I believe today is a beautiful Monday for all Malaysians as we don’t need to go out for work or study today. It’s public holiday as the nation celebrates 58th independence anniversary today. Happy Merdeka Day to Malaysia! Wonderful timing as the National Day this year falls on Monday, hence extending our weekend break. There shouldn’t be any Monday blues mood today. I’m ending the month with two movie reviews as I have watched two films released this year recently; ‘Southpaw’ and ‘Robert The Doll’.
‘Southpaw’ is a 2015 sports drama film which revolves on a boxer, Billy Hope who turns to trainer Tick Willis to help him get his life back on track after losing his wife in a tragic accident and his daughter to child protection services. The film directed by Antoine Fuqua starred Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, Naomie Harris, Oona Laurence, etc. First of all, I’m quite enjoyed with the redemption theme of the storyline eventhough many said its’ very much predictable and shown nothing fresh to the audiences. The plot is quite engaging but the development may be a bit unnecessarily too long.
The focus of the film must be on the performance of Jake Gyllenhaal as he is rumoured to be a heavyweight potential for best actor nominee in Oscars next year from this movie. Well, he is doing another fantastic job by being very much committed to this role of troubled boxer. He turned from a skinny man in last year’s ‘Nightcrawler’ to a bulky body in ‘Southpaw’. However, I think his role here is not exceptional enough to put him in frontrunner for a nomination next year since the competition in best actor is always compacted. Anyway, he still carried the movie very well with great performance. Another thing lacking from this drama is that they failed to inject some really cool heart-stopping climax moments into the film. There are also quite a number of emotional scenes but they didn’t hit at high note. Hence, these issues prevent the movie from climbing up the rating from movie critics. As for me, I’m still thinking that it’s a good solid movie. Out of 10 points, I rate ‘Southpaw’ a total of 7.5. This was the last film to be scored by James Horner before the composer’s death sadly.
Next movie is ‘Robert The Doll’, a very much unknown horror movie this year that are also based on a haunted doll. I still went for the movie despite knowing it received poor ratings from IMDb because I’m interested with haunted doll theme especially after being quite excited with ‘Chucky’ and most recently ‘Annabelle’ movie. ‘Robert’ film is said to be based on real life events when a family experience terrifying supernatural occurrences when their son acquires a vintage doll called Robert. I browsed the web to search about this doll and it do exists. However, the doll in the movie doesn’t look anything similar to the real thing which is now exhibited in a museum at Florida. Just like Annabelle, the doll looks more creepy in the movie. I knew they made it looks more terrifying for the scare effect.
The plot of the movie actually comes with potential to deliver. However, everything is ruined when scenes are poorly done, the characters are odd and the acting is bad. The worst thing is the acting part. The cast were just delivering their lines with forced emotions displayed on their faces. It’s so obvious that their acting is bad especially the woman portraying as the mother. Things are getting boring and unappealing even when it comes to the end when the doll start to show itself how evil it is. Out of 10 points, I rate ‘Robert The Doll’ a total of 5.9. Many points are just given for the very creepy-looking doll itself. The movie just couldn’t pull it off at all.
(Images in this post are from various sources throughout the world wide web)
