[EXPRESSO] The Electric State (2025) | Mr. Peanut, Break Down This Wall

VERY loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 retro-sci-fi illustrated book of the same name and directed by the Russo brothers, The Electric State is set in an alternate 1990s where robots, gaining sentience after decades, rise up and engage a full on war, ultimately won by the humans using headgear controlled remote drone soldiers. After the war, the headgear/vr sets are sold commercially to pacify the masses, while the surviving robots are sent to a giant desert prison colony.

We follow a juvenile delinquent, Jessie (Millie Bobby Brown), whom lost her family in a car accident years ago and is now a foster kid, as one night she gets visited by a robot of Kid Cosmo, her beloved brother’s favourite childhood cartoon, which claims to actually be him, leading the two in a roadtrip-escape adventure…..

One that plays it super-straight, all in an attempt to get us invested into this world… hard to when there’s simply no charm, with the movie actively refusing to embrace its inherent sillyness AND doubling down on being “gritty”, which backfires on a nuclear scale.

There’s a palpable attempt at telling a Spielberg style tale, but there’s no soul or substance to it, just a Ready Player One masturbatory penchant for pop culture regurgitation (that makes NO SENSE in context, to boot), well known actors half-assing their admittely bad characters, and a plot being a senseless, meaningless hodgepotche that makes even less sense as it goes on, never committed to anything besides vague, overly basic metaphors, or Funko Pops-friendly character designs.

Those that aren’t already well known brand figureheads like fuckin Mr. Peanut (what is this, Food Fight?).

It’s not even boring, but it’s quite bad, stupid, mostly just so confounding you had to wonder “Why?”, especially when it had a 320 million dollars budget.

[EXPRESSO] Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) | Multiversal Maelstrom

Been looking forward to this one all year, so despite not being “news” for most of the english speaking internet, it literally got in theathers here 4 days ago, i AM gonna see it and review it.

And while at first i wasn’t blown away in the way i expected, i was still incredibly surprised and intrigued from beginning to end by what it’s indeed quite the something else.

The premise sees Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a busy woman of chinese descent that runs a snall coin laundrymat, as she laments the woes of her aspirations being all unfullfiled by the burden of her job and her family, as she has to take care of her senile father, has troubles with her teen daughter, and feels unfullfilled in her marriage to a “weak man”.

All made worse as she has to undergo a fiscal interview by a very nosy ispector, but on her way there she notices a fracture in the multiverse, and she’s enlisted to save the fate of all universes by defeating an avatar of chaos.

It’s a novel enough spin on the multiverse concept that now audiences are quite familiar with, definitely an interesting premise and a fun execution, though i didn’t laugh as much as i expected, almost disappointing since it’s a really inventive movie that indeed tries a lot of weird ass things, set ups, the visuals fully take advantage of the multiverse “gimmick” and the fights scenes especially are as well coreographed as ridiculous in nature.

It’s not just as funny as i feel it could/should be, but even so i wasn’t really disappointed, as it’s still quite fun, highly captivating, inventive, the emotional moments are quite good, the cast its stunning, the characters likeable, making overall for a damn good chaotic time.

[EXPRESSO] 21 Bridges/City Of Crime (2019) | Good Cop, Bad Cop

21 Bridges - City Of Crime 2019 poster.jpg

Here in my country this one (retitled “City Of Crime” because originality) was advertised highly on having Black Panther’s star Chadwick Boseman and being “from the creators of Avengers Endgame”, the marketing cleverly not specifing it’s just produced by Joe and Anthony Russo, and after watching it i realized why, the signals were fairly clear to begin with, and it’s not exactly a “con job”.

It’s just a ploy to get you to watch another cop thriller with a manhunt through the streets of Manhattan, or in these case, the titular 21 bridges (which isn’t actually correct, but whatever), closed in order to avoid the killers (guilty of killing many cops in a failed heist) escaping, but it has to be done all in one night, etc. etc. It’s not a bad setup, but it’s a fairly typical nonetheless, like the main character, the exemplary cop with an unbreakable sense of duty and justice, who finds his beliefs challenged as things get more complicated and he suspect of an internal conspiracy… not that you need that to explain corrupt cops, but whatever.

And it’s decent, even if you’ve already seen this kinda of plot and characterization many many times, with a great cast that’s a bit too good for these characters, not completely stereotypical ones, but – again – very typical. Direction by Brain Kirk (TV director on Boardwalk Empire, Penny Dreadful, GoT, etc. here at his movie debut) is decent-good, it’s fairly fast paced, doesn’t pull punchers, and there’s no tonal problems or unbalance in themes like the movie rooting a bit too much for the cops despite showing how blatanlty corrupt they can be, nothing like that.

If anything, the italian marketing will “dupe” people into seeing a perfectly decent – if fairly disposable – cop thriller drama.

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