All User Reviews

I have not read the original book this is based on, I have seen the original Swedish movie though it has been so long I don't remember it that much. Given the originals are a Swedish Scandinavian story they sure went out of their way to DEI up the casting. Single mom and boy that live next door are now black and the vampire character is now of Spanish/Pilipino mixed race and her guardian from the originals is now her father played by a Mexican actor. The aforementioned
black mom is a detective with an Asian partner. There is an insane amount of DEI and a ridiculous lack of white people in general with most of those being female, except the white male junkie of
course. The scene of the kid in the school cafeteria shows almost no white kids. The gift shop owner appears to be a gay Asian.
A flashback scene shows the mom played by a Brazilin actress so not sure where the half Pilipino kid comes from but whatever.
The acting is ok generally except the child actor that plays Eli is pretty poor. There is a very bad CG shot in the first episode of her running and climbing a tree. Why make that CG at all? This feels like another one of these adaptations where they try to stretch out a single book into an ongoing series by adding a bunch of nonsense not in the original and just changing everything so much it barely resembles the original. One episode was enough for me.

One of the best dramatic movies of the 21st century so far

One of the best biographical films I've seen in a long time. It's totally deserving of any award where all the actors pat each other on the back, but it probably won't even get nominated because it’s about the guy who straight-up called some actors "Niggers". Actors who, obviously are part of the woke mafia and got all butt-hurt like idiots.

Yeah, this is the movie, and this is the dude who did that.

An excellent person, an excellent biographical story.

100% RECOMMENDED.

No woke stuff.

P.S.: I hope it wins a ton of awards, it totally deserves them.

The acting is pretty bad. The lead is supposed to be 15 and in highschool while the actor is clearly in her 20's. All of these highschool cool 'kids' look like they are in their 20's actually. This has all the problems the original did and the director hasn't improved at all for this one. Some jarring editing and scene transitions. The Jester just isn't scary and comes off as corny more than creepy. The kills are pretty lame with very little blood and gore. The small amount of gore there is looks comical (the double eye scene in particular looks really bad).
A lot of black DEI overrepresentation including the female black police officer. All the black characters are 'good'. There is completely out of
nowhere scene where a random white male attempts to sexually assault the '15' year old. This is pretty bad overall and not recommended.

Very fun watch

There is zero woke in this one. I think you would need to be a fan of Nic Cage movies to get the full effect. Nic plays himself in a journey of crisis driven, self discovery. It's a fun movie with a lot of over the top, unrealistic action. Highly recommended.

Can a movie have a negative woke score?

Nothing woke at all! Again, I do not recall seeing a single woke element in this film. This is a first in a very, very long time.

The film sends a very strong message, which some will frame as anti-immigration but that's not correct as we see the antihero protagonist clearly at 'ease' with non-European woman. The message conveyed is one of restorative justice and revenge as a means of catharsis. Judging by recent events, a lot of people will agree with the sentiments expressed and this will be controversial.

Some of the better scenes involve a walk-through of a conventional trial from the victim's perspective and how painfully disappointing it can be. Others frame too lenient judges as accessories to crimes and law enforcement officers as protectors of the criminal status quo. One memorable one, features a tense Q and A session with the family of an abhorrent criminal youth. Interesting to observe and contemplate the consequences of negligence and inaction.

Some elements are clearly questionable, such as harming a stranger to convey a point to a man who will soon be dead... Others were just sloppy, like the protagonist's repeated failure to disguise himself or wear gloves: his face, prints and DNA would be all over the crime scenes. And that's not to mention more sophisticated surveillance, such as license-plate recognition or how he overcame various security systems. A TV series could provide an interesting opportunity to showcase better skills.

The impression one is left with is of a budget Batman or a pre-Punisher who for some mysterious reason, decides to take out societal trash. Maybe he's a narcissistic sociopath looking for an excuse to kill people or maybe he's suffering from PTSD and driven by a need to win his dead Father's approval. Fascinating choice of actor, by the way! Whatever the compulsion, this movie felt fresh despite its many flaws and it would be interesting to see a better thought out sequel. If they can do it to create Mad Max II then why not this!

Horrible acting. Basically one of the those generic 90's dollar bin DVD's. Everything about this in amateur filmmaking. This guy is in his
70's and a war vet. The hilarious war scene that looks like it was filmed in someone's backyard looks like it's supposed to be Vietnam but he would
of been in in his late 50's to early 60's given this is in 1988. This even has the obviously bad inside the moving car green screen. I suppose it's
possible this was done on purpose but somehow I doubt it. This guy might be the worst special forces marksman in history. In the first firefight he has several chances to engage his pursues with them advancing in a bottleneck for a clear line of fire but instead falls back and allows them to enter a wide open area with plenty of cover before exposing his position. Lang gives a decent performance but it's a bit unbelievable this 74 year old would be able pull off some of the stunts and fights he's supposed to be doing here. I didn't see anything woke but unfortunately just not a good movie.

So this was one of the top horror movies of 2025? The acting was pretty good and the fx looked good. The story isn't really that original but it's not terrible, what we get of a story anyway. Nothing is ever explained in the end, there's is no reason for anything give. This has some of the most bottom of barrel lazy bad writing I have seen in a while. Basically what you have is 17 kids all from the same class run away at 2:17 on the same night. The movie takes place over a week 30 days after the disappearance from multiple different people's perspectives that all merge together in the end. The very first one is Justine and I knew the movie was in trouble already. Why open your movie with the most irritating, annoying character that I hated right away. I started noticing
writing issues pretty much from the start. It's a little thing but characters kept saying the kids all walked off into the night, yet multiple ring cameras show them bolting out the front doors and running away at full speed. This brings up another issue, everyone has cameras now, there would be a ton of footage of these kids running down streets and through front yards all the way to the destination. Not here magically not one camera seems to exist other than the couple of plot
device required ones. It's only been 30 days yet theirs no police, no search parties, no FBI anywhere. Something like this would be national news. This town would be crawling with media not to mention all the nosy bloggers and internet types, yet here nothing, not a single one. Actually the entire movie feels very low budget, the whole town is oddly empty. Every scene is devoid of any life other than the character on screen, no background characters, no cars just completely empty backgrounds. This is also horror in the loosest sense of the word, there's a few jump scares and creepy moments mixed with maybe a handful of disturbingly bloody violent scenes but it's very few. Most of the runtime is slow moving drama to get all the characters to the end sequence. This brings me to the finale, what a letdown after all that. The final 20 or so minutes turns into a lough out loud comical sequence. I was literally laughing at how bad the ending was. For woke, as others have said there is the gay mixed race couple. It's maybe 2 scenes of them walking around together and that's it. It's never brought up or made into an issue but it's there. There is also way to much DEI overrepresentation for what's supposed to be small town PA. I would not recommend this at all.



Some spoilers follow that give more examples of how horrible the writing is......



While I don't believe their was any actual family relationship how Gladys was able to persuade, find or cloud the minds of the family is never explains or really makes any sense. She's introducing herself as the Aunt and sister of the mom to everyone including investigators, who by the way have no problem with catatonic parents sitting like zombies while the aunt just takes over the household. Nobody questions how this mid 70's woman could possibly be the sister of the 32 year old mom. An officer and squad car disappear for several days with his car sitting outside the house and the station doesn't notice? The neighbors don't notice the car for days outside the house? The parents just vanish of the face of the earth for over a month and nobody notices? No friends or work notices them missing? Neighbors don't notice they just vanish and some strange woman is now living there? A screaming man is dragged out of a car across the front lawn and into a house and no neighbors hear or see anything? Even worse, screaming, smashing around fighting and several gunshots and not one neighbor right next door hears anything. Even the child narrator at the beginning, who we never actually see anywhere in the movie and appears to completely random states the kids 'walked off into the night never to be seen again' is in the end just a blatant cheap lie by the director.

No woke. Not a bad watch. It's just not my thing.

Impossible situations. Mechanical booby traps that have been dormant for centuries, but are perfectly operational, corny jokes, and ridiculous fight scenes. If you like that kind of thing, this movie's for you. It's sort of a dark, slapstick movie with a big budget.

Surprisingly accurate for a voluntarily modern vision.

This is not a serious movie; and yet, it gets so many details right, or closer to right than most movies this century. The armour, weaponry, costumes are (most of them) pretty much coherent with 14th century Europe. Not historically perfect, some details modernised, but nothing is jarringly bad.
The movie does bend the timeline a little, but the pervasive Chaucer in-jokes make up for it.


By modern vision, I do in no way the fabled "modern audience"; I mean translating (some) events or costumes into modern culture.
The movie opens with the peasantry singing Queen's We Will Rock You at a tournament.
Though obviously anachronistic, it does, to my mind, convey the overall feeling. Tournaments, jousting in particular, was a cross between pro wrestling and drag racing at the time. Big show.
So yeah, Queen.
Love the bloke turning donuts with his horse.

The cast is brilliant, to the last. Bettany is simply fantastic as an over-the-top Chaucer. Ledger was on his way to greatness. Tudy is Tudyk. Addy is at his best. Sewell is perpetually under-rated.

As for political agenda, I find none.
Yeah, female blacksmith. It did happen. Widow to a tradesman (as in this movie), cause one has to eat, or tradesman with no son, cause trade is precious. In both cases, they would help enough to pick up some skills.
Armourer, though, might be pushing it; there are (rare) historical examples, but the actress just looks on the smallish side.
Ah well, it fits with the rest.


All in all, a surprisingly good and endearing movie.

I must’ve watched a totally different movie called War Machine than the one the other comment is talking about. Who knows, maybe that’s the case and I really did see another film, because the one I watched was one of those that I wish had gotten a proper theatrical release so I could’ve gone to see it at the cinema.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen action sci-fi that’s purely made to entertain at this level.

There’s no “diversity saves the day” stuff at all. There’s only one woman in the whole movie (who interacts with the protagonist), and she’s not a girlboss, not butch (but she’s not feminine either). She’s bald, but it fits the role perfectly. She’s not going around lecturing or moralizing everyone… and I don’t want to spoil anything, but what happens after she intervenes has nothing to do with her!!!

It’s a really, really good action/sci-fi movie!

I highly recommend it.

Enjoy!

s1 woke-0 overall-4
I would say there is nothing woke in season 1. There are a few female officers but they are barely there and very few. The same with minority representation, very few and well within reality. Mostly good season with pretty good acting and only some minor writing issues.
s2 woke-1 overall-3
This is a step down from the first season. The decision to use another copycat with the Ripper expert from season 1 returning and is an expert again on this one is a bit implausible. The writing overall is not as good and there's a good bit that's just not believable. The police are a bit frustrating at how cowardly and ineffectual they are but I guess that's what happens when you have an unarmed police force. It's still watchable but not as good as season 1. Woke creeps in a bit here as well. There seems to be an effort to cast females in a lot of the supporting roles. There is a storyline where one of the original killers was gay so the copycat is pretending to be gay too. He is messing around with another character who is a girl pretending to be an underage boy. It's a minor plotline that takes up very little time and is not the focus of the season.
s3 woke-2 overall 2
This season goes to a new format, where the previous ones were 3 episodes with one case across the whole season now it's 6 episodes with 3 cases each taking place over 2 episodes. The writing takes another hit this time with characters doing dumb things and some pretty big stretches in believability. They also decide to stick with every case tying into a past case gimmick. This makes everything even more unrealistic and would of worked better to just go with a normal murder case instead. The ripper expert is now hired on as a research expert and becomes more annoying and out of place. The first case or
episodes 1-2 permanently introduce a new overweight body positive female to the team and a mixed race Asian female forensic expert for the arc to add to the female morgue attendant already in the cast. Getting even heavier on the female casting now. There is also a nasty entitled feminist type character for this arc and the usual overrepresentation of females and blacks in the secondary and background characters. The killer is so obvious and easy to pick out in about 2 seconds in this
arc. The 2nd case or Ep 3-4 introduce yet another female detective for the arc. The writing seems to be getting worse as it goes along. Ridiculous leaps in logic and highly unlikely coincidences keep happening. They are now investigating murders based on random world history murder cases with magically exact circumstances most of which are completely made up. 2nd case or Episodes 5-6. At this point the researcher character has become very annoying and I actually can't stand him anymore. The constant linking of cases to the past and using that to steer investigation has become ridiculous and makes every investigational procedure absurd. It's become tired and
overused. This season seems to want to push further away from the original police procedural and into supernatural/horror territory. A victim that almost is killed is a completely unrealistic for the situation angry feminist type. More and more of these types are showing up this season. The writing in this arc is completely absurd, lazy and unrealistic. A scene with a dead victim that is visibly breathing comes to mind. This season was a struggle to get through and I'm not going to bother with season 4. I would suggest watching season 1 maybe season 2 if you like detective stories but stop after that. It's unfortunate as the 1st season had so much promise.

Feels like just another typical US-made "Russian bad" propaganda movie. Good enough movie. That manipulative Mrs. Iselin character was very realistically painful.