I don’t know what’s been going on over last few months. I try my best to look out for movies that I’ll enjoy - no-one should be watching bad movies for the sake of complaining - but it just keeps happening. Are movies getting worse or am I becoming hyper critical with the dozens upon dozens of movies that I see for the first time, every year? Given that recent rant about the pretentiousness of professional movie criticism today, I think it’s just that these movies suck.

Of course, not all movies suck. Follow Stoski’s Movie Ratings Guide and we’ll wade through the sea of trash together. Let’s try to make the most of a bad situation, shall we?

Risky Business (1983)

Joel Goodson (nice name) is a stuck up rich kid living it up in suburbia. His life is perfect, but he needs some excitement in his life. Wacky hijinks, and a series of unfortunate decisions, and his sheltered naivete, pull Joel deeper and deeper into mischief, with no-one to rely on but himself.

Risky business is a coming of age teen sex drama comedy - a triple threat from a time when teenage characters where portrayed by teenage actors and scenes were calculated and deliberate. Far from the only way this film shows it’s age, while none of them bad, Risky Business tells a simple, straight forward story that gets more complex as the film progresses, but never takes it’s eye off the prize, or the main character. The stakes go up, and the problems mount one on another, but it’s always Joel, the viewer, and a camera, up against it all. Will Joel find the prostitute to get the information to go to the apartment to find his mother’s crystal egg back? Can he escape the clutches of the amazingly-played pimp Guido (played by Joe Pantoliano, of Bad Boys fame)? We’ll see, but no matter what, it’ll be real, and it’ll be down to Earth. Hijinks ensue, but it’s all above board.

Plus, the kid runs a brothel out of his parent’s house, all tax free! How cool is that! 100% realism.

3.5/5

Grimsby (2016)

Grimsby, while one of the better films from character actor Sacha Baron Cohen, suffers from the same brand of bottom-of-the-barrel toilet humor, likely only included for shock value, that unfortunately feature in a lot of his other films. I’m no prude, and I’ve done more of my fare share of laughing at ‘shidded and farded’ content on the internet, but no-one needs to see two grown men hide in an elephant’s vagina while getting assaulted by huge elephant wang. No-one needs to then see those elephants (plural) jizz all over those men while they’re still inside the female elephant’s vagina. No-one needs to see a man tearfully suck on another man’s scrotum. No-one needs to see two grown men shove six-foot long fireworks up their ass. No-one needs to see a tall, lanky man wrestling with a short, fat man, in the nude.

That last one was in another one of Sacha Baron Cohen’s films: Borat. Unlike Borat and it’s sequel, however, Grimsby is actually a good movie, in spite of a few tasteless (putting it lightly) scenes. The pacing is done well, as this movie actually has a 3-act structure - an amazing feat considering some of Cohen’s earlier work. Despite having a villain with a terrible master plan (give an entire stadium of people super-AIDS while sitting in said stadium), the plot execution is done well: Two brothers are separated in childhood. One becomes a commando-style secret super-agent, which the other throws his life away consuming brain-dead mass-market “entertainment” and waiting on handouts from the government in a British ghetto. One finds the other and fucks everything up, and yet they endure and follow the clues that lead them to taking the villain down as a team. A story older than time.

Sacha Baron Cohen obviously plays the lead, Nobby, but you’ll recognize Mark Strong from the Kingsmen movies, Ian McShane from the John Wick movies, and Isla Fisher from my dreams. Everyone does a great job in their respective roles, and I particularly enjoyed the Ian McShane appearances, if short and uncredited. He has a sort of weathered, comforting appeal. Never an unwelcome sight.

This overall score comes despite the gag-inducing attempts at “comedy”, not because of them. It isn’t too bad, just know what you’re getting into.

3/5

The Suicide Squad (2021)

DC tried the “lots of supervillans in one movie” gambit in 2016. They failed. The sound design sucked, the tone was completely off, and the whole movie more or less had completely fallen apart by the third act. This year, they tried again. Out with Will Smith and out with the depressing grays and browns. Instead we get Idris Elba, John Cena, and a lush, interesting jungle setting. Well, more interesting than samey concrete anyway.

So how did they go on this one? Better. Not good, but better. First: What they got right. The movie sets a good tone, visually and thematically, early on, and continues with that tone throughout the movie. I knows what it wants to be and largely gets it right. The sound design is decent, if a bit downplayed in parts and broken in others. Don’t expect to be blown away - or for every scene to sound as it should - but it does the job. The story here is a simple and effective one. The US government has learned that a foreign power has something that it wants, so it sends the villains in to get it. Simplicity itself. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and it doesn’t try to outsmart itself. It isn’t Avengers and it doesn’t try to be - no matter what the “lots of characters in movie mean movie copy Avengers” crowd might tell you.

Even the soundtrack was better here. You know that thing wherein music syncs up with on-screen action to create an almost zen-like sense of euphoric madness? So close - but at least they tried! See the first Suicide Squad movie for more information on doing this so poorly that it seems more like someone’s playing their own music in the same room in which you happen to be watching this movie.

What did they get wrong? Not much - that you can point to and say “this is what’s wrong with this movie”. The contest scene between Bloodsport and Peacemaker was pretty weak, but that’s only because it felt like a carnival ride wherein characters, props, what have you, don’t exist until the audience can see them. Guards are oblivious to their comrades gruesome, and sometimes noisy, deaths, despite the fact that, within the total space that the scene occupies, they’re shown to be standing mere feet away. That one’s a bit too much for me. I wasn’t there, but it’s as if the director (or writers) didn’t know how to conduct an action scene with so many moving parts, so they compartmentalized it into simply chunks. Makes life easy for them, but not as fun for the audience.

Aside from what’s already here, there isn’t much to say about this movie criticism-wise. It’s not just one thing. Trying to fix it is like trying to fix a bad soup; you might as well start over. It’s too far gone. The whole movie is forgettable. It exists only because the studio wanted to capitalize from their IP, and it shows.