2.5 Razors

Vacation Friends

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Vacation Friends
  • IMDb: link

Vacation Friends movie reviewVacation Friends offers your usual odd couple pairing when Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) and Emily (Yvonne Orji) meet the outrageous Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner) through a series of misadventures while on vacation in Mexico. Wackiness ensues. After having a far crazier vacation than they had planned, Emily and Marcus leave Mexico with no plans to ever see the other couple again until they show up months later uninvited at their wedding looking for their “best friends.”

Filled with equal amounts of laughs and groans, and just enough charm to keep you watching, the wacky Vacation Friends offers a nice (if obvious) message about how sometimes the people you least expect can become your closest friends (and not just a fun vacation story). Most of the movie features Marcus and/or Emily freaking out by what the other couple has done next only to realize their embarrassment over Ron and Kyla is blinding them to what the pair bring to their lives (aside from the chaos) and that the couples are better when they are in each other’s lives. It’s not something I’d recommend, but the right audience may have fun with Vacation Friends.

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Guilty Pleasure – Tekken

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Tekken
  • IMDb: link

Tekken movie reviewThrowback Tuesday takes us back to 2009’s adaptation of the Tekken video game franchise. Set in a dystopian 2039, the film follows Jin Kazama (Jonathan Patrick Foo) enter the Iron Fist tournament after the death of his mother (Tamlyn Tomita) where he’ll face off against the likes of Marshall Law (Cung Le), Miguel Caballero Rojo (Roger Huerta), Yoshimitsu (Gary Ray Stearns), and Bryan Fury (Gary Daniels) while hoping to kill the man he blames for his mother’s death Heihachi Mishima (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa).

Tekken is a throwaway action flick that offers some fun while it focuses on the tournament and Jin’s journey. Sure, it gets a bit lost when Kazuya Mishima (Ian Anthony Dale) begins screwing with the tournament in order to kill Jin before he has a chance to win, revealing the truth about Jin’s parentage in the process, but there’s plenty of dumb fun to go around and we get Kelly Overton looking as good as humanly possible as the flirtatious Christie Monteiro, along with Candîce Hillebrand and Marian Zapico as the Williams sisters and Mircea Monroe as Jin’s girlfriend.

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Rutherford Falls – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Rutherford Falls – Pilot
  • IMDb: link

Rutherford Falls - Pilot television review

The “Pilot” episode of Rutherford Falls introduces us to the sleepy town of Rutherford Falls which won’t remain sleepy for much longer. Our two main characters are Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), descendant of the town’s founder and proud owner of its museum, and Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding), a member of the Minishonka Nation, Nathan’s best-friend, and a woman struggling to get the funding to see her people’s heritage get honored and celebrated in the community. The event that shakes up things in the town is the Mayor’s (Dana L. Wilson) decision to move the statue of the town’s founder which sends Nathan over the edge (leading to a complete meltdown in front of the town). The episode is a fine sitcom pilot, successfully introducing the main characters, teasing Nathan having to reconsider long-held beliefs and compromise, and Reagan becoming more self-assured, while the town’s drama begins to be noticed by the larger world.

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The Protégé

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Protégé
  • IMDb: link

The Protégé movie reviewFor having a single writer and no directorial or production upheaval, The Protégé is one hell of a schizophrenic film. I don’t know if director Martin Campbell and screenwriter Richard Wenk had conflicting takes on what the film should be or if The Protégé is simply an example of the final result being far less than the sum of its parts. The action-thriller stars Maggie Q as a bookshop owner/assassin saved as a child from violence in Vietnam by a professional killer (Samuel L. Jackson) who raised and trained her to be his, wait for it, protégé.

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Fantasy Island – Hungry Christine/Mel Loves Ruby

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Fantasy Island (2021) – Hungry Christine/Mel Loves Ruby
  • IMDb: link

Fantasy Island - Hungry Christine/Mel Loves Ruby television review

Everything is new again. Again. For the second time Fantasy Island is rebooted (anyone remember the 90s version with Malcolm McDowell?). Roselyn Sanchez is cast as the island’s caretaker, although the role of her sidekick won’t be filled until the end of the episode when one of the characters gets a… tattoo. The premise of the original show is kept here with guests arriving at the mysterious island to live out a fantasy (which may not always go as planned). It’s not awful, which is more than I can say for some of these reboots, but I don’t know that there’s much magic here either.

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