CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 4-24-26
- Nick Digilio
- 3 hours ago
- 25 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, April 24th, 2026.
There are bad music biopics… and then there are movies like Michael.
And I mean that in the worst possible way.
This thing is a train wreck. An absolute, jaw-dropping, almost fascinating failure on nearly every level. The kind of movie where you’re sitting there watching it unfold and thinking, “how did this get made like this?”
Not just a disappointment, this is one of the worst movies of the year, easily. Maybe one of the worst in this particular subgenre, and that’s saying something because the music biopic has been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a while now.
So here we go. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, who, by the way, has made some good movies in the past. Training Day, The Equalizer, even some of his smaller stuff has worked. But you wouldn’t know it from watching this.
He is nowhere to be found here. No sense of style, no control, no vision. It’s like he just handed the camera to somebody else and walked away.
And the script by John Logan? Completely by the numbers. And worse than that, whitewashed to a degree that is almost comical. This is the same guy who wrote The Aviator and Hugo, both of which I loved. But he’s also responsible for some real clunkers, and this lands squarely in that category.
It’s lazy, it’s manipulative, it’s loaded with clichés, and it actively avoids anything remotely challenging or truthful about its subject.
Now, the movie covers Michael Jackson’s life from his early days in Gary, Indiana, through the Jackson 5 years, and into his rise as a solo artist, basically culminating around the Bad era in the late ’80s. That’s the scope. That’s what we’re dealing with.
And what do they do with that material?
They reduce it to the most simplistic, cliché-ridden, one-dimensional story you can imagine: abusive father, gifted/weird child, rise to fame, break free from the father’s shadow. That’s it. That’s the movie.
Colman Domingo plays Joe Jackson, and look, I know people love this guy, but I don’t get it. I really don’t. Here, he gives a ham-fisted, over-the-top, cartoonishly evil performance. Every scene is the same: yelling, threatening, beating his kids with a belt, forcing them to rehearse over and over again. There’s no nuance, no complexity. He’s just the bad guy. Period.
Nia Long plays Katherine Jackson, the supportive but passive mother, and she’s given almost nothing to do except look concerned and occasionally object. It’s all so flat.
And then there’s Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew, playing Michael.
Now, I’ll give him this, he did his homework. There’s no question about that. The physicality is impressive. The dance moves, the stage presence, the recreation of iconic performances, he nails that stuff.
The Motown 25 moonwalk, the Thriller video, the Beat It choreography, the Victory Tour performances…he looks the part, he moves like Michael, he clearly studied him. But he’s not an actor. He’s an imitator.
And there’s a huge difference. Because when the movie actually requires him to deliver emotion, to carry a scene, to do anything beyond mimicry, it falls apart. Completely. Which is probably why the movie is structured the way it is…Montage after montage after montage.
I mean, seriously, this thing plays like a two-hour collection of bad music videos. Every major moment is reduced to a quick-cut sequence set to a song. No depth, no development, no real scenes. Just highlight reel after highlight reel, all strung together with the most obvious, manipulative editing you can imagine.
And yeah, most of the music is great. Of course it is. It’s Michael Jackson. It’s the Jackson 5. There are some incredible songs.
But you don’t get to just blast good music over a series of clichés and call it a movie.
And speaking of clichés, every single music biopic trope you can think of is here. Every one. The abusive parent. The rise to fame. The moment of independence. The tortured genius. The misunderstood artist. It’s like they took a checklist and said, “yep, we need all of these,” and then just crammed them in without any thought.
But here’s where it goes from lazy to downright insulting: the historical inaccuracies. They are everywhere.
I’m not even talking about the obvious omissions, which, by the way, are massive. The movie completely ignores all of the controversies, the allegations, the lawsuits, the darker aspects of Michael Jackson’s life.
Now look, I’m not saying you have to center the movie around that, but to pretend it doesn’t exist at all? To completely erase it? That’s not storytelling. That’s propaganda.
But even putting that aside, the stuff they do include is riddled with errors and flat-out lies.
They present Off the Wall as Michael’s first solo album. It wasn’t, it was his fifth.
No mention of the movie The Wiz, or of Diana Ross at all, which is very odd because he was very close to Ross, and that film's failure is what lead directly to him recording Off the Wall. But, nowhere to be found.
They show him basically creating Thriller entirely on his own. Not true. Huge collaborators (Quincy Jones, Rod Temperton) are either minimized or ignored. They don’t even bother to acknowledge key contributors properly.
The fact that Thriller was originally titled Starlight, and that it wasn't Jackson's idea to change the name...nowhere to be found.
There’s no real mention of Vincent Price’s involvement. No real depiction of John Landis’s role in shaping the Thriller video. And I’ve talked to Landis, so I know how inaccurate some of this stuff is.
There’s a ridiculous sequence where Michael watches a news report about gangs and then just…goes out and recruits Crips and Bloods to choreograph Beat It. That’s not how that happened. Not even close.
There’s another sequence involving the Pepsi commercial accident where his hair catches fire, and suddenly that becomes this turning point where he decides to dedicate his life to helping sick children. Again, not accurate.
More unintentionally hilarious and wildly erroneous scenes abound, including one with a ridiculous Deon Cole as Don King, taking a one-on-one meeting with Joe Jackson that features bad wigs and smuggled Cuban cigars. Never happened.
There is also an infuriatingly fabricated scene in which the then President of CBS Records, Walter Yetnikoff (a heavily made-up Mike Myers, who has the distinction of appearing in this trash AND Bohemian Rhapsody), makes a single phone call to MTV that puts the video for Billie Jean into heavy rotation. Nope. Sorry. Not true.
Janet Jackson? Completely absent. Not even in the background. Which tells you a lot, considering she wanted nothing to do with this movie. Not to mention that Randy and Rebbie Jackson are also MIA...again, revealing.
And it goes on and on and on. Inaccuracies, omissions, simplifications. It’s relentless.
I didn't even mention Michael's pet monkey Bubbles, the worst CGI rendered chimpanzee in film history. During every scene that that monstrosity appeared in, I kept wishing that I was watching an episode of the far superior work Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp, intsead of the nightmare I was stuck with.
And all of this is wrapped up in this glossy, sanitized package produced by Graham King, who, by the way, also produced Bohemian Rhapsody. And if you hated that movie as much as I did (and I really hated that movie) you’re going to see the exact same playbook here.
Whitewash the story. Ignore the messy stuff. Pump up the music. End with a big, extended concert sequence to distract you from the garbage that came before it. That’s exactly what happens here.
The movie builds to this long, overblown recreation of performances from the Victory Tour and the Bad era. It’s loud, it’s flashy, it’s designed to get the audience clapping along and forgetting the two hours of absolute nonsense they just sat through.
And then it ends with a title card: “His story continues.”
Yeah. It does. And it gets a lot more complicated, a lot darker, a lot more controversial, and a lot more interesting than anything this movie is willing to show you.
This isn’t a biopic. It’s a sanitized, corporate-approved, money-grab version of a life story that deserved something far more honest, far more nuanced, and far more daring.
Instead, we get a hollow, cliché-ridden, montage-heavy mess filled with bad performances, terrible writing, and laughable historical inaccuracies.
It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. It’s dishonest.
And if you have any respect for music history (or for Michael Jackson as a complex, controversial figure) you should probably stay as far away from this as possible.
This is one of the worst movies of the year. - 1/2 star
David Lowery described Mother Mary as a “supernatural pop star nightmare,” and you know what? That’s accurate. It is absolutely a nightmare. It is also absolutely a mess. But it’s a fascinating mess.
And that’s important, because there are a lot of movies that are messy and don’t deserve your time. They’re sloppy, they’re indulgent, they’re incoherent, and you just want to get out of the theater. Mother Mary is not that. This is a problematic film, no question.
Tonally, it’s all over the place. The stylistic choices don’t always line up. The blend of reality and fantasy doesn’t fully work. The supernatural elements are the weakest part of it. And yet…there is enough in here that is strangely compelling, visually hypnotic, emotionally intense, and just plain weird in a good way that I’m recommending it.
This is one of those movies where the swings are so big, so wild, so unapologetic, that even when it misses, you kind of admire the attempt.
The setup is pretty terrific. Anne Hathaway plays Mother Mary, this gigantic pop icon who has stepped away from music after a personal and artistic crisis. She’s preparing for a big comeback, a huge return to the stage, and in classic diva fashion, she becomes obsessed with one specific detail: the dress for the opening show is wrong.
It does not represent her. It does not say what she needs it to say. So she goes to the one person who can fix it: Sam Anselm, a world-renowned costume designer played by Michaela Coel, who also happens to be her former best friend, former creative partner, and secret former lover.
That’s the movie, really. At least at first.
Mary goes to Sam’s isolated country home in England, and for most of the running time this becomes essentially a two-hander, a chamber piece, a long emotional confrontation between these two women who once created art together, loved each other, hurt each other, and now have to excavate all of that pain in order to make something new.
Sam agrees to make the dress, but on her terms, and those terms basically involve complete submission. Mary has to play by Sam’s rules. She has to surrender. She has to confront what she did, what she took, what she lost.
And when the movie is doing that, when it is just Hathaway and Coel in a room talking, sparring, manipulating, reliving their past, this movie is really something.
Those are the strongest sections by far. The dialogue scenes between Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel are electric. They are intimate and cruel and funny and heartbreaking.
Coel’s character gets the upper hand in these scenes, and watching Sam force Mary into a kind of emotional and creative servitude is incredibly compelling. She was betrayed. Her heart was broken. She has been sidelined while Mother Mary became this gigantic symbol, this untouchable icon, and now she finally gets to assert some power.
The emotional dynamics between them are rich and complicated, and Lowery lets those scenes breathe.
There is a lot going on here, and when it works, it really knocks it out of the park. The movie is about superstardom. It’s about image. It’s about collaboration and authorship and the way art gets created between people who are deeply entangled in each other’s lives.
It’s about heartbreak and betrayal and ego and performance. It’s about what it means to build a public persona so complete that it begins to swallow the actual person underneath it.
And because the movie is set in the world of gigantic pop spectacle, all of that gets filtered through music, fashion, theatricality, and performance.
The original songs are by Daniel Hart, Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA twigs, and they do a terrific job creating songs that feel like they belong to this level of mega-stardom.
They’re clearly inspired by the giant modern pop mythologies we live with now. David Lowery has said he was inspired by Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour, and Anne Hathaway has talked about using Beyoncé as an inspiration, especially Homecoming and “American Requiem,” and that all makes perfect sense.
This movie is very much about what the audience sees when they look at a pop god: the image, the spectacle, the costumes, the stagecraft, the projection of identity.
And it’s especially smart about the costumes. About how what a pop star wears is not just decoration but storytelling. The audience is being told who this person is by what she puts on, how she stands, how she moves, how she frames herself.
The movie really gets that. It understands that costume design is not secondary to pop performance, it is central to it. It is identity construction. It is autobiography as image. And I love that.
I also love the way Lowery stages all of this. Most of the movie takes place in this big, empty country farmhouse, and he uses that space brilliantly. The whole building becomes a stage. It becomes a theater. It becomes a place where memory, confrontation, fantasy, and performance all overlap.
There are flashbacks and emotional recreations that are staged within this one location in a highly theatrical way, with dramatic lighting and careful blocking and a real sense of performance space. It doesn’t feel realistic, and it shouldn’t.
It feels like emotional theater. It feels like the internal life of these two women being projected outward into architecture and design.
Visually, it’s a startling movie. A beautiful movie. There are sequences in it that are spellbinding. And then there’s the supernatural stuff. That’s where the movie kind of falls off the rails.
Mary tells Sam about a séance from her past, about being possessed by some kind of spirit, and this red ghostly presence (represented in part by this long blood-red piece of cloth) becomes tied to her guilt, her shame, her sadness, her creativity, her longing, all of it.
Eventually the film goes full-on ritual mode. Candles. Chalk circle. Ceremonial extraction. The idea is that this thing inside her, this possession, this accumulation of remorse and repression and damaged love, has to be pulled out and transformed into art. Into the dress. Into something she can wear on stage.
Now, conceptually, I get it. I even admire it. The metaphor is strong. The idea that artists take guilt and heartbreak and damage and turn it into something beautiful, something wearable, something performable, something public, and that’s terrific. That’s a great idea.
But the execution is shaky.
When the movie gets bloody and creepy and starts leaning into literal ghost story territory, it doesn’t work nearly as well as the emotional confrontation stuff. There are stabbings, there’s gore, there’s a tooth-pulling scene that is genuinely nasty, and while none of it completely pulled me out of the movie, it felt unnecessary.
The film already has this hypnotic, eerie quality. It does not need to underline it with gore and supernatural violence. It’s creepier without that stuff. It’s more effective when it stays dreamlike rather than going literal.
And that’s the frustrating thing: the movie almost trusts its atmosphere, but not quite.
Still, I was never bored. I was never fully disengaged. Lowery has too much command for that. Even when it gets overstuffed, even when it gets a little ridiculous, it remains interesting. It remains visually and emotionally alive.
And one scene in particular is just extraordinary.
There is a sequence in which Anne Hathaway’s character is told to dance without music. She wants Sam to hear a new song, but Sam refuses. She doesn’t want to hear it. She wants to see it.
She wants to see Mary express the song physically, through movement alone, and Hathaway just throws herself into this dance, this wild, desperate, emotionally naked physical performance.
It is the best scene in the movie. Easily. It is hypnotic and scary and beautiful and sad all at once. You feel the need in it. You feel the guilt. You feel the shame and the longing and the dependence and the yearning for reconnection. Hathaway is astonishing in that sequence.
And yes, the whole thing made me think David Lowery maybe dropped some acid and watched Parker Finn’s Smile 2 and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake back to back before making this movie, because the influences are impossible to miss.
The dance sequence feels very much in the orbit of Guadagnino’s Suspiria, especially the way movement becomes expression, possession, release. Hathaway even looks like Dakota Johnson at certain moments, and later there is an image involving her chest that is so reminiscent of Suspiria it’s hard not to think of it.
The big concert sequences, and the way the red ghostly figure intrudes on those huge pop-star performances, absolutely recall Smile 2 and that film’s terrifying stadium-show climax.
And the theatrical in-camera feel of some of the fantasy staging also evokes Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with that stylized, hand-crafted, deliberately theatrical visual language.
Those are pretty great movies to steal from, frankly. And the movie wears those inspirations on its sleeve.
But even with all of that, Mother Mary is not just derivative. It has its own identity. It has its own weird pulse. It has its own ideas about art and intimacy and image-making, and those ideas are worth engaging with even when the movie itself gets unwieldy.
And it is anchored by two terrific performances.
Anne Hathaway continues to be one of the most interesting major movie stars we have. I love her. I really do. She has grown into this fearless, intelligent, emotionally adventurous performer, and she is terrific here. She gives Mary exactly the right combination of confidence, collapse, vanity, desperation, and raw need.
And Michaela Coel is just magnificent. She has this control, this intelligence, this emotional authority that gives the movie its spine. Every time the two of them are together, sparks fly.
So yes, Mother Mary is a mess. It is all over the place. Some of it doesn’t work. Some of it goes too far. Some of it doesn’t go far enough in the right direction. The supernatural stuff is overcooked. The film is too long. It doesn’t all cohere.
But it’s a wild swing. It’s a strange journey. It’s messy, but it’s messiness with purpose, messiness with ambition, messiness in pursuit of something genuinely interesting.
And in a world full of dead, prepackaged, focus-grouped movies, I will take a fascinating mess over a dead-on-arrival piece of competence any day.
David Lowery continues to be a really interesting filmmaker. And Mother Mary, for all of its problems, is worth seeing. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There’s something immediately intriguing about a movie that opens with the promise of marital reconciliation and then very quickly pivots into, “oh, by the way, both of these people are planning to murder each other.” That’s a hook. That’s a great, dark, nasty little premise.
And going into Over Your Dead Body, I was genuinely looking forward to it…which makes it all the more frustrating that it ends up being such a mixed bag, and ultimately kind of a disappointment.
First of all, I didn’t even realize until the day of the screening that this is a remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, which, by the way, I like quite a bit. And once you know that, it becomes very clear very quickly that this is a pretty close remake.
Same structure, same escalation, same level of violence, same basic beats. So right out of the gate, there’s that nagging feeling of “okay…why am I watching this version when the original already did it, and did it well?”
The setup is solid. You’ve got Dan and Lisa (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) this deeply unhappy, toxic couple whose marriage has rotted from the inside out. He’s a failed filmmaker reduced to shooting commercials, she’s a struggling actress, there’s resentment, infidelity, money issues…you name it, it’s there.
So they go off to this remote cabin, supposedly to reconnect. Of course, secretly, each of them has planned to kill the other. That’s the movie. That’s the engine. And for a while, it works.
Jorma Taccone directs, and look, I like Taccone. I really do. One-third of The Lonely Island, those guys revolutionized the digital short at SNL, they’re insanely talented, and Taccone has directed some terrific stuff.
MacGruber (the movie version of the SNL sketches) is outrageously funny, completely committed to its stupidity, and just brilliant. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is one of the goofiest comedies of the last 20 years, a pitch-perfect satire that absolutely nails its tone from beginning to end. That’s the key: tone.
Because tone is exactly where Over Your Dead Body starts to fall apart.
In the early going, you can feel that Lonely Island energy. There’s some goofy, awkward, uncomfortable comedy. The performances are pitched a little big, a little off-center.
You get bits like the taser and chloroform showdown, which is this ridiculous, escalating attempt at intimacy that’s actually a murder attempt, and that stuff works. It’s funny, it’s uncomfortable, it has that dark comic edge.
But then the movie wants to be something else. It wants to be a serious black comedy about marriage, and about how relationships decay, about how couples can turn on each other, about that old cliché of “you live with someone long enough, you might want to kill them.” And that’s tricky territory.
That’s War of the Roses territory. And let me tell you something: The War of the Roses makes this movie look like amateur hour. Danny DeVito nailed that tone. It’s vicious, it’s funny, it’s consistent, and it actually has something to say.
Here? It’s shallow. Taccone just doesn’t have a handle on that balance. He can do broad, ridiculous, over-the-top comedy. He can do parody. But when it comes to sustaining a dark, biting, emotionally grounded black comedy? He loses control of it. And then the movie shifts. Hard.
Enter the intruders, two escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine), and a corrupt prison guard (Juliette Lewis). And when they show up, the movie just explodes into full-on splatter-comedy chaos. And I will say this: this is where the movie comes alive.
Samara Weaving, who I think is very talented (and has basically built a career on being hunted, tortured, or chased in increasingly insane situations), and she’s good here. She understands this kind of material. She’s done it before, whether it’s Ready or Not or other stuff in that vein. She can ride that line between horror, comedy, and intensity.
Jason Segel…look, I’ve never been a big Jason Segel guy. He’s kind of the same in everything. He found a lane back with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, with that sort of sad-sack, slightly awkward, semi-goofy persona, and he’s been doing variations of that ever since. And here, he just feels out of his depth. The tone shifts, the violence ramps up, the comedy gets darker and broader, and he just can’t keep up.
But Olyphant and Juliette Lewis? They get it. Completely.
Olyphant is doing that cool, dangerous, slightly unhinged thing he’s been great at since Go, with that mix of charm and menace.
And Juliette Lewis…man, she’s just one of the most fascinating, unpredictable, electric performers we’ve got. She’s been doing this kind of material forever (Natural Born Killers, Strange Days, Yellowjackets) she knows exactly how to play in this sandbox. Every time she’s on screen, the movie wakes up.
And the last act (once it fully commits to the carnage) there are moments that work. There’s creativity in the violence. Improvised weapons like billiard balls, pitchforks, a lawnmower.
There’s a little bit of that Peter Jackson splatter energy, a little Straw Dogs in the siege setup, a couple of genuinely funny visual gags, with characters stumbling around looking like human pin-cushions with stuff sticking out of them. It’s messy, it’s bloody, it’s occasionally inspired.
But again…tone.
Taccone lets it get out of hand. It becomes too much, too chaotic, too unfocused. And then the movie tries (again) to circle back to something meaningful about marriage. About connection. About rediscovering love through shared trauma and violence. And you just don’t buy it. Not for a second.
Because at the end of the day, for all the blood and noise and frantic energy, the movie isn’t really about much. It gestures toward something deeper, but never actually digs in. It skims the surface.
And while you’re watching it, you keep thinking about better movies. The War of the Roses. Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Even Ready or Not. Hell, even What Keeps You Alive handled similar ideas with more conviction.
So what you’re left with is a spotty film. A movie with a great premise, a few strong performances (especially Olyphant and Lewis) and some fun, nasty set pieces…but no real control, no consistency, and no real bite beneath all the gore.
Taccone is clearly a talented guy. When he’s in his lane (when he’s doing full-on comedy, parody, that Lonely Island absurdity) he’s terrific. But this? This is him stepping outside that lane and not quite knowing how to navigate it.
And the result is a movie that I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did.
Ultimately, I can’t recommend it. It’s inconsistent, it’s tonally all over the place, and despite a few flashes of fun and some standout supporting work, it just doesn’t come together.
A disappointment. - ⭐️⭐️
Every once in a while, a movie comes along about a very specific condition, a very specific person, and you kind of brace yourself. You go, “okay…is this going to be one of those heavy-handed, manipulative, after-school-special kinds of things?”
Especially when it’s based on a true story, especially when it’s dealing with something like Tourette syndrome, which, let’s be honest, has not always been handled with a whole lot of nuance or respect in movies.
So I went into I Swear with some caution. And also some skepticism, because it’s directed by Kirk Jones, who is a guy who, frankly, has made some pretty lousy movies over the years. I mean, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Everybody’s Fine…not exactly a stellar track record.
The last genuinely good movie he made was Waking Ned Devine back in 1998. That’s a long time ago. But I’ve got to tell you, this is easily his best film since then. And in a lot of ways, it’s kind of a surprise.
The movie is based on the true story of John Davidson, a Scottish kid growing up in the early ’80s who develops severe Tourette syndrome: tics, uncontrollable movements, and, most strikingly, coprolalia, the involuntary swearing, that becomes the defining and most misunderstood aspect of his condition.
The film follows him from childhood into adulthood, through all the pain, confusion, humiliation, and eventually, acceptance and advocacy that come with it.
And those early scenes…they hit hard. You watch this kid (who just wants to play football, just wants to be normal) suddenly start experiencing these tics, these outbursts that he can’t control. And because it’s the ’80s, nobody understands what the hell is going on.
Teachers think he’s acting out. Kids think he’s being rude. He gets punished, ostracized, bullied. There’s a scene on the football field where everything just collapses in front of him, and it’s heartbreaking. You feel it.
The movie does a really solid job of putting you inside that confusion, of showing how misunderstood Tourette’s was back then, and frankly, how misunderstood it still can be. It’s handled with a lot of respect, and it’s presented in a very three-dimensional way.
This isn’t just “here’s a condition, feel bad for this guy.” It’s about how people react to it, how society reacts to it, and how that reaction can be just as damaging as the condition itself.
Then we jump ahead to John as an adult, played by Robert Aramayo, and this is where the movie really finds its center. Because Aramayo (who, by the way, just won the BAFTA for Best Actor, kind of out of nowhere) is phenomenal here. I mean, really, really outstanding.
He anchors the whole movie. Completely.
And he has to, because this is not an easy role. It’s physical, it’s emotional, it’s unpredictable, it requires incredible control while portraying a lack of control. And he nails it. Even when the movie starts to wobble (and it does) he keeps it grounded. You believe him every second he’s on screen.
The supporting cast is terrific, too. Maxine Peake as the psychiatric nurse who becomes a kind of lifeline for him, and she’s wonderful. There’s warmth there, there’s intelligence, there’s a real sense of compassion without it ever feeling forced.
Peter Mullan, who is always great, plays Tommy, this caretaker who becomes a mentor figure, and his scenes are some of the best in the movie. There’s a job interview sequence involving Mullan that’s funny, awkward, and incredibly touching all at once, especially when it takes a weird turn involving his dog.
And the great Shirley Henderson, as John’s mother, brings a lot of complexity to a character who could have easily been one-note.
Now, the movie is a feel-good story. Let’s not kid ourselves. This is about overcoming adversity, about finding your voice (literally and figuratively) and about becoming an advocate. John Davidson goes on to become a spokesperson for Tourette’s awareness, he receives an MBE in 2019, he becomes a hero in his own way. That’s the arc.
But what’s nice is that it doesn’t feel overly corny. It flirts with that territory, absolutely. There are moments where it leans a little too hard into the drama, where it gets a little soap opera-ish, a little overwrought. But for the most part, it walks that line pretty well.
It’s also surprisingly funny. And not in a cheap way. The humor comes from the reality of the situation, and the unpredictability of John’s outbursts. There’s a scene in a car where he just unleashes a string of completely bizarre, inappropriate phrases (I mean, stuff like “I spunked on a jellyfish”) and it’s shocking, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s also genuinely funny because of how absurd and uncontrollable it is.
There’s a misunderstanding involving a bag of sugar that gets mistaken for heroin. There are moments that play like comedy, but they’re rooted in something real.
And that balance (the humor and the seriousness) is one of the movie’s strengths. It never treats Tourette’s as a joke, but it also doesn’t ignore the fact that there are moments of absurdity that can be funny. That’s a tough line to walk, and for the most part, it pulls it off.
That said…it’s too long. It runs over two hours, and you feel it. There’s repetition. A lot of repetition.
We get the point (over and over again) of how people react to John’s tics, how it leads to confrontation, how it leads to embarrassment or violence or misunderstanding. Some scenes are played for laughs, some for drama, but they start to blur together. A little more restraint, a little more subtlety, would have gone a long way.
Because sometimes the movie really hammers its message home. And look, I get it (this is an important story, it’s about awareness, it’s about empathy) but you don’t always need to shout it at the audience. Sometimes less is more, and this movie doesn’t always trust that.
But when it works, it really works.
There’s a scene at the MBE ceremony that’s both hilarious and incredibly tense, in which John involuntarily shouts something inappropriate about the Queen at the worst possible moment, and it perfectly encapsulates what the movie is about.
You laugh, but you also feel the weight of it. You understand the struggle.
And ultimately, that’s what I Swear does best. It gives you insight into a condition that a lot of people still don’t fully understand. It humanizes it. It shows you the person behind it.
There have been other movies about Tourette’s (The Tic Code, Phoebe in Wonderland, even something like Motherless Brooklyn, where Edward Norton integrates it into a noir detective story in a really interesting way) but here, it’s front and center.
This is the story. And it’s told with care, with strong performances, and with a genuine sense of empathy.
So yeah, it’s a little too long. Yeah, it gets a little heavy-handed at times. But it’s anchored by a truly remarkable lead performance, supported by a terrific cast, and directed with enough sensitivity to make it land more often than not.
It’s inspiring. It’s funny. It’s dramatic. And it might actually teach you something. And in the end, that’s enough for me to recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There’s a certain kind of thriller (you know exactly what I’m talking about) the kind that’s built entirely around a ticking clock. A bomb, a countdown, a crisis that’s supposed to ratchet up the tension second by second. We’ve seen it a million times. And when it’s done right, it works. It’s primal. It’s effective. It gets under your skin.
Fuze is not one of those movies.
This is the latest from David Mackenzie, a director who’s been around for a while now, and has made some interesting stuff over the years. Young Adam, Hallam Foe, Perfect Sense, he’s had a varied career.
But, the movie that really put him on the map in a big way was Hell or High Water, and that worked largely because of the performances. You get someone like Jeff Bridges in a role like that, delivering that kind of performance, and suddenly everything clicks.
Because Mackenzie’s strength has never really been in visual style or in building suspense. He’s kind of a by-the-numbers director. Competent, sure, but not particularly inspired. He needs the right cast to elevate the material. And unfortunately, Fuze does not have that cast.
The setup is familiar, but with a slight twist. An unexploded World War II bomb is discovered at a construction site in London (Paddington, to be exact) and suddenly the whole area is evacuated.
Police, military, bomb disposal units, everybody’s scrambling to deal with this potential disaster. You’ve got Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) trying to defuse the thing, dealing with complications, timers, all that stuff.
Meanwhile (and this is where the movie tries to get clever) a group of criminals led by Theo James’s character Karalis uses the chaos as cover to pull off a heist. They drill into a bank vault, grab money and jewels, and try to get away while the entire city is distracted by the bomb threat.
So you’ve got two threads: the ticking bomb thriller and the heist movie. In theory, that’s a pretty good idea. Blend those two together, you might get something fresh.
In practice? Not so much.
Let’s start with the cast. Aaron Taylor-Johnson (I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again) he’s a spotty actor. He can be good. I liked him in Nosferatu, I thought he was solid in 28 Years Later, and there are moments in his career where you go, “okay, this guy’s got something.”
But more often than not, he falls back on the same bag of tricks: glowering, posing, relying on his looks and that sort of intense stare instead of actually digging into a character. And here? It’s a hammy performance. It’s not grounded, it’s not compelling, it just sort of sits there.
Then you’ve got Sam Worthington, who continues to be one of the most inexplicably popular actors on the planet. I don’t get it. I’ve never gotten it. He’s in the Avatar movies, and he’s bad in those, and he’s bad here. There’s just a stiffness to him, a lack of presence. No matter who directs him, it just never quite clicks.
Theo James does what he can, Gugu Mbatha-Raw tries to bring some authority and gravitas as the police chief, but overall, this is not a cast that elevates weak material. And the material is weak.
Because the whole ticking bomb thing? We’ve seen it. Over and over and over again. Speed, The Peacemaker, The Dark Knight Rises, Nick of Time... you name it. The idea of a countdown, of impending explosion, of trying to defuse something before it’s too late, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.
And Mackenzie doesn’t do anything new with it. Nothing. There’s no added layer of suspense, no unique visual approach, no sense of urgency that feels fresh.
Now, I will say this, the World War II bomb angle is mildly interesting. There’s something inherently eerie about uncovering this relic from the past, this dormant piece of destruction suddenly reactivated in a modern setting. And the use of drones, the surveillance aspect, that adds a tiny bit of contemporary flavor.
But it’s not enough.
Where the movie actually shows a little life is in the heist sequences. When the crew is drilling into the vault, when they’re trying to pull off the robbery under the nose of the authorities, those scenes have a bit of energy. You can feel a pulse there. That’s where the movie is at its most engaging.
The problem is, even those scenes aren’t directed with much style or tension. They’re just…okay. Functional. You’re watching them and thinking, “yeah, this could have been good in the hands of a more dynamic filmmaker.”
And then the movie just kind of lumbers along, alternating between these two threads without ever really building momentum in either one.
There is a twist. Of course there is. There’s an epilogue, a flashback that recontextualizes some of what you’ve seen, adds a layer of betrayal, tries to deepen the themes a little bit.
And I’ll give it this...it is mildly interesting. It’s one of those “oh, okay, that’s what was really going on” moments.
But by the time it happens, it’s too late. You’ve already sat through a pretty clichéd, pretty uninspired, by-the-numbers thriller that hasn’t given you much reason to care. So the twist lands with a thud.
And that’s really the biggest problem with Fuze. It’s just…forgettable. There’s nothing here that stands out. Nothing that makes you lean forward in your seat. No real suspense, no memorable performances, no stylistic flair.
I was bored. Honestly, I was bored for most of it. And when you’re watching a movie that’s literally built around a ticking bomb, and you’re bored? That’s a problem.
Now, I will say this: it looks good. The cinematography is solid. It’s a sharp, well-shot movie. There’s a professionalism to the way it’s put together visually. But that’s about it.
This is a movie that’s been sitting on the shelf for a while, it played festivals a couple of years ago, and you can tell. There’s a reason it’s just now being dumped into theaters.
So yeah, despite a mildly interesting premise (combining a heist with a ticking bomb scenario) and a couple of decent moments during the robbery sequences, Fuze just doesn’t work. Weak performances, uninspired direction, and a complete lack of tension sink it.
I wouldn’t waste your time. - ⭐️⭐️
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