New Star Trek Beyond Trailer drops

New Star Trek Beyond Trailer drops

There's a New Star Trek Beyond Trailer out this morning after it leaked in Germany.

From director Justin Lin and starring once again Chris Pine, Simon Pegg and Zachary Quinto, Star Trek Beyond opens on July 22nd

Just Cause 3: PS4 Review

Just Cause 3: PS4 Review

Platform: PS4
Released by Square Enix

If ever there were a game that had its MO in its title, Just Cause would be it.

The open-world gamer's title could be an ode to righteous reasons or a dismissive response to the question "Why did it do that?".

Set several years after the end of Just Cause 2, our hero Rico Rodriguez is back and returning to his homeland of Medici. But not everything is as it seems on Medici as dictator General Di Ravello is installed and cruising for more than power. But one man standing in his way is Rico....a showdown is set.

There's nothing more in Just Cause's arsenal than the desire to simply wreak havoc in the most spectacularly OTT way possible.

If it were a film, it'd be of the Expendables homestead, complete with potentially a Jean Claude Van Damme as the lead (even if Rico does bear a terrifying resemblance to Gerard Butler). And the film version of the game would be punctuated with a series of explosions as full stops to each sequence.

And that's pretty much how the game goes.

Running around the Medici islands, liberating points and taking out revolutionaries, it has more than an echo of Far Cry coursing through its veins. As you head from one job to the next, there's always plenty of carnage to unleash and bad guys (as well as good guy civilian collateral) to get rid of.

Using your grappling hook to hurtle through lands and parachutes, and even a wingsuit, there's more than enough in terms of options for getting around - but each of these are fraught with odd issues. The grappling hook occasionally latches on to places but fails to take you there (an odd bug that hits from time to time with random spawning) and it's tricky to use the hook to scale up mountains.

Equally the parachute and wingsuit has seen Rico been smashed into the ground with wildly inconsistent results. A flailing parachute means Rico will go off course but a speedy wingsuit sees him killed when he plummets with speed into the concrete.

Combat is frenetic fun and occasionally tricky. A lack of an ability to lock into a target can result in ammo being over-used and from time to time, even if you shoot the baddies in the chest from point blank range repeatedly, they bizarrely get up and carry on attacking. And yet, it's in keeping with the almost perversely ACME grounded physics and reality the game seems to hold dear. With a wide range of highly destructive weapons in the game too, there's plenty of havoc to be wreaked.

You can blow up masses of fuel tanks in front of Rico and he will be flung through the air, and not killed but if a vehicle explodes with him in, he's literally toast. There's no consistency in what kills and what doesn't - but if you're willing to embrace the wild logic on show, Just Cause 3 is actually a cartoony game that amuses and entertains.

Graphically, the game hits some stumbles and some long loading times mean it's not exactly a smooth transition through Medici. Explosions look hellishly impressive and the game's clearly thrown most of its engine into achieving those, at the expense of ensuring there's not too much of a delay from the console gamer patiently waiting either for a reload or a next chapter to begin.

There's no denying that the occasionally self-aware Just Cause 3 is fun - its perverse adherence to its own rules which the gamer's not always party to means it's an uneven experience from time to time, but it's a joyous one too.

Rating:

Knock Knock: DVD Review

Knock Knock: DVD Review

Rating: R16
Released by Roadshow Home Ent

Mixing lust, paranoia and a healthy dose of what would you do, Eli Roth's Knock Knock follows Keanu Reeves' Evan and his night from hell.

Essentially a lucky man - husband, beautiful wife, good kids, Evan has it all. Staying home for a long weekend to work while his family goes away, his life is changed by a knock a the door in the middle of a storm.

Standing on his doorstep is two young women, drenched to the bone and doing the decent thing, Evan invites the lost duo in to get warmed up and phone a cab. But the pair seduce Evan despite his initial protestations - and soon one night could cost Evan everything.

Knock Knock is lurid and trashy and ultimately not particularly good.

The chamber piece is so OTT that it lacks any credibility of situation or drama; a fact not helped by Reeves' less than capable acting and a script that lacks any real bite preferring to pile on the hysterics rather than the psychological edge.

Sure, you could argue Eli Roth's gone for shocking and aimed for an ethical dilemma but the two girls are simply not up to scratch in anything other than looks and their subsequent cat and mouse games leave you feeling much less sympathy for anyone in their plight than you should. Perhaps if Roth had swathed the thing in a bit more subtlety, Knock Knock would have been more effective.

As it is, its torture horror ethos and OTT vibe badly cripples its intentions.

It's one Knock Knock joke that really does lack a decent punchline.

Rating:

Daddy's Home: Film Review

Daddy's Home: Film Review

Cast: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardinelli, Thomas Haden Church
Director: Sean Anders

Mining the Step dynamic has already proven fertile ground for Will Ferrell.

In the 2008 comedy Step Brothers, along with John C Reilly, Ferrell managed the fine line between sentimental and argumentative as the blending of two families took place.

But with Daddy's Home, Ferrell has managed to completely miss the comedic mark.

Ferrell plays Brad, a jazz radio station worker and step-dad to Linda Cardinelli's Sara's two young kids. Desperate to hear them utter the words Dad, Brad's world is turned upside down with the arrival of their leather-clad muscle bound biological father Dusty (Wahlberg, in reasonable comic form).

What starts off as genial jostling and an attempt to accommodate Dusty gradually sees Brad reach boiling point as Dusty starts to get his feet under the familial table...

Daddy's Home is excruciating, to say the least.

The best gags - all 3 of them - are to be found in the trailer of this weakly written and flat comedy that has neither the punch lines nor the sense of sparkle to carry it along.

Half the problem is at a script level where any such issues should have been ironed out; a lack of punchlines in relevant places doesn't help matters either as scenes limp to an end rather than a hilarious conclusion.

Ferrell plays mild-mannered fine and admittedly provides some laughs in some of the film as he tries to overcome his insecurities, bring his one-up-manship game and be the dad he's always wanted to be. There's some chemistry with former Other Guys co-star Wahlberg and Wahlberg at least appears to be having some fun flexing his comedy chops and flaunting his dance moves at the end. But there's little to no sparkle in the pacing of the story and its execution; it's almost as if someone's looked at the template of the Competitive Dad in The Fast Show and tried to bring it up to date.

Thomas Haden Church provides a few guffaws as Brad's blustering radio boss who's full of irrelevant stories - but his screen time is limited.

Ultimately though, Daddy's Home is a film which suffers because the funny just isn't there; it's too tame to be an R rated laugh-fest and too flat to be a family comedy. Plus, unbelievably at just over 95 mins long, it still feels too bloated.

There is a saying that sometimes you save the best till last, but with this Boxing Day release, it's clearly not the case. Daddy's Home is another embarrassment to Ferrell's CV and a comedy that forgets its simple MO - to provide laughs.

Rating:

Paper Towns: DVD Review

Paper Towns: DVD Review

Released by 20th Century Fox Home Ent

The road to coming of age films is littered with many entries, each of them iconic to their generation.

But as the audience grows and yearns, their desire to get a new self-knowing and quintessential entry of their own increases.

2014's The Fault in Our Stars was such an entry into the pantheon. Author John Green cashed in on the sick-lit genre and breathed a new life into a genre whose viewers had seen it all, with two leads that sparked amid the tropes of the genre and raised the material above its intentions.

Paper Towns feels like a slight but retro entry to the field, using its MO to remind teens that sometimes life is about the journey and not the ultimate destination, as well as dishing out some life lessons that are obvious to anyone over a certain age.

This time around, it's free spirit and impulsive versus safe and steady in the story of model Cara Delevingne's Margo and Nat Wolff's Quentin. Friends from first meeting, the duo's paths intertwine but rarely intersect, but one night, the enigmatic Margo bangs on Quentin's window and begs him to come with her on an adventure one night.

But the following day, Margo disappears, and a series of clues are left behind for Quentin to decipher as to her whereabouts. So, grabbing his two best friends, Radar and Ben, the group sets out to track Margo down.

Paper Towns will in no way match the success of The Fault in Our Stars. 

Going more for cute and twee, this road trip flick occasionally meanders en route to its destination. The easy bond between Quentin and his buddies is nicely explored, but there's no real learnings here or insight into the human condition, merely an acknowledgement that leaving high school is the start of something new and your comfort zone is about to be shattered.

The film's best asset is a dusky-voiced Delevingne, who imbues Margo with a spiky free-as-a-bird-yet-troubled mentality and who impresses greatly in the early scenes. But, narratively, she's missed from the film and spends great swathes of it as a gone girl, and really the film suffers from her absence and infectious vulnerability and joie de vivre.

It's not that there's anything wrong with a sincere Wolff et al, just that the safe revelations (OMG, who knew the hot girl could have slightly geeky leanings) and bland life lessons lead to particularly unsurprising moments; while there's a minor subversion of the tropes at the end, the final result is no less surprising.

The Fault In Our Stars star Ansel Englort makes a brief cameo aimed at tipping a wink to the teens who will lap up this film, but it has to be said Paper Towns feels slight in its intentions and resonance, perfectly adequate in its execution and pitched squarely and modestly at its teen audience who will adore it.

Rating:

'71: DVD Review

'71: DVD Review

Rating: R16
Released by Universal Home Ent

Thrilling, tense and visceral are perhaps the best ways to describe the drama '71.

Set in Belfast in 1971, a near wordless Jack O'Connell stars as rookie Brit soldier Gary Hook. As the film begins the trainees are being put through their paces, with the importance of team-work being drilled into them.

But recruited to the Belfast lines to help with peace-keeping duty, this squaddie soon sees the reality of team-work thrown out the window when a tense meeting between Catholics and Protestants on one street sees him cut-off from the rest of his squad.

Suddenly forced on the run behind enemy lines on one night, Hook's out of his depth when it comes to surviving what lies ahead - and his troubles, much like Northern Ireland's, are just beginning.

First time director Yann Demange rightly won best director at the 2014 British Independent Film Awards with this gripping take on the survival film. As bombs go off and the shocks hit, Demange knows how to lull you into a sense of dread, let it coil around you and choke you with it.

In among the visceral riot, close camera shots force you into the POV of Hook et al as you try desperately to see what's coming where but are only confronted with the uncertain reality of a sea of seething faces. Equally fuelling this powderkeg is O'Connell, whose near-mute presence forces him into a physicality of a performance that helps convey everything he needs and the internal conflicts.

As he staggers from one moment to the next, picking his way through dense fog and streets littered only with burning cars or petrol bombs, he's a commanding presence, a mix of frightened, vulnerable and determined.

Equally chilling are the politics of the time, as the words "We look after our own in the army" and relying on the kindness of strangers take on new meaning on the bomb-torn Belfast streets as allegiances are struck and betrayals are meted out, never overtly but always with subtlety as the conflict begins to take shape.

A final cat and mouse sequence set in a stairwell is the ultimate noose-tightening as storm clouds gather and the nail-biter heads to its denouement. Tragedy inevitably follows Hook on the streets of Belfast but not once does Demange milk this, preferring to showcase the sickening reality of the impending Troubles rather than linger on it.

'71 is an intense and riveting film, one which takes you into the pulsing heart of conflict and defies you not to succumb to a heart attack as it pursues its devastating conclusion.

Newstalk ZB Review - Talking In The Heart of The Sea

Newstalk ZB Review - Talking In The Heart of The Sea

http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-mornings-with-jack-tame/audio/darren-bevan-the-heart-of-the-sea/

http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-mornings-with-jack-tame/audio/darren-bevan-the-heart-of-the-sea/