already flooded with merchandise based on the popular casual gaming app and no one wanted to see more of it. Additionally, because making a story based on launching spherically shaped birds at building blocks with a sling shot doesn't sound like it has much story potential. Well, The Angry Birds Movie (2016) did finally hit theaters and it was every bit as weak, ridiculous, and unwanted as everyone assumed it would be.

Flightless birds lead a mostly happy existence, except for Red (Jason Sudeikis), who just can't get past the daily annoyances of life. His temperament leads him to anger management class, where he meets fellow misfits Chuck (Josh Gad) and Bomb (Danny McBride). Red becomes even more agitated when his feathered brethren welcome green pigs lead by Leonard (Bill Hader) to their island paradise. As the swine begin to get under his skin, Red joins forces with Chuck and Bomb to investigate the real reason behind their mysterious arrival. When it is discovered that the pigs steal all the eggs from Bird Island, it's time for the birds to get angry, fight back, and save their children. But the only weapon they've got is a gigantic slingshot the pigs gave them as a gift of good will.

The Angry Birds Movie is, of course, based on the app of the same name. Since it was released in 2009, the Angry Birds game has been downloaded more than 3 billion times across all versions and platforms of mobile devices. Angry Birds has become a big merchandise brand name, creating not only several variations of the popular app game, but also plush toys, board games, t-shirts, candies, a line of Hot Wheels cars, LEGO and K'nex sets, sports equipment, pet toys, and more. With so many products already available, it was only a matter of time before a movie was produced. The Angry Birds Movie did feel a lot like both a celebration of the game and a 97 minute commercial for the game and existing merchandise. Of course, there had to be even more merchandise produced specific to the movie itself. The Angry Birds Movie really was a cash grab, and it wasn't even a vaguely amusing cash grab like the Minions movie.

On the one hand, The Angry Birds Movie doesn't take itself too seriously. That's a very good thing, given the ridiculousness of its premise. But at the same time it doesn't take the ridiculous premise seriously enough to take advantage of the potential humor. Jokes often fall flat as they simply draw attention to how weird a situation is. For example, when the anger management instructor is launched via the slingshot, she literally drops fireballs out of her butt onto the pig city below. That happens to be what this character does in the game, but it's given no explanation in the movie. They could have made a joke about spicy burritos, have her be embarrassed when her lady-like demeanor is compromised, or just about anything, but instead they had Red quip "Well, how about that? She can shoot fireballs out of her butt." That was the joke. Many jokes are as bland and fall flat like this. There are a number of bird and pig related puns, most of which I thought felt forced and were disappointing as a connoisseur of delightfully terrible puns. There are a few amusing nods to the game, such as in the opening scene, when Red asks two birds what they rate the birthday cake he delivers, he asks how many stars out of three. This is a reference to the game; the highest score you can get is three stars.

The humor was disappointing, and the writing in general was pretty weak, too. Rescuing eggs of course makes sense, but none of the character's motives beyond that makes much sense. They just do what they do without much of a rhyme or reason behind it. The aforementioned incident of Red delivering a cake had Red arrive late. We're not given a reason for him to be late, and the recipients of the cake accuse him being lazy, tired, or of sleeping in. Nothing suggests that these might have been the case, and Red is established as being a responsible, if grumpy, individual. The reasons for events happening and the motives for why characters act the way they do are left unexplored and unexplained, making the story and characters very weak and flimsy. I realize this is a children's movie, but there are much better children's movies you could take your children to see. The Peanuts Movie, for example, was outstanding. The Angry Birds Movie, is so poor in quality that I can't imagine anyone who is not ten years old or younger enjoying it much. There are a series of 2-D animated shorts based off of the Angry Birds game which have far superior writing than this full length movie.

The Angry Birds Movie is to date the best film adapted from an app. This is a pretty poor endorsement, as I cannot think of a second example of such a phenomena. The story is predictably weak, the humor frequently falls flat, the characters are shallow and have nebulous motivation, and the movie drags on for longer than needed. The Animation is decent enough and the all star cast was great, apart from the lousy script they had to work with. I realize I'm not the target audience here, but Author C. S. Lewis once said, “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.” I believe the same can be said about children's movies; a lot of Disney films are enjoyed enthusiastically by adults. The Angry Birds Movie is mostly an annoying commercial for products you likely already own. This is not worth seeing in theaters, wait for it on home video if you must. If you really want an Angry Birds experience, you're better off spending movie ticket money on the entire collection of Angry Birds ads-free game apps and spending the evening playing those on your Smartphone.

Is there another casual gaming app that might make a good movie? Comment below and let me know!

Knights of Badassdom Movie Review

One of my coworkers recently discovered what a geek and movie buff I am, and she insisted that I watch Knights of Badassdom (2013). I'd seen the trailer some time back and had a small interest in seeing the movie. She let me borrow her copy and I did got a kick out of it, though the weird humor is only going to appeal to a small demographic.

Joe (Ryan Kwanten) is completely disconsolate after his girlfriend Beth (Margarita Levieva) dumps him. In an attempt to break him out of his funk, Joe's geeky buddies Eric (Steve Zahn) and Hung (Peter Dinklage) drag  Joe out to the woods to join them in a large scale Dungeons & Dragons-style Live Action Role Playing (LARP) game. Trouble arises when a prop spell book that Eric purchased on the internet ends up being a genuine tome of grimoire. While pretending to raise Joe's character from death, they unwittingly conjure up a blood-lusting succubus from hell that takes on the appearance of Joe's ex-girlfriend. Joe, Erik, and Hung are joined by fellow LARPers Gwen (Summer Glau) and Gunther (Brett Gipson) to stop the demon. Unfortunately, all they have to fight with are Styrofoam prop weapons.

This cast is brilliant. The movie itself is a celebration of geeky enthusiasm, so the geek icons that appear in Knights of Badassdom make it all the more fun. Ryan Kwanten is known for playing Jason Stackhouse in HBO's hit series True Blood. Peter Dinklage is a fan favorite as Tyrion Lannister in HBO's Game of Thrones series. And Summer Glau is well known for her role as River Tam in the Firefly series and as Cameron Phillips in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. While these characters don't necessarily reference the roles that made them geek icons, the fact that they are all together will certainly excite geek viewers.

The weird humor is only going to appeal to a specific demographic. It's absolutely geek-style humor. In the scene where the three friends first meet Gwen and Gunther, Erik quips, " And Guinevere the fearless, who's plus-three ass of perfection should keep the memory of she who should not be mentioned at bay." referring to Beth the ex-girlfriend. Gwen responds to this with, " Plus-three? Clearly you underestimate my endowments." There is another scene where other LARPers are speaking in articulate Old English while subtitles appear below translating the dialogue into complaints about his wife making him clean out the garage. The dialogue is witty and funny; most of the jokes will be the most funny to people who play Role Playing Games or who know people who do. The humor seeks to point a finger at the LARP community and laugh at their strange hobby every bit as much as it makes self-referential in-jokes that only LARPers would likely understand.

This is a Horror-Comedy movie, and it clings to horror tropes like an alien facehugger to John Hurt. Clearly none of the characters in Knights of Badassdom passed Horror Movie survival 101; the monster will get you if you have sex, drink, or go off on your own and be different. For a comedy, I would have expected this to be done with some irony, much like Cabin in the Woods did, but it fell short and just ended up being a gross run-of-the-mill slasher sort of movie. The deaths were silly but gross; it looked as fake as any low budget movie gore would, but still was gross.

Knights of Badassdom was kind of fun. The story was hard to take very seriously, even for a comedy. The humor was hit or miss, but when it hit it was funny; more so if you've ever played Dungeons and Dragons. The cast was lots of fun, I understand that the main cast went through Live Action Role Playing sessions before filming and Peter Dinklage was declared the most successful out of everyone. That would probably have been more fun to watch than this movie was. Knights of Badassdom reminded me of a grittier, more crude, and very violent version of Unicorn City. Unicorn City is squeaky clean, family friendly movie that features lots of geek humor while Knights of Badassdom is a crude and bloody romp that features a lot of geek humor that is intended for more mature audiences. Both have their merit and I'm glad I saw them, but neither of them is worth more than one viewing.

If you were to make a geek-fest movie, what collection of geek icon actors would you use? The more mismatched the better! Comment below and tell me about it!

X-Men: Days of Future Past Review

The X-Men film franchise has possibly been the longest running superhero film series after The Marvel Cinematic Universe which comprises all the movies surrounding The Avengers. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) acts as a sequel to both X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: First Class, it's the seventh X-Men movie, and ties the original trilogy and prequel together beautifully. It's also the best film in the franchise in my opinion!

Sentinels, robots that were created for the purpose of hunting down mutants, were released in 1973. 50 years later the Sentinels would also hunt humans who aid mutants. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his X-Men try their best to deal with the Sentinels but the modern robots they face are able to adapt and deal with all mutant abilities. Xavier decides to go back in time to change things. He asks Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who can send a person's consciousness into the person's past, to send him back, but she can only send someone back a few weeks because if she sends someone back further it could harm them. So Logan (Hugh Jackman) decides to go back himself because his healing powers might be able to withstand it. Xavier tells Logan that Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is responsible for the Sentinels' adaptive powers. When she learned about the Sentinels, she sought out and killed Bollivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the man who created them. Xavier also tells Logan that Mystique would be caught and studied, and her shape-shifting abilities would be added to the Sentinels, thus granting them the ability to adapt. Logan must go to the younger Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and ask him to help; the problem is that Xavier was despondent at the time and was taking a drug which allows him to walk but takes away his powers. Logan is asked to find young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and enlist his help also to prevent the Sentinels from ever being created.

Days of Future Past has a huge cast. A lot of actors return to reprise their roles from other films in the franchise, some as main characters and others as brief cameos. We also get a lot of new faces, too. Peter Dinklage is a actor born with achondroplasia, a common form of dwarfism, and is known for his role as Tyrion Lannister in HBO's Game of Thrones series. In Days of Future Past, he's the main antagonist, and is a business man through and through. He sees a potential to market something and is literally creating a threat out of mutants, who are virtually unheard of in the 1970's. He has no real hatred of mutants himself; he's just trying to market a product and goes to several countries' governments trying to sell his robots. I don't recall the original Trask having dwarfism, but Dinklage plays the role beautifully.

Another new face is Evan Peters as Quicksilver. This is a different actor portraying the same character we saw in the post-credits scene in Captian America: The Winter Soldier. Disney owns the Marvel Cinematic Universe while Fox owns the rights to X-Men, so these two versions of Quicksilver are not actually connected to each other. I wish Quicksilver was in the movie more; he was a really fun character. He can think and move at supersonic speeds, and is annoyed that nothing else moves at the same speed he does. The way he uses his powers is remarkable and creative, and he provides some comic relief to the movie.

The special effects in Days of Future Past were phenomenal. The 1970's Sentinels looked a lot like how a big robot from the 70's would look, while the future Sentinels were downright terrifying. In fact, future Sentinels were possibly some of the scariest movie killer robots I can think of; easily on par with the Sentinels from The Matrix series or the T-800 from The Terminator. The action scenes were fantastic, though a couple scenes with the future Sentinels were pretty violent. Had some shots lasted a little longer or if they had been much more graphic, the movie could have received an R rating. It did not, of course, but they were kind of pushing it. I suppose that dismembering someone made of metal is considered less graphic than dismembering someone made of flesh. Either way, I'd be mindful of the age of any kids you take to see this movie.

Time Travel stories can get really confusing with alternate time lines, paradoxical dichotomies, and questioning determinism and free will. This one is actually pretty straight forward. That's not to say the story is simple, it just doesn't become needlessly complex due to the time travel element. Having said that, there are a couple of continuity errors between this and other X-Men movies. This is such a good and solid movie that I have decided to believe that those continuity errors were put in place for the sole purpose of correcting really bad story decisions in previous movies. Days of Future Past is a solid story on its own.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is probably my favorite X-Men movie to date. It ties all the other movies together, tells a really good story, features some excellent acting, interesting characters, and some fun cameos from familiar characters. This is such a satisfying X-Men movie that if they were to end the franchise here, I would have nothing to complain about. They won't be ending the franchise here; stick around for a post-credit teaser. While Days of Future Past is great, it's not a particularly good place to start watching the X-Men movies. Make sure you watch X-Men, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: First Class, and maybe Wolverine before diving into this one. You needn't bother with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, that movie was really terrible and doesn't influence the story line here. I recommend catching Days of Future Past in theaters if you can. It's also worth owning once it hits Blu-Ray.

There are still a lot of X-Men storylines and characters that movies can showcase, what would you like to see in an upcoming X-Men film? Comment below and tell me about it!