Dreamcast20 #16: Sonic Adventure

2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, Sega's final - and in my opinion the finest - home videogame console. Despite a range of excellent games, it simply failed to compete against Sony's PlayStation 2. To celebrate, The Angriest counts down its 20 best games.

Sonic the Hedgehog is Sega' most famous and popular mascot character, so it's no surprise that one of the Dreamcast's first major releases would be a new Sonic videogame. Sonic Adventure was a bold attempt to advance the Sonic franchise in much the same way that Nintendo had transformed and updated Super Mario Bros with the 3D action-adventure title Super Mario 64. To be honest, Sega's attempt was only a partial success - but those bits that did succeed were a lot of fun to play.

Dreamcast20 #18: Ikaruga

2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, Sega's final - and in my opinion the finest - home videogame console. Despite a range of excellent games, it simply failed to compete against Sony's PlayStation 2. To celebrate, The Angriest counts down its 20 best games.

I am a huge fan of scrolling shoot-em-up games, in which the player controls a little spaceship shooting at a relentless swarm of enemy spaceships. I say this despite being absolutely terrible at playing them; once they get more frenzied than Galaga or Dragon Spirit (which swapped spaceships out for dragons), I am floundering. That aside, one of my absolute favourites is Ikaruga: an innovative shoot-em-up for arcades and the Dreamcast produced by the Japanese developer Treasure.

Dreamcast20 #20: Omikron: The Nomad Soul

2018 marks the 20th anniversary of the Dreamcast, Sega's final - and in my opinion the finest - home videogame console. Despite a range of excellent games, it simply failed to compete against Sony's PlayStation 2. To celebrate, The Angriest counts down its 20 best games.

In the alien city of Omikron, the player assumes the role of a police detective investigating a string of serial killings. When that detective is killed, however, the player begins a string of reincarnations from body to body while uncovering a supernatural war running out of sight for thousands of years.

Released in 2000 to decidedly mixed reviews, Omikron: The Nomad Soul was an adventure game with varied gameplay - some action, some puzzle-solving - with the original wrinkle of reincarnating the player's character as a different person each time they die. The universe created for the game is imaginative, and for 2000 it seemed like a pretty imaginative one.

Railroad Tigers (2016)

In December 1941 a group of Chinese railroad workers, led by the station porter Ma Yuan (Jackie Chan) engage in carefully staged raids of Japanese train shipments to disrupt Japan's military efforts to occupy China and invade other Asian nations to the south. When an injured soldier tells the group of a failed mission to blow up a strategically vital bridge, they take it upon themselves to complete the mission on the Chinese army's behalf.

Railroad Tigers is a hugely enjoyable slice of populist action-comedy, headlined by Jackie Chan in one of his most entertaining films in years. While the film has problems - in fact it has quite a few of them - none of them manage to fully obstruct what is ultimately a hell of a lot of fun. This is his third collaboration with director Ding Sheng, following Little Big Soldier in 2010 and Police Story 2013. To my mind this is the strongest of the three. It has plenty of action, a strong line in slapstick comedy, and makes the best use of its ageing star that I can remember.

Deadpool (2016)

Deadpool is a film that several Hollywood studios have been attempting to make for about a decade and a half, and it has taken until 2016 for it to finally gets its chance to impress. For most of that time actor Ryan Reynolds has been attached to star as well, so before any kind of actual review begins I feel it's worth pausing to both applaud 20th Century Fox for finally giving the project a chance and to congratulate Reynolds for his stamina and persistence, if nothing else.

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is a terminally ill mercenary given a second chance at life through an experimental process to activate mutant genes in his body. Ruthlessly betrayed, he sets out on a quest for revenge against the villain who transformed him into a hideously scarred psychopath with Wolverine-like healing powers.

To be honest there is not much in the way of story to Deadpool. It essentially has a couple of extended action scenes that frame extended flashbacks. It is basically a loose skeleton upon which the film can hang a lot of rude gags, extreme violence, knowing pop culture references and comic book in-jokes. That does not just work as a description of Deadpool the film; it can also work as a description of the comic book franchise upon which it is based.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

One year after they defeated Shredder and saved New York City, the Ninja Turtles are forced to defend the city again after Shredder escapes from custody and unites with the inter-dimensional alien Krang.

2014's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a visually and narratively incoherent mess, high on volume but low on logic, story, quality design and fidelity to the source. It was a moderate commercial hit, however, leading to this 2016 sequel. The director is new, with Dave Green stepping in to replace Brad Liebesman. At the same time it also draws a lot of material from the popular 1980s television cartoons, with prominent roles given to mutant henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady, the alien despot Krang and his giant 'technodrome', vigilante Casey Jones and mad scientist Baxter Stockman.

Sadly any hope that Out of the Shadows is an improvement upon its predecessor dies quickly: this is certainly a more coherently plotted film, but that is in large because it is so weakly plotted. Not a lot actually happens here, and what does happen is not original or even particularly interested. Unlike the first film, this sequel did not make its studio much money. This big-screen iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles looks set to mercifully expire with this second film.

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

Richard Chance (William Petersen) is an edgy Secret Service agent in Los Angeles. When his partner is gunned down during a money counterfeiting investigation, Chance becomes obsessed with taking down the elusive forger Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). Teamed with a new partner named John Vukovich (John Pankow), Chance takes every step he can - both legal and illegal - to track down Masters and bring him to justice.

A synopsis of To Live and Die in L.A. makes it sound like an incredible crass and cliche-ridden potboiler, and to a large extent that's a fair assessment of the movie. It's a 1985 action film directed by William Friedkin that really does trade extensively on stereotype. The first half pushed my limit for tolerating this sort of silly machismo. The second half completely redeemed it, as Chance's actions grew more extreme and the film began to push off in unexpected directions.

This is not top-tier Friedkin; the director's earlier works include The French Connection, The Exorcist and Sorcerer, after all, and To Live and Die in L.A. would have to be pretty formidable to hit those peaks. It is a smartly directed film, however, and some clever direction and typically strong editing help to make it much more than the sum of its parts.

Lego The Lord of the Rings (2012)

So some years ago Lego started releasing construction toys based on the Star Wars films, and some years after that somebody had the bright idea of turning them into a videogame. Lego Star Wars was an unexpected delight, combining the appeal of both the science fiction movie franchise and the perennially popular Lego bricks into one package. Buoyed by success, the developer Traveller's Tales arguably went a little bit overboard, releasing such videogames as Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean, Lego Harry Potter and Lego Marvel's The Avengers. To be honest there were only a certain number of trips to the well before the concept grew tired, and whatever number that was I am betting it was less than the number of Lego-branded games that have been released.

So in among all of these pop culture adaptations came Lego The Lord of the Rings, based on the three films directed by Peter Jackson. Like most of the Lego games it was released to multiple gaming platforms. I decided to sample the Nintendo 3DS version, since I have been enjoying using the console recently and had never tried a handheld version of a Lego game before.

Daylight (1996)

Former Emergency Medical Services chief Kit Latura (Sylvester Stallone), who resigned under a cloud after the death of several people, is dragged back into service when New York's Holland Tunnel collapses - trapping several survivors inside. After managing to get inside via a ventilation shaft, Kit leads the survivors in a race to escape before the entire tunnel floods with water.

It's actually rather funny noting just how similar the set-ups between Cliffhanger and Daylight are: both about everyday heroes played by Sylvester Stallone, both retired after a miscalculation lost innocent people their lives, and both forced to confront those mistakes in the process of saving the day the second time around. Both films were also, funnily enough, shot in Italy as a cost-saving measure. Beyond that, however, the two films split directions towards separate cliches. For Cliffhanger it was to Die Hard, and for Daylight it is to The Towering Inferno.

Cliffhanger (1993)

Mountain rescuer Gabe Walker (Sylvester Stallone) resigns after his last mission results in the death of a climber. Eight months later he is dragged back into service when a plane crashes in the Rocky Mountains. Reaching the crash site, he discovers that the plane's stranded passengers are an international team of criminals - and he is forced at gunpoint to help them located three fallen cases of money that are scattered across the mountain range.

Big, loud, stupid, and packed with ridiculous slow motion gunfights, Cliffhanger is a 1993 action film starring Sylvester Stallone and John Lithgow and directed by cheesy action movie master Renny Harlin. I am not sure if Harlin has ever directed more than one properly good film, which is The Long Kiss Goodnight. He has directed plenty of other movies that I enjoy for their rampant stupidity and over-the-top action sequences - including Die Hard 2, Cutthroat Island and Deep Blue Sea - but I would struggle to call any of them 'good' with a straight face.

So Cliffhanger has a Hollywood-friendly high concept, ridiculous dialogue, paper-thin characters, and story logic that simply doesn't wash, but ultimately it is just a wonderfully silly and rather fun action flick. Sometimes that is precisely what you want to sit down and watch.

The Dark Knight (2008)

As Batman, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has been fighting a non-stop war against Gotham City's criminal underworld, but his battle is catastrophically interrupted by the arrival of the Joker (Heath Ledger), an unhinged and unpredictable criminal mastermind who throws the entire city into chaos, with terrible consequences for Bruce, ex-girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman).

I realised while recently watching The Dark Knight that I have never reviewed it before. I have watched it many times over the past eight years. Not only is it my favourite film from 2008 it is also one of my favourite films of all time. It is a remarkable, quite masterful work of movie-making and for me a career high-point for its director Christopher Nolan. The bulk of the film alone would make it a genre masterpiece. At its centre, however, stands the late Heath Ledger in his most iconic, entertaining and skillful performance. We honestly had no idea his talent had developed so much and become so finely mastered until he had already passed away. It's an absolute tragedy.

The Rambling Guitarist (1959)

Young street musician Shinji Taki (Akira Kobayashi) wanders into the northern Japanese city Hakodate and straight into the affairs of local mob boss Akitsu (Nobuo Kaneko). Taki gets assigned to force a nearby family to vacate their house so that Akitsu can demolish it for a new amusement park - not realising that the woman he is trying to force out is Akitsu's own sister. Matters are complicated when a rival gangster, George (Jo Shishido), arrives on the scene - and believes Taki is an undercover police officer.

In the 1950s and 1960s Japan's Nikkatsu studio was churning out an astonishing number of cheaply made, fast-paced pulp crime and youth movies. The Rambling Guitarist, directed by Buichi Saito and released in 1959, delivers both at the same time. It stars a rockabilly young rebel with a Brando-style leather jacket and a guitar slung over his shoulder, and throws him into a stereotypical world of cigar-smoking gangsters, night clubs, and back alley shoot-outs. It is pulp entertainment through and through, but like a lot of Nikkatsu's output from this period it's immensely enjoyable to watch.

Suicide Squad (2016)

Following the death of Superman, government operative Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) uses her leverage in Washington to establish Task Force X: a top secret team of imprisoned super-criminals intended to head into certain-death crises and resolve them on the promise of having their prison sentences reduced. When the first of her metahuman operatives breaks free - the mysterious Enchantress (Carla Delevingne) - Waller sends in the rest of the team to take her down.

Warner Bros' haphazard attempt to replicate the Marvel Studios formula with the DC Comics suite of characters continues in Suicide Squad. It is a colourful mess of a film. Some parts work remarkably well, but there is a sense they were only found by accident after writer/director David Ayer and the studio simultaneously threw literally every available situation, tone, character and plot beat at the problem. It would be ridiculous to attempt to claim that it is a good film, but much like its immediate DC predecessor Batman v Superman it is at times a relatively enjoyable one. They have picked some very high quality ingredients, but they have tossed them all in a blender.

Now You See Me (2013)

Four stage magicians (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco) unite as the Four Horsemen. At the climax of their Las Vegas show they appear to actually use magic to rob a bank vault in Paris. From there they engage in a mystifying crime spree, all the while pursued by an ill-tempered Federal agent (Mark Ruffalo) and a professional skeptic (Morgan Freeman).

I have a pretty firm rule when it comes to films about magic: it has to be possible. Christopher Nolan's The Prestige is a knock-out example: it presents an assortment of magical illusions and tricks, but displays them in realistic ways and explains how they are done. I remember around the same time that The Prestige came out there was a similar magic-themed thriller starring Edward Norton titled The Illusionist. It simply didn't work, and one of the key reasons it didn't was because its magical illusions were created using computer-generated effects. They weren't actually possible to perform, and that just made the whole film collapse in on itself. It could not be trusted.

That is basically the core problem with Now You See Me. If you are going to present your audience with a movie about stage magicians using their craft to steal huge piles of money, you need to make that magic understandable, practical, and believable. Once you cut corner and simply use CGI and hand-wave your explanations, the reality of your story has been broken. It simply doesn't matter any more.

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

The Avengers have a fatal showdown in Lagos that sees a building severely damaged with civilian casualties. Tired of the rising death toll from superhero incursions, the United Nations spearheads a set of accords to bring the Avengers under government control. When the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) appears to stage a terrorist bombing of a UN summit, killing the king of the African nation of Wakanda, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) leads the charge to sign up to the accords and bring him to justice. When Captain America (Chris Evans) refuses to sign, and sets out to apprehend the Winter Soldier - former best friend Bucky Barnes - for himself, the stage is set for a super-heroic 'civil war'.

Or thereabouts. Captain America: Civil War is arguably the most ambitious and complex Marvel Studios picture yet. Ambitious because it pulls in a huge quantity of pre-existing characters while still finding time to introduce a few new ones. Complex because it is a combined sequel to both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron, and failing to see both of those films in advance will likely render half of this film somewhat confusing and nonsensical. It is also complex because of how one reviews it. If you're a Marvel fan, a lot of scenes in here are going to be an absolute delight. If you're simply looking for an entertaining action blockbuster, it's a little more difficult.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

After escaping from a Chinese gangster in Shanghai, archaeologist Dr Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) makes a crash-landing into India. There he finds a remote village whose sacred stone has been taken and their children kidnapped en masse. With kid sidekick Short Round (Ke Huey Quan) and lounge singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in tow, Indy investigates a nearby palace and the diabolical 'temple of doom' beneath it.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was the second Indiana Jones film, released four years after Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1984. It has generally been regarded as the weakest of the original three films. with many viewers disliking the misplaced combination of slapstick comedy and horror, the introduction of a child sidekick, and the gratingly irritating romantic lead Willie Scott. Generally speaking the mass opinions are correct: quality-wise Temple of Doom sits a solid distance down the heap from either Raiders or The Last Crusade, and debates over whether Temple of Doom is better or worse than late series entry Kingdom of the Crystal Skull probably don't really have a viable conclusion to them. This is one hell of a creative misjudgement. That said, this is not a complete disaster of a film but more of a curate's egg. There is a lot of good material in Temple of Doom, generally buried into the back half where most of the audience has already written the movie off.

Jurassic Park III (2001)

Palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is paid to act as a guide on a fly-by of Isla Sorna, an island off the coast of Costa Rica populated by InGen's genetically engineered dinosaurs. It is a ruse: before long the plane has landed, half of the crew has been eaten, and Grant is left to help two parents (William H. Macy and Tea Leoni) find their missing son - who was last seen visiting the island with his step-father.

There are not too many ways in which one can be kind to Jurassic Park III. The plain and simple truth is that it is not a good movie. It is a sequel in the unsatisfying and tired way all mediocre sequels are: it does very much the same sorts of things as the earlier films did, only varied just a little bit and with far less enthusiasm as it does them. Occasionally a glimmer of entertainment pokes through - a scene here, a joke there - but none of it compensates for a weak storyline, cardboard cut-out characters, and some uncharacteristically weak visual effects. It took four years between films to make The Lost World and Jurassic Park III. It took Universal Pictures another 14 to return with Jurassic World. I honestly think after the third film the franchise needed a long break to reset.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Four years after the disaster on Isla Nublar, Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is summoned to meet with Jurassic Park owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). Hammond reveals the existence of "Site B", a second facility on the neighbouring island of Isla Sorna, where the dinosaurs are continuing to breed and thrive. When Hammond loses control of his company to his ambitious nephew (Arliss Howard), Malcolm is thrown into a race to stop the dinosaurs from being taken off the island.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park marked a rare sequel for Steven Spielberg. Other than his Indiana Jones films, this remains his only follow-up in a career running through its fifth decade. It is a much darker, more complex film that its predecessor, a direction that both benefits and damages it. All things considered it is a step down in quality from Jurassic Park, and yet of the four films in the series it is the one to which I return the most often.

There is an amazing amount of good stuff to be found here, even if its assembly is a little scrappier and more haphazard.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Palaeontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), palaeobotanist Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) and self-proclaimed chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbum) are invited by billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) to inspect his brand-new theme park. Jurassic Park is a state-of-the-art wildlife reserve on a small island off the coast of Costa Rica. The wildlife is genetically engineered dinosaurs, recreated through dna manipulation, and they have just broken out of their cages.

It was impossible to avoid Jurassic Park back in 1993. It was the biggest film of the year; indeed at the time it was the biggest film of all time, at least unadjusted for inflation. Pretty much everybody in the developed world saw it. Many went and saw it multiple times. Its combination of dinosaurs, action and thrills made it a huge popular hit, and its ground-breaking use of computer-generated images (CGI) made it a watershed in Hollywood filmmaking.

It has now been 23 years since it was first released, so it seemed high time to take a fresh look and see how 1993's biggest movie blockbuster was standing the test of time.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Some times you can't go back again. I think pretty solid proof of that sentiment is Steven Spielberg's 2008 sequel Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It is a film made with the best of intentions, and certainly by a lot of talented people. It continued the Indiana Jones movie franchise that had - a relatively unpopular TV spin-off aside - seemingly wrapped up with The Last Crusade in 1989. Suddenly, 19 years later, there was a new instalment with a 66 year-old Harrison Ford returning as the titular archaeologist. The same creative team by-and-large reunited to make the film, yet the results seems to fall far short of The Last Crusade. While box office takings were huge, the audience response was fairly ambivalent. Crystal Skull rapidly became one of those Hollywood blockbusters - like Prometheus and Batman v Superman - that it was uncool to defend.

Certainly I cannot defend it. I can defend parts of it, but individual sequences and characters are not capable of saving an entire film. What is particularly striking to me about Crystal Skull is that it is broadly pretty great for its first half, and then weirdly derails as soon as it hits the jungle. After that it becomes a real head-scratcher: why those story choices? Why that kind of visual effect? Why those kinds of attempts at comedy? In the end it seems to leave the Indiana Jones series with two kinds of film: the slick, non-stop adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, and the messy 'curate's egg' attempts of The Temple of Doom and The Crystal Skull.