MAY 24 — The summer blockbuster season is approaching fast as we move even closer to June, but things are already heating up in cinemas everywhere as Hollywood studios make their usual move of releasing a few expected blockbusters even earlier in May to avoid the congestion that normally happens in June and July.
The big guns like Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth, The Fantastic Four: The First Steps, 28 Years Later, Elio, How To Train Your Dragon and Ballerina will all be coming from June onwards, and I haven’t even mentioned the ones that I’m personally very excited about like M3GAN 2.0, Nobody 2, Weapons and The Naked Gun.
Come to think of it, this is maybe the first summer since Covid-19 came into our lives that really feels like a full-on Hollywood blockbuster summer season, with so many big movies competing with each other and a wide variety of smaller titles that might just make some good money as well.
And judging from the box-office collection this year, especially from how great movies like A Minecraft Movie (with US$931 million or RM3.9 billion collected worldwide) and Sinners (US$322 million worldwide, for an R-rated movie!) have been doing, it looks like people are flocking into cinemas to watch movies again too.
So, as we await the bounty that will arrive in Malaysian cinemas from June onwards, here are some blockbusters from May that you need to check out.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
I’ve always had a huge admiration for a well-executed action movie. If you asked me, I’d say that only a truly accomplished director can deliver a well-executed action flick, because it takes every tool in a director’s box of skills/tricks to be able to pull it off.
The last four Mission: Impossible movies are some of the greatest action movies that Hollywood have ever produced, three of which were directed by Christopher McQuarrie (the genius who made The Way Of The Gun), who also directed this instalment, touted as the final film in the franchise.
While the previous film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was a model of action movie efficiency (if you really think about it, every single scene in that one is part of an action set-piece, with the only breather coming in after the death of one major character), this final instalment betrays everything that made the previous four films such great models of efficient action moviemaking.
The Final Reckoning has its action moments, yes, but its almost 3-hour runtime is full of exposition and clunky dialogue, and the amount of coincidence that needs to happen to move its needlessly complicated plot forward will annoy even the most ardent fans of the franchise.
If this is really the end for this franchise, then it’s a damn shame that it had to end things this way.
It’s not the worst blockbuster you’ll see this year, but it’s really nowhere near the awesome standards set by the last four instalments.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Finally, after 14 long years, the most foolproof horror franchise is back to entertain and traumatise the audience.
Every single movie in this franchise has the same plot – open with a spectacular death scene involving a crowd of people, which turns out to be a premonition so that the main character can save a group of people, and then spend the rest of the film marvelling at the creative ways that death can catch up with you even after you think you’ve cheated death.
And that’s the brilliance of the franchise, the audience knows the plot already, and the pleasures are to be had in the many creative kills that the movies set into motion once death starts making its way into the kill list.
Unlike other horror reboots, there’s no need to explain why this new movie exists, or why the villain is back, or why a legacy character is back among the new faces.
Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (who made the standout Freaks a few years back) have full understanding of the beauty and simplicity of this concept, and have managed to deliver another standout opening death scene in the franchise.
We’ve seen a horrific plane crash, an unforgettably gnarly roller-coaster accident and probably the greatest highway pile-up in movie history in previous movies, and in this one we’re served with the horrors of what might happen during the opening day of a restaurant on top of a tall observation tower (think KL Tower) called the Skyview.
The time is the late 60s, and this one is called Bloodlines because the character who had the premonition, Iris, managed to save everyone, so every single one who survived will have death on the hunt for their bloodlines as their children and grandchildren shouldn’t have been born.
How about the kills? Without spoiling anything, let me just mention that some of them involve a tattoo and piercing parlour, an MRI machine, a peanut allergy and the ever-reliable family barbecue in the backyard.
Already collecting US$122 million worldwide in just a week, this one looks set to revive the franchise for many, many years to come, and I’m all for it.
