2/10



This was fricking DREADFUL. Never has so much been spent on something so perfunctory and bereft of emotion, drama or even basic logical sense. I haven't read the book this is based on, but pretty much everyone who has said this is a horrible bastardization of the text, and it would have to be. When Stanley Tucci's stock Heartless Scientist villain intones "The world is a tire fire, floating on an ocean of piss", I couldn't think of a recent line that worked better as a perfect encapsulation of the movie that contained it. Millie Bobby Brown continues to demonstrate that she'd rather be doing anything other than acting (and she's aging faster than any barely-out-of-her-teens actress since Lindsay Lohan), Chris Pratt mugs and quips like a jackass (and looks weirdly like Matthew McConaughey throughout), the special effects are technically fine, but don't do anything you haven't seen a billion times before, and the "emotional" parts fall completely flat, despite a hard-working Alan Silvestri score that's the best thing in the movie by a country mile. Absolutely awful, and a miserable waste of resources.

More proof (as if we needed any) that the Russo brothers have no actual talent other than convincing studios to give them money.

Everything that's wrong with movies today and how they get made.

These guys were never legit, they were a joke from the get-go. Yet the Marvel fan crew held them up like THE WINTER SOLDIER was one of the greatest cinematic revelations of this generation.