Film Summary CDLXXXVIII (Message from the King)


A man, a search and a bike chain. Why a bike chain? Because this movie is as by the books as one could possibly get. So we have to spice it up by giving our main character something unique. In this case it's a bike chain. 
Best of my knowledge nobody's ever use the bike chain in the movie to kill people before.

Chadwick Boseman plays a South African. Who's visiting Los Angeles to check up on his sister. Because of some strange voicemail he had received earlier. 
Chadwick has nothing but problems from the start. 
He has to deal with airport security, low life idiots, a really crappy Motel and Incredibly small amount of money.
That's all before he discovers the faint of his sister. Once that happens is problems double. 

Well I say they double. In a way he's back to square one, now there's no leverage for him to worry about. He knows his sister is dead and he's not that bothered about his own security. 
So he can go around and beat the ever-living hell out of people with little to no effect on his side. 

I think they should have kept the mystery of his sister open on the table a little longer. Maybe have half the movie dedicated to him trying to find out her location. It's the most interesting part of the entire movie.

The tension deflates afterwards. The only way it's kind of brought back up again is by introducing this secondary character who Chapman's character is kind of interested in. And only in the most basic way. 
There's no romantic chemistry. It's more of a; ''Oh you're a downtrodden human being and I'm a downtrodden human being. Let's help each other out kind of thing.''

And the rest of the movie is just Bosman character going from place to place attacking these people and those people. Trying to figure out the best possible way to eliminate the people responsible for his sister's death. 
Every here and there they'll throw in a weird curveball like a odd USB stick that's maintaining some plot crucial piece of information or have one of the criminals involved in a weird sex slave Scandal kind of thing. 
This part kind of irks me. 
Why is it the criminals are all these gay? I'm not saying that there are gay criminals out or that you can't do that kind of thing. But gay people being criminals seems to be something of a Trope that movies love to fall back on from time to time. 
I'm sure somebody could do a whole thing about its being connected to Victorian England or something else. I think it's just a bunch of people looking at gay folks thinking that they're weird and then throwing that weird feeling in with criminals. 
But who knows.

Highlight of the movie for me was seeing Alfred Molina on screen.

Overall it sounds like I was negative on the film. But really I have nothing against it. It's a perfectly adequate Middle of the Road movie. You've already seen this film a thousand times before and you'll probably see it another thousand times.

Some people argue that to be middle of the road is technically worse than being bad. I argue that if I saw this on TV again I'd probably keep watching it until I ended up doing something else. As opposed to a bad movie which I would just turn off immediately.

Originally my only criticism was going to be why so many people were using old flip phones in the movie. 
Especially given that it was made in 2016. But then I remembered that happy people are drug dealers so maybe these are all throw away phones they can pick up cheap and then use once or twice before throwing away. 
In fact that might be the most fun you can have out of this movie. If you really wanted to you could pick every little inch of this film apart and debate as to why characters do certain things or Worse certain plot points are going or how predictable some of the scenes can be. But really there's nothing to be gained from doing that and it doesn't actually affect the film in any way.

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