MOVIE REVIEW: WAR DOGS (2016)

War Dogs follows the story of David and Efron. Former high school best friends who drifted apart, they get back together at a high school friends funeral. After catching up, they become business partners in selling guns to the war in Iraq.

While things start out smoothly enough, things get more complicated when they land bigger contracts. The movie then follows them as they get more involved as things keep going from bad to worse and they discover that the world of arms dealing isn’t as safe as when they first started.

Predictably, some deals go wrong. David learns a valuable life lesson about how exciting isn’t always good, and the friend everyone warns him about ends up being a jerk. So this is a standard morale story that tries to inject some Wolf of Wall Street into it.

At the end of the day, this is perhaps its biggest and most unforgiving flaw. It follows the most boring character to tell the most generic story. It takes no risks and wraps everything up with a “what lessons did we learn here?” final tag in the closing scenes. And somehow everything kind-of ends up okay for David.

This movie might have been more interesting if it followed Efron and left an audience surrogate behind (or confined to voice-overs, like Wolf). It is the equivalent of if Wolf of Wall Street followed one of Leonardo’s junior employees. Doesn’t quite sound very interesting, does it.

At the end of the day, it was an interesting premise. It was definitely better than the DC worst-of series this year. But it has to have a hard pass for being too generic for its own good. If you want a pretty generic story done extremely well, Kubo and the Two Strings is worth your time much, much more.

1.5 out of 5 dog-eared waffles.

MOVIE REVIEW: GHOSTBUSTERS (2016)

Ghostbusters is a movie that seemed to come around with allot of controversy. And most of this controversy seemed to be for controversy's own sake, as most people I talked to weren't too concerned about it being made with a bunch of female protagonists. As it turned out, the movie actually turned out to be pretty good.

The movie is about a bunch of scientists who go around capturing ghosts. One of them starts as being reluctant (not because of skepticism, but because of the damage to her career in academia it may cause), but becomes part of the group after she encounters a ghost. After forming the group, they get an office, find a fourth member (a non-scientist subway worker), hire a sexy dumb male intern (Chris Hemsworth, looking like he was born for comedy), and start capturing ghosts.

This is a pretty standard Ghostbusters movie. And it is a good one at that. It constantly goes around with tongue-in-cheek-style humour in its approach to situations and lets defined characters (in the ghost busters) react to situations in a believable manner. The only stumbling block this movie has is the ending or the more dramatic moments. Here, the movie stumbles. When the movie tries to get too serious, it doesn't work.

Unfortunately, the climax (involving someone killing themselves to set-up a master plan, to let you see serious) feels like it drags for the sake of having a big ghost battle climax (ala Marshmallow Man). Chris Hemsworth, despite being a good thing, is also over-used. It is like they realised how good he was and then doubled the length of all his scenes so the joke is slightly overblown as opposed to being appreciated.

While not as good as the original, this movie is definitely worth a watch. The comedy and characters are really good, the story is good and the effects are good. It did stumble by putting a bit too much a good thing in and also not nailing the change from comedy to serious well, but still highly enjoyable.

And the only reason I remember the Chris Hemsworth actor is because he is an Avenger.

3.5 out of 5 Ghosted Waffles