Terrible Plan! Movie Reviews

What I liked: The architecture of a heist movie has 4 stages: stage 1 explain how hard the job is, stage 2 come up with a ridiculously elaborate plan to accomplish the job and acquire hard to find equipment, stage 3 execute the plan but something goes terribly wrong, stage 4 sneaky twist and huge pay off. The Solo movie takes the bold move of streamlining the first two and a half steps, picking up with stage 3.5 "Something goes terribly wrong". This saves everyone the slow wind up to the actual action. This saved time translates into a movie with not one but all the heists. We have grand theft, customs evasion, train robbery, vault robbery, the classic hustle, and of course smuggling. I guess they may have tried to crowd too a little much in because they also almost always skip stage 4. This stage skipping also means that we don't know if the things they are doing are actually hard or they are just incompetent. I'm surprised more heist movies don't explore this ...

What I liked: This is an inspiring story. Not, as one might imagine from the title and cover art, in an early 20th century "We bought a zoo" kind of way or even a look at all these cute zoo animals kind of way. It is inspiring in a Schindler's List kind of way, the story of a Polish family who used their destroyed zoo as a cover to smuggle more than 300 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto. This is similar in scale to the efforts of the ten Boom family and about 1/4 the scale of Schindler's operation. But it this endeavor, in addition to hiding the Jews and passing them on to other safe houses, included a massive smuggling operation to extract them from the ghetto. The characters make courageous decisions in terrible terrible circumstances. Clearly the main characters are brave and mastermind an elaborate rescue operation, but all of the side characters ring true too. I don't know if the characters represent individuals or are composites but the film did an excellent j...

What I liked: This is a solid monster movie. So if you have been looking for the next Creature from the Black Lagoon, where it takes the super fast, super perceptive, super strong monster an hour and a half to eat three people and a raccoon, look no further. This film does an excellent job of playing on stress. The best comparison I can make is to a syllabus. You know exactly what is coming and exactly how it will happen, but you have no choice but wait the entire semester for it to happen. This makes normal things, like going up and down stairs, stressful. It also makes you wish the monsters would just hurry up already. Because the monsters have highly acute hearing the main characters communicate predominantly in sign language. The actress who plays the deaf daughter is actually deaf which is pretty cool. Several parents I know will feel vindicated to learn that noisy toys are the ultimate downfall in the movie. You have been right all along. Similarly, I have spent enough time on ...

What I liked: This was a lot of fun to watch. The stunts were good the booby traps and puzzles were elaborate. I was having enough fun to not get too concerned about falling 300 feet into a raging river, or the creative parachuting, or the excessive effect of 6 sticks of dynamite, or how everyone was doing pretty well for being shot in the chest, stabbed, breaking all their bones, etc. The plot is pretty similar to Last Crusade with fewer Germans and less Sean Connery. I liked the sidekick he was not useless and seemed reasonably invested in the "let's sail into the most dangerous ocean in the world to find and release the mythical queen of death" plan. What I didn't: There is a long tradition of people bringing the wrong kind of weaponry to gun fights but an ice axe? really? Why do you even have an ice axe in the tropics? And there are guns lying around and double guns is kind of your trademark. Every time I build a prison tomb to contain the evil queen of death ...