the @popcollin reviews

Liam Neeson continues his streak of blah-to-mediocre shoot-’em-up thrillers with a fairly lousy effort about a hitman starting to lose his mind. The story works, but the woeful script can’t keep up, and director Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”, “Goldeneye”) can only do so much to try to make us care. […]

I’m not sure the world’s population was beating down any doors demanding a sequel to the 2020 original, and the filmmakers, it seems, fed on that general apathy. The result is a largely boring, often head-scratching exercise in what-am-I-watchingness. Sure, you can stick your kids in front of it and […]

It’s clear, with the arrival of the fifth installment in the series that revolutionized the horror genre in the mid-90s, that the franchise is not getting better with age. Relying far too much on meta-humor and silly callbacks, the film lands with a blood-soaked thud. Sure, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, […]

This disjointed sci-fi mess keeps chugging along like it will actually get somewhere, but in the end (actually well before the end), it just comes off like a cheap, pedestrian Black Mirror ripoff. A half-dozen disparate stories in the near future are tied together only by the fact that they […]

“Awake” (Netflix): Plot holes, contrivances, and frustratingly unanswered questions are the order of the day in this second-rate suspense thriller about a society that can’t sleep. When an unexplained catastrophe wipes out all power, folks also realize they aren’t able to get any shut-eye, which leads to hallucinations and all […]

It’s not often that Disney makes a bona fide clunker, but there’s very little about this thing that actually works, chief of which is providing an answer to the question, “Why do we need an origin story of Cruella de Vil?”. From Emma Stone’s horrific attempt at a British accent […]

As if multiple re-shoots and delays weren’t enough of a clue already, the finished film based on AJ Finn’s runaway bestseller proves that even really good source material doesn’t guarantee a similar result. Yes, Amy Adams is great (just as she was in last year’s horrendous Hillbilly Elegy), and the […]

Jeremy Piven shines as a neighborhood pariah returning to his old Philly suburb stomping grounds (think Southie with even more of an attitude) to help convince the locals to get behind a planned casino for the area. While definitely having its heart in the right place, the film (written and […]

Hoping to prove there’s life outside of the Marvel Universe, the Russo Brothers decided to branch out (and take Tom Holland with them) to make a dead-serious drama about a young vet who becomes a junkie. Save for Holland’s raw performance, it’s an unfortunate misfire, as the Russos try too […]

Cleopatra Coleman thinks she may have found Mr. Right in the form of a guy (Nick Thune) who is an oddball eccentric, but what could have been a charming little indie-flick rom-com loses its footing around the halfway point and becomes a slogging mediation on death and grieving. The only […]