Movie Review: Frankenstein (2025)

Genre: Monster Drama  

Director: Guillermo del Toro  

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Lars Mikkelsen  

Running Time: 150 minutes  

Synopsis: It's 1857 near the Arctic Circle, and a Danish navy vessel led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) rescues Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who is escaping from the Creature (Jacob Elordi) he created. In flashbacks, the badly injured Victor recounts his story. As a child he experienced no love from his father (Charles Dance), and grew up to be an Edinburgh surgeon obsessed with defeating death. Shunned by the establishment, he finds a benefactor in Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), whose daughter Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is engaged to Victor's brother William (Felix Kammerer). Victor establishes a lab at an isolated tower, assembles body parts from fallen soldiers, and creates the Creature, but is then frustrated by its slow mental progression.

What Works Well: Director Guillermo del Toro adapts Mary Shelley's source material into a spectacularly imaginative spectacle filled with human heart and longing. Gothic sets, bold cinematography, elaborate make-up, and intricate costumes create a monstrous nightmare emanating from narcissism, a yearning for love, the complications of incomplete father-son bonds, and the questionable value of life without death. Oscar Isaac throws himself into a dark role where brilliance is stranded by the inherited absence of empathy, and Jacob Elordi surrounds acute loneliness with immense physical presence.  

What Does Not Work As Well: While the story is rich in incident and details, the running time is still too long.

Key Quote:

The Creature: If you are not to award me love, then I will indulge in rage. And mine is infinite!

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Movie Review: The Legend Of Tarzan (2016)

An adventure film, The Legend Of Tarzan tries to breathe life into the fabled character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs but gets trampled by a dull script riding an overabundance of computer-created beasts.

In the late 1880s, envoy Léon Rom (Christoph Waltz) is dispatched by the near-bankrupt Belgian King Leopold to secure the diamond treasures of the Congo. Rom strikes a deal with local Chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou): in exchange for the diamonds Rom will capture Tarzan and hand him to Mbonga.

Tarzan is John Clayton III (Alexander Skarsgård), the Baron of Greystoke, currently living in England with his wife Jane (Margot Robbie). He was an infant in Africa when his father was killed and John was raised by apes before meeting Jane and being rescued as a young man. He has phenomenal abilities to communicate with wild animals and travel at lightning speed through the jungle.

Falling for Rom's arranged ruse, John travels back to the Congo with Jane and American veteran George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), who is investigating slavery. Rom and his soldiers catch up with them but capture Jane instead of John. With the help of George and local tribesmen, John becomes Tarzan again and has to rescue his wife and stop Rom before he gets his evil hands on untold riches.

Directed by David Yates, The Legend Of Tarzan is a limp attempt to jump-start a franchise in an era already drowning in superheros. Despite adopting a welcome grim and irony-free tone, the film's plot is one long and boring chase, as Tarzan, George and their buddies trudge through the jungle chasing Rom's slow boat to nowhere. The pacing is laborious, and the editing often truncates scenes at odd moments, not that any of it matters.

The film relies heavily on CGI creatures, and for fans of animals created from pixels, they are all here, with a wondrous but artificially created African species appearing at the rate of one every eight minutes or so: lions, hippos, crocodiles, ostriches, elephants, wildebeests and of course lots and lots of apes all make their compulsory appearances, often for no narrative reason whatsoever.

Elsewhere Alexander Skarsgård takes off his shirt frequently to expose a chiseled physique, but is an otherwise humourless central character. Margot Robbie is primarily wasted into an old fashioned damsel in distress role, chained to a railing for most of the film. Samuel L. Jackson is dreadfully miscast as essentially a sidekick, while Christoph Waltz phones in yet another performance as the smarmy villain.

With thin characterizations and a threadbare plot The Legend Of Tarzan is old fashioned in a bad way, and over reliant on unconvincing new technology in an equally bad way.

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Movie Review: Downsizing (2017)

A science fiction comedy drama, Downsizing tries to be many things but succeeds at nothing.

In the near future, Norwegian scientists perfect the technique to miniaturize human beings. Several years later, and mostly in the name of consuming less of everything, a thriving people-shrinking industry has developed, with the small people living in lavish custom-built homes within idyllic communities. Occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) goes through with the procedure, but his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) backs out at the last second.

In his new surroundings Paul gets to know his neighbour, a bootlegger and party animal named Dušan (Christoph Waltz), and his mysterious friend Jooris (Udo Kier). Paul also meets Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a Vietnamese activist who was miniaturized against her will. She introduces Paul to her world of doing good deeds for other disadvantaged small people. Paul, Dušan, Jooris and Ngoc are eventually summoned to Norway, where a new crisis is brewing.

Director Alexander Payne moves from small and quirky films like Sideways and Nebraska and into a big-budget bloated production, and the result is a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. The special effects are clever, and the juxtaposition of small and large people is seamless. But otherwise Downsizing is a 135 minute fiasco, a film without a purpose, devoid of both comedy and drama, bouncing from one idea to the next, unable to create any narrative thrust or even remote interest in any of its characters.

The film starts off with a focus on "the grass is greener" theme, with Paul gradually captivated by the concept of starting afresh in a new world and at a new size. But once he is downsized Paul becomes a passive observer, and Downsizing stalls and stops. Dušan and Jooris are irksome and ultimately irrelevant, and after burning many minutes being introduced, they also fade away into bland sidekick territory. Ngoc briefly moves to centre stage, and it appears the film may decide to be about the fight for social justice in the newly created small world through the eyes of a wronged activist.

But no. She is also marginalized, and in a stupefyingly bad final chapter, all four are summoned to Norway -- to do what, exactly? Here another new story is suddenly hatched having something to do with the end of the world, and by this point nothing really matters. Payne completely loses control of his movie, which not so much crashes and burns as shrinks away to a mess of nothingness.

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Movie Review: Spectre (2015)

The twenty-fourth installment in the James Bond franchise, Spectre is tired, bloated and devoid of ideas and enthusiasm.

On a rogue mission in Mexico City, Bond (Daniel Craig) destroys a city block but eliminates terrorist leader Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona). With the entirety of the 007 program threatened with closure due to the bureaucratic careerism of the Joint Intelligence Service head C (Andrew Scott), M (Ralph Fiennes) grounds Bond. But he anyway gets assistance from Q (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) to continue his investigation.

In Rome Bond seduces Sciarra's widow Lucia (Monica Bellucci), and infiltrates a meeting of a secret terrorist organization chaired by mastermind Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), who was thought dead and knows Bond since childhood. Bond tracks down Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who broke away from Oberhauser, and then White's daughter Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). She reveals that Oberhauser is the head of Spectre, a consortium of criminals looking to control the world through terrorist acts and the massive harvesting of information from all the world's leading intelligence agencies.

The second outing for Sam Mendes as Bond director, Spectre finds the series sinking to another unfortunate low point. Despite the usual location hopping and well-staged action set-pieces, the film never kicks into gear, and ambles along with a long yawn. At the heart of the many problems is Daniel Craig exuding stony faced boredom and contributing to an emotionless core. But Spectre's  troubles extend well beyond a disinterested star.

The running time of 148 minutes is inexcusable. There simply is nowhere near enough plot to justify two and half hours of screen time, and the bloat is painfully obvious from the first pre-credit scene. Bond's tussle with Sciarra on board a helicopter takes forever, the two men punching it out for long minutes, sucking the energy out of the sequence. The pattern continues throughout, every chase and every fight prolonged to conceal the scarcity of meaningful content.

Worse still is the lack of any tension, drama or sense of genuine urgency. The worst that the bad guys come up with is sitting around a dark table discussing data breaches. Terrorist explosions take place on background television screens, while Christoph Waltz, first revealed as Oberhauser and then Blofeld, is a toothless bystander under both incarnations, his elaborate base in the desert used for...what, exactly? The shared history of Oberhauser and Bond is a muddled backstory, Mendes committing the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing what is supposed to be the emotional apex of the film.

Monica Belluci is wasted in a couple of scenes, while the sparkling Léa Seydoux emerges as one of the film's few sources of energy, almost overcoming the 18 year age difference between her and Craig. The Sam Smith moany and falsetto-hampered theme song Writing's on the Wall is one of the worst in the history of the franchise.

What remains is Bond on an unsanctioned mission to chase down information, his next destination and target barely explained as the film jettisons basic narrative exposition in favour of snazzy visuals. With the evil British intelligence desk jockeys angling to kill the 007 program, Spectre appears to give them a good reason to do so.

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The Movies Of Christoph Waltz

All movies starring Christoph Waltz and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Breakthrough (1979, uncredited)

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Water For Elephants (2011)

Carnage (2011)

Django Unchained (2012)

Big Eyes (2014)

Spectre (2015)

The Legend Of Tarzan (2016)

Downsizing (2017)

No Time To Die (2021)

Frankenstein (2025)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Big Eyes (2014)

A biography of artist Margaret Keane during her time with conniving husband Walter, Big Eyes is an amiable drama with elements of comedy. The film is engaging, but also limited by the ultimately small scope of the story.

It's the 1950s, and Margaret Ulbrich (Amy Adams) finds herself a divorced mother of young daughter Jane. She moves to San Francisco and pursues her hobby of painting sad children with big eyes, a singular motif in dozens of poses. Margaret meets fellow struggling artist Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), who claims to be trained in Paris. They fall in love and quickly get married.

Walter has a slick hustler's attitude and an ability to sell anything. He starts to peddle Margaret's paintings, and once they start to generate interest, he claims them as his own. He convinces Margaret to go along with the ruse, on the basis that women artists are not taken seriously, and she agrees, signing the paintings simply Keane. The images of melancholy big eyed children become a cultural sensation, and Walter mass-markets the art through television appearances, prints, posters and postcards. The Keanes become extremely wealthy, but with Walter becoming more erratic and the love evaporating, the marriage heads towards trouble.

Director Tim Burton takes a break from his typical dark and brooding aesthetics, and dabbles in something altogether more routinely domestic. Big Eyes is a relatively straightforward but also true story of a snake oil salesman taking advantage of a vulnerable woman to peddle schlocky pop art. Everybody gets rich and for a while, a bit happy, until the fad passes and greed consumes the money machine.

Big Eyes has a bright and cheery look, celebrating 1950s faux chic with vivid colours and a sense of West Coast street optimism. The film never wallows for too long at any point in Margaret's journey from divorcée to maligned artist seeking redress, Burton keeping the pacing brisk and the focus firmly on the central couple's evolving relationship.

Throughout its second act, the film portrays Margaret as a victim suffering in silence and reluctantly going along for the ride, although never comfortable with Walter's misrepresentations, especially when it comes to lying to her daughter. But her years of acquiescence, squeamish as it may have been, cannot help but seep away sympathy from her corner. Combined with the redundant hokum of her artwork, Margaret is a difficult character to fully cheer for.

This takes nothing away from Amy Adams' committed performance. In a reserved but ultimately steely display, Adams conveys Margaret as full of quiet self-doubt, uncertainty and mounting suspicion that the man she hurriedly married is both less and more than what he initially appeared to be. Christoph Waltz gradually but steadily goes over the top, starting out with Walter as a smooth persuader and ending the film as a joke of a man, desperate to hang on to his castles in the air, his big eyes for unearned wealth having created an empire built on the fault line of mass deception.

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Movie Review: Django Unchained (2012)

Quentin Tarantino takes on the Western and creates a bloody feast. Django Unchained marries Tarantino's love of excessive violence with the outlandish sensibilities of Spaghetti Westerns to exact sweet revenge on slavery's brutality.

Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a German bounty hunter criss-crossing the deep American south just before the Civil War. He seeks the services of the slave Django (Jamie Foxx), who helps Schultz to identify and eliminate three wanted criminals on the ranch of "Big Daddy" Bennett (Don Johnson). Schultz gives Django his freedom, and the two men become partners, hunting down wanted men and cashing in large bounties. Django also hones his shooting skills and becomes an ace deadly marksman.

The two men then embark on a mission to find and free Django's wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). They track her down to the sprawling plantation of megalomaniac Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Pretending to be interested in purchasing slave fighters to attract Candie's attention, Django assumes the distasteful role of a black slaver advising Schultz, and the two men spend an evening as Candie's dinner guests negotiating a deal. When Candie's loyal head slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) begins to suspect that Schultz and Django have no real interest in slave fighters and are really only after Broomhilda's freedom, the evening's civilities disintegrate rapidly.

With liberal use of the "n" word, Django Unchained wastes no time in establishing its purpose as a reminder of the time when slavery in the South was part of the social fabric, less than seven generations ago. Much as Inglourious Basterds was a dream Jewish revenge story, Django Unchained is a fairy tale of vicious black revenge on the evil white men who propagated the worst excesses of slavery.

Tarantino is not satisfied with the generalities of slavery as an evil concept. He builds from mere inhumane men-in-chains treatment to abhorrent whippings, burning with irons, punishment in underground cells, and then delves into the depraved world of slave fighting. The entire slave fighter sub-plot is unnecessary for the film's narrative, but used as an exclamation mark to the brutality of an era that had to end.

The movie layers on the abominations to justify the essential bloodbath that Tarantino predictably unleashes on the screen in the final 30 minutes. And when the blood finally flows, it gushes, Tarantino literally painting the walls, ceilings and floors red with a series of wild massacres, spiritually cleansing perhaps but nevertheless almost incomprehensibly messy.

Apart from the violence, the other Spaghetti Western echoes are strong, including the music, scenery, humour, camera angles, and prevailing unbathed look of the numerous extras. At a mammoth 165 minutes in length, Django Unchained aims more for the duration of epics like The Good The Bad And The Ugly, but past the slavery context carries a much simpler revenge tale more suitable for a significantly tighter running length. The padding is occasionally exposed, an entirely superfluous raid by "Big Daddy" and his men turning to a mildly unfortunate comedy routine.

Christoph Waltz delivers his usual smoothly hypnotic performance, a German ironically - and rightfully -  acting all superior to the barbarous southerners, holding all the answers and sure of the direction in which American society must evolve. Jamie Foxx is less showy as the film's centre of gravity, a man seizing a most unexpected opportunity to gain freedom and then unleash justice in the name of love. In the tradition of many Western heroes before him, Foxx allows others to do most of the talking while communicating mostly with a multitude of guns and a hail of bullets - explosives optional but always helpful.

Leonardo DiCaprio takes the role of Calvin Candie and sinks his teeth into it with relish, Candie a brute in gentleman's clothing, preferring to be addressed as Monsieur Candie but not understanding a word of French. When Candie's anger is unleashed, DiCaprio lets loose in a terrifying rage, having fun filling the screen with Southern bravado.

In addition to Don Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson living up larger-than-life roles, Tarantino finds space for the likes of Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Bruce Dern, Jonah Hill and Robert Carradine. And Franco Nero, the one and only original Django, has one scene, passing the bullet-riddled Western torch across 46 years of movie making.

Django Unchained is stylish exuberance, amplifying a sub-genre that celebrates parody to construct an exaggerated revenge tale, painted in gory red.

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Movie Review: Carnage (2011)

A four-person character study, Roman Polanski's adaptation of the stage play God Of Carnage benefits from excellent performances but remains stage-bound and hand-cuffed by the necessity to extend a single meeting long enough to make a movie. With a few creaky moments, Carnage squeezes out 79 minutes of enjoyable and sometimes comic drama.

A schoolboy argument at a local New York City park results in Ethan Longstreet receiving a hefty stick in the face from fellow 11-year-old Zachary Cowan.  The parents meet for a supposedly mature and cordial discussion about the juvenile dispute. Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) Cowan visit Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) Longstreet with the intention of apologizing and planning a reconciliation between the kids.

The meeting shifts through a sequential gearbox: polite, tense, confrontational, and hostile, finally finding its level of comfort as a debacle. While the fault lines between the Longstreets and the Cowans are immediately apparent, it is the internecine conflicts within each couple that are more delightfully revealed.

Foster gets the showiest role as Penelope, an unapologetic liberal seeking high-minded solutions to every problem, comprehensively melting down upon being intellectually abandoned. Waltz has fun with Alan, a slippery and sarcastic corporate lawyer continuously distracted by his cell phone and greatly contributing to the carnage while adding mounting humour to the dysfunctional visit. Reilly's Michael is just one of the guys, the problem being that Penelope wants him to be so much more. Winslet delivers the most polished performance as Nancy, a professional woman simultaneously proud of her husband and disgusted by him.

Alcohol is introduced halfway through the visit, and it's a disappointment that a mind altering substance is allowed to trigger the more blatant abandonment of polite behaviour. The script by Polanski and Yasmina Reza (who wrote the play) does not show faith in the characters to honestly evolve and let loose without lubrication.

There are a few other rough spots in Carnage, as on several occasions the dialogue clumsily stretches to prolong the visit and retrieve the Cowans back from the elevator hallway and yet again into the Longstreet apartment. Polanski does not attempt to liberate the proceedings from the stage, with the film confined almost entirely to one room.

Carnage is more about the acting than the messaging, four performers enjoying a sparring session, their words sparkling with a hidden electricity when they collide in the New York air.

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Movie Review: Water For Elephants (2011)

A classic love triangle set against the backdrop of a touring circus desperately trying to survive the Great Depression in the early 1930s, Water For Elephants succeeds thanks to the memorable setting and committed performance from the three lead performers. It may not be the most original story every filmed, but it is delivered with compellingly grimy panache.

In 1931, Jacob (Robert Pattinson) is a young student about to graduate from Cornell University's veterinary school when his world collapses around him: his parents die in a car crash, and all their belongings are seized by the bank due to a mountain of debt. Left with nothing, Jacob abandons his life and joins the Benzini Brothers Circus. August (Christoph Waltz) runs the circus with a cold heart and an iron fist, including throwing men from the moving train when he can't afford to pay or feed them. His attractive wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) is the star attraction of the circus, with an elegant animal tricks show.

August hires Jacob as the circus vet and because he enjoys the prestige of having a college educated staff member. It does not take long for Jacob and Marlena to develop a mutual attraction that does not go unnoticed by August. With the bad economic times getting worse, August acquires Rosie the elephant from a defunct circus in a final desperate attempt to revive the fortunes of Benzini Brothers. With Jacob's help in training Rosie, Marlena's new show atop the elephant is a huge hit. But August cannot control his mounting fury at potentially losing Marlena to Jacob, and his rage results in a classic circus tragedy involving wild cats on the loose, a crowd stampede, and one vengeful elephant.

Told from the perspective of an elderly Jacob (Hal Holbrook) recounting the story decades later, Water For Elephants thrives in the smelly environs of a travelling circus made up of desperate characters traversing a desperate United States in desperate times made less tolerable by prohibition. As brought to life by director Francis Lawrence, there is nothing attractive about the Benzini Brothers, despite August's efforts to place the occasional gloss of glamour on his life. Christoph Waltz gives August a single-minded survivalist clamp on his circus, justified by the agonizing alternative of starvation for him and his wife.

Reese Witherspoon is almost angelic in both look and behaviour as Marlena, likely an appropriate portrayal since we are seeing her through Jacob's adoring eyes. As for Robert Pattinson, taking a break from the Twilight and Harry Potter franchises to play Jacob, he is earnest to a fault, with a character that is unfortunately less interesting for being almost too honest and too straight.

Water For Elephants may lack the sparkle of originality, but it finds its strength in capturing the anxiety unleashed by misery to deliver a rich experience of romance and sorrow.

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Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Yes, it's all fun and games and lots of Nazis get killed; but does the world really need a World War II fairy tale?

A conflict that engulfed the globe for six years surely has enough incredible stories that are real, close-to-real, or capable of inspiring sensational but still reality-based fiction, and over the years Hollywood has generated no shortage of World War II movies that cover all these various dimensions of reality, from the extremely serious to the wildly gung-ho.

Still, a revenge fairy-tale in which all high-ranking Nazis, including Hitler himself, congregate at a dingy Parisian cinema only to get slaughtered and burnt to death by the combination of a rag-tag commando unit and a Jewish girl? Is this what scraping the bottom of the intellectual barrel looks like when it is packaged and polished by a high profile director with a respectable ensemble cast?

From the mis-spelled movie title to some clearly derivative scenes, Quentin Tarantino is clearly not taking any of this seriously, yet the movie never quite places itself as a satire. The result is a general mis-match between intent and execution, with too many scenes played straight and asking for an emotional investment, only for the overall story arch to be just slightly short of farce.

Christoph Waltz as the Jew hunter Hans Landa emerges from the chaos with a priceless performance that will long survive the memory of the movie. He is all sleazy charm effortlessly combined with ruthless fascism. His scenes have a deliciously uneasy edge and deserve to be wrapped into an entirely better and more serious film.

Brad Pitt appears unsure if he is re-making The Dirty Dozen or an arts film. The rest of the cast stick closely to the first of one dimensions.

Inglourious Basterds is not short of entertainment. It is just glouriously unnecessary.






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