Jemaine Clement Archives | Deep Focus Review

M3GAN 2.0

Brian Eggert — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 22:44:16 +0000

M3GAN 2.0 taps into today’s rampant debates about how artificial intelligence has infiltrated our lives. Unlike this summer’s other major sequel with a malevolent AI at the center—Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, a bloated, self-serious affair with some remarkable stunts—this campy lark has a sense of humor about itself. B-movies and exploitation cinema like this can explore timely issues as effectively as more prestigious fare. They can weaponize their entertainment value to deliver commentary while avoiding didacticism. With its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek, a silly chunk of entertainment such as M3GAN 2.0 can confront real-world anxieties about AI’s role in the erosion of privacy, the death of critical thinking, the elimination of jobs through automation, and the devaluation of human creativity. Such ideas linger just below the surface of this killer robot yarn from Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster. New Zealand writer-director Gerard Johnstone (Housebound, 2014) returns after delivering an unexpected hit with 2023’s M3GAN, which earned $181 million in box-office receipts on a $12 million budget. Johnstone takes a cue from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and offers a sequel that flips the script on the original. Like James Cameron’s all-timer sequel, M3GAN 2.0’s one-thing-after-another […]

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Avatar: The Way of Water

Brian Eggert — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 18:27:08 +0000

In the 13 years since James Cameron debuted Avatar to skeptical audiences, only to blow most of them away with his vision and showmanship, the doubters have again resurfaced. With over a decade to forget about his 2009 feature, which broke box-office records and introduced audiences to his vividly conceived world of Pandora, many have wondered what more Cameron could possibly have to say about the Na’vi in a sequel. Would the finished film justify him taking so long to make not only one sequel but a proposed four? But if Cameron’s previous sequels, Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), demonstrate anything, it’s that he can take well-established material and reinvent what made the original so great. With Avatar: The Way of Water, the technophile director puts his considerable toolkit to work, expanding upon Pandora by exploring the much-beloved setting beneath its ocean’s surface. The sequel looks better than the original and dazzles with its photorealistic creations, from the 9-foot-tall Na’vi to the range of ecosystems on display. And while there have been, and will be more, pieces written about the advances in computer and filmmaking technology developed to complete The Way of Water, Cameron manages to keep […]

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The LEGO Batman Movie

Brian Eggert — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 21:30:29 +0000

Movie mayhem and nonsensical bytes of randomness reign supreme in The LEGO Batman Movie, a commercial-of-a-movie designed for maximum irreverence. Brightly colored geometric shapes form into walking-talking advertisements, selling their counterparts on toy store shelves. All of it seems assembled for a target audience whose Ritalin prescriptions have run out. Aussie animation company Animal Logic once again brings a bazillion LEGO bricks to life, while a trifecta of editors (David Burrows, Matt Villa, John Venzon) chops the movie into dizzying cuts the human brain must process and dispose of milliseconds at a time. All of this leaves room for only the most generic of stories, rendering the experience notable only for its disposable quality. Children will love it. The LEGO Batman Movie does not provide a sequel to its 2014 predecessor, the smarter-than-expected postmodern blockbuster The LEGO Movie, so much as a spinoff. The movie imagines a scenario and presentation worthy of Robot Chicken, the spoof-based Adult Swim show where toys come to life in stop-motion animation. Indeed, director Chris McKay began as an animator for several stop-motion shows on the Cartoon Network’s late night broadcast. Helming The LEGO Batman Movie, McKay’s approach is surprisingly straightforward and lacks edge—in that […]

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Moana

Brian Eggert — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:28 +0000

“If you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you’re a princess,” says Maui, a self-obsessed demigod. In her Polynesian village, Moana serves as the chief’s daughter, not royalty; nevertheless, she bears all the traits of your typical Disney princess. Alongside her dim pet rooster, Heihei, a comic relief character even more useless than the talking snowman in Frozen, Moana sets out on an adventure of self-discovery against her father’s wishes. Following this boilerplate scenario, the heroine of Walt Disney’s animated musical Moana remains a princess regardless of her title. Directors John Musker and Ron Clements established this formula in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, and then followed their model in Aladdin (1992) and The Princess and the Frog (2009, underrated). Musker and Clements are joined by co-directors Chris Williams and Don Hall here, and despite the absurd volume of directors behind the production, Moana is an entertaining and often beautiful entry into the Disney canon. When she realizes her island village is slowly dying, Moana (voice of Hawaiian newcomer Auli’i Cravalho) defies her overprotective father and sets out to find Maui (Dwayne Johnson). According to Polynesian legend, Maui stole the heart of Te Fiti, the goddess of life, […]

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The BFG

Brian Eggert — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 00:00:14 +0000

Steven Spielberg brings his audience into a world of spritely dreams and gentle giants in The BFG, his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel. Children and former children (i.e. adults) familiar with Dahl’s “Big Friendly Giant” will be delighted about the faithfulness of Spielberg’s production to the source material, although it does not include many of the gristly details that often accompany Dahl’s writing. After all, the author’s stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, and Fantastic Mr. Fox have inspired great filmmakers to explore his unique balance of grand imagination and dark, often precarious humor. However, Spielberg creates an entirely wholesome, good-natured, and graceful cinematic storybook that will enthrall many. If there’s any major flaw in the production, it’s the decidedly ungraceful mixture of superb-looking performance-capture giants and live-action performers. Spielberg first considered adapting Dahl’s book around the same time he released Hook in 1991, an overwrought children’s fantasy set in J.M. Barrie’s Neverland realm of Peter Pan. At that point, the director had already broken box-office records and captivated millions with another family film, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, released the same years as Dahl’s book was published. But he didn’t believe 1990s technology could convincingly bring the […]

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What We Do in the Shadows

Brian Eggert — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:16 +0000

An overexposed subgenre and a tired format are revived to hilarious effect in Taika Waititi’s and Jemaine Clement’s What We Do in the Shadows. This New Zealand production about a quartet of vamps living together in a Wellington house takes the form of a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary, but also has threads of MTV’s The Real World and even moments that belong in a “found footage” horror yarn. Here, an unseen documentary film crew (protected by crucifixes), seemingly funded by a New Zealand documentary foundation, charts the lifestyles of various bloodsuckers. In reality, the film was distributed in the U.S. with the help of Will Ferrell’s comedy site Funny or Die after screening at Sundance; but Defender Films, Unison Films, and the New Zealand Film Commission produced it independently. And though it’s an indie release, the film has deservingly received a limited theatrical push, as opposed to the standard VOD debut of most indie titles these days. Costars and co-writers Waititi and Clement headline the fanged foursome, each having originated in a different century and together representing a culture clash. Viago (Waititi), an 18th-century dandy who likes a clean house, occupies the screen most of the time. In the first scenes, […]

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Men in Black III

Brian Eggert — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:11 +0000

The unwanted child of over-aged parents, Men in Black III comes fifteen years after the 1997 original, and ten long years after the grossly underwhelming 2002 sequel. Emerging from years of troublesome development and facing the daunting task of creating renewed interest in this franchise after so long a hiatus between films, director Barry Sonnenfeld returns for his third go-round with Earth’s top-secret alien-cops and injects his usual wide-angle zaniness into the production. International star Will Smith, who hasn’t appeared in a movie in four years, returns as Agent J, the wise-crackin’ comic relief next to Tommy Lee Jones’ straight-man Agent K. The actors’ signs of age—Smith is 43 and Jones is 65—have begun to show, as does the spent nature of this franchise. But these are all just numbers. Fortunately, the movie’s neat time travel plot and a helluva performance by new costar Josh Brolin make up for the general uninspired tone permeating throughout. In the opening sequence, Boris the Animal (Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement), a killer alien from an extinct species, escapes from the MiB Lunar prison to exact revenge on Agent K, who forty years ago shot off Boris’ arm. Cut to Earth, where J […]

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Rio

Brian Eggert — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:46 +0000

Blue Sky Studios animated and Fox distributed the “family film” Rio, which presents an A-list cast performing a mediocre script by Don Rhymer, based on a story by director Carlos Saldanha, who also helmed Fox’s Ice Age series. Fox can get all the talent they want to provide voices and sing mediocre songs; celebrity voicework hardly makes up for their second-rate narrative and animation that never wows. Moreover, the story contains a suggestive narrative fuelled by rampant innuendo, far too much for G-rated fare. But aside from apparent sexual undertones, this is a children’s film through and through, with lots of pretty colors and butt jokes to entertain the 4-to-8-year-old range. Adults will find little to savor in dialogue overflowing with pop-culture references and stereotypes about South American living, but children will laugh at dancing, brightly colored birds. The story involves an endangered male macaw named Blu (voice of Jesse Eisenberg) traveling from his safe haven in Minnesota with his clingy owner, Linda (Leslie Mann), to Rio de Janeiro, where he will propagate his species with the last known female macaw of his type, Jewel (Anne Hathaway). These are among the rarest birds on the planet, and so human smugglers […]

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Dinner for Schmucks

Brian Eggert — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:58 +0000

Slobs versus snobs. Nerds versus jocks. Schmucks versus elitist businessmen. It’s all relative. Such familiar comedic tropes have been around forever it seems, and Dinner with Schmucks has no qualms about returning to the realm of the hapless underdog battling for the right to exist against privileged powermongers. Director Jay Roach helms a comedy very similar in approach to another of his movies, Meet the Parents, as both rely on absurdly uncomfortable situations and a protagonist too timid to do anything about them. Though filled with notable stars and plenty of hilarious bit roles, the movie as a whole drags and annoys, and ultimately proves a little two-faced, as the ‘snobs vs. slobs’ setup often does. After an impressive display of salesman-like ingenuity, lowly 6th Floor analyst Tim (Paul Rudd) receives an invite to a weekly dinner at the home of 7th Floor executive Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood). Each of the superior office types invited to this dinner must bring a “special” guest. “Special” in this case means idiotic, as the executives have staged this dinner to poke fun at what they consider nerds and losers. Tim thinks the idea is “messed up”, as does his art curator girlfriend Julie […]

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