Tag: Keanu Reeves

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JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 [Review] – Burning Down The House.

“El Sacerdote” J.L. Caraballo Letterboxd @captzaff007

This past week had found me introducing my wife to the indelible, cool, violent, hilarious, and almost orgasmically stylish world of John Wick, starting from scratch to the lead up to the special dress-up party screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 at the Alamo Drafthouse down in Brooklyn’s Albee Square. Director Chad Stahelski returns to the series that started the journey into hilariously creative ultraviolence, along with star Keanu Reeves, who hasn’t lost a single step along the way…even if John Wick himself has lost a finger.

 

 

Following up on the events of the third film, John and Winston (Ian McShane) find themselves once again on the run, and with few trustworthy allies. We get a few familiar faces along the way, including The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne, who seems to be enjoying every millisecond in the role), and Charon (the late Lance Reddick, who wound up getting the loudest, longest applause of the entire film…and also a dedication during the preshow).

John might have just uncovered a way out from under the crosshairs of the High Table, but before he gains his freedom, he has to survive a gauntlet of bounty hunters and fellow colorful assassins sent to sic him by the Grand Marquis (Bill Skarsgård). Globetrotting and expansive vistas ensue, as do incredibly well-staged fights in locations that offer nearly every possible weapon imaginable.

Stahelski and cinematographer Dan Laustsen can shoot the shit out of action scenes. One of the best bits of Laustsen’s tenure with the Wick series was the raid of the Bowery King’s lair back in Parabellum: the rich shadows hiding black-garbed assassins who pop out of nowhere and disappear back as if they were never there. In Chapter 4, most of the film is set in the same sort of darkened night world; even a neon-blazed nightclub run by Scott Adkins‘ Killa is lush in darkness — the neon acts more like a means to suck all available light out of the scene than to illuminate it, and it works to great effect.

As surprising as Scott Adkins is in this film (his appearance is…a choice, I’ll say that much), the absolute scene stealer is Donnie Yen as Caine. While just short of giving the protracted, multi-level fight between Wick and the Shinobi Twins (Yayan Ruhian, and Cecep Arif Rahman) that led into the fight with Zero (Mark Dacascos) in Parabellum a run for its money, what Caine lacks in an instantly iconic yet single clash is longevity. He and Wick cross paths multiple times, and never once does it feel like a rehash. This series — and this film, specifically — remains home to some of the most creative action set pieces in modern filmmaking.

What these films bring is a sense of fun through all the violence: all the characters know exactly what sort of movie they’re in, know exactly how outrageous their entire existence and universe is, and it is actually refreshing that while the inciting incident to this entire series of films is love (the taking away of it, to be more specific — and love not just of a person, but of places, things, objects, and purpose, to be even MORE specific, So don’t @ me), there isn’t a romantic subplot or any of that shit to bog down the film, or to make any of them feel perfunctory. And anyone who suggests that the lack of romance is a hindrance to ladies enjoying these films clearly has not met my wife, nor have they attended this screening: it was as close to a 50/50 split difference in guys to ladies in the screening.

These are movies that know what they are (silly action fantasies), know what they do (be as creatively, professionally violent as possible), and do it well (gorgeous people, costumes, and locales? Clear, shot composition and camera movements edited in a way that is exciting, energetic, and fucking easy for an audience to follow and know just where characters are in relation to each other).

Like the main character himself, these films probably the best of the bunch of modern action films, and endlessly creative. At nearly 3 hours long, Chapter 4 never loses its nerve, its energy, nor its focus. If only there were three more hours of footage to go.

The Alamo screening hosted a costume contest beforehand to judge best-dressed audience member (there were an INSANE number of well-dressed people.) Almost 20 contestants went on stage. The winner?

The woman who dressed as Wick’s dead dog. Stay beautiful, geeks.

5/5 Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat back tattoos.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is now playing in theaters.

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THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS [Review]: Feed Your Head.

“El Sacerdote” J.L. Caraballo Twitter @captzaff007

The path between me seeing The Matrix on opening night back in 1999, and me doing what I’m currently doing for a living — to this day — is a straight line. When The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions, came out in the spring and winter of 2003, respectively, my friends and I skipped school, and went to the earliest showings we could find. When the 10-or-so disc DVD boxed set came out in 2004, you best believe I received it for Christmas (and still have it in my possession, surprisingly).

The Matrix is a big deal to me, is the point, so much so that I pinpoint that film as the first time I realized that movies could be about something more than what was merely onscreen; when my friends and I set about remaking The Matrix, for fun, as a comedic parody, off-and-on throughout high school, I had set about rewriting the entire script, thus making me be a better, more concise writer. So when word came about that a fourth movie, The Matrix Resurrections, was about to come out?

You best believe I got that goosepimply feeling the first time I saw the trailer…

Does a Matrix movie released more than 20 years after the original — and nearly 20 years after its last, much derided sequel — hold up? Does it have anything new to add to series? It does. Greatly so. I’m going to go right ahead and say something that will allow you to quickly determine whether this movie is for you: this movie is on par with The Last Jedi in how it subverts its own mythology, and adds a refreshing metatextual commentary on its own existence. This film — like The Last Jedi — is a decades-late sequel that actually does the work in expanding upon, and beyond, what worked with the original, while not fully ignoring everything in between.

If you hated The Last Jedi, you can stop reading right now.

Director Lana Wachowski — pressured into revisiting her groundbreaking cyberpunk opus due to Warner Brothers basically forcing her to do so, or hand off the reins to a third party — has set Resurrections some 60 years after the events of Revolutions. The film begins as an almost shot-for-shot remake of the opening scene of the first film: every beat, line, camera move, lighting choice, is deliberately mimicked…yet everything is just slightly off. Trinity looks different, her clothing looser. And while lines are exactly the same, they’re not said by the people who should have said them. And then the Agents appear…and things are definitely off.

The opening scene, we soon learn, is a modal built inside a MMPORPG — essentially a hidden cutscene playing on loop forever. Hacking into the modal is Bugs (Jessica Henwick), who is on the search for Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who, we also learn, has been trapped living a loop as well. The designer of the modal — and the larger MMPORPG in which it is hidden — is none other than Thomas Anderson, nee Neo (Keanu Reeves), who has spent what he believes has been the past 20-odd years living off the success of his groundbreaking game, The Matrix.

Forced into a position where Warner Brothers (who, in the movie, owns the rights to The Matrix game) is going to revisit The Matrix as a sequel, with or without his help or input, Thomas is forced to reconcile his own connection to the Matrix, a connection which is so strong he is driven to hallucinations and, at one point, almost committed suicide. His analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) has helped Thomas reclaim control over his life using meditative techniques, and helping to separate the fantasy from the fiction. That is…until Morpheus pops into the “real” world.

I’m already this far into the review, just got to the end of the inciting incident. Look, I could write an entire essay on this movie (and probably will…): it is a much more mature film than I was expecting, and perhaps a much more mature look at the entire franchise than audiences were expecting, but it truly is a superior movie than either of the sequels. While the explanation behind how exactly Neo is alive took some time to fully appreciate, the thematics of why he is works.

The crux: if the sequels doubled down on its own mythology to the point of expositing much more than it should have (which both slowed down the action and made the central themes confusing or otherwise opaque to general audiences), this film uses its own nostalgia to ease audiences into feeling what these movies are about, as opposed to characters talking about it.

The result? A more intimate, lower-stakes, scaled-back story set in the universe of The Matrix; a movie that is essentially a prolonged love story that hinges on a will-she-won’t-she decision by one of the main characters predicated on the idea that maybe a happy fantasy is preferred when reality is dangerous and confusing and painful (especially when that fantasy is something that can never be achieved in the “real” world to begin with). If The Matrix was about Neo making a choice, Resurrections is about him trusting in another person’s decision, no matter what the outcome. And, yes, The Matrix is about a lot of Things.

There is an entire genuinely funny sequence in Resurrections where game designers talk in a circle about what made The Matrix “work”…often repeating the same things over and over until their words lose all meaning; hell, even Morpheus in one sequence mockingly repeats his own technobabble from the first film, chiding Neo by saying sometimes hearing something familiar helps ease people into new ideas, even if that familiar something doesn’t make much sense to begin with. But sometimes the choices made are only half-answers, or in need of being abandoned — as is the case in the fate of Zion and Morpheus — and change needs to occur.

Lana Wachowski shook up the foundation of her own masterpiece, not rehashing the same story or mythology, or even the same old conflicts, but using it to push into something richer and more sublime. The action does rock — even if most of it occurs in the opening and closing scenes, respectively. And while Henwick was a great new addition, Abdul-Mateen II just does not yet have the gravitas of his predecessor (although, yes, that is part of the point of his recasting).

There is nothing as groundbreaking as bullet-time (as if there could be at this point…although this movie does play with the concept in interesting and fun ways), but there is something so satisfying about Jonathan Groff‘s face breaking against the ground in his turn as Smith (again…he suffers from not enough gravitas…but that is also the point). Wachowski proves herself to be a solid director and writer on her own, and both Neo and Trinity (a still-impossibly-cool Carrie-Anne Moss) not only talk and feel like real human beings (the change in Neo’s character is the most drastic, yet most rewarding), but have honest-to-God chemistry that proves itself to be the actual climax to the movie.

Truth be told, Reloaded and Revolutions are strictly sci-fi/action movies with overly-explained philosophical ideas attached, and eventually collapse under their own weight. Resurrections might be smaller scale, and more intimate, but its ideas are much richer, broader, and interesting than anything since the first Matrix. Oh, and keep and eye out for both Matrix veteran actors Daniel Bernhardt and Lambert Wilson! …What a bunch of jerks. 4.5/5 Speeding Bullet Whiskeys.

The Matrix Resurrections is playing in theaters, and available to stream with premium account on HBO Max.

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CYBERPUNK 2077 [Review]: Bug Snacks.

Dee Assassina
@assassinasan

Who knew that one of 2020’s most highly anticipated games would turn out to be a PR disaster? I’m not here to regurgitate everything about its bugs, crashes, or refunds. There’s plenty of articles out there to inform you. I’m writing this review to inform you of my experience playing the Cyberpunk 2077 and analyze the core gameplay mechanics…

Before I dive in, let me get it out of the way that I played the PlayStation 4 version of the game on my PS5. When I first popped in the game, I felt like I was playing a game that looked worse than games at the end of the PlayStation 3 generation. With every patch that followed, the game looked and felt significantly better. The biggest and most persistent performance issue is the game crashes about every hour, sometimes the audio cuts out, and sometimes the left stick won’t run or it’ll automatically aim the gun unprovoked.

The rest of the bugs are quite hysterical, as if I’m reliving some funny glitchy moments that were prominent in Bethesda games. It’s a shame that the studio who worked on the The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — which set the bar for open world games at the time — somehow fell behind. Issues aside, I’m still having a lot of fun. There’s truly something special here and a little more time to bake in the oven could have gone a long way.

Night City is a beautiful, bright, dystopian cesspool filled with neon lights, raunchy advertisements, litter and piles of trash. NPC’s are stylized in punk outfits, intoxicated, and puffing on cigarettes to take off the city’s edge. Certain parts of Night City are filled with claustrophobic and dark alleyways. Other areas like Pacifica have a large open space with palm trees and a carousel by the beach. Go further out of Night City and you’ll reach The Badlands, which is a large land of dirt, filled with piles of trash and nomads in encampments. Each area within and around Night City has its own personality and aesthetic. Overall, it has the level of grit that NYC had in the 1980’s.

If the aesthetic of Night City didn’t inform you enough of this Cyberpunk world, there’s plenty of lore written in shard collectibles (data pads), messages or files in computers, and a web with news or other information sources. There are gangs, corrupt police, greedy corporations, criminals from all walks of life, high technology, and persistent access to sex workers. This world felt fully realized.

I get a certain level of sexuality comes with the Cyberpunk theme but this felt excessive and unnecessary most of the time. I had a similar complaint with The Witcher 3 except.. this is way worse. It actually desensitized me to sexual themes. Perhaps more of a focus on the games polish instead of the different genital options would have helped this be a better product. Sometimes this game felt like it was created by young boys who just hit puberty. I’m just asking that it be toned down a bit.

What gets to me the most is, I could spend an hour figuring out what my penis size is but at no point could I modify my appearance throughout the game. I couldn’t even dye my hair. This is definitely a lost opportunity for a game taking place in a setting where body modification is rampant. Even my characters clothing looked like a mess because you had to focus on armor ratings instead of style. Here I am, in a city full of NPC’s who all looked 1000 times cooler than me because CD Projekt RED didn’t take a page out of many video games’ books for transmogging or simply just keeping cosmetic separate from armor stats. In a game where I thought I can look however I wanted to, I felt zero autonomy outside of the character creation screen.

Not only did I look completely uncool, but the character you play as named V (female body and voice type) didn’t really have a personality worth connecting with. What made V interesting wasn’t her personality or dialogue choices, but rather the core NPC’s around her. They weren’t just supporting characters but they pretty much carried V as a character. She felt like nothing without them, and empty shell, or a vessel for their influence. The closer I got to the end, the more I realized that may have been the point.

But, damn those characters are cool. I found myself interested in getting to know every single one of them, even the ones I didn’t particularly like. The dialogue and storytelling is superb. Even side quests kept me engaged. Do be warned: a lot of the themes in even side missions tend to get very dark. To be clear, Cyberpunk’s narrative focuses on themes of sexual violence, child abuse, homicidal revenge, and suicide. There’s a lot of dialogue in this game in a similar way to a game like Fallout. The only downfall to the dialogue is sometimes the options would be on a timer that is way too quick. World building is a strong element to Cyberpunk 2077.

A big chunk of Cyberpunk‘s gameplay is a combination of Fallout and Grand Theft Auto. Like Fallout, there’s loot everywhere to sell, store, or dismantle. Don’t worry– they patched out how many dildos you’ll pick up. There’s random junk to sell, a variety of guns, armor/clothing, and mods for weapons, armor, and cybernetics. You can craft, purchase, and upgrade gear and weapons. Like Fallout, this is an RPG so there’s extensive upgrades to your attributes (body, tech, intelligence, reflexes, and cool). Upgrading specific attributes gives you access to perks that can aid hacking, stealth, gunplay, melee combat, and dialogue. Your attributes will impact how many options you have to approach missions, what items you can equip, and how many dialogue choices you can pick. I do wish there was a proper re-spec option for both attributes and perks, especially considering a lot of trophies are tied to specific builds and I had to do a lot of reloading saves.

The only aspect of GTA this game reminds me of is the driving, the amount of NPC’s, and how you can interact with them. Sometimes riding from Night City through Pacifica and all the way to The Badlands felt like riding from Los Santos to Blaine County in GTA V. You can also steal vehicles but you don’t keep them unless you buy them and there’s no car mods.

The driving initially controls poorly, but it feels better when you purchase or unlock better cars or bikes. Similar to the driving, gunplay feels better as you unlock better weapons. Legendary weapons allow you to equip more mods and have more perks to inflict status effects like poison or electric damage. There were certain combat sequences, specifically against bosses or cyberpsycho’s that felt sloppy. They would zip around, often glitch and get stuck on things, and I didn’t find myself using much strategy aside from running and gunning. For an RPG, the combat is fair, but more polish could have made it more solid.

Even the mission structure felt messy. Oftentimes I would be mid-dialogue with a mission giver and then get a call from an NPC, and would have to navigate listening to both dialogue’s at once. Another issue: sometimes I would have one mission active, but because I initiated another mission to have it in my quest log, walking too far would sometimes cause me to fail, and thus having to reload my save. It’s a shame the mission structure is sloppy because I really enjoyed most missions. There’s a lot of good long dialogue, but it was overshadowed by sloppy mission structure. I’m hopeful this will be patched.

For now, Cyberpunk is a sloppy game that exudes plentiful charm, intelligent storytelling, and fun gameplay. I have no doubt that this game will be something people look back on as a darling once CDPR patch things up. In the meantime, if you haven’t already purchased this game– don’t. I can’t recommend it yet. But, I know for a fact that once things are polished and optimized for the new-gen (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5) consoles that Cyberpunk 2077 will be a memorable experience.

Even if the issues didn’t exist, there are much better games that released in 2020. 4/5 Bibles.

-Dee Assassina

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THE GEEKDOM GAMESCAST [Episode 30]: Cyberpunk 2077.

Alright chooms, the rollout may have been a disaster for a lot of Corpo’s rusty decks but Myke Ladiona, Patrick Obloy, and Justin Langlois visited the right ripperdoctors to have played working versions of Cyberpunk 2077. Jack into the Gamescast‘s 30th Episode to hear us get into all the bugs, the sketchy rollout of the review codes, and the crashes.

It’s not all fried though, we do get into the story, the hacking playstyle, the branching narratives & more…

Make sure to check out Justin’s podcast Bright Lights & Scary Shadows and if you want the podcast version of this video check out
https://rationalragenetwork.podbean.com. And be sure to catch us in a few days for our first impressions of Cyberpunk 2077!

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BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC [Review]: Don’t Call It A Comeback.

“El Sacerdote” J.L. Caraballo Twitter @captzaff007

Another week, another straight-to-streaming release for a major motion picture due to the ongoing pandemic (yes! It’s still going on!). With the conclusion of what can only be described as “an absolute surreal, shitty week”, there was at least some levity in the form of Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves and their transdimensional adventures through time and space via a time-slipping phone booth (remember those things?) in director Dean Parisot’s Bill & Ted Face The Music.

Usually decades-long pauses between installments does little to improve the storytelling quality (*coughcoughIndependenceDaycoughcough*), but here the quality remains more or less the same (for better and for worse), while mainly experience an upgrade in looks and specs…

When we’re reunited with the duo, they’re aging rockers, playing weddings to their meager fans, and awaiting their appointed destiny to fall into their laps. They’re married to Joanna and Elizabeth, the time-displaced princesses they’d met in Bogus Journey, and they each have a late-teens kid, Ted’s daughter Thea (Samara Weaving), and Bill’s daughter Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine), and their seeming co-dependence on each other has led to the two couples going into marriage counselling…together.

Meanwhile, in the far future, society — and the entire universe itself — is on the brink of imminent destruction unless Bill and Ted perform the one song that will unite the world in peace. Kelly (Kristen Schaal), the daughter of the late George Carlin’s guide, Rufus, has arrived, delivering the news that gets the plot going.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in “Bill & Ted Face The Music”.

There are, in actuality, three time-traveling plots going on here. The main story focuses on Bill and Ted travelling further and further into their own futures, hoping to steal the completed song from their future selves, and perform it in the present.

While the most focused plot here, it’s also easily the most amusing: one future finds the duo living together in a posh mansion, and donning British accents for some reason (what they refer to as the Madonna phase), with some meta-joke with Keanu himself, since he had been trashed early in his career for attempting an accent. This storyline is the film’s most interesting, and it’s clear early on that Winters and Reeves were having a hell of a lot of fun jumping right back into character.

Secondary to all this is Thea and Billie, who wind up stealing their own phone booth and traveling to various points in time to build the greatest band in all of history. Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, Mozart, flutist Ling Lun, and prehistoric drummer Grom make the cut, as histories and locations jump around and blend into each other. Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine are amiable enough in their roles — basically playing younger verrsions of their fathers — but some of the “gee whiz!” expressions seemed somewhat forced, and their scenes offered some of the more jarring examples of green screen use in recent memory (it isn’t terrible…but it is very noticeable).

Thirdly, Joanna and Elizabeth spend most of the film traveling on their own, trying to find a reality where they are happy (this plot goes nowhere…they wind up returning at the climax, which is the first time I’d noticed they were missing from the story at all).

Along the way, several characters return to further connect this sequel to its predecessors. Death (William Sadler) makes a welcome return, and is just as bemusedly a curmudgeon as ever (and seemingly spent the past 30 years continuing to cheat himself at various games while holding a grudge against our duo).

Barry‘s Anthony Carrigan is perhaps the strongest new addition as a kill-bot named Dennis Caleb McCoy, who gets some of the best jokes of the entire movie; and Jillian Bell makes the best of her few scenes as the exasperated couples counselor Dr. Taylor Wood (although she typically elevates any role she’s given). But as fun as these characters are, the real charm lays strictly with Bill and Ted.

***SLIGHT SPOILER FOR THE CLIMAX***

Having them merely be over-the-hill versions of their slacker young selves seems an appropriate extension of their characters, as it makes their lack of real, concrete success be less from a character defect and more from being over-sincere in their confidence (it’s not that they’re lazy, but that they have supreme confidence that they’ll save the day right when it matters). And, of course, they do. Or rather, they learn at the right moment that the greatest song in the world was written by “Preston/Logan”, and not necessarily Bill and Ted themselves. And it was that realization — that the “Preston/Logan” known to write the song that unites the world was actually their daughters — that was wholesomely pleasant.

Look, I’m 34 and know that some of my more preposterous dreams and goals aren’t going to happen, and to see two characters come to that same realization, and, without hesitation, understand that sometimes the best way to save the world is to play backup, is reaffirming. There’s nothing monumental or life-changing about that development, but seeing it occur with two characters in pop culture — and two who are probably the least you’d expect to have that sort of process — is charming.

***END SPOILER***

“Charming” is the word best used to describe Bill & Ted Face The Music. It isn’t mind-blowing, and it won’t change your life, and by know the conceit and charm of the concept might seem somewhat stale — but it is good, charming fun. The cinematography by Shelley Johnson might have been a bit too flat, and the editing by Don Zimmerman could have been tighter (get rid of Joanna and Elizabeth’s subplot altogether), at no point was the film anything less than entertaining. Would this have benefited from a large-screen release? Probably not; if anything the theater trappings might have been even more obvious on a large screen.

There’s something to be said about plain old fun, charm, and characters trying to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do. After a week as disheartening as last week was, it is surprising that such a throwback to weird, yet mainstream, filmmaking is place where that positive energy now emerges. If you can, give it a watch. San Dimas high school football rules! 3.5/5 Dave Grohls.

Bill & Ted Face The Music is available for streaming on iTunes, and currently playing at select theaters if you’re a crazy person.

-J.L. Caraballo

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TOY STORY 4 [4DX Review]: One Child’s Trash Is Another Child’s Treasure.

“Monsignor” Travis Moody
@travmoody

Disclaimer: Toy Story 4 is my first Toy Story film.

Yeah– what the hell, Moody! But, hey, at least this review comes from a fresh perspective. More importantly, I witnessed Toy Story 4 in the 4DX format. Watching the movie’s opening chase sequence and plethora of carnival ride scenes urged me to think this was made with 4DX in mind. More likely, things just worked out that way. While one of the more tepid experiences (Detective Pikachu and Godzilla: King of the Monsters‘ fourth-dimensional effects blow this one out of the water) 4DX has to offer, Toy Story 4 still has the right amount of seat movement, water sprays and lighting effects for the youngest moviegoer…

You don’t want your kid in the hospital, do you? All joking aside, taking your kids, your kid’s kids or your kid brother’s kids to Toy Story 4 in 4DX is a great, cost-effective alternative to Disneyland. They’ll enjoy the chair swaying up to the skies, seat merry-go-rounding to the film’s various rollercoaster and ferris wheel locales, and zoom-zooming of chase scenes– and there’s a lot of them. Fireworks have cool light flashes in the theater corners, too. I was surprised how light the water sprays were, though, considering the first scene takes place in the rain. There isn’t a whole lot of splash to Toy Story 4, but usually water is a fun effect for children. They could’ve added more sprays, me thinks.

One of the new 4DX effects that caught my attention are the pitter-pattering of carriage steps during a late-movie carnival get-away sequence. I love when the good folks over at the 4DX labs get creative and deliver something new to the format. You could really feel the bottom of your seat clump, clu-clump! I was also stunned by the amount of back-punch effects thrown in this 4DX, despite the movie’s surprising amount of fight sequences. I know. Toy Story. Fight sequences. I need a super late-pass to the franchise, so you tell me. Guess don’t mess wit’ lil’ Bo Peep (Annie Potts), y’alls.

Sorry Woody, got a recording session with Cyberpunk at noon!

Keanu Reeves is someone everyone is messing with right now. So it’s no shock to see America’s latest Sweetheart own his part as Dook Kaboom (think an “extra” Evel Knievel); the ultra charismatic Hollywood motorcycle stuntman has a deep layer of characterization too, with tons of self-doubt until Peep puts Dook in his place and sets him up for the spotlight. Keanu’s scenes are among the best, along with the rib-tickling comedy of Bunny & Ducky’s Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key. Although the three characters often feel like a sideshow in comparison to the big roadtrip story with Woody (Tom Hanks) and new toychest-owning child Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw), it’s a welcomed comic relief.

Despite having no prior experience to compare this weekend’s new — and supposedly final — Toy Story to the previous three, I recommend its enjoyable balance of thrilling chases, nuanced comedy, and heart-warming story. Toy Story 4 is one of the year’s funniest films (and many of the best jokes come during the post-credits scenes), a solid roadtrip script centered around new villain, Gabby Gabby (an admirably sympathetic, yet creepy Christina Hendricks) and trash-toy, Forky (Veep‘s Tony Hale is outstanding as a talking.. spork with pipe-cleaning biceps), and a whole toy store full of action bits complimented just right in 4DX. Take the kids!

Movie = 3.75/5
4DX for Adults = 3.5/5
4DX for Kids = 4.25/5

-Travis Moody

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