At a time when so many “children’s” films offer up new ideas or at least fresh takes on old ones, Sherlock Gnomes feels like a pre-Pixar effort. It’s easy to imagine the entire thing was spawned during a meeting where someone pointed out that Holmes and Gnomes rhyme and then they worked backwards from there, shoehorning the Gnomeo and Juliet characters in a mystery where they could utilize the Sherlock cliches.
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Vikander shines the brightest, effortlessly projecting an image of both innocence and emerging strength — it’s a long way from Jolie’s fairly sexually charged portrayal, and it’s meant to be since the gaming series dialed back early Lara’s “proportions” with the reboot. As with the game, however, Lara’s transition from doe-eyed victim to hardened killer feels rushed after both handled her initial kill quite well.
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What really hurts Prey at Night is ridiculous character behaviour. It’s hard to go too deep without spoilers, but here’s one example (and trust us, there are several more). At one point one of the family members is trapped by the blonde female stranger. She has a knife. Rather than do anything and everything to survive, she just submits to her fate. It triggered one of the hardest eye rolls in recorded history.
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Much like Ex Machina, Annihilation is science fiction tinged with plenty of realism, and as it turns out that familiarity makes the differences all the more unsettling. This is still Earth, and not some crazy futuristic dystopian version, either. The technology, the characters, the location, all of it is immediately recognizable and relatable, and that serves to ground the more fantastic elements in a sense of reality.
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One of the movie’s strengths is keeping the humour coming without becoming overly manic with the delivery. There are enough lulls to give the best jokes space to breathe, and there are a number of silly one-offs (like rich person fight club or the fertility doctor) that get played out as we go. It ends up being a very well-paced mix of clever lines and slapstick physical comedy.
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Speaking of gritty, there are no punches pulled here. The violence is intense and realistic with choreographed fight scenes replaced by blood-soaked desperation. There’s sexual assault and multiple scenes of gruesome torture where the perpetrators of these acts don’t bat an eye.
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Easily the best part of the film is the train attack itself. It’s well done, not sensationalized — there’s no back story for El Khazzani or any of terrible “villain building” that hurt 12 Strong — and depicts a true act of heroism for which all involved deserve tremendous credit.
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