BEFORE: I spend about half of my weekend watching TV - only half, because I also have to try to have something like a life outside of TV and movies. So I'll go out to dinner with my wife, or we'll go out shopping like we did yesterday, or I'll try to get something done around the house - this weekend it involved replacing our outdoor grill cover, which was falling apart, with a new one that was in one solid piece. Cleaning up the rest of the backyard, which is full of sticks and weeds, will have to wait for another day.
But when it comes to TV, there's simply too much of it on - I can't wait for the spring season finales of my shows so I can have a little bit more free time. "Gotham" finally ended, for good this time I think, so did the Marvel show "The Gifted", so there's 2 hours a week I can get back, but my DVR is still filled up with the latest seasons of shows like "American Gods", "Barry", "Cloak and Dagger" and "The Orville" - plus I've got episodes of all my other shows, like "Law & Order: SVU", "The Simpsons", "Bob's Burgers", "Family Guy", "American Dad", "Little People, Big World", "Restaurant: Impossible", "Shark Tank", and "Bar Rescue" on tape dating back to mid-March. Throw in "The Daily Show" and the 3 talk shows I try to stay current on, plus "Jeopardy!" and it's no wonder I feel like I can't catch up. So when everything on this list goes on hiatus for the summer, I can finally make some progress. I just hope there aren't too many good summer shows airing (I know "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is starting up again in a couple weeks) because I was planning to finally watch "Lost" this summer, and too many new shows will put an end to that plan.
In movies, Naomi Watts carries over from "The Sea of Trees".
THE PLOT: A Russian teenager living in London who dies during childbirth leaves clues in her journal that could tie her child to a rape involving a violent Russian mob family.
AFTER: Another TV show that I watch (one of the few shows that my wife and I will watch together) is called "The Great British Menu", which might be some kind of offshoot of "The Great British Baking Show", I'm not sure. I caught much of the previous season with her, where chefs from around Britain competed to get their dishes on the menu for a banquet in honor of the heroes of the NHS, the National Health Service of the U.K. (The next season features a banquet at Abbey Road Studios, so I'm looking forward to seeing Beatles-themed menu items, like maybe a Yellow Submarine Sandwich or an Octopus's Garden Salad. That's what I'd serve, anyway...).
But the lead female character is a midwife in London, so she must work for the NHS. I just hope she qualified for a ticket to that banquet. She's of partial Russian descent, so she knows a bit about the world that this teen immigrant came from, before she was brought to the hospital about to give birth with complications. But when the teen dies during childbirth, the midwife tries to track down where she came from and how she came to be where she was, and that puts her in contention with the Russian mob in London. Of course, she doesn't know right away that they're mobsters, because the old man who owns the restaurant seems very nice, and just asks a lot of questions about the girl's journal, like where the midwife is keeping it, how many people live there, and how many people he'd have to kill to retrieve it. Nope, nothing suspicious about that at all.
Meanwhile, the mobster's driver seems to be working his way up the crime chain by befriending the mobster's son, helping him dispose of the odd body or two here and there, and then explaining to his father why they had to go behind his back and kill this guy or that. Because you don't just kill another mobster without repercussions, even if that guy was spreading truth about your sexual preferences or your drinking habits. Everybody in the organization leaves a vacuum, and there are always two or three guys ready to fill every void.
But I'm honestly making this chain of events sound more exciting than the movie did - there's a scene in the film where the midwife is trying again and again to get her motorcycle started, and that's an apt metaphor for the first hour of this film. It keeps trying to get into gear, but it just doesn't want to start, and then when it does start, it can't seem to build up any momentum. With one exception - there's a fight in the bathhouse when the driver is misidentified as the mobster's son, and it's preferable that he gets taken out instead of the mobster's son, who would then get to live, I guess. Only, NITPICK POINT, what was the plan after that, would the son have to disappear to maintain the illusion that he was killed in the bathhouse? He couldn't ever be seen again, or continue his activity with the mob, or the Chechens would know that they killed the wrong guy, so this plan wouldn't even work.
The ensuing struggle in the bathhouse is an epic fight, and there's been an awful lot of male nudity already around here lately (like in "The Paperboy", "A Star is Born" and I think "Gerald's Game"). But the problem is, a fight like this would be only one of many exciting scenes in a film like "Mission: Impossible - Fallout", and here it's the only real action scene in the whole film. Unless the goal here was to make life in the Russian mob look ultra-boring, the rest of the movie just feels flat when compared to this one big fight scene.
Last year I ended up watching a bunch of films set in the Middle East, but this year, Russia seems to have become a focal point. Geez, first they hack our elections, and now they're taking over my blog. Already in 2019 I watched "Red Sparrow", "The Death of Stalin" and this one, plus I know there will be more Russian stuff when I start my documentary chain in June...
Also starring Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "On the Road"), Vincent Cassel (last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Armin Mueller-Stahl (last seen in "The Peacemaker"), Sinead Cusack (last seen in "Wrath of the Titans"), Mina E. Mina, Jerzy Skolimowski, Donald Sumpter (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Raza Jaffrey, Josef Altin, Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse (last seen in "Mother!"), Tereza Srbova, Tamer Hassan, Olegar Fedoro, Aleksandar Mikic and the voice of Tatiana Maslany (last seen in "Destroyer").
RATING: 4 out of 10 cases of black-market brandy
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