Review Roundup: ATL, Slither, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Basic Instinct 2
Filed under: Animation, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, New Releases, Family Films, Review Roundup
Four big new releases this week, and every last one of them was screened for critics. What is the world coming to? A couple of the movies earned surprisingly good reviews (hooray for ATL!), while one in particular is just as awful as we had hoped/feared/expected. In brief: ATL is surprisingly solid, Slither rocks, Ice Age: The Meltdown has a really funny squirrel in it, and Basic Instinct 2 is a huge, insulting, boring pile of crap. Read on for details.
- ATL:
I'm not the only one who noticed with
pleasure how gentle - no
drinking, no juvenile drug use, hardly any swearing - ATL is. Not only does it not follow the expected Urban Drama path, but a
lot of critics actually
think
it's pretty good. The handful who don't
like it are are more "meh" than hateful, and generally acknowledge that the film's slew of debut
performances are promising.
- Slither:
Everyone pretty much agrees
with Scott on this one: if you're a horror geek, you'll love it. The rest of us, however,
probably shouldn't bother - not because it's bad, but because we're not really equipped to appreciate either the
movie's clever gore or its references
to the genre's illustrious
past. (Or, as Robert Ebert put it, "If the name
Troma means nothing to you, what are you doing reading a review of Slither in the first
place?")
- Basic
Instinct 2: Shock of shocks, the movie sucks. Suffering alongside
James, few critics were able to
wring any pleasure whatsoever out of
this one, even in the old
reliable "so bad it's good" sort of way. I mean, you know things are bad when a critic calls your Sexy-with-a-capital-S movie
"unforgivably
dull" (it's amazing how many reviews use the D-word), particularly when that's one of the kinder
descriptions offered.
- Ice
Age: The Meltdown: It's a bad sign when virtually every review (including Kim's, which is really the only one you
need to read to know what the film is like) talks in glowing terms about a
squirrel doing battle with a nut, a bit that is totally unrelated to the
movie's plot and takes up minimal screen time. Very, very bad. That said, there are a few critics who disagree with the disappointed
masses and think
the film outdoes its predecessor - parents, you may want to limit yourself to these reviews, since you're likely to be seeing the
movie 700 times.
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