2.5 Razors

The Endgame – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: The Endgame – Pilot
  • IMDb: link

Feeling like it was inspired more than a little by The Blacklist, the first episode of NBC’s The Endgame introduces us to a super-criminal (Morena Baccarin) in control of a vast global network who allows herself to be captured the the United States Government to further her own plans and put herself in the path of a single agent (Ryan Michelle Bathe). While the heads of the various agencies are at first smug at the prize they’ve snared, they soon realize who is in a trap when Elena Federova (Baccarin) masterminds a number of bank heists across the city while still under FBI lock up.

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Dragons: The Nine Realms – First Flight

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Dragons: The Nine Realms – First Flight Part 1 and Part 2
  • wiki: link
  • wiki: link

Well this is an unexpected series? Set more than a thousand years after the various movies and TV-shows that make up the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, comes Dragons: The Nine Realms. Set in present day, our main character is precocious teen Tom Kullersen (Jeremy Shada) who relocates with his scientist mother (Julia Stiles) to the ICARIS research station investigating the Kullersen Fissure which holds a secret no one has guessed: a pathway to a world of dragons. Obviously a modern interpretation of a very familiar character to the franchise, Tom will be the one to discover a dragon and unearth a whole new world. Or, to be more precise, a much older one.

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Marry Me

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Marry Me
  • IMDb: link

With a pair of likable stars and a braindead romcom plot, Marry Me is pretty much exactly what you would expect. The unlikley pairing between celebrity Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez) and schoolteacher Charlie Gibert (Owen Wilson) comes about through convoluted means when his friend (Sarah Silverman) drags him to Kat’s live concert where her live engagement goes sideways due to her fiancé’s (Maluma) infidelity and she marries a random member of the audience instead.

The saving grace to balance the inherit weakness to the plot is the charm of the two stars. And Lopez and Owens are good here as characters who seem smarter than to get themselves mixed up in such a ridiculous circumstance. An American version of Notting Hill with a heavy amount of social media and brand perception thrown in, Marry Me is far from a must-see, but if you are forced to sit down for a romcom, you could certainly do worse.

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Naomi – Enigma

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Naomi – Enigma
  • wiki: link

After discovering that her parents knew she arrived from another world, Naomi McDuffie (Kaci Walfall) sets out to learn as much about her murky origins as possible. The flashbacks to “Enigma” are underwhelming to say the least, especially compared to how the reveal works in the original comics. I’m not sure if Naomi’s parents are still hiding more details from her (like say one of her parents also not being from this world) or if the episode’s writing is simply substandard and will continue to recon story and plot at random as the series has done repeatedly since the first episode to offer underwhelming reveals.

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Death on the Nile

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Death on the Nile (2022)
  • IMDb: link

Writer/director/star Kenneth Branagh returns to reprise his role as Hercule Poirot in this follow-up to 2017’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. The adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile isn’t as successful, in part due to source material not being as strong this time around and in part for some questionable creative decisions.

It takes far too long to get to the setting for our murder mystery, let alone the murder itself. By the time the body has dropped more than half the film seems to have already passed. In a somewhat defiant attempt to justify the character’s look in the previous film, Branagh opens with a flashback explaining the reasoning behind Poirot’s ridiculous mustache. After jumping forward, we are given multiple scenes setting up various characters, both in London and in Egypt, before finally get them all together on a ship sailing down the Nile River.

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