zipirovich Reviews

Honest Thief (2020)

Lazy screenwriting makes for a terrible movie

[2/10 · 10 May 2021]

Please don't waste your time on this. I deeply regret watching it, as this is approximately 1 hr 40 min of my life wasted that I'm never getting back. The movie's biggest, but sadly not the only, issue is with the plot. This is one of the laziest script-writing instances ever. The whole plot mainly consists of plot holes (pun intended). These plot holes are so huge you could walk a herd of elephants thru them. And the lazy screenwriters don't even bother with covering their laziness! For example, (spoiler alert) at one point the protagonist decided to secretly get his girlfriend out of the hospital. How is it shown in the movie? He walks into her hospital room, tells her we need to get out of here... and the next scene we see is the two of them in his hotel room. We're supposed to believe that nobody in the entire hospital noticed a patient being "secretly" walked out? And why should we believe that that's possible, if even the screenwriters didn't believe it possible themselves, so they quickly cut to the hotel room? And the whole movie is just like that. Terrible, just plain terrible. Even Liam Neeson is terrible in it too, showing the emotional depth of a cardboard box. My only guess is that once he signed the contract and got the money, he decided not to waste any acting on this sad excuse of a movie.

Holiday in the Wild (2019)

Gorgeous views and cool elephants

[3/10 · 9 February 2020]

There's some beautiful scenery, and the elephants are so cool! In fact, the elephants in this movie are much more talented than the humans. From the latter species there was no acting to speak of. I've just read in the trivia for this movie that puppets had to be used in the movie, for safety and animal preservation reasons. But I rather felt that it was the human actors were replaced with puppets -- they were just as believable as cardboard figurines would be. I understand that this was made for a noble cause, and I would have liked to applaud the effort... but it was just so poorly executed.

The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

Boring and pointless

[1/10 · 13 July 2013]

I regret wasting my time on watching this pretense of a movie. It's so slow, extremely boring, and absolutely pointless. It's starts out as something that could be interestingly developed, but that doesn't happen. A typical example of a movie that could've been, but alas it wasn't. Various subplots in the end either get lost or are left unexplained and underdeveloped. Watching absent-minded Ethan Hawke in a coat for 80 minutes -- that's pretty much this movie is. Granted that the two female leads (Kristen Scott Thomas and Joanna Kulig) looked good and acted well, but that's not enough. Especially in the case of Kristen Scott Thomas's character -- I mean seriously, what the heck was that about?

Deception (2008)

Unbelievably bad movie

[2/10 · 17 August 2009]

I deeply regret wasting almost two hours of my life on this film. I've seen bad movies before, but this one was quite a shocker to me -- I expected so much more from the names on the box, especially from Hugh Jackman. There isn't much to add to what other reviewers have already said. It's a very boring movie, slowly dragging on and on and on... and that's not even the worst part about it. All "twists" of the plot are predictable because they are either too trivial or have been used before in numerous other much better movies. "Derailed" (a decent movie) and "Vabank" (a Polish masterpiece) jump immediately to mind. And then there's the ending -- I can't event count in how many ways it's absolutely stupid.

Serko (2006)

Plain bad

[2/10 · 20 October 2008]

The only reason I am giving more than one star to this movie is because there are even worse movies out there. Which does not mean that there is anything good about this one -- there isn't. I had seen Alexei Chadov before in other films, and he is (or was?) such a good young actor that his name alone drew to me this one. What a huge disappointment! There is no acting in this film whatsoever, not on Chadov's nor on anybody else's part. Acting is bad, directing is bad, the whole setup is entirely wrong in most details. Everything is so false. Boring, bad, horrible movie. I truly regret that I wasted my time watching this, and I strongly urge to stay away from it - this movie is not worth watching it.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Plain bad

[1/10 · 15 December 2007]

POTC1 was one of the best movies I've ever seen. POTC2 was pretty good, though with some reservations. POTC3 is by far one of the worst. I wish I hadn't watched it. I feel like ripped off -- not only did I lose three hours of my life for this crap, but it also successfully killed all of the enjoyment I had for the first movie.

As it's already been said here by other reviewers, I attribute all its crappiness to the writers/producers team. The plot is as stupid and pointless and plot less as it gets. They killed all the lightweight enjoyable humor and spirit and feel of POTC1. They completely lost touch with reality. They even managed to spoil the Jack Sparrow character, first by not showing enough of him, and second by giving him such horrible lines and actions and behavior that made me wish they'd better not showed him at all. They... basically, everything that could be done wrong they did even worse than that.

To be fair, there are some good things about the movie. Sometimes good features can save an otherwise not-so-great movie; alas, that's not the case here -- on the contrary, it just makes me feel sorry for the effort wasted on this crap. E.g., although I have a problem with the whole resurrecting Barbossa idea, I enjoyed very much Geoffrey Rush's work in POTC3, he's just a brilliant actor and did a brilliant work, best in this movie.

I don't know what exactly they were thinking after the well-deserved success of the first movie, but turning into a trilogy (G-d forbid they decide to go on!) was a great marketing idea whose sole purpose obviously was to rip the world public for lots of money. This has nothing to do with movie-making. Can we sue them??