Jaws-Alamo Drafthouse Movie Party (2025)

 

There are plenty of posts about the movie Jaws on this site, and I'm going to be writing more in the near future because I'm seeing the film again at least twice this summer. So I'm going to digress a little bit on this post and just talk about the experience rather than the movie itself.

The screening was at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Mueller location on the east side of Austin .  We have been to this theater several times before and frankly it's not our favorite. It requires that we park in a structure that requires us to login and pay in an online app. We do get validation for the time we're at the theater, so it's not the fact that we have to pay that is the problem, it's just the technical process that is a little annoying.

The theater is located about 30 miles from our house, and we left a good hour and a half early because we want to be at the theater well before the movie starts to take in the pre-show videos and trailers that Alamo curates for us. Also we usually order dinner so we want to get there so that our meal arrives before the movie actually starts. All of those plans went to hell when we got on the highway and the rain started coming down. We had a torrential downpour of biblical proportions, and it was complicated by high winds and hailstones that were usually golf ball sized but sometimes even bigger. I had to slow down on the drive, put on my hazard lights and struggled to see the cars in front of me on the road. We finally got a break in the rain and we got to the parking garage just in time for an even stronger deluge of hail, and rain that was mostly blowing sideways. We stood in the parking garage for about 15 minutes waiting for a break. When the hail stopped we made a run for it but we're careful not to run on the ice because it would have been easy to slip and fall. However that care meant that we were in the rain long enough to be completely soaked when we got into the theater.

The theater complex has individual bathrooms that are gender neutral and then sinks outside of the toilets that are available for everybody to use. They didn't have the hand blowers that would have been helpful in drying off our clothes before we went into the theater. I had to run a couple of paper towels through my hair to dry it enough to feel like I wasn't still swimming in the ocean.

This was a movie party, and as you've probably seen before the movie parties at Alamo include some props. We got a shark fin foam hat, we got a bath bomb in the shape of the Orca, and we got a small inflatable life preserver with a simulated bite taken out of it, maybe I can use it to float a drink in the pool. I also participated in a game before the show where two people competed for the prize shark head popcorn bucket. Unfortunately for me, the game consisted of a contest to draw on a chalkboard a shark. I need a ruler and a compass to draw a straight line or  a circle, so I knew I wasn't going to be winning right from the beginning. I had fun anyway.

As usual the movie was great, and as I said before I'll write about it again a couple times this summer. I can say that when I'm looking for details that I didn't always pay attention to in my previous 137 screenings, I noticed that the kids on the beach at the start of the film did in fact have some crab legs that they were gnawing on.

Although I didn't win the shark head bucket, the hostess for the show did say that it was available for purchase at the concession or concierge stand. So when the movie was done we thought we would be able to finally get this prized addition to our popcorn bucket collection. Imagine our frustration however when the concierge station was closed and we looked at the buckets that were sitting across the counter on a Shelf and we're unable to purchase one. Another frustrating experience on this excursion.

2 days later we did make a trip down to the Lakeline Alamo, and Amanda dashed in in the hopes that she would be able to get one of those popcorn buckets. Lo and behold we scored.

Fight or Flight (2025)

 

For more than a decade now people have been making films that attempt to just string together long action sequences to make a movie that is definitively 100% active. Usually there's a brief set up followed by a long string of action set pieces, combat sequences, and a variety of gunplay. This formula works as long as the events make sense, and the actors are well cast. “Fight or Flight” does a pretty good job of these things and it makes the wise decision to cast Josh Hartnett in the lead role.

Harnett  was at one time the next big thing, but he never quite crossed over as a success in a big movie. He has had a good career, but he's also had a bit of a Renaissance in the last couple of years. He was in last year's “Trap”, and he's had a couple of supporting roles in movies that have made good use of the screen presence that he offers. This movie fits him like a glove. It requires him to be a little bit older, appear on screen in a sort of a scuzzy form, and at the same time allow him to be a badass. It works.

There's also something about planes in the air in the last couple of years. Earlier this year we had the Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg thriller” Flight Risk". This took place in a small plane, whereas” Fight or Flight" takes place on a regular airliner. That means there is enough room to run around, occasionally hide out, and sometimes dispatch the bad guys in a bathroom or luggage compartment. Hartnett plays a former federal agent who is getting a chance to get back in the game and his controller, a former love interest, is manipulating him remotely. . 

Of course there is a plot twist and the original goal of the mission gets somewhat inverted. Hartnett’s character ends up with a couple of unusual allies, which allows for a lot more martial arts action, including some of the wild variety of acrobatics that people have come to expect in modern martial arts sequences. Does any of it make any sense? The answer is no, but you won't care because you'll have a good time watching all of the Mayhem. Look, we get a pleasant lead, and a couple of fun turns in the storyline, for an action picture that is usually sufficient.

Don't stay home on Friday night to watch this on a streaming service, you should still go out and do something fun. However you'll be happy to watch this on a night when you shouldn't be compelled to socialize and you just want to veg in front of the TV.

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)

 

Next week on the LAMBcast we're going to have a Tom Cruise draft. This makes perfect sense because essentially Tom Cruise is the last of the movie stars. There's not anybody close to Tom Cruise when it comes to opening a movie. He hasn't been able to make everything he's in a success, but his batting average is pretty damn High, and with the final Mission Impossible film on the schedule, Tom puts in his all as he usually does to give us some thrills.

Let me start out by saying that although I like this film quite well it does have a couple of significant problems. First of all it is almost 3 hours long and that seems excessive for what is mostly an action film. A second problem might be the thing that makes this feel long, the first hour of the film is filled with exposition narrative that is clunky and struggles to connect the events of the previous films into a single storyline. I'm all for fan service especially when it comes to the final film in a series, but only a couple of the things that they attempt, work very well.

The most logical extension that they have found for these films is suggesting that the MacGuffin from the third “Mission Impossible", is in fact The Entity, the AI Boogeyman that arrived in episode 7 “Dead Reckoning”. In the earlier film it was referred to as the Rabbit's Foot, and we never got to know what it was all about. The idea that it is some sort of blueprint for creating the AI that everybody is worried about here in the last film is a minor stretch, but one that works pretty well.

The connection between this film and its predecessor however is not as smooth. Many of the things that happened in the previous film are vaguely referred to, but none of it seems to be strongly connected to the events of this film. The exception being the location of the submarine that contains the original algorithm of The Entity. The way this problem was approached in the last film is completely different from the way it is approached in this film. That doesn't mean that it couldn't work, it just didn't.

The stakes in the film are, as always, a little elevated. It seems that Ethan Hunt has to save the world repeatedly like some comic book superhero instead of dealing with a more manageable problem that could offer us some thrills with a believable set of consequences. To be honest it's unlikely that any film of this ilk is going to have the audacity to let the world end. If that conclusion is off the table then given what has come before, “Mission Impossible Final Reckoning” feels like it is just a structure that exists, not to build suspense but to hang the set pieces on. At least those set pieces are really good.

I have no doubt that a number of other reviews will mention the two big sequences in the movie. I'm not clever enough or alert enough today to try to find something deeper so I will just repeat what should be obvious to anybody who's heard of this movie, the submarine sequence with it’s underwater photography is ambitious, and,  come on  the bi- plane sequence terrific. Along the way we get to see Ethan Hunt run, get punched, do a lot of punching of his own and give us a couple of fakeouts. The plan is outlined in  its broadest sense. We usually  get a description of what's supposed to happen, and then it happens .Of course there are always one or two complications along the way, but the complications that take place in this movie have less to do with the details of each individual problem and everything to do with just trying to move the pieces around on the board so we stay interested.

The IMF needs to be a little bit more engaged with Ethan to make us care about what's going on. In this story they seem mostly reactive and taking their time just to be sure that Ethan will be able to do what he wants to do. The only one of the team that really gets the opportunity to feel like a part of the story is Luther, the character played by Ving Rhames. Even then, the resolution of his storyline feels a little manufactured.

I will mention that one of the things that was different about this movie is where we saw it. We had traveled to New York for the holiday weekend to catch several Broadway Productions. We got there early enough on Friday that we could fit in a movie, so we got a chance to use our AMC “A list” membership and see a film right in Manhattan. The theaters are built vertically rather than horizontally, which makes getting in and out of them feel a lot more like a puzzle. You have to go up a level or down a level to find an exit or the bathroom. So it was an experience as much as it was a Mission Impossible movie.

Cruise is great and I'm glad that he continues to do his own stunts and care about the way the movie looks. His partner Christopher McQuarrie, directed and co-wrote the screenplay, and he was a lot more effective managing the filmmaking then he was getting the story ideas right. The movie looks great but doesn't always make a great deal of sense.

In the 30-year history of the franchise there have been some highs and lows. The first and third films are my favorite but both “Rogue Nation” and “Ghost Protocol” are excellent. I wish I could say the final films, which are direct sequels to each other, topped it off with the best, but they actually fit in the lower half of the eight films. At least they're better than MI- 2.

Have we set our final farewell to Ethan Hunt? It's hard to say. Tom Cruise is 62 years old, although he looks like he's much younger than that, and it appears that he is quite capable of continuing the action beats necessary for a movie like this to work. I just get the impression that the story lines have gotten a little tired and that there's a struggle to find something worthy to make as the subject of the film, and I'm not sure that's what is really important. It seems to me that the characters and the incidents are the things that make these movies work.

Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

 

I've said it before, including a mention on the LAMBcastt, there must be something about us that is just wrong for enjoying these movies. The main reason that somebody goes to see a “Final Destination" film is to watch people die in elaborate convoluted accidents. The fascination with this sort of thing is easy to understand, since everybody does some rubbernecking when they pass that accident on the highway, or watches videos online where people get hurt doing stupid things. I suppose we can excuse this behavior in regard to the movie because we know it's an elaborate fiction, and that there is some malevolent force behind it. Still, when you hear people cheering for some gruesome moment in one of these Rube Goldberg execution methods, it does make you question Humanity.

A month ago on the podcast, we covered the entire “Final Destination” franchise. The people on that show all enjoyed it so much that they volunteered to come back and talk about the new installment, which arrives here 14 years after the last Edition. “Bloodline”s has a couple of twists on the formula which helps make it feel fresh and worth investigating. The biggest innovation is that the original disaster is in fact completely avoided, which leaves a whole lot of deaths unaccounted for in the Grim Reaper’s Ledger book. The storytelling gets a little convoluted and the explanation of  how death is just catching up with everybody at this point is awkward. Almost 30 years after he was denied all those earlier deaths he is finally getting around to the main family involved. Those of you who have seen the previous Final Destination films know that there is an order in which the deaths are supposed to occur, and we get a trick here that shows how that has been pushed back for several decades. As you know however, the bill is going to come due.

One of the things that makes “Bloodlines" work is that we get some characters that we do in fact care about. The hero of the original disaster turns out to be the linchpin for this story, and once that plug is pulled we return to the inevitable line of disasters. Interestingly enough though, there are a couple more turns which create some humor in the story and a lot more suspense. Many of these come at the expense of audience expectations from previous entries in the series. Sudden bus deaths are narrowly avoided, and a complex series of events that is reminiscent of two elaborate scenes in the earlier films, turns out to be a red herring.

If you take the time to listen to the podcast that I'm going to post here, you'll hear everybody ranking their favorite deaths. Once again, our entertainment values are pretty morbid, but they are also satisfied with a well plotted story, some pretty effective character work, and a lot of fan service that turns out to work pretty well.

As horror films, these movies undermine the suspense and thrills a little bit, because we know eventually everyone is in fact going to die. The only questions we have concern how they're going to die and whether or not it will be entertaining enough to wait around for. This film is just about 2 hours and that's 30 minutes longer than most of the other entries. I never found my attention lagging, but I did wonder sometimes if in an attempting to create some dread, the filmmakers stepped on their own jokes. For example a character that's been holding off death for decades is holed up in a cabin that is surrounded by a yard full of things that would be happy to kill her. It feels like the exact opposite of what the character would probably choose. If you want an example of this you can go back to Final Destination 2 and see how Clear Rivers tried to do the same thing.

Minor quibbles aside, this film was a blast and it was exactly what I was looking for. What it says about me that I enjoyed it so much is not clear, but I suspect that most of you who love horror films will find plenty to justify spending your money and your time on “Final Destination Bloodlines”.

Sinners (2025)

Well I'm happy this film is doing so well with the box office, and encouraged by the willingness of people to invest in a story that is not based on some other IP, I don't want to be blind to the flaws of the movie simply because it succeeds so well and in most aspects. Let me start with the positive things and then move on to a couple of the main criticisms that I have of Ryan Cooglers's "Sinners".

The film takes great effort to set a time and place where there is automatically discomfort in the normal settings that the principles find themselves in. A pair of twin black brothers have returned home to their southern roots after having ripped off the mobs in Chicago, well into the Great Depression. The hometown they have returned to, seems calm on the surface, and supposedly the Klan is no longer in operation, but that doesn't mean that it's roots are not still near to the surface. The brothers are attempting to create a social club that caters to the local black population, in particular to their taste in music dancing and other frivolities. Most of the social tension that you get at this point is set up for atmosphere, but later on director/writer Coogler, tries to use it as a plot point to finish off the film and that doesn't quite work.

Anybody who chooses to see this will know that it's a horror film, but it does take a while for the horror elements to develop. There is some early mumbo jumbo about hoodoos brought from the African Homeland, and maybe some of the Caribbean influence as well. All of that is really in aid of developing a secondary character who will provide some exposition later in the film. The ability to recognize vampires doesn't really require all of that, but the film goes through the motions anyway.

The characters in the film do the most to create an atmosphere of dread without any particular source. Michael B, Jordan plays the brothers as a pair of menacing hoodlums who recognize their own depravity, but proceed to live life as if they are the ones who are in the right. Their younger cousin, a musician with dreams of blues mastery, gets mixed up in their plan to create a juke joint that will bring in big dollars and hopefully provide him some fame. The brothers are not interested in him becoming a regular part of the entertainment. They seem to sense that this is a one-off opportunity, it's going to have some negative consequences, and they appear to be trying to avoid trapping him into their own lifestyle. That's about as close as being noble that the two hoodlum Brothers get.

It takes an hour or so for the supernatural element to enter the story, and when it does it's pretty creepy. The rapidly multiplying population of monsters sets the stage for a siege segment that is the main action sequence of the film. Viewers steeped in Vampire lore will understand some of the rules that are being followed, but there are also some things that don't make a lot of sense.

This is where some of the flaws of the film come in. The rules of the world that they have created seem a little ambiguous. Why becoming a vampire turns you into a virtuoso musician, singer, or dancer is not clear. Characters who are turned seem to maintain the personas of their  earlier selves, but never for long and it's not clear what's driving them. Also for a group of characters who are so intelligent as to give a philosophical justification for their actions, they don't seem to have planned for the arrival of dawn. Which for vampires is a pretty short-sighted fault.

The best things about the film are the musical sequences which integrate Blues roots into the plot line. In fact it might even be acceptable to call this film a musical based on the number of scenes where the primary emphasis is on a performance. The scenes of the cousin playing guitar in the car, or performing in the Juke Joint, are excellent. The scenes of the vampires trying to use music is a way of enticing themselves into the Juke Joint are also quite good. Apparently being dead can turn you into quite the Irish dancer, I'll have to keep that in mind for future reference.

Well the film is superior in a number of ways, it does suffer from some of the typical faults of horror movies. The main characters have to make stupid mistakes, someone has to violate the rules, and there will be choices that will make you scratch your head. As usual I try not to give away any spoilers in these posts, but a little of what I'm about to share with you might hint in that direction so proceed in reading with a little caution.

Ryan Coogler cannot find an exit for the movie. He creates a scenario which allows for a satisfying murder of dozens of violent racists, but it has nothing to do with the main plot of the film and it feels tacked on. Even when it's finished, he is still not done. There's a final twist in the film which is designed to give us one more musical interlude, and a take which seems to suggest that giving in to being a vampire isn't necessarily all that bad. The movie should have ended 20 minutes before it did. And regardless of how good the song is or how satisfying an extended sequence of cathartic violence might be, it's got nothing to do with the main story and it feels like padding. Coogler needed his editor to twist his arm a little bit and say "let's stop here".

So the production quality on the film is great, the actors do a terrific job, and the horror story works pretty well even with some of the flaws. It all gets diluted by Coogler's attempt to turn the film into a social commentary. Something that was not needed in order for the film to be worthwhile.

The Accountant 2 (2025)

       

A whole series of disparate events come to a violent conclusion and dozens of bad guys are killed. That's about as much of a plot summary as you need for a movie like this. Action films can work well with a minimal backstory, and sometimes they work well when the plot gets convoluted. This is one of the latter. A sequel to "The Accountant" from almost a decade ago, it finds Ben Affleck as an autistic but functioning human being with extraordinary financial skills. In the first film he was a savant and an extraordinary killer. He's not really an assassin anymore, but his old skills have not left him and he calls on them along with his estranged brother by John Bernthal, to wreak havoc on a trafficking organization.

If you want the audience to really hate the bad guys, you give them the worst kind of criminal activity to be involved in. In this case it is human trafficking, primarily of illegal immigrant women into prostitution. I don't think it's a spoiler to discover that one of the ways the organizations controls the women, is by imprisoning their children. We don't see it on the screen, but there is little doubt that an economic stream involving the children will eventually be in their future as well. It is by a strange series of coincidences, that the head of the FBI Financial crimes unit gets involved in a case that connects the trafficking group with an assassin.

Of course to fight against assassins, it helps to have a couple of Assassins on your side. That's where Affleck and Bernthal come into play. The FBI chief gets a little squeamish working with killers who don't have the same restrictions of legal Authority on them. Still they end up approaching the case from different directions, and ultimately connecting a dangerous assassin, to the crime ring. There is a bit of a twist in this plot development, I'm not sure it makes a whole lot of sense, but they do try to explain it. 

Affleck's character lives in an Airstream trailer, and connects with his financial Empire through a mysterious computer center, filled with children who, like himself, have some Savant abilities. It's been almost 30 years now that filmmakers have been trying to make computer hacking interesting on screen. Programmers, typing in code onto a computer screen, has to be inter-cut with a lot of other activity to make it watchable. The "Accountant 2", does these hacking scenes as well as anybody else has.

Although you would not want to know either Affleck or Bernthal's characters in real life, they make a fascinating pair in the movies. Occasionally questions come up concerning morality, but they're never really answered. There is usually some joke that gets them out of a moral quandary. This was a very effective action piece, with a story that was mysterious enough to keep you intrigued for the 90 minutes that the movie runs. Then we get a shootout, multiple deaths of bad guys, and a couple of closing lines suggesting that we'll be back with this crew again.

Thunderbolts* (2025)

We were scheduled to see this film on Thursday night at the usual preview screenings that now are really just the opening day of the film. However, as members of the Paramount Theater family we were invited to a free screening the night before that, so we felt a little special and we made the Trek down to the State Theater for the film. It was a packed audience and everybody was very enthusiastic, now let me tell you whether or not they should be,

The MCU has been in the doldrums for a few films now. It seems for every "Guardians of the Galaxy" success or "Deadpool" crossover, there is an "Eternals" or "Quantumania", ready to drag the franchise down. The powers that be, have been struggling to get the gravy train back on track, and with this film it looks like they hit the switch for the right set of rails. "Thunderbolts*", soon to be retitled, is a very satisfying team up of secondary characters, some heroic, some villainous, who come together as a group in order to face down the next existential crisis facing the planet. Yet before they deal with that crisis, they have to deal with a different existential crisis, their own sense of self-worth and levels of depression.

Florence Pugh's character, Yelena, is a skilled Black Ops agent, with pretty much the same skill set as her sister, the deceased Black Widow. What satisfying thing can you do with those skills? Unfortunately it seems they've been put to use by the current director of the CIA for some not very pleasant tasks. Yelena is giving in to a malaise that she may not be able to draw herself out of. The fact that she is not the only one who is suffering from an apparent rut in an unsatisfying field is the premise for the film. I enjoy light-hearted super hero movies but I know they can't all be fun times beating the bad guys. To make the stories real, there is usually some human drama involved. This movie creates a parallel structure of the opening half, with its mentally ill protagonists, and in the second half, turns that depression into the literal big bad of the film.

I've said it before, I am not deeply invested in comic books. It's been about 55 years since I spent any time looking at those colorful pages in a magazine format. There have been thousands of stories, and hundreds of heroes and villains have come and gone in that time period. I understand that there will be characters that I'm not familiar with and that's okay. As long as they are explained adequately in the film I'm looking at at the moment, I can enjoy the movie and appreciate the way the character seems to work. There are two characters in this in this film, which comic book fans seem to be quite wound up about, Taskmaster and the Sentry. Both of them appear in this film but with vastly different story arcs. I can't begin to debate the merits of how the characters are used in comparison to the way they originated in the comic books, I have no knowledge in this area. I can say that I felt one of these characters was ill-used in this story and the other is being set up for more important plot lines in the future.

Florence Pugh continues to impress with her talents on the screen. She portrays a convincing badass with a serious demeanor who is conflicted over the direction of her life. In contrast, David Harbor, who plays her father the Red Guardian, is equally living a less than satisfied life, but his attitude toward it is completely different. His avuncular and upbeat personality provides the movie with some humor and light moments as the main characters face their existential nightmares. The film also features John Walker, who for a short period of time was the new Captain America. He is portrayed by Wyatt Russell, and his take on the character is funny while also being a little problematic. Of course the drama of the film stems from the fact that all of the characters are problematic.

The story combines the usual tropes of the MCU hero team-ups. Each misfit gets a brief introduction, they engage in a competition/fight among themselves, and then they learn who the real enemy is and have to decide if they are able to take on that individual. Does that sound like Guardians of the Galaxy or The Avengers? There's a reason for that, it's because these films with a group of Heroes follow very familiar storytelling points.

The combat scenes in this film are pretty solid. There's a fight in an underground vault that is decisively designed to eliminate the heroes. It's choreographed very carefully and the flying knives, speeding bullets, and Flying Kicks all last about the right amount of time. I never felt like anything in this movie was padding, although there are several sequences which seem to suggest the exact opposite.

A pivotal new character, Bob, starts off as a naive confused patient, but ends up a somewhat deranged and honest hero and villain. It's another part of the mental health theme of this movie. It may be pressing good taste a little bit to have a deranged meth addict in a chicken costume attacking people for laughs, but in the long run it is a sad commentary on the lives that some people lead, returning us to that theme of disappointment, despair, and depression.

I can't say that this was the best MCU film, or even a top tier episode. I can say I enjoyed it enough to go back for the Thursday night screening that we had originally planned on and repeat the experience for a second evening in a row. I was entertained by the film and satisfied that the keepers of the franchise are starting to right the boat. As usual there are mid credit and end credit sequences as part of the exit titles. One of them is just a final joke and the other is a tie-in to the future of the franchise. Both of them are worth sitting through the credits for. Oh, and we get an official redubbing of the film title.

*

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