Mindless Movie Marathon (part 2)

I heard from a few people that they liked this movie marathon idea, so I thought I would do another one this week. Check out the first one here. This time around, I did a Netflix double feature where I watched two new Netflix original movies. Just like last time, both movie reviews below will contain spoilers and/or major plot points, so proceed with caution if you haven’t seen them yet, otherwise fly with me on this journey, and let’s discuss what I watched this week.

Spaceman

The first movie in the marathon is quite literally the newest addition to the Netflix original movie catalog (it premiered on March 1^st). Adam Sandler stars as Jakub Prochazka, an astronaut in the middle of a year-long mission in space. He is also up there all alone and you can tell right away that something is slightly off.  Carey Mulligan stars as his wife, Lenka. (Mulligan was in my last movie marathon, so I wonder if this will be a theme). The fastest way to describe the premise of this movie is what if Castaway and Interstellar had love child? The result would be some variation of Spaceman! I will explain more as I go on.

Right from the beginning of the film, Jakub is about 180 days in and there is an issue with the toilet and he is having some trouble sleeping. This is causing him to have vivid dreams during the short bursts when he does sleep. At the same time, he hadn’t been able to talk to Lenka and he is worried that something is up. About this time, a giant spider shows up on his ship and begins to talk to him. Thankfully I had seen this in the trailer, so it didn’t catch me off guard, otherwise, it might be quite alarming when it shows up.

At first, Jakub is scared, but as the spider (he ends up calling Hanus, voiced by Paul Dano) and he slowly start to bond, more of the picture comes into focus. I have always been a fan of Sandler and his offbeat comedy, even when others were down on his stuff, so I really wanted to like this movie, but to me, it seems like he put very little effort into this role. I’m sure that was part of the character’s design, but I’m sure I couldn’t have pulled off quite a few of those scenes myself with no acting abilities at all.

 As he approaches the anomaly in space, it completely goes off the rails and makes you wonder what the point was of the whole movie. Since Hanus can see his memories, he has been questioning his actions towards Lenka over the years. Even though she is through with him and wants to move on, he gets in touch with her and explains how sorry he is for everything. He then leaves his ship to rescue Hanus and is seemingly lost in space as his vessel floats away. Lots of weird trippy scenes of him floating around, Hanus dies, and then somehow there is another ship out there and they pick him up.

Very lazy writing at the end. I’m sure there is some deeper meaning to this that I’m overlooking, but overall this wasn’t a very good movie. I did enjoy the score as the music was eerie throughout and Paul Dano did a great job as the voice of Hanus. But it just wasn’t enough to save this from itself. I give this space movie a generous 5 out of 10.

Lift

The second movie in my marathon this week was Netflix’s Lift. It’s been out for a few weeks now, but I thought it was fitting to go along with Spaceman. Lift is a heist movie with a great cast. Not quite an all-star cast, but lots of great actors and actresses that I’ve liked from other films. The main idea of the movie is Interpol agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has to recruit a master thief (who happens to be her ex-boyfriend) Cyrus (Kevin Hart) to steal $500 million from a man named Jorgensen (Jean Reno) so he couldn’t use that money in nefarious ways.

Now, I’m a sucker for a good heist movie and this one is a lot of fun, but it’s also not anything new. They must gather a team of individuals who each have a special skill. Then put together a crazy plan to steal the money. In this case, they are going to steal the whole plane, land it somewhere, and then take the gold after it lands. Of course, their timeline gets moved up due to an unforeseen incident, so they have to do it in less time. Lots of montages of the team as they work on their individuals tasks and an obvious growing attraction between Cyrus and Abby.

Of course,while they are doing the mission, something breaks and they have to scramble to solve the issue in the last second… you know normal heist movie stuff. Honestly not a lot of new ideas here, just placed recycled ones into this plot and add in an airplane and some NFTs for good measure. The two main stars were good, but the real fun was the team that was working for them. Denton (Vincen D’Onofrio), Camila (Ursula Corbero), Magnus (Billy Magnussen), Mi-Sun (Yun Kee Kim), and Luke (Viveik Kalra) all pulled off their portion of the lift, but Jorgensen’s men were on the plane and intervened.

For a moment, they got the upper hand, but in the end, Cyrus and his team got Jorgensen arrested and just for good measure, they also stole the $500 million for themselves. Abby even quit when she learned that Huxley (Sam Worthington rounding out the full cast) tried to shoot them down. This was a fun ride even though it was mostly predictable. I enjoyed the cast and all the different roles they played, they worked off each other nicely and you could feel comradery amongst them. I do feel like a movie of this magnitude could have made some money on the big screen, but I was happy enough to also watch it on my tablet while on a treadmill.

Just for the fun factor and cast, I think this movie deserves a strong 6 out of 10. I feel like they could have done a little bit more and it will probably deserve another viewing at some point.

Thanks and see you here next week!