Post by moviemouth on Apr 21, 2021 4:48:20 GMT
8/10 for me.
Not sure what you mean by the story being frustrating, but you don't have to explain your reason to me.
The movie is a comedy the way I see it and part of why it works so well as a comedy I think is actually the reason you dislike it.
Arnold is a douchebag in the movie who treats his family as if they are an inconvenience to him almost and this causes his goofy bored wife to find something elsewhere. The movie is about them becoming closer and the last act is a hilarious ending, where they are now 2 agents who work together.
The story just feels like it's building to something greater but instead chooses to fall to the least interesting thing happening in the world at the time - the couple's story. Not that it's an inherently bad idea, but (again) I find almost every character except Arnie's to be annoying, so naturally the development scenes won't land for me.
It's like if a James Bond movie kept cutting away from/cutting back on the action scenes to focus on the story of 007 and some goofy Bond girl instead of getting to the inevitable big/ambitious stuff.
To be fair, I've never been a fan of Cameron's writing of characters. You could practically copy/paste every one of my reviews for his movies with this:
"Action = great; characters = annoying"
That is funny. I like the movie so much for exact reasons you dislike it. I might just have a much different taste in character writing and comedy than you do in this case. It seems we find different things annoying, because very few James Cameron characters are annoying to me.
I think his character writing is adequate and I am often a big fan of the general stories he writes. It is definitely his filmmaking where he is the best though and not just the action, but the tone of his movies and the fact that I find many of his movies have a emotional impact on me.
I am actually not much of a James Bond fan, so maybe if they focused more on James Bond when he isn't doing James Bond stuff and focused on his domestic life in a comedic way I would be more of a fan.
