Bumblebee -- a review

I was looking forward to seeing Bumblebee, largely for two reasons. The first was that Hailee Steinfeld was starring in it. This is the very same Hailee Steinfeld who admirably held her own against Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers’ superb remake of True Grit (and she also gave voice to Gwen Stacey in one of my all-time favorite superhero movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). The other reason I wanted to see Bumblebee was that it was directed by Travis Knight, who also directed the astoundingly good Kubo and the Two Strings, a movie that made me care deeply about a group of animated characters from beginning to end.

Bumblebee starts out like a typical Transformers film, with the Transformers battling their blood enemies on their homeworld, and losing badly. When I first saw this CGI orgy, I let out an audible groan, thinking it would devolve into the usual confusing Transformer slugfest that Michael (Boom-Boom) Bay gave us in the previous five (!!!) films, where you had no idea who was doing what to whom. But I was pleasantly surprised to see this opening fight was not only stylishly directed, and it was genuinely exciting, but you also perfectly understood what was happening. It served it’s purpose in pulling you into the movie.

But Bumblebee isn’t like the other Transformers films (and it’s all the better for it) in that it’s a more personal story about a girl and her robot. As silly as that might sound, it works very well here. Taking place in the outskirts of San Francisco in 1987, Bumblebee comes to Earth by himself on a scouting mission, only to suffer extreme damage during a fight with the US military, along with one of the bad guy robots. Steinfeld plays a young gearhead who discovers Bumblebee--in disguise as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle--in a junkyard and drives him home, thinking he’s just another car that she can fix up.

Of course, once Bumblebee reveals his true nature to Steinfeld’s character, then the real shenanigans begin. It’s basically a lot of running around, dodging the US Army (led by John Cena, who’s perfectly cast here as a jut-jawed super soldier), as well as a pair of evil robots. Eventually, the fate of the world is at stake, but Knight keeps things so well-focused (compared to the usual Transformers film) that we never lose sight of who we’re rooting for. But despite the scaled-down story, Knight still manages to give us a highly imaginative film with some whimsical and even heartfelt moments. Thanks to having sharply-focused, creative direction, along a good cast, Bumblebee winds up being a thoroughly enjoyable entry in this series. --SF

Comments

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Presence -- A Review

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...

Cleaner -- a review

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog