Gary SteelA regular column in which GARY STEEL sifts through the mountain of available streaming TV and brings your attention to great new and old shows as well as those to avoid.
Beaten To Death (Brollie) 1/10
Don’t you really hate it when great cinematography is wasted on a miserable story? Beaten To Death (2022) is an Australian film that uses every visual trick in the book: it looks and sounds great and they’ve used digital post-production to get every grain looking superb and every edit exactly right. But its story material is so slim that it barely warrants a 15-minute short, let alone a feature-length endurance test. And that’s what it is. The story, such as it is – much of it told in flashback because, well, they can – involves a hard-up young suburban couple who do what seems like a low-level drug deal that goes horribly wrong.
The couple head into the desert to pick up the drugs but the female is murdered and the male is beaten up and tortured. Then he escapes and thinks he’s gotten away, but is captured, tortured some more, and buried alive. And escapes again, and… and… It’s fucking excruciating and it features a stupid false ending as well. Honestly, if this is the best of Aussie horror, I’ll pass thanks. And making matters much worse is the fact that the free film platform Brollie, which contains a wealth of great independent movies, is now packed to the gills with infuriating ads. I can handle the occasional ad if it’s not popping up right in the middle of a scene, but it’s incessant, and it’s the same bloody ad about 50 times in one movie. Consequently, Brollie has gone from being one of my favourite platforms to one I’ll never watch again.
The Beekeeper (Disney+) 8/10
Great dumb fun, The Beekeeper is one for all those fans (like me) of vengeance films out there, and it hardly puts a foot wrong in its non-stop, blood-pumping action sequences. Adam (Jason Statham of The Meg and Expend4bles) is a retired secret operative who is incensed when unscrupulous phishing criminals steal all the money from a charity his landlady administers (prompting her suicide) and from then on, he’s on a ceaseless mission to cause untold mayhem all the way up the chain to the top dog. There’s hardly a moment to catch your breath and there are precious few of the usual boring attempts at dialogue/human drama while Adam keeps his explosive momentum up.
Wallace (played by the always excellent Jeremy Irons) is a reluctant advisor to spoilt brat criminal mastermind Derek (Josh Hutcherson of The Hunger Games), who just happens (spoiler alert) to be the son of the president. How can our hero possibly get to this guy with his team of top security, some of whom come from the very organisation Adam once worked for? A-ha! We know from a long line of vengeance movies to never underestimate the wiles and strength of a real macho man! But seriously, I love this film and it ticks all the boxes if you’re feeling that the world is unjust and want to pretend for a moment that you’re putting things right.
I Passed For White (Prime Video) 6/10
As any regular reader of this review column knows, I’m a big fan of “exploitation” and various kinds of b-movies, and I Passed For White (1960) surely belongs in both categories. Starring Sonya Wilde as Bernice/Lila, a woman of mixed race who pretends to be white in an America that still enforces segregation, it’s obviously cheaply made but, given that, the acting is mostly competent and the director does the best with the tight sets and tighter budgets he’s been given.
While the film isn’t especially exciting, the subject explored is fascinating, especially given the 1960 lens through which it’s viewed. A minor item perhaps, but it’s given an extra coating of vintage allure via an especially scratchy print. The scenes with a hep black jazz band performing in a very white eating establishment are especially fun.
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (Disney+) 6/10
The latest instalment (the 10th!) of the current sequence of Planet Of The Apes movies is concurrently spectacular/awe-inspiring and ultimately disappointing. It begins with the mass genocide of a community of chimps by a determinedly murderous gang of apes and then follows Noa (played by Owen Teague), a thoughtful and compassionate chimp who is now travelling alone and grieving from losing his entire community. Along the way, he teams up with a lone human, Mae (Freya Allan) and ultimately, they find their way to a seaside ape settlement, where Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) rules the roost.
Apes have long taken over from humans, but haven’t been able to tap into the wonders of human technology. The narcissistic Proximus (Trump in disguise?) is attempting to gain entry into an ancient human vault containing unknown human weaponry and uses his duplicitous human offsider Trevathan (William H. Macy) to lure Noa into helping him do so. Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes is visually stunning and dramatically by turns believable and downright silly. There’s something off-centre and unresolved about the plot and that left this viewer with a sense of dissatisfaction at the end. Flawed, but for those willing to ignore the inconsistencies and endure the long running time, there’s plenty to impress.
The Perfect Couple (Netflix) 6/10
One of those shows you enjoy at the time but promptly erase from your memory banks afterwards, The Perfect Couple is an entertaining murder mystery that’s more like an updated Agatha Christie than anything. And despite its 21st-century setting, there’s something deeply anachronistic about the scenario and the story’s various plot devices. To put it bluntly, The Perfect Couple is saved by an exemplary performance from Nicole Kidman as Greer, the matriarch of a super-rich family that’s in preparation for the wedding of their son Billy (Benji Winbury) to a not-very rich at-all zoo worker Eve (Amelia Sacks). Except on the night before the wedding, Eve’s best friend is murdered, which means that the remainder of the show’s six episodes is a guessing game as to who did the dirty deed.
A real problem with this story is that the entitled rich bastards it portrays are just not likeable, so it’s hard to be that interested in them. As is typical in this type of murder mystery, we slowly learn more about the tangled web each of the characters has weaved and why they could be the perpetrator of the murder, but it all seems a bit too soap opera much of the time, despite the irony and the sharp tongues. But like I said, Nicole Kidman saves it with her frankly bonkers performances and shifts in character, despite obvious cosmetic surgery having given her face a rather odd expression. Light entertainment.
Poison/s (DocPlay & YouTube Premium) 7/10
How much can we bear to watch about Putin’s diabolical dictatorship? Well, this three-part documentary from 2023 does a good job of explaining just how dangerous the Russian regime is under his spell and how he’s been able to withstand sanctions from the West. And Poison/s also does an excellent job of researching and digging up well-informed former collaborators and current foes of Putin to give us an insight into the way Putin has managed to turn what looked for a brief time to have become a modern democracy back into a one-party machine.
We discover that the former KGB agent, as he ascended the political ladder, simply used his training to stick to a path of cover-ups, massive state-wide corruption, and a policy of poisoning or imprisoning anyone who stood up in opposition. And, as we find out, this doesn’t end at Russia’s borders. We hear the stories of Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in the UK along with those of several others, and get a fascinating first-hand account of the astonishing battle English businessman William Browder continues to have with Putin. Most disturbing is the way that the West seems practically impotent in the face of Russia’s threat. Yes, it can be a bit dry at times but is essential viewing, nevertheless… and even more so with Russian sympathiser Trump having recently, astonishingly, made it back to the White House.
Ready Player One (Prime Video) 7/10
I’d never heard of this 2018 film, which isn’t a huge surprise given that I’m not a huge fan of Steven Spielberg or virtual reality films. Prompted to see it by kids immersed in the gaming sphere, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s quite a ride and full of immersive and visually imaginative action sequences that kept me on the edge of the couch. Adapted from a book set in 2045 in which most people spend a vast amount of time in OASIS (not a band but a virtual reality simulation) in an attempt to escape a largely destroyed dystopian world, some kids enter a contest to find a hidden egg. If they do so, they become owners of the game itself.
It might sound like an unpromising concept, but there are plenty of surprises, near-death experiences and thrilling visuals, as well as a uniformly brisk pace that never lets the viewer lose interest. All credit to Spielberg for updating his directorial style to suit the project and the medium but still using his considerable skills to make it a satisfying story, of sorts. Our family loved this film and even though it’s going on six years old it doesn’t feel dated. The kids didn’t get all the embedded humorous references to films like The Shining, but the adults certainly loved them.
Sweetpea (Neon) 8/10
You’ll either love or hate this six-part so-called “dark comedy-drama”, and happily, I’m in the former category (the wife wasn’t so stoked with it). A big part of it for me was just watching the always compelling Ella Purnell (Fallout, Yellowjackets) playing Rhiannon, a sad-sack admin assistant at a newspaper who has never realised her potential due to bullying at school years before. Rhiannon, whose pet name is Sweetpea, transforms from a mild-mannered young woman into a raged-filled, revenge-fuelled murderer after her father’s death and the reappearance in her life of Julia (Nicole Lecky), the very person who traumatized her at school.
The series takes several unexpected turns, including a kidnapping, and improbably, she’s promoted to a reporter’s job covering the murders. As unlikely as the story seems at times, it’s also a great character study with some inimitably British dark humour, and enough twists and turns to keep you hooked. But it’s worth a watch for Purnell alone, who was incredible in Fallout and proves with Sweetpea that, despite her looks and those huge eyes, she’s much, much more than just one of the most distinctive faces of the ‘20s.
Time Bandits (Apple+) 5/10
The original 1981 Time Bandits was a blast. Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python-adjacent film was quirky as hell and it was as much fun for kids as it was for THC-enhanced twentysomethings as it hurtled into uncharted time travel adventures. And the ‘bandits’ were dwarfs! I had high hopes for the new, New Zealand-shot TV series and that its creators, including Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, would successfully update and encapsulate the flavours of the original. Oh dear. What a let-down. With only one or two chuckles in each of the 10 roughly 30-minute episodes and characters that never quite seem to take flight and special effects that are so fake that you wonder why they bothered, the 2024 Time Bandits just doesn’t work.
But the real clincher is that the story is threadbare. What worked in a normal film feature feels padded and stretched beyond belief, and although I kept on watching to the end out of bloody-minded loyalty, I regretted wasting all that time. And of course, the show ends without an ending, leaving us hanging for the next series, which Apple+ recently announced has been cancelled, mercifully.
Trolls Band Together (Netflix) 5/10
This 2023 computer-animated film managed only 63 per cent on a popular aggregator site, and I’m surprised it didn’t get a more lowly score. It’s not that Trolls Band Together doesn’t have its moments: there are quite a few adult-oriented jokes hidden amongst the excess verbiage, and the movie is colourful and fast-moving. But there’s really no reason for this to exist except for the fact that it’s a well-known franchise. They seem to have forgotten to write a proper story and the one they’ve stapled together is really rather pathetic.
In essence, this third Trolls film sees the boy band BroZone break up acrimoniously and sometime later, its members have to reunite to rescue one of its members from the clutches of a nasty, wannabe-famous couple called Velvet and Veneer, who are literally draining the essence of his talent. Uh, yeah. It’s all very mundane and the Trolls themselves are hardly full of character or idiosyncrasy. The film’s colours are said to have been influenced by the classic Beatles animated movie Yellow Submarine, and that might explain its pleasing colour palette. But sadly, that’s not enough to make it worth spending time with.
The Best & Worst Streaming TV is a regular column in which Gary Steel assesses the worth – or otherwise – of the vast trove available to stream. Unlike other media, our policy is to dig deep and go further than just Netflix or what’s new this week.
