2.5 Razors

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
  • IMDb: link

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil movie reviewHonestly, other than the look of Angelina Jolie as the title character, I could remember almost nothing about 2014’s Maleficent walking in to view its sequel. In five years, I’m betting I’ll remember even less about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

Jolie and Elle Fanning return as the sorceress Maleficent and the Queen of the Moors, Aurora. The film opens with a proposal by Prince Philip (Harris Dickinson) to wed Aurora and unite his father’s human kingdom with the magical realm that Maleficent turned over to Aurora at the conclusion of the first film. While Philip’s father (Robert Lindsay) is quite taken with the idea, neither Maleficent nor the prince’s mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) think much of the pairing as both hold bigoted views towards the other kingdom and the races that inhabit them.

The crux of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil isn’t really about Maleficent. Nor is it about Aurora and her love story. Instead, the film is focused on the evil machinations of Queen Ingrith (Pfeiffer) as she works to spur on a war that antagonists on both sides are more than willing to fight once she lights the spark.

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Arrow – Starling City

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Arrow – Starling City
  • wiki: link

Arrow - Starling City television review

Arrow opens its final season with a somewhat perplexing episode finding Oliver (Stephen Amell) repeating history on a parallel Earth as he’s rescued from Lian Yu and taken back to Starling City (eight years later than in his timeline). The episode allows for the show to replay scenes from the show’s First Season and return a few familiar faces. What we later learn is that Oliver is on Earth-2, the home of Laurel (Katie Cassidy) who has returned to her Earth as a hero, and his mission involves procuring an important power source necessary in the coming crisis. What isn’t ever really explained is why the the Monitor (LaMonica Garrett) needed Oliver to procure the Dwarf Star in the first place. The episode ends with Oliver successful but also with the destruction of the Earth as the Arrow offers the first look at what is at stake in the coming crisis.

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Doctor Doom #1

/ / Comics

Doctor Doom #1 comic reviewDoctor Doom, reinstated as the absolute ruler of Latveria (although not for long), gets a new comic as Doctor Doom #1 opens with Doom’s vocal opposition to using a black hole on the moon as a means of cooling the Earth and dealing with climate change. Ridiculed for his dissenting opinion, Doom is once again cast as the villain when all evidence to an attack on the station points back to Latveria and Victor von Doom.

Casting Doom as a victim wouldn’t be my first choice, and the miserly grumpiness of the character (really his defining characteristic here) leaves something to be desired. The thread of Kang, who is apparently tied to Doom on some level, is one of the issue’s bright spots foreshadowing something larger on the horizon.

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Nancy Drew – Pilot

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Nancy Drew – Pilot
  • IMDb: link

Nancy Drew - Pilot television review

Our introduction to Nancy Drew (Kennedy McMann), the title character in The CW’s new series which takes its name from the well-known kid detective who has remained popular and in print since her first appearance in 1930, isn’t solving a case but hooking up with a boy she barely knows in a garage. It’s here that the show’s creators break from the tradition of the cute and precocious Nancy Drew template and offer an older, although not necessarily wiser, version of the character. McMann turns out to be a fairly good choice for this version of Nancy who, in the first episode, deals with a murder, a ghost mystery, the lasting effects of her mother’s death on her life plans, and the supernatural. It’s the last of these that becomes the hardest two swallow, especially as it becomes increasingly clear just how much of ghosts and things that go bump in the night the show’s writers are prepared to accept.

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Aladdin

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Aladdin (2019)
  • IMDb: link

Aladdin DVD reviewThe 2019 live-action remake of Disney’s animated film of the same name is a mostly harmless, and mostly pointless, endeavor that adds little (if anything) new to the tale (other than giving the Genie a girlfriend). As in the previous remakes, the plot and songs are brought in from the original (although this version sadly lacks Robin Williams‘ madcap antics that helped elevate an otherwise pedestrian story).

Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott star as street thief Aladdin and Princess Jasmine with Will Smith stepping in as the Genie and Marwan Kenzari providing the most bland version of the villain Jafar possible. Although there’s certainly money spent on CGI for the project, the film lacks any of the magic of the animated feature.

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