Star Trek Beyond, Alice Through the Looking Glass, The BFG and Now You See Me 2

It's kinda weird to see yourself in a plane movie

Star Trek Beyond

After a strong reboot, this is a bit of a misstep for the new Star Trek franchise. The Enterprise is taken down by a space scavenger and the divided crew must prove that unity is strength, not a weakness - though the antagonist always wins through numbers so doesn't oppose the idea very well. 

On a dusty world, the crew use salvaged scrap and enlist the help of a badass female alien to recover a McGuffin that threatens the entire Federation. 

The whole plot feels lazy and generic and it was far harder to care about the characters, good or bad, then in the previous films. This felt totally unimaginative and the plot would have made a poor entry as an episode in the original series. Disappointing. I'm glad I didn't watch it in the cinema.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

At the very least, a new Burton/Disney instalment of Alice in Wonderland is going to be a visual treat, of strange inventive creatures and distorted bodies. And so it is with this watchable but not very likeable sequel.

An adult Alice has improbably become a sea captain, but a spurned suitor is seeing to it that she becomes in every way an ordinary young woman.

Returning to Wonderland through the looking glass, she finds the Mad Hatter out of sorts. He found something to remind him of his family and has become obsessed with finding them. Only they died in a Jabberwocky attack years ago.

Alice resolves to go back in time, but as so often happens in this sort of time travel story, instead she discovers some deep dark secrets.

The film tries a little too hard to make coherent and consistent characters of Carroll's, and arguably this would have been a very dark story if there were no secrets to uncover. I think that normalising the cast and greatly reducing the random nonsense of the original detracts a lot from the charm. This feels more like an Oz film than an Alice one. 

But the climactic final action is a feast for the eyes and this is an inventive piece of fan fiction based on an original world, even if it doesn't match the original tone, and Sasha Baron-Cohen's Time is a fun mixture of slapstick and menace. 

But that sea captain idea? Nah. Just too unbelievable.

The BFG

This is one of those strange cases of a CGI-heavy movie that looks very strange and uncanny when clips are seen in isolation, but when watching the whole film, coheres nicely. In fact, this is rather a good adaptation of a beloved novel that suffered from not being the kind of story that lends itself well to movie trailers. The BFG's strange speech, Sophie's understated strong-heartedness, a story that revolvers largely around hiding and small but touching wonders...

Spielberg does suspense as well as he does wonder, which works here, but somehow the lack of real development for Sophie holds the movie back from really becoming affecting. She's brave and clever but doesn't really need to grow in a significant way during the course of the story. That would really help, I think.

Unsurprisingly, the whizz-bangs are minimised here, to the point they may as well not have been included. Even as a small child, I thought that part fell flat.

I thought this adaptation might have been poorly done but it's actually very respectful, even loving. That charm came across to me, but sadly I don't think it's going to resonate widely. For my personal enjoyment, though, my impressions were positive.

Now You See Me 2 

I can't be really objective about NYSM2, because I had a very small part in it. Over three very cold and rainy nights, I was an extra, showing up blink-and-you'll-miss-it crowd scene moments in both the Dave Franco and Lizzy Caplan sections in the climactic final act, despite them being set in totally different places. How's that for magic?

So it's slightly regretfully that I report that this is the usual case of a very poor Hollywood sequel. I really enjoyed the first movie, more even that average reviews may lead you to expect. I loved the origin story here of different styles of magicians brought together with a common goal, the twists were satisfying and the Robin Hood theme worked well. 

Here, sadly it's not so. There's a very strained explanation for the change in female actresses, then the Horsemen not only reveal themselves to the public again in underwhelming style in scenes set in New York but filmed in the ExCeL (would've been much more convenient for me to be an extra there!), the antagonists are foiled much too easily and then the final twists just don't feel like anything new or surprising. Plus the idea to give Woody Harrelson a goofy second role took things way too far into Austin Powers territory.

There are things to like here. Some of the magic works nicely and it's occasionally spectacular. But where the first film was a very pleasant surprise, the second is unfortunately just everything one would expect from a cash-in sequel.