This was rad. A different movie from the original almost entirely, as this follows the book story far more closely. It also doesn’t include the colorful hunters.
I was pretty excited to see Edgar Wright taking this on. His mood is very fitting here. You can’t stay campy if you’re doing the book, but you can’t go fully dark, as the book does, with a retelling like this. He landed it right in the middle, with a cogent point that is formed alongside comedy and actual fun adventure.
The ending was always the big question. In the book, in case you don’t know, Ben Richards hijacks a plane and flies it into the network building. That’s a scenario we might not see again in movies in our lifetimes. But this ending was far more appropriate for the times. I’m here for this stuff right now.
Performance-wise, Glen Powell was great. He’s a leading man, and that much is obvious to me. This dude will carry movies for a long time. Josh Brolin, the far more apt comparison to Richard Dawson’s Killian than Coleman Domingo was, killed it. His smarminess is top notch. Killian, to me, is an icon, and Richard Dawson played him perfectly. Brolin only taking half that role, but the actually, deeply evil half, takes a bit away from what he was doing compared to Dawson, but he plays the evil half perfectly. He’s such an asshole.
Coleman Domingo being both the showman and the guy who pulls the Sven at the end lacked a bit of punch for me. Sven’s line, “I’ve got to score some steroids,” is pivotal in the original’s climax. Here, it isn’t possible, as Wright went with the decidedly less beefy version of hunters. That brings us to Lee Pace. I find him to be a slightly bothersome overact. He has been in some great stuff (Halt and Catch Fire) where that didn’t ruin things, but I haven’t ever thought he was doing anything but acting. Here, he is great. It probably helped that I didn’t see him most of the time. But he played that main hunter well and was a solid contributor to the final scenes. He was really good here.
Big love to this movie. It was a ton of fun and I loved the much bigger scale of the world set up here. The players all worked for me, and the story was a ride. This will earn occasional rewatches in my house.