Gavin Watches a Lot of Movies

...and has opinions on them
Alright, new week, new movie review - not that I'm planning for this to be a weekly thing, it's just probably gonna be that way for a bit while there's a bunch of summer movies coming out that I want to see. Obviously, last week's review was... a bit of a doorstop, to say the least, but I'm confident this one's going to be much shorter. After all, there's no way this week's movie could be anywhere near as irredeemably abysmal as Skillhouse, right?

...right?

Nah, I'm just fucking with you, this one was great.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

Normally I wouldn't bother including the release year in the title, but given I do sometimes go back and review older movies I've just watched for the first time this year, I figured I should be clear up front that I'm not talking about the original slasher classic from 1997. In much the same vein as 2018's Halloween, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer isn't a reboot or remake, but a distant future sequel with the actors from the original (Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr.. and a few other surprise cameos) reprising their roles as older, jaded versions of their characters serving as de-facto mentors to the new cast. Also much like 2018's Halloween, it isn't afraid to ignore any of the dumber plot developments from the old sequels, so fans can rest assured we are once again dealing with a living flesh-and-blood Fisherman instead of an inexplicable magical zombie.

In terms of formula, the movie follows the original framework pretty closely: a bunch of drunk college students cause the death of a stranger in a recklessness-induced car accident, which they agree (with varying degrees of reluctance) to cover up and never speak of again. One year later, the guilt-stricken main character returns to her hometown, only for her and her friends to start getting ominous letters from a mysterious hook-wielding fisherman who Knows What They Did Last Summer, putting them in a race against time to identify their slicker-clad stalker before they wind up on a Long John Silver's dollar menu.

(Note to self: should probably look up whether Long John Silver's has a dollar menu before I post this.)

Having recently rewatched the original IKWYDLS in preparation, it was hard not to notice just how chock-full the movie is with callbacks and familiar setpieces - sometimes to its detriment. While the fanservice does land more than it flops (at least for me), it's definitely one of those movies that feels like it's constantly straddling the line between "affectionate nod to the original" and "HEY LOOK IT'S THAT THING FROM THE MOVIE YOU LIKED, ISN'T IT CLEVER THAT WE DID THE THING FROM THE MOVIE YOU LIKED AGAIN?" That said, it does make some interesting improvements to the original's formula, including making the protagonists more sympathetic and likeable overall, changing the intial car accident scene to make it more of a genuine accident and less of an outright murder, and most importantly of all, making the main character a canonically kinky bisexual (which, in my extremely biased opinion, should be grounds for an Oscar nomination in and of itself).

Is it a perfect movie? God no, not by any means - the dialogue is constantly giving the vibes of 40-something screenwriters making assumptions about what Kids These Days talk like, and the ending takes some pretty silly turns that lead to the film ending on a painfully corny note. But let's be real: if it wasn't corny as hell, would it really be I Know What You Did Last Summer? If you're looking for a good, fun, no-frills slasher movie to kill two hours with this year... honestly, Heart Eyes is probably still your best pick, but this one's a relatively close second. Solid 7/10, and I'd personally bump it up to an 8/10 soley by virtue of it not being fucking Skillhouse.
 
Brace yourself, there's probably gonna be two new reviews here this weekend. Finally arranged a time on Sunday to go catch Superman with my dad, but before that, got another random horror movie I'm gonna check out tomorrow night.
 
Okay, so update, the plan to catch two movies this weekend turned out to be off by a factor of one. My intention was to catch a schlocky-looking horror movie called The Home on Friday night, but apparently sometimes Fandango decides to just fucking lie about showtimes, so I got dropped off at the theater just in time to learn that the screening I was there for didn't exist and the next one wasn't until way later at night than I could manage. At least they gave me a free popcorn for the inconvenience, which I got to eat while waiting a full half-hour in the lobby until I could arrange for someone to pick me up ahead of schedule.

So with that plan scuppered, I guess that just leaves the movie I did manage to successfully catch.

Superman (2025)

...Not gonna lie, I feel like this is gonna be a hard one to review. Not because I didn't like it - it's every bit as incredible as everyone says - but because I suck at talking about movies I actually love. Maybe it's all those formative years spent growing up in the era of amateur Youtube critics nitpicking stuff to hell and back, but while I can go on for literal hours breaking down everything I don't like about a bad movie in excruciating detail (see: Skillhouse), when it comes time to talk about what I do like about a good movie, my brain goes completely blank and I just mumble some vague stuff about likeable characters or a clever plot twist or whatever comes to mind. Hell, my Sinners review boiled down to "go listen to someone smarter than me talk about why this movie is great because I don't think I can do it justice".

Still, I feel obligated to at least give it a shot, so let's just get the obvious out of the way: this is hands-down the best big-screen depiction of Superman in decades. Like, maybe my frame of reference is skewed because I'm more of a casual comics fan and most of my Superman movie experience is with the Snyder version, but it's been so goddamn long since we had a version of Superman that felt anywhere near this human. Every scene he's in, every choice he makes, it all drives home again and again what Superman really is at his core: not an invincible alien demigod whose strength should be feared, not a clumsy Christ allegory too good for this sinful earth, but simply an unfailingly kind man who, no matter how often he doubts himself or makes the wrong decision in the moment, will always be motivated by a genuine desire to help everyone he can.

If it was just Superman himself captured so perfectly, that would already be praiseworthy, but the supporting cast is every bit as sterling as the leading man. Lois finally gets a proper chance to show off her reporting chops and shine as an equal partner to Superman in her own way, Jimmy proves a capable sidekick and loyal friend (while still very much being comic relief), Pa Kent delivers a truly magnificent speech on parenthood and purpose that I can only hope has his Snyderverse equivalent stewing in his grave, and while I don't personally know enough about most of the other superheroes in the film to talk on how they were depicted*, Guy Gardener is definitely done justice as a shameless, obnoxious asshole who nevertheless proves his willingness to put his money where his mouth is when lives are on the line.

*(That being said, Edi Gathegi's performance as Mister Terrific is top-tier despite me knowing jack shit about the character before coming in.)

And of course, far and above anyone else, Nicholas Hoult steals the show as the single most hateable and monstrous depiction of Lex Luthor in cinematic history. The usual calculating, charismatic presence of Luthor is eschewed here, and that's very evidently a feature, not a bug. Just as every one of Superman's scenes drive in his kindness as the core of his character, every one of Luthor's scenes are purpose-built to emphasize what he truly is under all the wealth and power: a petty, spiteful wretch of a man so utterly infuriated and bewildered by the idea of power being used selflessly that he's willing to throw away trillions of dollars and tear the world apart just to put a stop to it. Just as Superman exemplifies the best parts of humanity, Hoult's Luthor is the embodiment of the worst our world has to offer.

That, of course, brings us to the reason why a lot of humanity's worst have taken particular offense to this film: the strong, smoothly-executed political commentary. Between the illegal detention center where political undesirables are held without trial in transparent cube-shaped cells (which, if one were to stretch a bit, might be compared to ice cubes), the unnecessarily violent arrest scene where one of the arresting officers smugly tells Superman that due process doesn't apply to aliens, the genocidal foreign president who boasts of his country's long-term alliance with the US and proudly declares his intent to annihilate his neighbors and seize their land using weapons from his American allies, and of course, the constant overbearing presence of a tech billionaire who sucks shit on every conceivable level, many of the evils Superman faces in the movie feel like they've been drawn less from comic books and more from the front page of newspaper. Compared to the MCU's latest foray into political commentary being more along the lines of "we should be nice to the president even if he did lots of crimes and also the IDF is awesome", it's a refreshingly incisive direction for the film to take.

I could probably go on a while longer about all the different elements that come together to make this movie as incredible as it is, but it's getting late and I really don't want to go over the character limit and have to make a second post, so I'm gonna try to cut it short and say that ultimately, so much of what's good about Gunn's Superman boils down to how earnestly hopeful it is. No snarky self-referential jokes about how dumb superhero tropes are, no cynical message about how Superman's ideology could never cut it in the real world, just a heartfelt reminder that even in the bleak times we're all going through right now, there will always be hope and the opportunity to be kind - to do better. Because no matter how the rich and powerful may try to shout us down, to insist cruelty is the only way the world can function, we can do better than this.

10/10 movie, upgraded to 11/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse (and yes, I'm probably going to keep doing this bit with every movie I review for the rest of the year.) I still think Sinners is going to wind up being my favorite movie of the year, but this was an incredibly close second.
 
Oh wow I'm suddenly doing a lot of these. Sometimes summer release schedules can be a blessing and a curse, I guess. Anyway, time for more horror!

Together

Real quick tangent: it always low-key annoys me when movies name themselves after a single common word. It's bad enough that Disney's trying to copyright the entire English language bit by bit through an endless series of bland glurgefests, we don't need genres I actually like jumping on the "let's make our movie slightly more obnoxious to look up online" bandwagon. Yes I know my favorite movie franchise of all time is called Saw and I'm being a giant hypocrite SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

Quibbles about the name aside, Together has been one of the more heavily advertised horror movies of the year (albeit thankfully not nearly to the same infuriatingly inescapable level as 2024's Speak No Evil), and considering my favorite movie of last year was also an artsy body horror flick with a small cast and heavy symbolism, I couldn't not give this one a try. The movie stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie (who I am just now learning while writing this are married in real life) as a newly-engaged couple with a rocky relationship who move to a small, isolated countryside community. Naturally, not even a full 24 hours have passed before they make the most "white people in a horror movie" decision possible and drink from a creepy-looking ritual pool in a dilapidated underground chapel they fell into while hiking, infecting them with a mysterious supernatural force that attempts to draw their bodies together and merge them into a single organism.

So, to cut to the chase: is the movie good? Yes, definitely. Did I like the movie?

...Ehh, kind of?

I genuinely do not understand why Together never clicked for me. On paper, so many of the pieces to create something I would have loved are in place here, but in practice, I walked out thinking "yeah that was okay I guess". The body horror aspect works brilliantly to build tension in the first half of the movie, sending you into panic mode every time Franco and Brie make any kind of physical contact as you wonder what, if anything, is going to get glued together this time - and absolutely making you squirm in your seat whenever something does get stuck - but once the merging starts in earnest, the obvious CGI effects feel like a major step down compared to what came before. The subtext is about as blunt as The Substance, drawing clear parallels throughout between the semi-toxic codependent relationship our leads are trapped in and the magical phenomenon making it literally impossible for them to separate for any length of time... except while The Substance used its over-the-top symbolism to brilliant effect in one of the most visceral skewerings of Hollywood ageism and impossible female beauty standards ever put to film, Together never really felt to me like it had anything more incisive to say about codependency than "yep, it sure is a thing that exists".

Honestly, the fact that this movie is sitting at a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes right now is bewildering to me - not in like a snobby "how could those mouth-breathing fools possibly enjoy such dreck?" way, but more in a genuinely curious "what are so many people seeing in this movie that I'm not?" way. Most of the reviews I checked talk about how incredible the romance is between the two leads, and it was fine for me but it never felt all that amazing. Maybe I just don't have enough real-world romantic experience for any of this stuff to resonate with me, or maybe I need to accept that something about my brain just does not gel with the vast majority of romance stories. Whatever the reason for the disconnect, when it comes to romance/horror fusion movies of 2025, I'll still be sticking with Heart Eyes.

(Also it's one of those where like 90% of the best scenes are in the trailer, so that might be part of it too.)

6/10 for me, upgraded to 7/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.
 
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Okay, had a heck of a time with this review. Started writing it last night, and then I accidentally closed the tab and lost everything when I tried to go back to it, so I figured I'd just take a break to cool off and recreate it the next day, except now everything I wrote is back somehow? Not sure how that works, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth!

Weapons

Another heavily-anticipated big-name horror movie of 2025, this one coming from Zach Cregger - who, between writing 2022 horror hit Barbarian (which I haven't seen myself but have heard was amazing) and producing Companion earlier this year, has a short but impressive track record with the genre. Reportedly, Jordan Peele got into a multi-million dollar bidding war to produce this one, and was allegedly so furious when he failed to secure the rights that he fired his whole management team. So, now that the movie's actually out, was Weapons the kind of once-in-a-lifetime screenplay worthy of ending careers over?

...Honestly, not quite?. Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome movie and I loved it from start to finish, but I already get the feeling this is going to be the Longlegs of 2025: a horror movie that is legitimately brilliant and praiseworthy in its own right, but is probably going to get a fair amount of hate from disappointed people who were expecting something different and feel like it was overhyped.

As stated in the trailer, on the poster, and in the very first scene of the movie, the plot of Weapons centers around a mysterious event wherein seventeen children (all from the same elementary school class) simultaneously wake up in the middle of the night and run away from home, vanishing without a trace. When the police fail to turn up any concrete evidence connecting the teacher of said class to the incident (and, presumably, give Tiktok a quick once-over to make sure the Run Away Into The Darkness At Exactly 2:17 AM And Never Come Back Challenge hasn't gone viral), the father of one of the missing children begins his own investigation to prove the teacher's guilt, while the teacher simultaneously searches for a lead on her missing pupils and a way to clear her name.

Going into this movie, one of the comparisons I heard floating around was to Magnolia, and from what I know of that movie's it kind of tracks. Rather than focus on a single main character, Weapons splits the bulk of its runtime into six vignettes of varying length that each focus on a different resident of Maybrook, showing their actions, independent investigations, and day-to-day struggles in the lead-up to a big final encounter where everyone's paths intersect for better or for worse. It kinda reminds me of a "golden ending" visual novel in effect, drip-feeding the audience clues about the overarching mystery with each route that the characters will ultimately have to put together in the endgame... though much like one of those VNs, there's definitely some paths that only give you the vaguest hint at what's truly going on and other paths that suddenly drop massive game-changing reveals out of nowhere.

It's an engaging plot overall, but I think if there's any one element that people are going to be very love-it-or-hate-it about, it's the resolution. I'm going to try to talk about it with as few actual spoilers as possible, but as much as I personally liked the antagonist, their introduction does come a bit out of left field, and I think most people going to see this one are going to have a very different expectation of the mystery's solution than what actually winds up happening. Most of all, the ending of the film is... not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but kind of abrupt and surprisingly comedic compared to everything that comes before.

I know it sounds like I'm dogging on this movie, but I swear to god, I genuinely loved it - it's just very different than I (and probably a lot of other people) thought it would be going in, and I'm seeing the Longlegs hype backlash from last year flashing before my eyes all over again, and i really don't want that to happen. If you're going to see it, I highly recommend you keep an open mind - despite all the fancy marketing, Weapons is by no means an "elevated horror" movie. There's no big, obvious social commentary to it, it's just the story of some weird shit happening in a small town, and sometimes that can be just as fun to watch.

8/10, upgraded to 9/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.
 
Feeling bummed out because my stream went poorly, so figured now's a great time for a two-for-one review special! Normally I try to space out my movie nights a bit more, but actually wound up catching two movies over the weekend - one at home Saturday night, and one at the theater Sunday afternoon. And boy oh boy, did we hit both ends of the quality spectrum with this one!

The War of the Worlds (2025)

As anyone this far into the thread probably recalls, when I wrote my multi-post review of Skillhouse, I said I was already prepared to call it the worst movie of the year simply because I couldn't imagine anything that possibly could be worse. And now, having watched Amazon Prime's recently-released and widely-panned adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic... okay, no, I still definitely hate Skillhouse way more, but this one still sucks.

Let's get the one positive point out of the way first: I genuinely think the movie's framing device has potential, and I can kind of see the vision behind it. It goes without saying that when people think of War of the Worlds, they think of the legendary Orson Welles radio adaptation that created unintentional mass panic by telling the story via a series of fictitious news broadcasts. In contrast, the 2025 movie is shot as an Unfriended-esque screen recording of a high-level DHS agent's computer as he gathers intelligence on the alien invasion and helps to coordinate a counter-offensive. It's definitely an oddball choice that causes its share of problems - chiefly, keeping the main character bound to a desk for 99% of what's clearly trying to be a high-octane turn-your-brain-off action movie - but I can still sort of see the conceptual parallels of telling the story from the viewpoint of someone observing the action from afar in real time, even if the execution is a flop.

And good fucking god is the execution a complete flop. The plot is insane and riddled with gaping holes from start to finish, the main character (played by Ice Cube of all people) is painfully unlikeable, and the product placement goes well beyond blatant and straight into the entire movie feeling like an elaborate 90=minute Amazon ad. I'm not even going to try to pick apart this thing and explain why it's bad. I'm just going to share, entirely without commentary, a list of events and plot points in this movie, and then I'll let you draw your own conclusions:
  • One of the first scenes in the movie is Ice Cube using the unbridled power of the most comprehensive and intrusive surveiilance states in human hstory to hack his adult daughter's fridge and bitch her out for not eating enough protein.
  • One of the main characters is an Amazon delivery driver, whose job proves instrumental to saving not only Ice Cube's daughter's life, but the entire human race.
  • A subplot revolves around the manhunt for a mysterious super-hacker. Ice Cube eventually identifies him by reversing the voice-changer effect on one of his recorded messages, which it appears he could have done at any time but just didn't think to try until now.
  • The president just unironically looks into the camera at one point and says something along the lines of "for the sake of humanity, we must win this War of the Worlds!"
  • The aliens are on Earth because they want to eat our data, which is a finite resource apparently. They stick their big wiggly mecha-tentacles into a bunch of data centers and just start slurping up all the data, and it makes all the military's tanks and planes stop working instantly because you can't fly a plane without data.
  • Literally every time a character criticizes government surveillance, they specifically mention the government "snooping on people's Amazon carts" as their go-to example of horrific and unwarranted overreach into the private lives of civilians.
  • The final act of the movie has the heroes racing against time to kill the aliens before an incoming bomber squadron levels Washington DC under the orders of Ice Cube's evil boss, because the movie immediately forgot the plot point about all the planes crashing without any data.
  • In what is presumably meant to be a tragic, serious emotional moment, the aliens eat Ice Cube's dead wife's Facebook page.
  • You know how in basically every version of War of the Worlds, the aliens are ultimately defeated not by being outfought or overpowered by the humans, but by exposure to simple Earth pathogens they don't have any immunity to? Yeah, in this version the main characters bullshit together an anti-alien plot virus that they ship to Ice Cube with an Amazon delivery drone so he can make all the aliens explode.
  • During the climax, the drone carrying the plot MacGuffin is knocked to the ground by the aliens and lands on its back. Thankfully, it lands next to a homeless man with a functioning smartphone who can be bribed with a $1000 Amazon gift card to flip the drone back over.
  • Having saved the world, the protagonists naturally receive the highest honor to which any American hero can aspire: a congratulatory tweet from Joe Rogan.
So, with all that laid out, why do I still think Skillhouse is worse? Well, to put it simply, what it lacks in actual quality it makes up for in being downright hilarious to watch with friends or family who know what they're signing up for. I threw it on for my dad as an impromptu "bad movie night", and we had an absolute blast riffing on it from start to finish, so I can't genuinely say I regret the time I spent watching it. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means grab some drunken friends and give it a shot - but if not, steer clear.

1/10, upgraded to 2/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

The Naked Gun (2025)

Moving from a same-named remake to a same-named sequel, we have The Naked Gun, a distant-future soft-reboot of one of the greatest comedy movies ever made! I was hyped for this one from the moment they announced Liam Neeson would be the new Frank Drebin - one of the most central sources of the original movie's comedy was Leslie Nielsen's ability to act as a totally serious character even while saying and doing the most ridiculous things, and Nielsen himself was originally famous for playing serious tough-guy leading roles, so casting someone with a similar background felt like a promising sign.

So, did it live up to the hype? Well, reviews in my theater seemed to be mixed... by which I mean that my dad absolutely hated it and thought it was one of the worst movies he'd ever seen, but me and the entire rest of the audience were laughing our heads off from start to finish. There's admittedly a few jokes that didn't quite land for me, and certain parts of the ending felt like they fell a bit flat compared to the climax of the original, but overall they did an incredible job of not only capturing most of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker's deadpan comedic style, but putting their own modernized spin on the formula. It's not a spot-on match, but I don't think anyone realistically expected it would be, and I feel like they got better results by going their own way here and there than they would have if they'd gone the full nostalgia-pandering route.

...Which, in hindsight, is probably why my dad hated it so much. I guess that's my whole review summed up for me right there: if you're coming into this looking for them to do everything exactly the same as Nielsen would have done it and any deviation from that will be a negative for you, then just do yourself a favor and watch the original Naked Gun at home instead. If you're a fan of the original but willing to accept that a different cast, director, writing team, and release century is going to result in a different movie, or you're just looking for a good parody movie in general, you're going to have the time of your life.

9/10, upgraded to 10/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse. If nothing else, see it so you can watch Liam Neeson punch an alpha-male tech billionaire so hard he cries.
 
Wow, it's been a while since the last one of these, huh? Technically I did watch Shin Godzilla somewhere in there, I just didn't think it was fair to review it because I was recovering from another eye injury flare-up at the time and couldn't read any of the subtitles - only reason I went was because I bought the tickets in advance to go with my dad and I knew he wouldn't go without me. Anyway, you know what else is coming back after a long break this time of year? FOOTBALL! Real football, specifically, not the weird loser bitch-baby kind you Europeans have where a bunch of people run around a ball and pretend to fall down for 90 minutes and then the game ends 1-0. Let's watch a movie about that!

Him

Oh, come on. I know I already bitched about the single-common-word title trend back in my Together review, but using a pronoun is just fucking obnoxious. What's next, definite articles? Am I going to have to review a horror movie called "The" next year?

Annoyingly hard-to-Google title aside, Him is a rare genre combination of sports movie and horror movie, centered around an up-and-coming rookie named Cameron who suffers a career-endangering brain injury after being attacked by a man in a mascot costume. With his prospects on the line, he receives a once-in-a-lifetime offer from legendary football superstar Isaiah White, who wants to personally train him as a potential successor at his private desert compound. Cam, of course, jumps on the chance to learn from his childhood idol, only to find himself increasingly unnerved by Isaiah's bizarre and dangerous training methods, his horde of obsessive and unstable fans, and his steadfast belief that one can only become truly great at football if they're willing to sacrifice everything in the name of victory.

Him is a movie with a lot to say about the culture and industry of professional football - though how well it says it may be up for debate, especially as things take a hard right turn into the surreal in the final 20-30 minutes. From the very start of the film, we see a young Cam watching on TV as Isaiah suffers a graphic, bloody, bone-shattering injury in the process of making a game-winning play, his father encouraging him to keep watching and telling him that this is the ideal of manhood he should aspire towards - that "real men make sacrifices". The commentary doesn't get much kinder from there - comparisons are frequently drawn between football and gladiatorial combat, hedonistic parties and adoring groupies are deployed almost strategically to entice Cam back into the fold whenever the brutality becomes too much for him, and by the time the movie reaches its spectacularly bloody finale, it's clear that the true villain is not Isaiah himself, but the very system that made him what he became.

Honestly, I'm surprised this one's tanking in the reviews as badly as it is, because I really quite enjoyed it. It's got its flaws, certainly - the pacing can be inconsistent, dragging in the first part of the movie before slamming down the accelerator for the finale, and said finale definitely feels like a major departure from everything that came before it. I've seen a lot of people accusing it of being style without substance, and that's true to an extent, but there's definitely a fair bit of substance to be found if you're looking for it, and more than enough style to make up for what it's lacking. Overall, Him definitely isn't reaching the lofty heights of Sinners or Weapons, but I'd still personally say it's a fun enough ride to be worth the watch. Can see it being hit or miss on whether you enjoy it, but you'll damn sure remember it.

7/10, upgraded to 8/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.
 
"Him" sounds interesting. Sounds completely different than what I was expecting, based on what you're saying about it. (plus the previews were confusing as fuck :P)
 
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