If the pervading memory of Jan de Bont’s 1996 block-fluster Twister is an image of bovine aeronautics, it’s hard to picture how its instantly less iconic 2024 sequel, from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung, will be remembered. Perhaps only in retrospectives examining Glen Powell’s sharp rise to megastardom. Two decades of graft lie behind the chiselled Texan’s supposed overnight success. Having made his debut in 2003’s third Spy Kids flick, Powell has successfully bit-parted his way through all from The Dark Knight Rises to Expendables 3. The winds changed with Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You but now they’re very much stormin’ high.
The world changed forever in July 1969. Or, perhaps, it didn’t. If you go in for that sort of thing. An extraordinary number of people still do it would seem, with conspiracy no less ripe in 2024 – six human moon landings later – than fifty-five years ago. Possibly more in the age of rampantly untempered social media. It’s from such cynicism that Fly Me to the Moon fuels its launch into limited ambition. The film started out as a streaming project and will prove circular in that regard. Certainly, there little extra to the terrestrial here.
Despicable Me peaked with Silas Ramsbottom. Not the Steve Coogan voiced character, per se, but the sequence of his jowly introduction. Was it Kevin, or perhaps Bob, who looked furtively to his neighbouring minion and sniggered ‘bottom’, before bursting into unbridled laughter? Either way, a gag of all time greatness was born. Nothing else in the, now fourteen-year-old, franchise has ever matched such infantile brilliance, certainly not in such a way as to justify the astounding commercial success the series has achieved. $4.6bn and counting. Film four does little to break the mould, instead opting for gentle expansion. It’s bright, breezy and a little exhausting.
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