Jack the Giant Slayer - DVD Review

Starring Nicholas Hoult, Ewan McGregor, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, Eddie Marsan and Ewan Bremner.
Directed by Bryan Singer.

★★

This movie is a prime example of an over-reliance on CGI to cover up problems with the actual story. The giants are fake, they look fake, and so there's no weight to them, cool as it may be to watch the humans run around on giant sets.

Hoult (Warm Bodies) plays Jack, the young man who eventually gets magic beans. A twist this time around is that the princess likes to travel in disguise among her people to get a taste of the real world (think Aladdin and Jasmine), but she is at Jack's when one of the beans accidentally gets wet and shoots into the sky.

There is some wonder building up to the meeting of the giants, but then when we do meet them, it's underwhelming.  They look like a cross between LOTR's cave trolls and ... the people of Polar Express.  If they're this humanoid, why not go for make-up and prosthetics and get some real-looking creatures to fight?  The 100% CGI-ness of the giants sucks out the wonder, and it sucked me out of the movie.

It's clearly made for children when it comes to the acting styles, but there's also enough heads getting bit off by giants that it earns its PG-13 rating.

Warm Bodies - Movie Review

Starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco and Analeigh Tipton.
Directed by Jonathan Levine.


★★★


The voice-over narration is by a witty fellow, but unfortunately that narrator is trapped in a zombie body who can only shuffle along and manage some moans and grunts.  His grunts get more strained when he meets a cute girl.  So ultimately this is a perfect metaphor for lovestruck teenhood.

R (Nicholas Hoult) is one of many zombies that came about a plague struck Earth eight years before whenever we are now.  He's called R because that's the only part of his original name he remembers. You may remember Hoult as Beast from X-Men: First Class. He's been in many other things, but his work as R is going to be the role where now I won't forget who Hoult is.  ("Who's Nicholas Hoult?" "The guy from Warm Bodies." "Oh yeah...")

Now underneath it all, yeah, it's a twist on the Twilight craze, where Romeo's a zombie instead of a vampire, but it's decidedly a comedy first, and it works. It also has less gore than your random Walking Dead episode.