Ty Watches "Knock at the Cabin"

Last weekend my wife and I went back to the theater and saw "Knock at the Cabin". I have not been inside a theater for a movie since early 2022 when I saw "Everything Everywhere All at Once". My wife had the day off and wanted to go out for lunch and a movie. She picked lunch and I picked the movie. She was also pretty adamant that we went to a theater. It was cool. There was us and two other, older couples for a noon showing.

I have wanted to see "Knock at the Cabin" since I first saw a trailer about two or three weeks ago. I have liked, or at least been into, the past couple M Night Shyamalan movies. "Glass" wasn't great, but at least all the "superheroes" in Shyamalan's previous movies got together and made something that had stuff that worked. "Old" crumbled at the end, but up to that point it kept my attention. And "Split" is a very good movie, full stop. So "Knock at the Cabin" had won a place in my brain. I wanted to see this movie. I am a big Dave Bautista fan and to see him playing this type of character really piqued my interest. He is usually used as Drax or as a big guy that is there for comedy relief. I did like his character in "Glass Onion", and his small role in "Blade Runner 2049" is extremely memorable. Those are about the only time he has ventured away from typecasting and they both worked. So seeing him playing this soft spoken doomsdayer type really pulled me in. I then read what the movie was about  and that made me even more amped.

The long and short is a family goes on a vacation and they are met by four people who say they have to kill one of their own or the apocalypse will occur. Pretty easy premise to follow. It is like a thriller version of "Sophie's Choice". Bautista is the lead. Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Abby Quinn play the doomsday people. They each explain that they have had visions and they came together to try and stop the apocalypse. Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge and Kristen Cui are the family that has to decide if they will live alone with the three of them as the world ends, or if they will make an awful sacrifice to save the world.

I really wanted to love this movie going in. I had high hopes. The movie got solid reviews as well, so I was hyped. The movie, for me, fell a little flat. There are things I love in this movie. The creepiness, the quietness, the sacrificing, the stories being told, the tension, that stuff worked and worked very well at points. Groff and Aldrigde played great off each other. They had wonderful chemistry and they were tremendous in this movie. The little girl was exceptional. She has a very bright future. And Dave Bautista was phenomenal. He was quiet and spoke very matter of factly and that made him even more frightening. Even a good amount of the twists and turns work very well. But it was some of the other stuff around the movie that didn't totally hit for me. The twist was predictable. For a director like Shyamalan, even in his bad movies, the twists usually work and I have a hard time seeing them coming. This one was pretty easy to follow. Some of the disasters and diseases were a little on the nose. They pulled a lot from COVID and modern news. I think I wanted a fresher take. Some of the stories the doomsayers told were familiar and tired.I get why they were inserted into the movie but I wanted a different point of view.

I think mostly, for me, the biggest problem was my expectations were far too high. I should have lowered them a bit. My wife said she liked the movie okay, but it was a little flat at points. I wish I had gone in with her point of view.

"Knock at the Cabin" is an okay movie with a great performance from Bautista. But I wish I had waited until it was streaming to watch. At least I got to have a date with my wife and that made it worth it. But the movie just didn't fully hit me the way I was hoping it would. 

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

Come and support Ty and the podcast on Patreon.

Follow Ty on instagram and twitter.

SeedSing is funded by a group of awesome people. Join them by donating to SeedSing.

It is Such a Shame that "Southpaw" Wastes so Much Talent

Southpaw is not worth bothering the microwave

I'm predisposed to like movies about boxing. One of my all time favorite movies is "Raging Bull". That's the watermark for me and almost every other movie critic there is and ever will be. I also enjoy movies like "Ali", "The Great White Hope", "Million Dollar Baby", "Fighting" and even "Girlfight", that's a very good, very underrated boxing movie and, probably, Michelle Rodriguez's best acting performance to date and yes, I'm including her small, but recurring role as Anna Lucia Cortez on "Lost".

So, naturally, I was excited to see the movie "Southpaw" when it came out last year. I even mentioned it on one of our very early, possibly first, podcasts. I was expecting big things from this movie. It had Jake Gyllenhall, whom I really like, Rachael McAdams, who is an excellent actress and it was directed by Antoine Fuqua who directed "Training Day", another one of my all time favorites. It was also written by the guy that wrote "Sons of Anarchy". I never watched that show, but I heard only tremendous things about it.

I was on board. I didn't get to see it in the theaters, but I just recently watched it via my Netflix account and it may be the most melodramatic piece of overacting I've seen in quite some time. I was so underwhelmed and kind of mad that this movie I had such high hopes for, felt like a 2 hour waste of time. It starts out cool, with a bruised and battered Gyllenhall screaming into the camera and it pulls back to show him in the middle of a title bout, but, it was really downhill from there. It was almost like watching a soap opera. The story was a good idea. Prize fighter with a temper gets into a fight with his next opponent at a benefit and someone accidentally shoots his wife and kills her. Gyllenhall is now alone with their daughter and he's lost and drunk and high all the time. He loses custody , cleans his life up and gets his kid back.

Simple story, but the boxing is what had me intrigued. It was the direction and over acting and chewing of the scenery that lost me. Gylenhall is a wonderful actor, but there is only so many times I can watch him scream in agony over his deceased wife. Same goes for him getting drunk and stoned or threatening to hurt or kill other people. Rachel McAdams is only in the first 20 minutes of the movie, but her New York accent is dreadful and the way she interacts with Gyllenhall, there's absolutely no chemistry. Even her death scene was a bit too over the top. The little girl that played their daughter was the most generic "hard on her luck" kid they could find. Her direction and attitude was way to "woe is me" for a movie. Curtis Jackson, you may know him as 50 Cent, was a terrible villain. He tries to win you over at the beginning by seeming like he really cares about his fighter, but I think we all knew he was only in it for the money from the get go. It was way too obvious. The bad guy needs to have depth and almost a likability before we turn on them. Not in the case of 50 Cent's character. I knew almost immediately that he was a money grubbing bad guy. The only really decent acting in this movie came from Forrest Whittaker. He played Gyllenhall's new mentor, after his life fell apart, and even though he was paint by the colors character, Whittaker did a pretty good job. That's to be expected from an actor of his caliber though. I did enjoy most, definitely not all, but most of the scenes that he was involved with.

This brings me back to Gyllenhall. Not once did I believe his character. Sure, he got into great shape for this role, but aside from that, he was not very good. He was too moody in some scenes. Too angry and over the top in others. He didn't play the part of antihero very well at all. He's much more suited for a movie like "Nightcrawler" because he can really dig deep into that character. In "Southpaw", he was chewing all of the scenery. If McAdams accent was bad, Gyllenhall's was atrocious and I like Jake Gyllenhall, just not in this movie or this role.

That brings me to the director, Antoine Fuqua. He came out of the gate with guns blazing, directing the totally kick ass "Training Day". Then he tried to do a very similar project with "The Equalizer". That movie isn't very good. And "Olympus Has Fallen" was a train wreck. And now we have "Southpaw". I think he belongs in the same class as M Night Shyamalan and Neill Blomkamp. These guys started with a bang and now, they are going out with a whimper. It sucks too because I really like both Blomkamp and Fuqua, I could care less about Shyamalan.

I was very disappointed with "Southpaw". If they focused more on boxing and less on the melodramatics, I probably would've loved the movie. If you're thinking about watching this movie might I suggest you go watch "Raging Bull" instead. It's ten thousand times better and you already know you will enjoy it. "Southpaw" is not a good movie.

Don't waste your time.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture Editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man podcast. He once thought about becoming a championship boxer, then he heard about all the hitting. Follow Ty on twitter @tykulik.