Skip to main content

The Boy -- a review


Full disclosure time here: I’ve had a mad (simply mad, I tell you!) crush on actress Lauren Cohan since I first laid eyes on her during the second season of The Walking Dead. And although her presence on that zombie soap opera isn’t enough to keep me watching it, I still keep an eye out for her whenever she shows up in other projects, such as the straight to video opus Death Race 2. 2016’s The Boy is her first starring film role, and it was actually released in theaters! Whoa, looks like this girl is definitely going places.


In The Boy, Cohan stars as Greta, a young woman who has been hired to baby-sit a kid for a wealthy old couple who live in a spacious mansion in England. Weird stuff happens right at the start when Greta, showing up at the mansion for the first time, removes her boots and leaves them at the front door--only to have them vanish when she goes to retrieve them later. But it really gets weird when Greta realizes that the “boy” that she has been hired to take care of is nothing but a life-sized doll of an eight year old lad with creepy alabaster skin and eyes that have a thousand yard stare.



Greta is given a list of things that must be done for Brahms (aka the creepy little doll). This list, which includes playing selected pieces of music very loudly, must be strictly adhered to, reminding me of the rules that had to adhere to with the Gremlins to guarantee nothing went wrong--and of course people ignored those rules right off the bat. Greta does the same thing. Once the old couple are gone, leaving her alone in the mansion, Greta just tosses the doll aside and kicks back and relaxes.



Big mistake, for once she ignores the rules, that’s when the really creepy stuff happens. I enjoyed this one. It has a nice, Gothic atmosphere, and slowly builds up its terrors, as opposed to diving straight in teeth-first. The Boy is basically a mystery/thriller that unravels its plot with care, including the twist near the end. Cohan acquits herself very nicely here, effortlessly carrying the movie as the only person on screen for long stretches of its running time. The Boy may not be the greatest film ever made (it has some plot holes), but for what it is, it’s entertaining enough to enjoy on a rainy weekend afternoon. --SF

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jack Reacher Never Go Back -- a Review

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa...
Post a Comment
Read more

3 Body Problem

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Holdovers -- a review

It’s always a joy to watch someone who’s a master at their work, whether it’s a musician, an artist, or an actor. Most great actors make it look easy--which is not to say that I think acting is an easy job. I know from personal experience that acting is very hard. It’s a skill that the talented make look very easy, and one of the most talented actors working today is Paul Giamatti. If you’ve watched some movies over the past few years, chances are very good that you’ve already seen Paul Giamatti. He was the jittery earthquake expert in San Andreas , the sympathetic police chief in The Illusionist , and as the titular John Adams (a part that got him the Emmy and a Golden Globe) in the 2008 HBO series of the same name. Recently, I saw Paul Giamatti in the superb The Holdovers , a movie that I wasn’t planning on writing up, but I kept thinking about it--and all of its characters--long after I saw it. In The Holdovers , Giamatti plays Paul H...
Post a Comment
Read more