Pete's Write

This is one of the largest movies to come out of Netflix, with around 200 million spent making this and it treads a rather familiar path, a sort of Jason Bourne mixed with Craig-esque Bond elements and a healthy dose of XXX action mixed in. So does it work? The spy genre mixed with the hero fighting against the odds is a tried and test plot, and this movie does not do much to advance the genre, however what it does, I feel, it does well. It tries to spice it up with some human elements, it also throws in some quiet humor, with Ryan Gosling playing the strong silent type pretty well, and he does continue the Neil Armstrong act, with few words, but some elements of quips and one liners thrown in for good measure.  Ana De Armas does try to play a counterfoil to him and it is her second espionage outing after the last Bond movie. As with the current trend, she is less femme fatale and more action stronglady trying to match Ryan blow for blow. However she does not stand out much and there i

24 was a very successful TV series, with a tight plot, and an equally tight timeline of essentially 24 hours. You could not believe the number of things that could go wrong and need to be fixed within the same day. It went on to another few seasons, all with the same premise and there have been many that have followed this formula. This new Prime Video series follows in the same vein, albeit with a much longer timeframe. There is still a pressure of time, and some of it is due to (spoiler alert) a growing tumor in the protagonist's head. Chris Pratt must have signed on for a few movies / series for Prime, and he has played a military person for two of them already. So in the first episode Chris plays a Navy Seal commander who loses his team in a mission that went down poorly, but as it develops, there is something far more sinister and he spends the rest of the series hunting down the people who causes all the death. The plot is simple, brutal, but it is punctuated with some flashb

The success of Raiders of the Lost Ark has spawn countless imitations, and of the better ones, there was Romancing The Stone, National Treasure and even Tomb Raider. The key ingredients were a good chemistry between the leads, mixed in a lot of good fun and action, humor and a smattering of romance without being too saccharine sweet, then mix it all together for big bucks at the box office. However that's easier said than done and not every treasure hunt action movie rakes in the dollars and positive comments.  So The Lost City walks in the footsteps of hallowed predecessors, treading a nice line between action, comedy and romance. Let's not forget the importance of a good villain, someone you detest enough yet remains charismatic.  Whilst not breaking any new ground, the combination of Channing and Sandra do generate enough laughs and despite Sandra being in her fifties, she does still look very good and does the romantic bits without missing a beat. Her forte is physical come