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Chroma Squad

Games and Entertainment

3.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

App

Chroma Squad is a tactical RPG about five stunt actors who decide to quit their jobs and start their...

Digital Photography and Artistry

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Podcast

Discover your digital photo artistry! In the latest 3 episodes, I share my approach with both...

Whose Line is it Anyway

Dan Patterson

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Book

This title is presented on 2CDs. It features Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Lenny Henry, Griff Rhys Jones...

Awix (3310 KP) rated Downton Abbey (2019) in Movies

Sep 28, 2019 (Updated Sep 28, 2019)

Downton Abbey (2019)

2019 | Drama, History

8.4

(17 Ratings)

Movie Rating Watch

Big-screen version of the popular costume soap feels like a long episode of a TV costume soap that's ended up in a movie theatre by accident (there's a shock). Daily life at Downton is thrown into uproar by the royal visit; this is mainly just a pretext to hang various low-stakes storylines onto, none of which are especially gripping.

The heritage view of the country is pervasive and unquestioned; the plot mostly concerns a bunch of people utterly determined to be as servile and deferent as they can, no matter the obstacles in their way. You either accept this is normal behaviour and buy into the film's picture-book idea of English life, or you don't, in which case this is not the film for you. Fine performers get very little to do; not much happens overall, to be honest. But if you watched the TV show and have affection for these characters I expect there will be much here you will enjoy. To me it just seemed like a load of under-powered smug monarchist piffle.

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Awix (3310 KP) rated Edge of Darkness (2010) in Movies

May 5, 2020 (Updated May 6, 2020)

Edge of Darkness (2010)

2010 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

6.0

(11 Ratings)

Movie Rating

The legendary TV mini-series is retooled for the big screen as a bog-standard Mel Gibson revenge thriller. A detective's daughter is killed, and his investigations lead him to discover she was a target of forces within the military-industrial complex operating above the law.

As well as two-thirds of the running time and most of the plot, the movie version of Edge of Darkness also cheerfully dispenses with virtually everything that made the TV show so memorable: theoretically a fiendishly convoluted thriller, it also contained an environmentalist subtext, an incest subtext, a subtext about Anglo-US relations, even some borderline SF & fantasy elements. All of this is gone and just replaced with Mel Gibson looking intense and beating people up. As a result it is very hard to care about what's happening, although the illogicality of much of it does manage to cut through (someone poisoning someone else and then deciding to shoot them as well is practically a motif). Ray Winstone is not bad as Jedburgh, but given the source material the rest of it is unforgivably lousy.