Heist

Carmen Sandiego – The Sticky Rice Caper

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Carmen Sandiego – The Sticky Rice Caper
  • IMDb: link

Carmen Sandiego - The Sticky Rice Caper television review

Following the two-part opener explaining Carmen‘s (Gina Rodriguez) origins, the show sets in on a more straightforward episode with “The Sticky Rice Caper” which sends our thief to Indonesia. The episode introduces two new characters as part of Carmen’s team in a brother and sister (Michael Hawley and Abby Trott) who first help Carmen allude some mysterious agents in Paris and later help her prevent V.I.L.E. Academy‘s sinister plot to wipe out the rice crops on the island of Java for the sole purpose of profit. Both Crackle (Michael Goldsmith), who gets a harsh lesson about failure from V.I.L.E., and the pair of Chase Devineaux (Rafael Petardi) and Julia Argent (Charlet Chung), and their continued pursuit of Carmen, return in limited roles in subplots not connected to the main storyline.

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Carmen Sandiego – Becoming Carmen Sandiego

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Carmen Sandiego – Becoming Carmen Sandiego
  • IMDb: link

Carmen Sandiego - Becoming Carmen Sandiego television review

After opening with a stylish heist sequence, the two-part opener to Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego takes place mostly in flashbacks which fill in the history of the world’s most famous thief, including where she learned her skills and acquired both her unusual name and trademark hat. While the robbery truly is the best part of the two episodes (making me hopeful that the remainder of the season will be even better), the flashbacks are an interesting way to rewrite the Carmen Sandiego‘s (Gina Rodriguez) history for the purposes of the new show.

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Widows

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Widows
  • IMDb: link

Widows movie reviewRe-imaging a twelve-hour mini-series into a two-hour film, Steve McQueen delivers an action-drama featuring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Debicki as the widows of an armed robbery team who are forced by the gangster (Brian Tyree Henry) turned political figure their husbands robbed to pay back what they owe.

There’s an awful lot of plot and superfluous characters here, most likely because they appeared in the mini-series. A tighter focus on Viola Davis’ character and the robbery itself could have helped shore up the script a bit more, which gets lost in the weeds a bit when dealing with the political aspirations of a criminal and the criminality of the son (Colin Farrell) running for his father’s (Robert Duvall) office, as it seems to need at least one additional rewrite. The also the trouble with Debicki’s arc, while her new-found self-confidence makes sense as part of the robbery I’m not sure how it makes her twice as intelligent by the movie’s end (seriously, I was starting to expect a Keyser Söze twist). And the film isn’t without twists, although none are particularly necessary to the overall plot or natural conclusion of the story. (And one actually wraps up things a bit too neatly.)

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Firefly – The Train Job / War Stories

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Firefly – The Train Job / War Stories
  • wiki: link
  • wiki: link

Firefly - The Train Job / War Stories TV review

This week’s Throwback Tuesday post takes us into the black for more of Joss Whedon‘s Firefly. Although separated by several episodes, “The Train Job” and “War Stories” are connected by the team’s involvement with the sadistic criminal Adelai Niska (Michael Fairman) who hires Serenity and her crew to perform a job for him in “The Train Job” and proceeds to take his pound of flesh in “War Stories” for their failure to see the job through. Both episodes are character-driven and delve into the people who keep Serenity flying. In the first we discover that, despite being smugglers and outlaws, there is a limit to how far Mal (Nathan Fillion) and his crew will go. And in the second we see the complex dynamic in the Mal/Zoe (Gina Torres)/Wash (Alan Tudyk) relationship along with how far the rest of those aboard the ship will go when one of them is put in danger by a sadistic madman like Niska.

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Ocean’s 8

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Ocean’s 8
  • IMDb: link

Ocean's 8 movie reviewI love heist films, and I love the Ocean’s 11 franchise. Admitting this, I may be willing to cut the latest film more slack than the average viewer. Without a doubt, Ocean’s 8 is the weakest of any of the four films. It lacks the style and pace of director Steven Soderbergh‘s 2001 film as Gary Ross drags out scenes far more than necessary. It also doesn’t help that the script lacks the wit of the original, often struggling to put its charismatic stars in the best situations.

Borrowing quite a bit from the 2001 film, Ocean’s 8 begins with Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) getting out of prison and immediately putting together a crew of old friends (Cate Blanchett, Sarah Paulson, and Mindy Kaling) and some new acquaintances (Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter) for a score she’s been planning for years. The cast is great, and they work well together. However, the script struggles early in offering much of interest for them to do together on-screen. The fact that the heist is far more straightforward, and lacks the last-second surprises of the previous films, also is a bit of a disappointment. That said, once the set-up is complete and the heist planning begins, things pick up.

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