Jaume Collet-Serra

Jungle Cruise

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Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson

Exactly what it’s meant to be, Jungle Cruise is the walking, talking, filmic version of the Disney theme park ride it is based on. No one gets hurt, or wet, or even scared, no one laughs at the jokes, which are deliberately weak. It’s fun, in that slept-through-half-of-it way. Christmas afternoon, here it comes. The idea for the movie first took wing after the success of another film based on a theme park ride. But why saturate the market? And so Jungle Cruise got parked while Pirates of the Caribbean did its thing, after which the normal thousand-and-one interruptions to the process of getting an idea onto the screen got in the way. … Read more

Black Adam

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Black Adam

Black Adam is the superhero film for people who’ve had enough of them. Or it wants to be. Full of familiar elements given a dry witty twist, it stars Dwayne Johnson as an immortal creature who returns to his native city of Kahndaq to save the citizens of a brutally colonised Middle Eastern city in their hour of need. So far, so King Arthur, though Black Adam, whose name is Teth Adam at this point, is actually more like the mummy from The Mummy Returns (an early foray into acting by Johnson, all those millennia ago) crossed with the terminator from The Terminator. The Terminator comparisons gain weight when Teth Adam takes up … Read more

The Commuter

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Liam Neeson between two train carriages

Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly and largely unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and … Read more