2026 - SHELTER, this year's Jason Statham film

With the inevitability of a returning season this is the yearly Jason Statham action film no better or no worse than any of his other films.  In Shelter, Statham is a man living alone on a deserted island with an abandoned lighthouse on it.  Washing up onto the beach is a teenage girl who has survived a ship sinking.  It turns out Statham is an ex special ops agent skilled at killing a lot of people all at once or one at a time.  His cover is now blown and so the chase is on.   Will Statham be able to stop the army of assassins sent out to kill before he can save the girl and get her to safety?  Have you guessed the very obvious answer to that question?

The teenage girl is played by somebody with a tongue twister of a name called Bodhi Rae Breathnach she interacts with Statham fairly well.  Award winning actor Bill Nighy (as in what am I doing in this film) is the leader of the assassins and since this a Jason Statham film you know he's going to get it.

 

The director Ric Roman Waugh was a former stuntman who had worked on The Last of the Mohicans, The Last Action Hero and the bizarre meta universe film The One, so he knew his way around staging the action scene stuff which is for the most part fairly well done. 

 

Shelter is the usual time killer of a film.  It keeps the viewers interest from beginning to the end or at least until the next Statham film comes rolling along in 2027.

The film was written by Ward Perry, the running time is 107 minutes.

2026 - SOLO MIO, okay romantic comedy

Unlikely leading man Kevin James is a school art teacher who proposes to his long time girlfriend.  The plan is for them to get married in Rome.  During the wedding she leaves him at the alter and he is understandingly depressed.  He meets the owner of a coffee shop named Gia who he bonds with.  Do I have to paint a picture about how this plot is going to end up? 

This is a very mildly pleasant rom-com.  The actors are decent, Kevin James has spent years on TV sitcoms so he has his comedy sthick down fairly well.  The actor playing Gia, Nicole Grimaudo is likable even if she does overdo the excitable Italian woman character thing a bit much.

 

Really the best reason to see this film is the on location filming in Rome and the Italian countryside actually the only reason to sort of sit through this thing. This is one of those films that was made for streaming at home, you don't need to have any emotional investment in the story.  All right I'll say it, it's the perfect film to watch with your significant other.

 

The film was barely written by the directors, John Kinnane, Dan Kinnane and Kevin James, the running time is a brisk 96 minutes. 

2026 - DISNEYLAND HANDCRAFTED, how they built Disneyland

The granddaughter of one of Walt Disney's most important contributor's Ub Iwerks, has assembled this film about the construction of Disneyland in Orange County, California during the 1950's.  First off who was Ub Iwerks?  Well he was with Walt Disney at the very beginning helping to develop the Mickey Mouse character.  Iwerks was responsible for many of the visual effects that showed up in Disney's films in particular Mary Poppins, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Sleeping Beauty just to name a very few.  Iwerks also handled the special effects for Hitchcock's The Birds.

Anyway, Ub Iwerk's granddaughter Leslie got access to some rarely seen 16mm films on the construction of Disneyland that Walt Disney had commissioned during the building.  The films had for the most part had never been seen and were in perfect condition. They were edited into a narrative and are interesting to watch.

 

Disneyland was one of Walt Disney's most important creative endeavors and he spared no expense in building it.  Amazingly the park was constructed in one year,  a real pressure cooker of a time table.  The film has voice over narration from the actual participants in the construction of Disneyland and they clearly had their doubts about the whole project. 

Obviously this film is going to appeal mostly to nerds groupies of the Disneyland Park.  However it is kind of fascinating to see the construction of one of the seminal theme parks in the United States and the near perfect color films shot during the construction are pretty cool to look at.  This documentary can be viewed where else, on the Disney plus channel.

The running time is 79 minutes. 

2026 - PROJECT HAIL MARY, it's really long

Extreme over length finally kills what could have been a good science fiction story.  The directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have been very good providers of crowd pleasing entertainments with films like 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie. They were fired off of the Star Wars spinoff Solo because they thought they were hired to make a comedy which apparently isn't what Disney wanted.  Believe me considering how Solo turned out their approach would have made a much better movie.

 

For Project Hail Mary they were working with a big budget based on a novel from the author of The Martian.  They mounted a very elaborate science fiction epic with a screenplay by a top writer Drew Goddard.  Ryan Gosling was cast as the hero astronaut who has to save the planet earth.  Current flavor of the month German actor Sandra Huller is the scientist in charge of Project Hail Mary  She plays the usual stoic who secretly has a heart of gold.

 

Even with all the elaborate and at times dazzling visual effects, Ryan Gosling is the whole show.  He has to virtually deliver a monologue throughout the whole film and act next to some kind of puppet rock creature.  He does this very well and keeps the film watchable for about an hour.

 

However Project Hail Mary is cursed with all of the problems these current big screen films have.  It has a very meandering script with a lot of plot exposition.  In this case there's  lots of jumping back and forth in time and a whole lot of screen time hanging out with the space alien.  This finally drags the film into major boredom.  It also has one of the worst issues all these recent big budget films have as well, the inability to know when to end the damn story.  There are at least three endings in the last half hour.  This film isn't bad it's just tedious.

Project Hail Mary runs 156 minutes. 

2026 - WAR MACHINE, science fiction action junk which is entertaining

The latest streamer action movie and there are a lot of streamer action movies is War Machine.  It's an entertaining time waster and no one will confuse it with Wild Strawberries.  War Machine is essentially a remake of Arnold's Predator action classic and it does have as it's star another man mountain Alan Ritchson.

Ritchson plays a soldier who gets admitted to the Army Ranger training program although in real life he would probably be considered a little old.  Ritchson is suffering from PTSD from a previous tour in Afghanistan but he's still one tough SOB.  Anyway on the final test of his Ranger training he and his classmates get dropped into the middle of the Colorado woods although Australia is the substitute for Colorado.  They run into a robotic killing machine released from where else space aliens who apparently want to take over the earth.  So now the plot sequels into a rehash of that other space alien invasion epic Battle:  Los Angeles.

 

Lots of shooting, ray gun blasting and chases the usual stuff.  The War Machine seems unstoppable until Ritchson finally gets his hands on a bulldozer.  So now the film borrows from the climax of Aliens which had Sigourney Weaver battle it out in a mech suit with the prime Alien monster.  The War Machine looks a lot like the ED-209 from RoboCop by the way.

 

There are really no original ideas anymore or so it seems in the movie business.  Still this film does a decent job with the action stuff. Alan Ritchson has been kicking around the film business since 2004 until he finally hit the big time with the "Jack Reacher" series.  I'll say this for Ritchson at least he's young, it's getting a little hard to stomach all these geriatric action stars still working, I'm talking to you Arnold, Sylvester and Harrison.  Time to take your millions and maybe retire to a turkey farm or something.

War Machine was written by Patrick Hughes and James Beaufort, the running time is 107 minutes.