R.K Movie Review Round Up - Volume 3

There is some real Warhammer 40K shit going down in Atlanta right now, so as far as we’re concerned it is still a great time to escape reality and sit in a dark room for two hours a week. Minimum. Honestly, we’d go more often but we refuse to sign up for Cinemark’s Movie Rewards and we aren’t made of money.

Our own weird personal hangups regarding rewards programs aside, let’s get into it.

Thunderbolts*

The big reveal for this movie would probably have been more impactful if anyone at Risky.Kitchen was the “comic book” flavor of nerd. Weirdly though, none of us are. Magic: The Gathering? Sure. Tabletop Wargaming? Absolutely. Dungeons and Dragons? We’re already fist deep in a bag of Cheetos and ready to roll initiative.

But comic books? Fuck off with that virgin shit.

The premise is this: The Avengers are gone and nobody thinks they’re ever coming back. Where did they go? We don’t know. We haven’t been keeping up with the MCU. But they’re gone. In their absence, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been running a clandestine research operation to create a way to print superhumans and has been using a gaggle of C-list antiheroes to facilitate and keep things all hush-hush and sneaky-like. Why? Because it is fun to do things all hush-hush and sneaky-like. Duh.

Eventually though, stupid ol’ Congress ruins everything so Louis-Dreyfus is forced to liquidate her antiheroes. Except they all refuse to blindly kill each other, mostly, and instead team up to stop her from finishing the project they were unwittingly helping bring to fruition.

Enter Bob, one of the experiments from the project. Thunderbolts* is banking on you finding the name “Bob” hilarious and the movie uses the name as a punchline multiple times. It’s a big swing but they nail it. Bob is a funny name. This is a fact.

Anyway, everyone thought the project had failed entirely but it turns out Bob was a success and so Louis-Dreyfus puts him through an accelerated Superhero 101 crash-course and suddenly Bob isn’t Bob anymore but now goes by the (admittedly badass) name “Sentry”.

Almost immediately though, he gets all weird and goes all Dark Link and starts calling himself the Void. Which is also a badass name. Gotta give it to Bob. Void starts sending folks to the shadow realm left and right and things are looking pretty not great but then the Thunderbolts* show up and eventually de-Void Bob through the power of friendship and make him Bob again.

It’s revealed at the end of the film that Thunderbolts* will henceforth be known as The New Avengers (thus the asterisk). So that’s good. JLD, of course, isn’t punished because she is a career politician and those guys have plot armor thicker than any superhero, mostly.

R.K Rating: 4 Wait Why Is That Guy Who Isn’t Chris Evans Calling Himself Captain Americas out of 5 Wait Why Is that Guy Who Isn’t Chris Evans Calling Himself Captain Americas

Fight or Flight

We’ll admit it. We bought tickets to this film thinking it would be absolutely terrible and we would be able to dunk on it in this article. Our hopes were further buoyed when the movie started and we realized we were the only ones in the theater. Perfect.

We have never been happier to be so stupid and wrong.

This is perhaps the greatest Josh Hartnett movie ever made. And yes, we’re counting Pearl Harbor when we say that. Plus, he’s blonde in this one and that is the best flavor of Hartnett.

The quick summary: Hartnett plays a burned Secret Service agent called upon as a last resort by his former boss/girlfriend. His task? Board a plane and bring in a world-renowned hacker known as the Ghost who basically everybody hates because the Ghost has been a-hackin’ all kinds of things and pissin’ off all kinds of people.

In the best plane-based action movie premise since Snakes On A Plane, roughly half of the other passengers are hitmen looking to bag the Ghost themselves. Harnett, being the only one interested in actually keeping the Ghost alive, has to defend the hacker in an increasingly ridiculous set of outfits.

What follows is an hour and fourty minutes of absolute delight. Hartnett hams it up while murdering an entire plane full of people, dropping fantastic action movie one liners the entire way.

The movie even has something to say about the state of the world and the terrible corpo-future we are barreling towards. Midway through the movie, we learn that his handler/former girlfriend is not working for the good ol’ US of A but in fact for a social media company that is threatened by the Ghost (who it turns out is an ethical hacker and has been punishing governments and criminal organizations alike).

Action, comedy, and keen social commentary? Best Picture 2025, calling it now.

The best part? The movie ends on a cliffhanger so if there is any justice in this fallen world, Fight or Flight 2 will happen at some point. That hope is going to be what keeps us going for quite a while. Beg, borrow or steal a way to watch this movie. You won’t be disappointed.

R.K Rating: 5 Josh Hartnett Is Still A Dreamboat at 46s out of 5 Josh Hartnett Is Still A Dreamboat at 46s

Final Destination Bloodlines

It’s a Final Destination movie, which means it’s basically an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos from the same universe that The Running Man takes place in. Or, our universe, but 20ish years from now once the stupification of America is complete.

The plot is unimportant as you’re just waiting for the next wacky death to happen, but we’ll go over it briefly anyway. Back in the 40s or 50s or old timeys, a lady has a premonition that saves the lives of an entire restaurant full of people. This makes Death mad, because these people have now all escaped their fate. And fate is fate, but a premonition is not fate, even though it could be argued that the woman in question did nothing to provoke the premonition and therefore experiencing it and acting on it to alter everyone’s fate was in fact her fate and so maybe Death should just chill the fuck out for once.

But no, Death does not see it that way and begins a decades-long campaign to murder all of these fate-cheaters.

Death is not a total jerk though, and there are some surprisingly strict rules:

• Death has to kill everyone in the order in which they would have died at the restaurant
• Death has to then move down that person’s family tree in the order in which everyone was born before moving on to the next person’s family
• People who married into the family are excluded from the Death curse since they aren’t related to anyone from the restaurant.

That last point seems pretty fair and so maybe we were too hard on Death earlier with the whole fate thing.

At one point in the movie, the main characters find the youngest person who was at the restaurant that day and would have been the last person to die and he refuses to help them even though he is essentially immortal as long as they are alive since Death has to kill everyone in order. So that was kinda weird.

If you’ve seen any Final Destination film, you’ve seen this one too, but we will say we appreciate the fact that everyone dies in this one. Death wins. So, you know, good for Death.

R.K Rating: 2 People In The Theater Were Holding Full-Ass Conversations During This Movie And It Didn’t Really Bother Anyones out of 5 People In The Theater Were Holding Full-Ass Conversations During This Movie And It Didn’t Realy Bother Anyones