Hi!

I don’t normally talk about mainstream / new movie releases for a few reasons…. first – tons of other writers will already have gotten to them and done a MUCH better job than I ever could. B) (I did that on purpose) it’s not really my bag or – hmmm – my *ahem* metier and third – I’m so fucking slow that by the time I get to them they’re not even new releases any more. They might not be decades old at this point but they’ve come and gone from your (at this point) TV screens and you’ve moved on to something more fancy. Kind of like those two girls I liked back in high school…. SIGH… weep… oh nostalgia. But, since I’ve been covering some older shit for a while now, I thought I’d go all 2021 for a minuten (I did that on purpose too) and see what I found out here. Also – since I didn’t really love this thing, I thought I’d try something a little different today. Let’s see what happens if we look at this from different perspectives.

Taylor Sheridan (is that really what he looks like?? That’s 1000% not what I was expecting) leaves the sandy plains of Texas and the coldy plains of Wind River and the beefcakey plains of Yellowstone to take us to the mountainous region of a place I don’t remember and trade in his beefy cowboys for beefy firemen who not only fight fires and drink cold beer but also jump out of airplanes when the need arises to rescue people trapped and in need of Proper Rescuin’. Unlike the solid stories he told in Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River or the first season of Yellowstone, this time we get to see a movie filled with maybe a dozen unanswered questions that no one but the viewer cares about, some iffy decision making along the solid storytelling and (I think) one squad of burly firemen who can put out a RAGING forest fire covering an entire mountain in a manner of hours. People that I interact with on a daily basis loved it but my brains were troubled wondering about things like: what was so important that all these people had to die, how did Jake Weber get so old so fast, what was on that piece of paper and what kind of roadside hotel ink and stationary can stay legible when the person holding that in his pocket is submerged in water for a very long period of time and…. really…. what happened to the horse?

Angelina Jolie returns to my screen, this time as a beefcakey firejumper who says “fuck your rules, pal!” and tends to jump out of the backs of speeding pick-up trucks with only her parachute to save her life. I also forget why she’s banished to – what’s it called – a ranger station to do her time for being bad or insubordinate or something but, relax folks, her hair is always perfect, her lips always glossy and moist and, just in case of you know, there’s a part where she has to take of her shirt to do some care on her – ahem – lightning strikes – ahem – but, if you were worried, her teets are ok because they’re cloistered in a nice frilly brazier that only the highest class Punished Fire Jumper Rangers are wearing this season. She’s also forlorn and troubled in another piece of plot that escapes me but, hey, it’s Sway (Gone in 60 Seconds if you don’t remember) so she can whoop your sorry ass while jacking your muscle car and make you like it, buddy. Oh, and she can take some lightning strikes too. Eat shit!

Littlefinger returns to my screen as a Don’t Waste My Fucking Time With Your Nonsense Crying contract killer who will shoot you dead right fucking now and isn’t ashamed to kill women or children. He may or may not draw the line at pregnant women though but, probably not. He’s great with explosives and close range firearms but not so swell with long range automatic weapons. We never know just who he’s working for or why he wants to kill everyone but thank heavens they sprang for Tyler Perry to show up for five seconds as his boss. Remember in The Guest when everything was just kind of going OK in small town America and then the military shows up to blow everything to smithereens? At least the writers gave us a point for that. Here? No. Maybe he’s just killing some time since he fell out of the Moon Hole or whatever they called it.

It says here that Nux Nicholas Hoult was born in 1989 so that makes him *clickity click ten key click* 32????? What? Unlike Jake Weber who seems to have unheroically aged and aged fast, Hoult actually looks younger than he did in Fury Road and those crappy X-Men movies. Lucky for him! Maybe he eats some of those Tom Hanks sandwiches… Here he’s the second part of the dynamic killing duo on the hunt for a little boy with a note in his pocket. He was probably my favorite part of this thing even though he doesn’t get much screen time. Well, I guess my favorite part until the big fist fight scene in the burning forest. I guess also I should say that it’s not that he didn’t do his choregraphed fist fighting scenes well, I just thought that shit was kind of stupid. Well, at least he didn’t get struck by lightning a couple of times though. Lucky!

Making another Marvel segue, one of my favorite Marvel TV properties was The Punisher but we probably can’t see anything like that any more. You can’t go around showing some fictional character beating the shit out of some other fictional characters anymore whether they fictionally deserve it or not, right? I mean – didn’t they cancel Brooklyn 99 over that whole defund the police shit, for fuck’s sake? Can we all just be toit for 30 minutes a week? Here, The Punisher cleans up his act a little as a funded police officer up in the mountains. He and his pregnant wife run a survivor’s camp on the side so you know they’ve got the skills to try and survive if a couple of cold blooded killers should come calling in their neck of the woods, looking for a little boy with a piece of paper in his pocket. Earlier I said Nux Hoult was my favorite part of this but I changed my mind, it’s The Punisher. Defund Film Miasma.

I couldn’t really find a picture of this next character I want to mention but – note – I didn’t try very hard so here’s another picture of Baelish reminiscing about his adventures around the Moon Hole.

Also not getting much screen time is a horse who starts off by minding his own business. Before he knows it, the person who comes in and gives him food and sweeps up his shit needs a lift. “Hey lady, I don’t think you’re in the best shape to be riding around on my back through a mountain,” he tries to say but he’s not calling the shots. After all, he’s smart like that and knows where his apples and sugar cubes come from. So he lets her mount him and they take off into the night, towards the roaring fire and then, wouldn’t you just fucking know it, he’s written out of the script like some drifter cowhand in an episode of Yellowstone. Who the fuck wrote this shit, anyway? OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH…..

In the end, I wasn’t too impressed with this piece of cinema but I know people who were but that’s just me. I’d take any of his other shit over this any time. Except for maybe any Yellowstone after season 1. Those have been a little bit on the uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh iffy side…..

FILED UNDER: AT LEAST THEY TRIED