When family members switch bodies with each other during a rare planetary alignment, their hilarious journey to find their way back to normal will bring them closer together than they ever thought possible.
Family Switch is if you took Freaky Friday (2003) and made it into a Christmas movie…look what do you really want me to say about this movie?
Emma Myers turns in a decent performance, Ed Helms is also quite decent here as well, but Jennifer Garner and Brady Noon fall behind unfortunately. Oh and for some reason Rivers Cuomo is in this movie (funnily enough his character is named Lake) plus Howie Mandel is here as well so that’s neat I guess.
I think this movie would have been fine enough if it came out back in the early 2000s, by now all of the plot points in the movie have been explored far better in other films. The movie has its best moments when it’s focused on the family just bonding together rather than the comedy (which is by far the weakest part about it.)
Family Switch is basically yet another Netflix movie that will be talked about for a week or two before being forgotten about, you can absolutely do so much worse on the platform that doesn’t really do the movie in favors.
A woman and her son enlist a motley crew of so-called spiritual experts to help rid their home of supernatural squatters.
Haunted Mansion is another take that’s based on Disney’s theme park attraction ride The Haunted Mansion. The first movie was of course was the 2003 movie The Haunted Mansion, a silly movie that some people still quite like to this day. Haunted Mansion (2023) however? It’s a complete and total mess as well as being one of Disney’s most forgettable releases this year.
Haunted Mansion has a decent cast and they do the best they can with a script that is incredibly limited, LaKeith Stanfield, Owen Wilson and Danny DeVito in particular are decent enough, what holds them back is the script. Between a lot of painfully bad jokes and product placements such as Baskin Robbins, Burger King, CVS and a few others it starts to become a mess that strangely enough makes very little sense.
At least with the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion it had some sort of personality and actually knew what it wanted to be, this one wants to go for a darker tone, have product placements and tell unfunny jokes. It’s not like this movie did not have potential either, the New Orleans setting if it were taken advantage there could have been some really strong moments. The characters are given very little in ways of character traits and development, combine that with such a dull plot that moves at a snails pace and you have a chore of a movie to sit through.
I wish there was more to be said but this is the most nothing movie I’ve seen so far this year, it’s a bunch of product placements and a poorly written script crammed together with some talented actors involved.
Haunted Mansion is available on Disney+ and on all VOD platforms.
When the children of the world’s greatest secret agents unwittingly help a powerful game developer unleash a computer virus that gives him control of all technology, they must become spies themselves to save their parents and the world.
Spy Kids: Armageddon is the fifth Spy Kids movie and serves as a reboot to the series, a reboot that was absolutely not needed as well as offering nothing new to the series.
Look I’m well past the age demographic of these movies and I did not go into this movie expecting a masterpiece, however Spy Kids: Armageddon completely misses so much of what made Spy Kids so fun in the first place. I’m not going to act like the Spy Kids movies are well written pieces of cinema but at least the first two had charm too it.
With Armageddon there is very little charm, the cast don’t work nearly as well at all. Zackery Levi and Gina Rodriguez as the parents are uninteresting and really phone it in. Connor Esterson and Everly Carganilla as the leads have some decent moments and at the very least do seem like they are having some bit of fun in certain scenes.
It doesn’t help that Armageddon reuses so many plot elements from other movies and makes them worse, for example there’s the part when the family has to fend off skeletons which is from Spy Kids 2, the movie being centered around video games and set inside a video game that’s Spy Kids 3D. Heck even character traits are reused such as a lot of the jokes being at the expense of the brother, the parents not telling the kids they are spies and the sister having a comeback roast. It’s absolute laziness and wants to come off as a throwback type of movie but it isn’t really a throwback when you are just using the exact same ideas but only somehow making them worse.
Everything else that isn’t reused is quite forgettable, some of the action scenes for some reason take themselves a bit too seriously which is completely odd considering the whole point of why people like the first two Spy Kids movies is they don’t take themselves seriously. It’s a very odd tone shift that completely doesn’t work at all.
Overall Spy Kids: Armageddon was a terrible reboot that offered nothing new to the series, I’m sure the age demographic will get a kick out of this one. Everyone else not so much.
Depicting the aftermath of a sleepover birthday party hypnotism gone wrong as best friends Megan and Paige, along with soon-to-be step-sister Veronica, wake up with absolutely no memory of the night before.
The Slumber Party is a DCOM (Disney Channel Original Movie, I’m just going to use DCOM from this point going forward) that was released on Disney+ a day later. I haven’t reviewed a whole lot of DCOMs but I’ll go ahead and talk about this one since it was on Disney+.
Anyway The Slumber Party is basically a PG version of The Hangover, I’m already not the biggest Hangover fan out there. But I will say that this movie actually did have it’s positives. The cast is at least charming and actually do feel like they are friends as opposed to some other DCOMs (I’ve seen some of the latest DCOMs but as I said before I just haven’t reviewed them), there’s a few jokes here that did get a laugh out of me but like some of the later DCOMs a lot of the jokes are just not very funny.
The Slumber Party is also the fourth movie this year to use Bonnie Tyler’s song “Holding Out For A Hero” Tetris, Shazam: Fury Of The Gods and The Super Mario Bros Movie being the other three. The use of the song here is fine, it gets the job done but honestly really demonstrates how overused the song is really becoming. Obviously this isn’t the movie’s fault as they really couldn’t have predicted that many other movies would have used it in the exact same year. It’s just frustrating that’s all.
Side tangent aside the main issue is the movie is ultimately just The Hangover but with kids in it, there really isn’t anything else here to really stand out. Having that said this is absolutely a movie where I do think younger audiences will love it, it’s completely harmless and I can imagine it does get the job done by entertaining it’s target audience.
In the midst of navigating the hardships of adolescence, 12-year-old Prem Patel discovers his deceased father was a rapper. He sets out to pursue a career for himself as a rap superstar and is determined to find out if hip-hop is in his DNA.
Got to say I’m a bit surprised from World’s Best, while it does fall into the typical Disney+ movie hole where it does end up feeling like a Disney Channel Original Movie. There’s a genuine amount of fun to be had here with this one.
Utkarsh Ambudkar is a whole lot of fun here and really puts his all into a performance that may not always give him the best material, but during the music segments he takes advantage of it and really pulls some great moments. Manny Magnus is a solid lead and does a pretty solid job of making his character feel quite grounded in a lot of ways, it will be interesting to see where his career goes.
The rest of the cast while not anything necessarily amazing, they get the job done and are genuinely charming as well. As I said before World’s Best can feel like a Disney channel original movie at times with the script being the main culprit plus some of the humor isn’t quite great either. Granted it is less noticeable as a lot of other Disney+ original movies, the movie itself does follow a lot of story beats about a child (in this case son) who wants to follow the footsteps of their deceased parent (in this case father).
But what makes this one standout a bit more is the direction from Roshan Sethi (who previously directed 7 Days), he brings a handful of heartwarming moments that are just enough to push the movie over the finish line. It has a lot of heart and does manage to make some of the characters feel a bit more grounded.
Overall World’s Best is flawed but a quite charming movie that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.
The youngest of King Triton’s daughters, Ariel is a beautiful and spirited young mermaid with a thirst for adventure. Longing to find out more about the world beyond the sea, Ariel visits the surface and falls for the dashing Prince Eric. Following her heart, she makes a deal with the evil sea witch, Ursula, to experience life on land.
I’m going to skip over the whole conversation about Disney’s Live Action Remakes since I already briefly talked about it in my Peter Pan & Wendy review last month, anyway The Little Mermaid had me a bit worried. When the trailer dropped myself and a few others said that Halle Bailey would be the standout but mostly everything else would fall flat, it’s a common pattern that happens with a lot of these live action remakes. However as I said before in my reviews I like to be proven wrong when it comes to film and to my surprise…The Little Mermaid did just that.
The Little Mermaid is very flawed, the underwater parts don’t exactly look all that great as there are moments where the CGI is very noticeable. Javier Bardem gives a pretty poor performance as King Triton, Jacob Tremblay as Flounder is a very lifeless performance and Awkwafina as Scuttle is yet another addition to her bad performances post The Farewell. I’m not going to on a huge rant about the rap Awkwafina sings in the movie. I really don’t have that much to say about it, it’s bad of course but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. To be quite honest I found it more unnecessary and very unfitting than bad, it comes right out of nowhere and ends shortly after and is never spoken of again.
Now moving on to what really worked for the movie, let’s start with of course Halle Bailey who was the standout. Her film career is going to go very far and it really shows here, she captures the spirit of Ariel while bringing her own direction to the character, her acting really shines through when the film goes to the land portion of the film. Her screen presence is genuinely charming and she naturally connects with the rest of the cast, even if I didn’t like some of the other performances such as Awkwafina or Tremblay there is absolutely no denying that she connects with them easily.
Daveed Diggs as Sebastian took me a little bit to get used to, but he really did a great job. His version of Under The Sea is a whole lot of fun and he really does capture the character quite well, Melissa McCarthy as Ursula was also pretty solid obviously there is no topping Pat Carroll (voiced Ursula in the original) who delivered one of my favorite performances of all time. With that said I do think McCarthy did a pretty good job with what she was given, absolutely far better than some other depictions of iconic Disney villains (looking at you Jafar from Aladdin (2019). Finally there’s Art Malik who plays Grimsby, he’s genuinely fun and is just a very charming character. He’s a prime example of a fun side character that gets the job done quite well.
The music was surprisingly pretty great, I say surprisingly because yes while Rob Marshall director of Chicago (one of my favorite films) is in the director’s chair. This is Disney we are talking about, the music in these live action remakes have always been a hit or miss or some movies will have a few good songs and the rest would just be very forgettable. However that wasn’t the case here with The Little Mermaid, minus the previously mentioned rap. The rest of the songs are pretty well done renditions of the original songs, Under The Sea is a lot of fun, Kiss The Girl is one of the film’s highlights and Part Of Your World is truly fantastic due to Halle Bailey’s powerful singing voice. Which is why the music works so well the singing voices are truly great especially Halle Bailey who as I said before has a tremendous singing voice.
Lastly there’s Rob Marshall’s direction, his approach of “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it” is truly effective here, especially in terms of story. Rob Marshall’s touches on the music is absolutely felt here and he really does a fantastic job of connecting the cast to one another, there’s some genuinely well done moments of chemistry between Halle Bailey and Jonah Hauer-King.
Overall The Little Mermaid (2023) is quite solid, it’s definitely flawed but it’s a genuinely fun little film that manages to be a lot better than a lot of the other live action remakes.
Caleb Channing is about to be relocated to an idyllic faraway planet following his father’s death. To fulfill his dad’s last wish before leaving, he and his three best friends hijack a rover to explore a mysterious crater.
Crater is yet another Disney+ Original Movie that a had a humongous amount of potential but falls very short when the movie tries to execute it’s themes.
Crater has decent enough act the standout is McKenna Grace who gives a strong performance that has some character moments that help develop her character, Kid Cudi is pretty fun but there is honestly not a whole lot to say about him here.
The main problems here are mostly the writing and world building, the writing leaves a lot more to be desired with character moments that are completely missing. Sure we are given some information about the characters but not enough to the point where the viewer will care about them, the world building is very poorly explained as well as having way too many scenes that spill out exposition for long periods of time.
What’s frustrating is Crater does wrap up pretty nicely, there’s some beautiful and emotional scenes during the final moments of the movie that actually could pull your heartstrings. But due to the very bumpy road to get to that point it really holds Crater back from being a decent movie.
Crater can be summed up as a coming of age movie but in space that has a lot of failed potential, there’s a good movie in here somewhere it’s just not showing up unfortunately.
A boy on a family trip to Mexico discovers a young chupacabra hiding in his grandfather’s shed.
Chupa is yet another one of those “group of kids discover creature and have to hide and defend it from people who want to harm it” type of movie. The problem I have with these types of movies is they almost never try to differentiate from one another and Chupa is really no exception.
While Chupa is ultimately a very harmless family movie with some actually decent acting (Christian Slater is in this for some reason) and it clearly does have heart. A lot of this is just recycled from other movies in this sub-genre, I guess the most interesting about this movie is the bond between Chava (played by Demián Bichir) and Alex (played by Evan Whitten).
The grandfather and grandson bond has it’s moments of character development but is unfortunately doesn’t fully come together, which is a shame because the movie does a far better job at that than when the movie focuses on protecting Chupa. There really isn’t anything here that is horrible a lot of it is just very blandly written, a lot of it just comes down to whether or not the viewer likes these sort of movies.
If you enjoy these types of movies you will probably like this one, if you don’t then you are going to have a bad time because there is absolutely nothing new here.
Three mummies leave their underground secret city in ancient Egypt and end up in present-day London to search for a ring that was stolen by a greedy archaeologist. However, their mission might prove to be a little difficult.
Mummies has Nickleback’s song Far Away as the credits song..yeah I got nothing to start with for this one to be quite honest.
Mummies is not offensive but the movie really lacks charm and creativity, the characters are about as well written as a piece of cardboard. The jokes are the usual type of humor that constantly pops up in some of these animated movies.
The world itself in the movie is poorly explored and really doesn’t lead into anything memorable at all, the voice acting I guess is fine enough the voice cast get the job done but none of it is very noteworthy or memorable.
Honestly the main problem with Mummies is that it’s not memorable at all, there’s nothing here that brings the viewer into the movie or there isn’t anything that the viewer leave remembering the movie. This is the sort of movie you have on in the background and just completely ignore it.
Chang, a 16-year-old Asian American high school student in band, bets the school basketball star that he can dunk by homecoming. But before he can rise up, he’ll have to reexamine everything he knows about himself, his friendships and his family.
Why does anyone care if Chang can or cannot dunk? Jokes aside I was definitely expecting the worst with Chang Can Dunk, in some ways it’s a bit better than I thought and in others well it’s exactly what I expected it to be.
The performances are fine enough, particularly Bloom Li who’s given a script that is on the level of a bad Disney Channel Original Movie. He does what he can with it and I definitely respect him for that, Dexter Darden is decently fun as well and I actually liked Zoe Renee despite her ultimately just being the love interest and that’s it. It’s definitely one of the better made Disney+ movies, it goes for this bigger in scale type of feel which I will admit is kind of surprising to see from this sort of movie.
Unfortunately just about everything else is either terrible or falls into the forgettable category, the writing as I said earlier is not that much different from a Disney Channel movie it’s just a bit more mature with it’s tone and that’s pretty much it, the movie is very predictable to the point where you can guess what is going to happen within the first 10 minutes. The movie attempts to go for a coming of age sort of feel which doesn’t work nearly as well as they thought it did, which again comes down to the writing.
We aren’t given a whole lot of character moments with any of the characters even with Chang himself, we are given very surface level information that a lot of these Disney+ movies tend to give and then the movie decides to move on to the next scene. Part of what makes a good coming of age movie is character development and character moments, where we learn about the character, how they feel, what their goals are, who they are as a person and much more.
I can definitely respect that Chang Can Dunk at the very least attempted to try and be a coming of age movie (something you really done often see in modern Disney movies) but it doesn’t do it well here unfortunately, I definitely think with a much more focused and better written script there could have been something really great here.
Jerome Reviews... 