Awake not Woke!

It's good, but not great

Well, the bar is now so low, simply not having Streep play Jesus in the Old Testament is almost enough. I don't consider myself a scholar of the Bible, bit I'm pretty sure the writers played a bit loose with the source at times. Pretty sure monogamy wasn't a thing for the kings of the times. At least, they did not introduce non-sense: men are men, with beards on their chins. The cast is a solid ensemble of could-have-beens: talented enough that they could have had a bigger career, but not lucky enough. Or too ethnic: they (almost) all look appropriately Semitic. No black-washing this time, go figure. Visually, the series is adequate but uninspired. Or inspired, actually. Mostly Lord of the Rings (Lang's Samuel is very Gandalf-y), with some Dune, and a tad of Shogun. Again, I'm not an expert on the period, but the clothing might be off part of the time, jewelry is sometimes suspicious, weapons are anachronistic more often than not, and the architecture, especially in wide shots, often looks Medieval, Central to Eastern Europe to me. Anyway, the script flows well, narration is clear albeit not inventive, and the cast works hard at selling their parts. Uloom and Fehr are stand-outs (always liked Fehr), Lang, well, is about as good as he was in Conan. Or Braven. He really should avoid filming with Momoa.

DEI black boyfriend for the white female lead is a horrible actor and only there for the mixed race couple check mark. The white male security guard has a black daughter. A lot of DEI overrepresentation in general. A large male security guard gets overpowered and manhandled by a tine petite female. This is a complete mess of a movie. No comedy or horror despite those are the genres it listed in. This is one of those movies where all the characters are made to act unrealistically and crazy for no reason other than to try to make a odd quirky movie just to be weird. Despite all the music and product placement it never really feels like it takes place in the 90's either. Just another pretentious indie movie whos director thinks they are clever.

Once again we have a British movie where the black population is less than 4 percent yet we have a black male character with the only white male in the movie other than the child being the dead father. Even the fire fighters that show up none are seen or heard talk except for 1 female fire fighter. The acting is average at best the FX are minimal and not very well done. There are hardly any scares with only a few lame jump scares and loud blaring noises. The creature is only ever seen in very dark or blurry fast moving scenes and the little you do see of it doesn't look very good and definitely not scary. Very slow moving and boring for the most part.

Enjoyed this, good action movie.

I really enjoyed this, of course the story is nothing groundbreaking or creative but it's a Jason Statham movie so you know what to expect. No woke shit to really report, much better than the beekeeper which had more wokeness in it.