Hey, remember when M. Night Shyamalan could write a good movie? Me too. What the hell happened? 14 years on from Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for The Sixth Sense (and three years on from Razzie wins for Worst Director and Worst Screenplay for The Last Airbender), the director teamed up with the Smith family for two hours of tediousness and poor CGI. As if taking one of the most charismatic stars in Hollywood and making him a dour, monotone supporting character to his own irritating son wasn't bad enough, Will Smith's hilariously named Cypher Raige had to deal with such horrible and portentous dialogue as;
"I detected graviton vibrations in the hull. Graviton build-up could be a precursor to mass expansion. The pull of our own graviton weight could set us off."
Aw, hell no! That particular gem was only in the first act, and both members of the Smith clan suffer from Shyamalan's stilted, overwrought words. After two hours of listening to this constant stream of sci-fi nonsense, I wasn't the only one that had to take a knee. Runner-Up: Riddick Almost a decade after the bloated misfire that was The Chronicles of Riddick, Vin Diesel returned as sci-fi anti-hero Richard B. Riddick in a threequel that returned to the character's low-budget roots as first seen in cult classic Pitch Black. If you're a fan of the franchise, then this movie will tick all of the boxes but it seemed more like a rehashing of Pitch Black than anything groundbreaking, although Jordi Molla's death scene is my favorite of the year. There are some striking visuals for a low-budget, greenscreen-heavy movie, but the dialogue at times is just terrible. A choice quote from Vin Diesel's gravel-throated voiceover sums it up; "Instead winding up on Furya, we wind up on some place called.... not Furya." Thanks for the heads up. Then of course there is the blatantly misogynistic dialogue leveled at Katie Sackhoff's Dahl throughout pretty much the entire movie. I'm not sure how anyone thought it was a good idea to translate it from page to screen but it's not clever, or funny, and I won't even quote it here because I'll probably be censored! Come on Katie, you deserve better than this, surely.
I don't do social media, so like or follow me in person but please maintain a safe distance or the authorities will be notified. Don't snap me though, I'll probably break. I was once labelled a misogynist on this very site in a twenty paragraph-long rant for daring to speak ill of the Twilight franchise. I stand by what I said, it's crap.
