150 Word Review: 'The Electric State' (2025)
No game
The Electric State is charmless, but on the other hand, it's flavorless, like a hot dog. Speaking of, the streaming industry's business model is feeding subscribers bland tubes of meat forever.
This is the Russo Brothers' second flick for Netflix. Any moments of originality can be attributed to the source material, Simon Stålenhag's haunting illustrated novel of the same name. His retro-futuristic robots are creepy and sad.
In The Electric State, humans fought thinking machines and won. Enter a girl and her bro, a bot with a boy's soul. Enter Chris Pratt as a rogue with a wig. Enter Giancarlo Esposito, as a *yawn* villain. Enter Ke Huay Quan as a mad scientist. Millie Bobby Brown is our plucky star. She weeps beautifully. There's product placement, too: Mr. Peanut leads the droid resistance.
This FX extravaganza cost $320 million. Where'd the money go? It's a mystery, like hot dog meat.
150 Word Review: ‘The Gray Man’ (2022)
The Gray Man is a basic, big-budget action movie directed by the Russo Brothers, their first masterpiece for Netflix.
It stars two charismatic hunks of gold in their prime. As the hero, Ryan Gosling is a stoic super soldier softie gone rogue, and a mustachioed Chris Evans is the happy-go-lucky freelance assassin hired to take him down.
There’s a standard plot about corruption at the agency, but that’s unimportant. What is important is the carnage. The stunts. The spectacular explosions. The city of Prague is nearly destroyed. There’s a brutal fight inside — and outside — a plane.
The best thing about The Gray Man is it has one foot duct-taped to the gas. Regé-Jean Page is a CIA SOB, Billy Bob Thorton a grizzled mentor. Alfre Woodard makes a helluva exit. Ana de Armas is wasted. But back to Evans and Gosling: what a pumped-up pair of chaos meatballs.