"Megalopolis" - Mercy Killing

In the not-too-distant future city of New Rome, "genius" architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is attempting to pave the way for a new Utopia, using his new material "Megalon", a multi-purpose material which also gives him the ability to stop time. He is opposed by Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and a director out of his fucking mind. Stuck in the middle are Cicero's daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) and the people of the city, whilst from the sidelines Catilina's driver Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishbourne) narrates, and television presenter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) ingratiates herself into the life of not only Catilina, whom she loves, but his treacherous inbred cousin Claudio (Shia LaBouef) and disgustingly wealthy uncle Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight, yay?)...

A palindrome of tedium and a monument to grandiose emptiness, presided over by the decaying husk of auteurism, seizing upon scattered imagery in the same way in which a first time watcher of "Baraka" who is exceedingly enamoured with psychotropic drugs and the works of Terrence Mallick but also really thinks he's "not like the other kids" because he reads books and Shakespeare rather than watches Tik Tok would do.

Made over the course of several lifetimes (including that of his wife, to whom this film is dedicated and deserved far, far, far better), "Megalopolis" cost $120 million in Coppola's own cash, a pet vanity project free from the shackles of studio interference and corporate ghouls tethering his vision and genius.
Where are those 9 producers on "Hellboy" (2019) when you need them?
A preposterously backwards looking attempt to grasp at any idea, hurling images and the most embarassing kind of dialogue in a manner so haphazard you'd think it was a 1st year film student: you'd tell that pretentious cravat-wearing prick to get a real job if he showed you this.
Cast members are not characters, but dolls spewing philosophy at each other in increasingly cheap setpieces (underpopulated nightclubs, C-roll from "King of New York") between title cards etched into stone rather than the memory, as they attempt to jangle keys in front of you in attempt to gain "cult status": Aubrey Plaza femdomming Shia LaBouef and dressing as a slutty Cleopatra; Adam Driver fighting a brick wall as he hallucinates on drugs that he has a million clown arms; recreations of Ancient Roman gladiatorial arenas which look more akin to an event to sell a patricularly odious timeshare; Jason Schwartzmann playing the drums, or Dustin Hoffman randomly dying to collapsing pillar in what feels like a fucking cutaway gag on "Mr Show".
But instead of wonder and weirdness, they grasp at boredom. For a movie about a central character who can "control time" I'll give them this: time did indeed seem to compress and dilate on a whim in this movie, stretching like the shooting schedule of "Apocalypse Now" or the French Plantation Scene of "Apocalypse Now" in a manner which is frankly criminal. It should be illegal to make me look at my watch this much. It should be illegal to make something more tedious than a silent documentary on a "weird dream a pigeon had last night" shot out of focus..
Laurence Fishbourne drones in quotes and narrates events we already watch. An editor would have caught this in post: it's that shit cut of "Blade Runner" but instead of budget Sam Spade, it's Sam Spade quoting the bylines of every Andrew Tate fan on a message board from 2001.
We get terrible renditions of Shakespeare in place of dialogue, and where the rest of the dialogue is not simply quotes, misquotes or pretentious corrections of misquotes with the original quotes: it is repetitive. When not repetitive, it repeats itself. When it is not doing that, it duplicates. And beyond duplication it clones itself. And it's repetitive to boot.
I am entirely unsure what was inside the copious amounts of weed FFC was smoking when he made this movie and molested several people, but I hope that one day it can be weaponised so that we can one day infect other nations with the power to dictate such terrible choices in acting, plotting, coherence and storytelling: that shit was potent enough to eliminate the human mind's capacity for reality, reason and coherent thought.
Shia LaBouef prances like a preening theatre kid, but not in a fun way, more like that annoying one who won't stop singing Hamilton at you in a cafe one night because you mentioned that you liked Lin Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights".
Adam Driver is as wooden as his daughter in "Annette" (just watch "Annette", that movie fucking rules).
Nathalie Emmanuel is done by harder than she is in the "Fast and Furious" movies.
Giancarlo Esposito is... fucking hell... not the worst here, he gives as good a go as any but fuck me, not even he makes this dialogue work.
Aubrey Plaza somehow comes out unscathed: she plays her "Wow Platinum" social climber fem-domme femme fatale money expert golddigger like April Ludgate infiltrating a theatre troupe and mocking them all the way, but somehow getting nominated for both leads in their production of "Blood Brothers" for her talent. I love her.
The central conceit of the film, as he has stated, is to try to compare the fall of Rome to modern day America, and vice versa - in between the Roman names (weirdly casting Cicero as a villain and Catalina as a hero, in a reversal of a conspiracy that only like, 4 scholars and my mate Sam care about) and the blunt force trauma imagery, we get limp-wristed "satire" which I have to read as satire because otherwise my brain cannot comprehend a script this terrible. Red caps thrown at a fallen wannabe grifter dictator who curses their name whilst a sign reads "Make New Rome Great Again!" is discarded.
That sort of bullshit.
But this is not the core concept, as much as he wants it to be.
FFC (who has our leads discuss the fact that their baby who will "lead the future" will be called Francis, and names one of his 2 protagonists after himself) is actually making a movie about a "visionary" who is misunderstood by the world around him, oppressed and threatened and plotted against by rich bankers and wealthy elites who do not care for his vision: and unintentionally makes himself out to be a vile, condescending, pretentious, sexist, sorrowful drug fiend and dickhead surrounded by Yes-Men (fucking James Remar is in this! I legally have to see James Remar movies! And he gets, maybe, like, 2 lines! Fucking BLASPHEMY!); and that's just the character. I almost want to believe that there is some sort of plot against FFC, that there are studio executives with grudges and axes to grind, who have been praying for this film to fail, because that then would at least be some sort of reasonable explanation for this film being so dreadful (other than the obvious and correct assertion that it is simply dreadful). But no such luck.
I know that reading this back makes it sound somewhat interesting, somewhat fascinating as a failure, that in years this is going to be seen as a comedy camp classic, that there will be a reevalutaion of this work:
But no.
Genuinely, do not bother.
This was interminable, there was constant derisive laughter in our audience, and myself and the two people I was watching this went through the stages of grief in about 8 seconsds, or longer: time means nothing.
I can't even find time to talk about how all of the incestuous banking family and villains throw out jussssssssssst enough Yiddish to make it seem deliberate, but not QUITE enough to make it seem like it's being anti-Semitic, or the fact that the movie's sexist as shit to boot (I mean, you could probably guess that).
Fuck this movie.
Fuck me.
It is purely by his own Folly, his own petard hoisted by arrogance (and molestation allegations) that has led him to this disaster, and this will be how he goes. As coherent and meaningful as a collection of untranslated Horus poetry loaded into a shotgun and fired at a passing windmill made of bees. As fucking exciting as reading my fucking blogs.
As doomed as its namesake but nowhere near as interesting, coherent, respectable or with anything to say.

"Fast X" - Review

I feel that my usual style of review would not really fit the tone and ludicrous nature of this franchise. So after some initial thoughts, I shall instead merely give a summary of what happens in this film.
Directed by Louis Letterier after Vin Diesel annoyed Justin Lin (who has directed 5 of these movies, and survived 5 installments of Vin Diesel, for context) so much that he finally walked off set: it is readily apparent (if not already) that a man who was already 4th or 5th choice is nothing without the incredible choreography of Corey Yuen.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Dominic Toretto (Mark Sinclair) has settled down for the 9th time, after defeating the Vietnamese street racing gangs of Johnny Tran (Rick Yune), sitting out of his homosexual life partner Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) taking down the white yet supposedly Argentinian and definitely, properly, pinkie-promise memorable drug lord Carter Varone (Cole Hauser, always kind of having a career); avenging the death of his friend Han (Sung Kang) in the world of underground drifting in Tokyo; avenging the murder of his girlfriend Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez, consistently too good for these movies) at the hands of drug lord Arturo Braga (Jon Ortiz), and getting put in prison in the process, but making a hot new friend on the way in the form of Gisele (Gal Gadot); busting out of prison with the aid of his crew (Han, Gisele, two guys named Leo and Santos, and Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson, who are purportedly playing characters from 2 and 4), and taking down drug lord Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), whilst teaming up with super cop Luke Hobbs (Rock "The Dwayne" Johnson) and his partner Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky); teaming up with Hobbs once again to take down mercenary robber and thief Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) and throwing him out of a plane, and also retrieving the now alive but amnesiac Letty, rescuing her from a life of evil but losing Gisele in the process; getting recruited by the CIA (Kurt Russell) to take down Deckard Shaw (Jason Fucking Statham) after her seeks to avenge his brother (who is not dead) by blowing up Han in Tokyo, and in doing so our crew recruit British hacker Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and stop a Somalii pirate (Djimon Hounsou), who probably is a druglord at some point, from obtaining a CIA super weapon namd God's Eye; turning against his family and team due to blackmail from cyber-terrorist "Cypher" (Charlize Theron), who has kidnapped Neves, had her bear Toretto's baby, killed her once she had done so, and was also puppeteering both the Shaw Brothers, and the pirate, only for Dom to wriggle free of her control long enough to do battle with a nuclear submarine and drive Cypher into hiding, burying the hatchet with Deckard in the process; and finally crossing paths with Cypher when she recruits international superspy Jakob (John Cena), Dom's long lost evil big brother, in a scheme to take over the world - but thankfully he managed to change Jakob's heart with the power of family, and dicovered Han had faked his death and was now working with the CIA to protect a magic child from Cypher and the CIA because she can access and create a superweapon, and though Cypher escapes, his family is all back together and everything is cool and happy and hunky-dory. Oh, they also travelled to space.
It's THAT simple.
Dominic Toretto is living happily with his crew, Brian still retired, and having dinner with his grandmother (Rita Fucking Moreno) when Cypher comes to his door, bleeding and warning him of a ruthless, dangerous new enemy by the name of Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), who is out to avenge the murder of his father at the hands of Dominic Toretto and a large bank vault, and has seized all of Cypher's equipment in order to track down Toretto and his crew and make them suffer... Now Toretto must ride again, teaming up with old faces and new, in order to put a stop to this dangerous madman and protect everything he holds dear: Christian imagery, cars and everybody whom he has decided to be nice to under the umbrella of "family".

Right.
So.
Here we go.
We open on flashbacks to Part 5, displayed by a title card, in the car chase which killed Reyes (spoilers), it jumps to ANOTHER distracting title card which made me think it was going to be cutting to the present day, but no: it was the same time frame, Jesus H Chrst; and here the movie begins by using the marketable and apparently nostalgic memory of Paul Walker to have Jason Momoa photoshopped and retconned into one of the bigger and better and more coherent setpieces of the series, ending with Momoa thrown off a bridge, spread-eagled in a Jesus pose in the water which was atrocious when "Man of Feels" did it too, and then he opens his eyes and we cut to modern day. Rita Moreno is introduced for a single scene, we are reintroduced to the sun-drenched yet oddly muted and grimy looking shots of this series and its cast, Tej and Roman have displayed no development over 9 movies, and the big reveal happens: at their house comes Cypher! Shock gasp! But its one interesting twist and trick in these first few crucial minutes is more teling than it thinks: it's quickly undercut by how rapidly the bane of Toretto's life is allowed to speak and use diplomacy, how much of a charisma vaccuum Diesel is on screen (particularly in the part of botched brain surgery Steven Seagal-esque Toretto), with Rodriguez running laps around him almost as fast as the camerawork cuts away from her, and the most interesting part of the sequence is relegated to a fight-scene flashback introducing us to Dante (admittedly, a fun villain who steals the show immediately with a garish wardrobe, 2 man buns and a funny line about how he has kidnapped the loved ones of everybody in the room except for one "poor sad bastard" whose throat he then slits) where Cypher has to fight her way free. Rather than putting a bullet in her, as she wishes, Letty (as property of Toretto) must abide by HIS wishes to leave Cypher for the CIA, who then snap-cut arrest her off screen under the watchful eye of "Little Nobody" (Scott Eastwood, living up to the character's name here, as I keep forgetting he is in these movies) in the first of many editing nightmares which betray the behind the scenes drama of the shoot, its hunt for a director, and why the career of Louis Letterier has been on the backburner for such a long time.
Roman, Tej, Ramsey and Han (the latter of whom is the only one allowed to have any bonding moments with Toretto, in one of the wiser moves of the movie as Kang is the best of the male actors in this one, and Han continues to be the best non-Deckard character when he is given stuff to do) are deployed to a mission in Rome. Ramsey immediately cuts down Tej with a single, simple delivery of some tech specifications, and when he says "marry me", she delivers an "Is that all it takes?" which slices straight through the forced, otherwise miserable banter of the 2 worst characters (Tej is worse, at least Roman has a character) in a line I choose to believe is Emmanuel (a talented actor) reclaiming some agency after the utterly shameless bikini shots of her in 7, lusting over her by Tej and Roman, and waste of her in 8 and 9. If I don't I'll go mad.
The whole job turns out to be a set up by Dante for... This:

In a 20 minute sequence, our characters become living pinballs chasing after an enormous bomb before it can blow up the Vatican. Letty triple-bunny-hops a motorbike front and back over a streetlamp felled by a flick from Dante, only to be arrested by police. Von Doosel rides a ramp in order to knock a crane which can divert the bomb into the river rather than the Vatican. The gang are framed as terrorists as a result, and we get this image:

Ven Diagram shares a conversation with Magdalena Shaw (Helen Mirren), who is the mother of Deckard Shaw and in Italy for some reason. Oh, and in case you missed that: the CIA have Cypher, the owner of all of their missing equipment, in custody after she was brought in BY THEM and aided by their street racer buddies whom she told about the theft of all of her shiny shit by Aquamandalorian, but they blame the ethnic minority gang in what is probably the most realistic thing in the movie.
At the CIA headquarters, which is made to look like an office from "Minority Report" but shot in complete darkness save the screens, we are introduced to Brie Larson as Tess, A.K.A "Miss Nobody", daughter of Mr Nobody (still missing and not appearing in this movie) from shoes upwards, in what COULD be an effective introduction, but in this series is straight up pornographic, as her shoes are essentially:

Yeah, you ain't "Brick" mate.
Alright, then she chats with new character "Aimes" (Alan Ritchson, who isn't bad but just happens to look like every antagonistic mole or traitor character in every single direct-to-DVD JCVD film ever made. I'm sure that's nothing), who makes an excellent point about how the CIA cannot be relying on car chase terrorists, even if Daddy Han is among them.
I might have made up that last part.
Tess vows to go and clear their names, and struts out like a queen. She also has multiple earrings in addition to her spiked dominatrix heels, if that's your thing.
Mia (Jordana Brewster) and Von Giap's mixed race plot baby he had with "Was Once A Character" Neves are hanging at the house, which is then attacked by special forces soldiers. John Cena (and I wish I was exaggerating) then literally teleports into the movie to suplex a man through the entire first storey of a house, because he heard somewhere across the globe that a child was in danger.

Then he's all "sup gang, Dim Dosel sent me!" and grabs the kid to take him on loveable adventures with his big bear uncle, and to write Mia out of the movie because the writers already have one woman in the main crew...
During this entire sequence masquerading as a subplot throughout the film, by the way, I hope that you don't think them giving Jakob a load of development and writing and using his Cena's natural charm and charisma to full effect for some of the more wonderful moments and sparks of humanity (there's a good gag about him having a family friendly car and not advocating swearing, lines funny enough to HAVE to have been put in there by Cena) in a movie apparently about "family" means that he will die, because that would be writing of the worst calibre and a badly written end to this growth of a character over 2 movies from villain with a familial past to our "hero" to genuinely heroic person who thinks that family matters, and attempting to have him go on a journey of redemption and turmoil and earning his way back in would be too much work and besides we have cars to ogle.
On that note, Letty wakes up in a facility alongside Cypher. Here we could take a moment to have some excellent, high octance writing (pun intended) about 2 mortal enemies forced to grit their teeth and fight for their own survival against a common foe: why, earlier in the living room, Cypher even paraphrased "the enemy of my enemy" in a line which would have been cringe-fuel had it not been delivered by a good actor. But you came here to see Michelle Rodriguez wrestle a woman!
Naturally this subplot, being gold, is put on the back burner for the rest of the film until the end.
Veep Dozer travels to Brazil and meets Diogo, a guy he knows whom I had to look up and was apparently in "Fast Five", and the always wonderful Daniela Melchior. But the movie stumbles again, as already haphazard and rushed cutting (the movie already seeming like 2 12 year olds on the playground creating the ultimate super team up, in the best possible way, and coming up with hurried excuses for why characters reach places when questioned by that one girl whom they know trying to join in because she likes one of the boys but finds it really hard as this game is so stupid, and they placate her with things like "because he's a super secret agent, duh!" or "they stole a bunch of money from bad guys and can afford jets and stuff!") implies that we know this character when we literally have only just met her. And I say that as a "fan" of these movies - they do her introduction and characterisation and why Ving Raisin knows her AFTER the sequence where he has a street race and saves her life from Jason Momoa in a hot pink car by flipping her yellow car onto a fruit van so that the bomb attached to it clips off and merely sets the car upside down and on fire, but she miraculously comes out unharmed. To be fair, movie, I KNOW who Daniela Melchior is, because she is wonderful and I love her and she deserves to be in more movies more often, but come the fuck on! Jason Momoa kills Dingo and Melchior (ISABEL! That's her name! I had to look her up with the Wikipedia page I have open here) then promptly fucks off. I mourn his loss, but he'll be back, because he is THE BEST PART of this movie, and the first Jason Momoa performance I have loved, where I feel he has shown diversity and range.

Me on the way to see a Daniela Melchior movie.
So she turns out to be the sister of Elena "Dom's Baby Sack" Neves (it's criminal what they've done to Pataky in these movies...) after a "classic" Fast and Furious sequence of drag racing, bikinis, sunshine, and 2 sides pulling guns on each other ("You think you can buy anything... but you can't buy the streets!" That is some fucking "Step Up 2: The Streets" energy, and I am all here for it.) - and she is the "bad girl" of the 2, a street racer where her sister was a cop, and covered in tattoos where she was "clear", and played by a darker skinned actor so that we couldn't feel TOO threatened by Elsa Pataky being foreign because she didn't LOOK too foreign... It should be, on paper, a parallel to Dimbulb and Breen, and I know that because the movie has Vox Dipplo state it almost verbatim. Also Melchior acts WAY MORE than she should in this movie: she's fucking fantastic and I hope she goes far, legitimately, she is wonderful.
It should be stated here that this movie is trying to be "Avengers: Infinity War": a selection of exposition dumps and visits to various characters in a "greatest hits" compilation to give everybody something to do, but needs WAY more tightening, as instead of setting up things for the future or the finale, it feels like spinning its wheels, overtightened and messy...
Anyway, the better characters (Han and Ramsey) take Tej and Roman (that's not fair... I like Roman better than Tej) in search of hoes in different postcodes. Or plot and money, whichever comes first. See: the man who puts the Ho in Duncan IdaHO has hacked into their bank accounts and posted the money as a bounty to every mercenary in the world to kill them, and they have no money for weapons or transit or ANYTHING and are on the run! Only, Roman actually has a bunch of money strapped to himself like a fucking suicide vest. See what I mean about this being 12 year old mad-libbing?
If not: it turns out that Letty and Cypher are in Antarctica.
So Volatile Deepthroat is on a quest for vengeance against Dante, freewheeling and bumbling, and his crew head to London with Roman's nipple dollars to buy some gear from Pete Davidson (honestly welcome in this at this point), who is a stoner Ramsey knew from her hacker days called "Bowie420" (I wish I was making that up) and this scene serves no purpose other than to have Roman and Tej get into a fight whilst Han eats a pot-muffin and gets high, and watches, because Bowie420 has his laptop open on the bounty. I actually like it as a scene, it's character-focused and explains stuff, albeit poorly. The movie could have solved so many problems by just having a line here or there to say why a guy knows stuff.
Brie Larson continues queen shit by entering a bar dressed entirely in leather (her jacket reads "Good Vibes Only", which is such a fucking Brie Larson thing, honestly), starting a fight with some punks, and pulling a shotgun from behind the bar - which somehow gets her on Vote Defra's side. She updates him on Letty and they part ways.
Things culminate on a bridge (again) from the 5th movie (again) where Din Veezel is captured by Agent Aimes, only to be ambushed by Dante in his fabulous car, and our protagonist not only fucking Hulks out and flips a car, but attaches 2 helicopters to his own car with harpoons and wields them as fireballs after Dante shoots Aimes in his bullet proof vest (the Agent basically going: "Oh shit bro, maybe you're onto something with all these dudes after you!") and steals God's Eye from Tess (who turns up wearing a blue pants-suit but no shirt, from my memory... again, if you're a Brie Larson fan - her fashion game is on point...), who Vung Dimsum sends to the hospital with Daniela Melchior. Remember: we can't have more than one woman on screen for a long period of time.

At some point in this sequence, Jakob takes Brian Jr (right - side note time: this guy should be like, 6, but is played like he's 12. The movie has bent the laws of time in addition to physics. SIDE, SIDE NOTE! There is a sequence where Vlog Duggle is kissing Letty, whose actor is displaying INCREDIBLE talent by attempting to create chemistry and genuine warmth with Domininc Bloody Toretto, and he asks when they can have their own baby. A BALLSY movie would have her not able to get pregnant, as the real families we make are chosen, not forged in blood, but they would never do that because they are cowards. And women are destined to be vessels for the seed of Vex Doodad) to his rocket missile car, and they end up in a car chase again because the CIA and Dante are after them and they cross paths with Vorpal Drake, who watches as his son is kidnapped by Dante but Jakob "sacrifices himself" heroically in what should be a touching moment (Cena gives it his all, and has the closest thing to a callback in this script) by flipping his missile rocket mobile over a piece of concrete, touching his cross to his lips, closing his eyes after making eye contact with his brother upside down, and landing on a bunch of cars in a fiery inferno. I think I have a picture of that here:

Our hero doesn't even fucking mourn (at least, I think he doesn't: Vlad Dungus is hardly the most expressive actor, and even if he were Charlotte Rampling, the editing would fuck him) before driving onto the dam.
Team London, meanwhile, meet with Jason Statham in what SHOULD be, again, an explosive and high-stakes character showdown between Han and the man who killed him (Deckard) but again, after a brief brawl and the arrival of the villains - Deckard packs his shit and leaves because "they're goin' after me mum!". I love Statham so much.
Ramsey and her crew arrive in a plane for some reason to help Don Torettioni, Tej and Roman burying the hatchet and me burying my love for Statham as I know he will be coming back for the sequel and thus I have no hope for more Deckard Shaw... Then Aimes, the evil looking agent, reveals that he is evil and shoots it down! Our plane hurtles out of shot, leaving the majority of our cast to be in flux unless they can inevitably renegotiate their contracts in time for the movies they're already doing, and Momoa decides to blow up the fucking dam to drown Victor Dogooder and those ACCURSED children!
Oh no!

Then in Antarctica, Letty and Cypher (hatchet buried off screen) clamber out into the snow and ice, to be greeted by Cypher's fucking submarine, piloted by Gisele, who pops her head up, smiles, says nothing, and then credits roll.
This movie is fucking exhausting.
I enjoyed it, in parts, but fuck me it's the worst excesses of the franchise with fewer of its strengths and missed opportunities. But there are so many layers of hilarity, weirdness, and odd film making choices and decisions that I actually kind of recommend it to everybody: everybody will pick up on something here to entertain them!

"The Invitation" - Review

Evie (Nathalie Emmanuel) is a struggling artist in New York city. Her mother passed away recently, and she is feeling listless. So as she works at a party for a DNA testing firm, she takes a chance and takes one: discovering that she is related to a rather wealthy English family. On a limb, she joins awkward cousin Oliver (Hugh Skinner) at a family wedding in England. She meets a variety of relatives and strangers, including dapper Lord of the Manor Walter De Ville (Thomas Doherty), but there may be sinister intentions behind her invitation...

It took a lot of effort to not put the synopsis of Karyn Kusuma's "The Invitation" there (please watch that film, it's excruciating in the best way), this film is an odd duck.
It has moments where its direction is pretty good (highlights involve a feast and the sloppy, messy soundsof eating and the close-ups of the food in a stark, disgusting detail; and a manicure sequence) but it never really rises above "fine". Largely it's a tonal problem, a common problem for films and particularly horror movies. Writer Blair Butler (whom I know as the model on the front cover of "Booster Gold" Issue 23) is going for a "Dracula" transplant (particularly Brides of Dracula, with the characters of bitchy Viktoria, Stephanie Corneliussen having fun, and adorable blonde Lucy, played by Alana Boden) and for a while that seems what they are going for: Baroque Goth drama and a fish out of water story with a likeable Nathalie Emmanuel.

Unfortunately it never reaches the tension it craves, and it also never hits the biting (hah) satire of something like "Ready or Not". When the climax happens it is fine. The catharsis isn't as earned as it could be. I don't think it helps that the chemistry between Emmanuel and Doherty doesn't spark and fizzle.
There's a few good jokes, and Sean Pertwee is fun as the dickish butler, but I'd best describe the movie as "inessential".