No.195 : The Circle (2017)

The Circle at the IMDb

Emma, one of the famous Watsons along with me and Bubba, stars in this tech thriller that outstays its welcome by a good half hour.

She plays Mae, who works as a temp for a water company and drives a crappy old car. She has an admirer in Mercer who fixes her car and doesn’t realise he has no chance. Mae gets a job at tech company ‘The Circle’ thanks to her friend Karen Gillen who sets up the interview.

The job is basically customer service, but soon the inevitable creepiness starts to appear. The Circle demands full access to all employee details and expects them to socialise within the company. Mae is resistant at first but when she sees the benefits, such as medical care for her sick father, she buys in.

Her enthusiasm is noted by company supremo Tom Hanks and CEO Patton Oswalt. Neither of these two are overly involved and Hanks looks like he filmed his scenes in a single afternoon.

Mae meets John Boyega off ‘Star Wars’, who seemed a bit miscast as the tech genius behind some of The Circle’s products, and he warns her of getting in too deep. Mae doesn’t listen and gets wired up for 24 hour webcam exposure to promote the company’s new ‘See Change’ technology. Later innovations such as compulsory voter registration via The Circle make us a bit uneasy and when Mercer dies in a company stunt, Mae has to reevaluate her commitment to the company.

Can this once temp worker bring down the multi-national tech company with help form the Star Wars guy? Are the company really evil and is the message really going to be that blunt? You Bet!

This film started out OK but as soon as Mae steals the kayak it goes downhill. The message about privacy was hammered home with a sledgehammer, with the tech company basically planning to record everything we ever say or do. Hanks was a bit one note and I wasn’t sure if he was meant to be evil or just misguided. Watson was OK but had a lot of heavy lifting to do and I really didn’t care for her journey. The peer pressure was well realised, but I was expecting a big reveal that she’d been brainwashed when she really just got caught up in the hype.

The guy playing Mercer looked like he found the part in a cereal box and Boyega’s ‘deep throat’ character was a waste of time. Some scenes ran too long and I felt like I’d spent days in the auditorium watching product demos - buy ‘The Circle’ products! It did look like there had been a big change of plan midway by the production as Karen Gillan’s character went from high-flyer to mentalist in the blink of an eye.

It was sad to see Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly as Mae’s parents, as they were both dead within a year of this film coming out. Paxton looked terrible and I assumed his character’s MS was the actor’s own. He actually died of a stroke so good performance here Bill!

‘The Circle’ had a hollow ring to it and I didn’t believe the public’s buy in to their shenanigans, which weren’t really evil just a bit invasive. If you want to watch something about an shady tech company watch ‘Devs’ instead of this - that’s got Ron Swanson in it too. This one was over long and under developed.

THE Tag Line - Not Fully Rounded     56%

No.85 : The ‘Burbs (1989)

The 'Burbs at the IMDb

Off to the suburbs now as we take a look at this horror comedy staring Tom Hanks and directed by ‘Gremlins’ helmer Joe Dante. Sounds a sure fire winner? ‘Fraid the ‘Burbs isn’t worth the effort.

Hanks plays  his usual likeable every man character, who on this occasion is called ‘Ray’. He’s married to Princess Leia and is looking forward to a week off at home. Leia is worried he’ll go nuts in their quiet cul-de-sac but we’re pretty sure all sorts of exciting stuff is going on behind the net curtains. They don’t show this exciting stuff however and rely on a dog shitting on someone’s lawn to get a feeble laugh - two if you count the man trodding in the mess five minutes later.

The neighbours are your predictable collection of kooks with Bruce Dern leading the way as a military nut with an unfeasibly attractive wife. For your money you also get Corey Feldman off ‘The Goonies’ and some other assorted and forgettable oddballs.

The pressure of suburbia soon gets to our principals, but while they are at each other’s throats they realise that the new neighbours who moved in a month ago have yet to tend their yard. This mild observation leads to more suspicions and paranoia and before long the gang are convinced a fully fledged cannibal cult have moved in.

They get little satisfaction from the householder but that’s little surprise given he’s the lead Nazi from ‘The Blues Brothers’. With the mania reaching fever pitch our heroes plan a mission to break in to their home and investigate the weird goings on while Feldman hosts a house party so he and his friends can observe the doubtless wacky conclusion.

This was a really dull effort that only succeeded if its intention was to show how dull life in the suburbs can be. The slow build up lasted a full hour and the tension never got above ‘don’t care’. It was clear from the off that the mysterious happenings would have a reasonable explanation and once it all goes explosive it’s equally predictable that a wrong foot is on the cards, otherwise our heroes will end up in the clink.

Part of the issue for me was that the film never left the same few houses. Of course this claustrophobia is part of the plan but it just makes the whole enterprise seem small scale and unimportant. The plot where the foreign neighbours were thought to be eating people was absurd from the off but not in a funny way. Why Hanks didn’t spend his week off getting Leia out of her frumpy outfits and into her ‘Jabba’  bikini instead of raking through bins was never explored.

Bruce Dern was passable doing his usual ‘mania’ bit but Hanks phoned in his performance from very far away. The plot was too thin to sustain the film and although the last half hour brought some explosions and a some surprises they felt unearned as all empathy towards the characters had been lost long ago.

The seismic shift in pace towards the end and the unfolding revelations looked like frantic rewrites that failed to save this laugh and gore free horror comedy.

THE Tag Line ‘ ‘Burbs Fails to Disturb or amuse  45%