John Wick: Chapter 4

The master of revenge returns.

After recovering from the previous movie, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is back to bring the pain to more of his assassin acquaintances though this time they are equally arm(ored) which leads to longer and more violent exchanges which are choreographed and filmed beautifully as this franchise has become known for. John does seem to be slowing down a bit, but story wise it still makes sense given what he's been through.

John making more art work.

Speaking of the story, it also is an improvement over the last movie especially with the inclusion of the blind Caine (Donnie Yen) who is more than just someone to fight against. If you liked the previous movies, you will enjoy this one. Just leave your expectations of realism at the door as some people (Mr Wick included) just have a LOT of HP. Highly recommended!

Star Wars: Rogue One

Develop emotional attachments at your peril!

While The Force Awakens is sort of a retelling of A New Hope, Rogue One goes totally off tandem to do it's own thing to tell the story of just how the rebels got their hands on that Death Star schematic.

As expected the visuals and soundtrack are great and the majority of the characters do their parts well too. Big thumbs up to Donnie Yen. It also ticks the box of "action flick" given the number of explosions and my favorite part is that most of the good guys die.

Queue new material for Star Wars Battlefront...

I also like that they show how each of them goes out (though majority is through the same way). None of this Deathly Hallows crap where you just hear about it later or see people possibly dead, possibly sleeping with no explanation. There are equally silly bits though, such as why is there a Prince of Persia trap in the archives? Lol.

Definitely not a movie for everyone, but it turned out to be right up my alley! I give Rogue One 3.5 imperial grenades out of 5.

Ip Man 3

Because Donnie needs to fight Mike Tyson.

After surviving the Japanese occupation (in Ip Man 1) and establishing his school (in Ip Man 2), the humble Ip Man (played by Donnie Yen) is now pretty famous in his town and an as expected, gets involved in protecting it against gangsters and being challenged by another master. The sets are great and the action choreography fantastic as usual. As before, there is some wire fu, possibly a touch too much - more than in the previous two films I think, but it doesn't take too much away. While the group combat scenes are good they still suffer from the "six guys in the back, looking threatening but not doing anything" syndrome for keen eyed viewers. What really shines are the solo fights, especially the one with Mike Tyson!

Very cool.

While Mike's entire plot line of being there is quite flaky, I can overlook it since it is the best fight in the movie for me - which is a problem since the final showdown, while probably more technical and still impressive to watch, is simply not as interesting. Despite all that the story did keep me interested and made me tear up a bit. Maybe I'm just getting soft? I'll have to rewatch the first two someday to see if they managed to get that emotional thing going too.

All up I give it three and a half wooden dummies out of five, and highly recommend it to martial arts buffs or Donnie Yen fans - but only after you've watched the first two Ip Man films. They're just as good or better than this one anyway. :)

Highlander: Endgame

[Post #18 of the Blaugust Challenge!]

One problem the Highlander franchise has is with continuity on a few (but important) aspects of the overall story so for the benefit of this review I'm going to pretend none of the earlier films, series or cartoons exist and just base it on what I saw here. The story focuses on a bunch of immortals, aka people who have "a hard time dying" if they don't get beheaded, one of whom has a huge grudge to another that he has held for centuries, literally. Unfortunately the grudge bearer and main villain happens to also be stronger, so the two heroes of clan MacLeod have to combine their powers to stop him.

Throughout the movie there are various flashbacks to whatever time eras are called for. This is both cool and annoying. Cool in that the sets and costumes department did their job well. Annoying in that the characters speak with different accents (often humorous) within them, and that there are SO MANY of them sometimes strung one after another. Oh, did I mention that they have multiple flashbacks of things that happened earlier in the SAME movie? Well they do! It's like the director thought you would have forgotten at that point. Gahhh.

There's also a redundancy in characters. The entire bad guy group could have been reduced to main bad guy and main female. More importantly Donnie Yen's character could have easily replaced Bruce Payne's slightly overacted and much less skilled martial arts (actor wise) main villain. Well, the grudge would have been slightly shorter but it would have still worked. In truth the best part are the fights, especially with Donnie versus Duncan (Adrian Paul). I wasn't surprised to see Donnie acting as the combat choreographer in the credits.

Best yet most pointless fight in the movie.

In short, this is quite a flawed movie (I'm skipping a LOT of flaws such as obvious stunt doubles and reusing the same fight footage twice) - one that would probably only appeal to regulars of the franchise like myself. I give it one and a half katanas out of five.

Blaugust Bonus: I think I'm going to use another of Belghast's writing prompts today - "What is your favorite boss encounter in any game and why? What makes that encounter stand out in your mind and what can be learned from it?"

Like any gamer I have a pretty big list to choose from here, but I think I'll stick with the final Queen's Gauntlet match of Guild Wars 2 - a petite necromancer named Liadri. It took 140 attempts before I finally won the match against her, which is almost as bad as some of those Super Meatboy levels. Why is it my favourite? Because it was challenging (for me anyway, I'm not like Wethospu), solo only, and forced me to adapt. Don't know how many trait lines I switched between in all those attempts before I got one that worked.

Most importantly you could watch and cheer on others while doing so. I remember throughout that week meeting new people as we took turns laughing and advicing each other in between getting our asses handed to us in the various matches. Maybe that's why it sticks out most for me - it was the ideal social soloists setup. It was awesome.