BEFORE: It's summer clearance time, and everything must go - off my DVR, to make room for the new movies coming in. I got my TV DVR down from 80% full to about 25% full this summer, because I was home so much and there wasn't so much new TV, thanks to the ongoing strikes. But now I have to focus on the movies DVR, which has stayed around 87% or 88% full because I've watched so many films on Netflix, and also many of these films aired on channels that won't let me dub them to DVDs. So they sit there, taking up space until I can link to them, and I think we all know how difficult that can be. I've got to keep trying, though - one day that DVR is going to break down, as all things eventually do, and I'll lose a bunch of movies that aren't being aired anywhere right now. Like today's movie, which aired in 2020 on Starz but when I dubbed it to DVD it got all messed up somehow, so I had to keep a copy on the DVR for another two years.
I thought I could link to this one from "The New Mutants", which had its own problems getting released and watched by me (passed on it three or four times because the release date kept getting pushed back, and then, in the end, was it worth the wait? No way...). I'd heard that Antonio Banderas was going to be in that X-Men related film, and then his character apparently got cut from the film, he was going to play Sunspot's father in a post-credits scene, but the movie was so bad that all sequels got cancelled, and thus no need to introduce someone in the first film that would have been important in the second. Anyway, when I found out he was cut I had to change my chain, and "Beyond the Edge" got stranded as a result. Again, that was two years ago, and it took me this long to circle back to Antonio Banderas, who carries over from "Acts of Vengeance".
Since it's the last day of August, here's my format breakdown for the month:
5 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Secret Headquarters, Escape Room, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Beyond the Edge
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Moonfall, Dear Evan Hansen, Avatar: The Way of Water, Jeff Who Lives at Home, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, Acts of Vengeance
9 watched on Netflix: Bruised, Extinction, Outside In, The Mother, 65, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Paddleton, Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
2 watched on Amazon Prime: The People We Hate at the Wedding, Nope
1 watched on Hulu: The United States vs. Billie Holiday
1 watched on Hulu: The United States vs. Billie Holiday
2 watched on Disney+: Strange World, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
26 TOTAL
THE PLOT: In Moscow, a gambler gathers a team of people with supernatural abilities to win big at a casino.
AFTER: Seriously, you can see my problem - there are NO stars in this film, outside of Mr. Banderas. And they all have Russian names, that should have been a dead giveaway - if I thought films made in Bulgaria had low production values, films made in Russia are apparently twice as bad. So just as I had to hide "The New Mutants" between two other films with Anya Taylor-Joy, really, the only way to get rid of this one was to stick it between two other films with Antonio Banderas. (Sure, I guess I could have just NOT watched it, but that's not usually an option for me, I'd rather tough it out and then complain about it.)
The first big problem here is that the story is just plain crap - it sets itself up as something of a cross between "X-Men" and "Ocean's Eleven", but for sure, it's not nearly half as interesting as that combination could be. The lead character, Michael, has no powers, just gadgets, and he tries to pull off a casino heist by himself with the aid of technology and disguises, but all his machinations were to get him into a high-stakes poker game in the VIP room, where he wore special glasses that allowed him to see the other players' cards. But then just when he went "all in" and was about to win the big hand, he realized someone with telepathy was at the table, and made him falsely believe that he had great cards, which he didn't. And that person got to leave the room, while he got busted for cheating - and the punishment was, somehow, to steal the 5 million euros that he didn't end up stealing himself, because that's how casinos work?
Michael's solution, now that he knows there are people with special powers, is to recruit a team of those people himself to pull off an even bigger casino heist, like 10 million euros (rubles?), so he can give 5 million back to the first casino and keep 5 million for the new gang. I'm trying to read between the lines here and that involves a fair amount of guessing, because the film just didn't really explain a lot of these details. So he goes to a casino in the middle of nowhere (Siberia?) to find an old friend, or maybe it's just a guy who acts like his old friend, I'm not sure, but that guy has been keeping track of people with mental powers. One with mind control, so the dealers don't realize what's happening, one with power over machines to divert the security cameras, and one with telekinesis to control the dice and the roulette balls so they'll always win. Oh, and one girl with telepathy so he can communicate with the other team members. Trust me, I'm making this plot sound a lot cooler than it is.
The team members need to be reigned in, because Tony, the guy who can control machines, realizes he can control the casino's slot machines - and not just the ones with real wheels, the video ones, too. But all the slot machines I've ever seen have a little sign on them that says, "manipulation of this machine will void all jackpots" or words to that effect. I have a feeling that casinos are willing to call anything you do a "manipulation" when you win, because really, the slots are designed to NOT pay out jackpots, so if somebody wins big, they must have been manipulating the machine, right? Eric, the kid with telekinesis, wins at the craps table, too, but this is absolutely not what Michael wants, to win all over the place and draw attention to themselves. But I think his team just came up with a better plan and he couldn't handle that.
Eventually their team meets up with the other team that's been ripping off casinos, and there's a connection between them - no spoilers here because this is probably the one little secret this film has in store. But even when that's revealed, it also makes no sense if you stop and think about it, just like the whole movie. Look, I'm not saying that if you put together a team of people with super-powers that they HAVE to go out and save the world, but all in all that's probably a better use of their talents than stealing money from a Russian casino. Now, stealing money from the Russian government, that would be thinking big, and it would probably pay better, and the world would regard you as heroes, and you could at least get a book deal out of it. Just saying.
The other big problem that made this film unwatchable was the horrible sound mixing - most times the music would be at like level 8 and the dialogue was at level 2, which made it difficult to hear what anyone was saying. Like, was this done on purpose to cover up the crappy dialogue or the crappy fake American accents? Or did it just get mixed improperly for U.S. cable? It's tough to say, but I've never seen a sound mixing fail on this level before. On the televised Oscars ceremony, they sometimes have trouble explaining to the audience what "sound mixing" is and how it's different from "sound editing". Well, just show a clip of THIS film as an example of what NOT to do, problem solved. Thank God for subtitles, or I never would have made it through this film.
Hey, I've got a great way to get back at Russia for invading Ukraine and all their other shenanigans, all we have to do is encourage them to keep making movies like this one, with a $5 million budget, that only take in $2.3 million in worldwide box office. They'll be broke in just a few years at that rate! But actually it looks like the Russian film industry is already in danger of collapsing, because major film festivals all boycotted Russian films after the 2022 Ukraine invasion, and then film distributors followed suit and did the same. So the U.S. remains the dominant force in film production around the world, take that! It's a bad time to be a Russian filmmaker, I guess, but then again, it's also a bad time to be a U.S. filmmaker, at least until the strikes end. Everyone who can afford to take a break is taking a break, and I guess a lot of other people are getting jobs doing something else? Not sure, but I know I was job-hunting all summer long and I couldn't get hired anywhere in the film or TV industry, so it must have been due to the strike.
Well, that's it for August. 22 films scheduled for September, and then comes the October horror chain of 25 films. After that, just 17 films until Christmas and 20 until the end of this Movie Year.
Also starring Milos Bikovic, Lyubov Aksyonova, Yuri Chursin, Evgeniy Stychkin, Aristarkh Venes, Maksim Al-Names, Anastasiya Anikhovskaya, Sergey Astakhov, Vilen Babichev, Riccardo Cigogna, Nikita Dyuvbanov, Evgeniy Knysh, Mikhail Mikheev, Alessandra Starr Ward, Petar Zekavica,
RATING: 2 out of 10 unexplained monoliths out in a field, designed to look like the cover of a prog rock album, for some reason
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