There are 12 movies from 2020 that I watched last month but didn’t get
around to reviewing. To address the
backlog, I decided to just do a roundup for them – similar to what I did in previous situations like this. So, here
they are, arranged from what I enjoyed the most to the least:
The Croods: A New Age
The Croods was one of my favorite animated movies of 2013. I didn’t think it was
going to be any good, but it turned out being heartwarming, thoughtful, and
hilarious. It took a couple of years before
a sequel for it got made, and because the gap of time between it and the
original, I didn’t have much hype for it.
I thought the window for an effective sequel had already closed. However, similar with the case the first one,
the sequel turned out being much better than I expected. I extremely enjoyed the comedy, the
narrative, the music (“I Think I Love You” is an absolute banger!), and
creative creature designs. Pixar’s Soul and Onward may be the best Hollywood animated movies of 2020, but The Croods: A New Age is honestly not so
far behind them.
Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul
This was one of the four anime films I was looking forward to watch in
2020 (the other three being My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, Violet Evergarden The Movie, and Demon
Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train, the latter two I’ve yet to
watch). It picks up the story from where
Made in Abyss season 1 left it off. In it, Riko, Reg, and Nanachi finally cross
paths with the White Whistle mad scientist Bondrewd, whom they must first
defeat before they can do their “final dive” to the sixth level. It was exciting to visit the Abyss again,
which I think is one of the best fantasy setting concepts ever. And as usual, the sense of wonder and
adventure is balanced with the sense of horror and tragedy. We already knew from the anime series about
Bondrewd’s heinous experiments. But
having that piece of information didn’t really prepare us for the harrowing
developments in this movie. Seriously, it
has the most heartbreakingly horrifying moment in anime since Shou Tucker made
a chimera out of Nina Tucker and Alexander.
A Whisker Away
It’s a Ghibli-ish teen drama fantasy where an unhappy teenage girl is given the
ability to transform into a cat, which she uses to get close to her crush. While mostly sweet and whimsical, it also
becomes darker and deeper, and ultimately offers a moral worth pondering on. It’s an engaging anime film, but for a movie
about cats, it didn’t quite appeal to a cat person like me as much as I thought
it would.
#Alive
This is the 2020 Korean zombie film that must be watched over Peninsula. It centers on a young adult gamer named Oh Joon-woo (played by Yoo Ah-in, the guy from Burning) who’s left stranded alone in his family’s apartment unit during a sudden zombie apocalypse. He almost hangs himself out of loneliness, hunger, and thirst, but regains the will to live again after coming into contact with a young woman named Kim Yoo-bin (played by K-drama superstar Park Shin-hye), who is stranded in the opposite apartment building. #Alive feels like it’s tailored for 2020 – the year of pandemic and lockdowns and isolation – although that’s not really the case as it was made in 2019 and there’s no way the filmmakers would have predicted the world’s condition in 2020. Nevertheless, the coincidence made #Alive a perfect, relatable zombie film for 2020.
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
I had a blast with the first Shaun
the Sheep movie, so I expected the same with this movie – and I did. The plot is nothing special. Shaun, Bitzer the sheepdog, and the rest of
their farm friends band together to help a juvenile alien who got stranded on
Earth be reunited with its parents, while government agents are out to capture
it. It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand
times. It’s the E.T. the Extraterrestrial premise.
What makes it delightful is the winsome cartoon humor involved and the endearing
animation. I mentioned this many times
already in the past, but stop-motion animation simply has this distinctly charming
quality inherent to it, which immediately make me like a movie done is such a
style most of the time.
Freaky
The main draw of this movie is hinged on its simple but intriguing twist
to the meta slasher film premise: what if the killer and the final girl
magically switched bodies, Freaky Friday-style? While it’s not necessarily terrific, it’s utterly
enjoyable in the same way the Happy Death
Day movies are utterly enjoyable, for it has heart, effective comedy, and committed
performances. Vince Vaughn and Kathryn
Newton’s performances were really compelling.
Hayop Ka! The Nimfa Dimaano Story
Made by the creators of Saving Sally, this Filipino adult rom-com animated film follows Nimfa, a cat who
works as a perfume saleslady and who is dating a buff mongrel named Roger. Tired of being poor with Roger, she becomes
besotted with a rich, handsome dog named Iñigo.
The immediate charm of this movie is the mere fact that it’s a Filipino
animated film. Filipino animated movies
are very rare, and they don’t come in the level of production value that Hayop Ka! has. Thus, we can say that this is the best
Filipino animated film by default.
Moreover, despite having a visual style and anthropomorphic animal character
designs that are more apt for younger audiences, it is a movie with very adult
themes, and the disconnect between its kid-friendly look and adult-oriented
content is an instant source of hilarity.
Beyond that, the narrative comedy is generally witty and effective, and
the puns that pop out in the background during the course of the movie are
constant sources of amusement.
Promising Young Woman
I don’t agree with a significant part of its message, but as far as
being a movie goes, it’s a splendid revenge thriller black comedy. Entertaining and gripping from start to
finish, it delivers well-executed twists-and-turns, subversive storytelling, and
a magnetic performance from its lead actor, Carey Mulligan, who plays a cunning,
vindictive former med student bent on a feminist crusade against rape culture.
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
In 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie:
Sponge Out of the Water, SpongeBob and the gang became animated in CGI for
a stretch when they went to the surface.
The right people were probably pleased by that that when it came to the
next movie, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge
on the Run, it was entirely done in CGI from start to finish. And that’s basically the only notable thing
about this movie. It’s fine. It’s entertaining in the way SpongeBob SquarePants is entertaining. However, it isn’t necessarily a must-watch
(unless you’re a die-hard SpongeBob
SquarePants fan). But it’s
fine. Also, Keanu Reeves is in it. Speaking of Keanu Reeves…
Bill & Ted Face the Music
I enjoyed Bill & Ted’s
Excellent Adventure and Bill &
Ted’s Bogus Journey back in the day in cable, but I haven’t really been a
big fan. Thus, a third installment
wasn’t something I was remotely clamoring for. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this movie. It has some fun moments and funny jokes
(Missy now being married to Deacon is hilarious), and Samara Weaving and Brigette
Lundy-Paine were pretty appealing as Bill and Ted’s daughters – probably even
more appealing than Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, Bill and Ted themselves (the
stoner portrayal no longer quite work in their age). But, in the end, I won’t care for it just
like I didn’t care for its predecessors.
The New Mutants
After getting plagued by delays, the last movie from the Fox X-Men
franchise was finally released in 2020.
And the movie turned out being as throwaway as how its release was
treated. I thought that this was going
to be a genre bending treat like Logan
and Deadpool – that it would be the
horror to Logan’s arthouse drama and Deadpool’s comedy. However, it happens to be just a bland, messy
film. It’s boring for the most part, and
it struggles to find its identity between a YA angst fest and a popcorn
superhero flick. Still, I could see that
there must be a good movie in it somewhere.
The concept of the premise is promising, and the cast is solid and the
characters they’re playing are cool (their personalities, however, are
hackneyed and badly written). Maybe if
it had more budget for the CGI, the script was given a few more rewrites, and a
more visionary director was hired, The New
Mutants would have been a standout.
I would love to see Anya Taylor-Johnson’s Illyana Rasputin/Magik in the MCU, though.
Jiu Jitsu
This is a bad, cheap sci-fi martial arts film. There are decent fight scenes, but they aren’t
mindblowing enough to make watching this movie worth it. I only picked it up because I thought it was
going to be a fun junk movie. There were
two main selling points: a.) the premise is a mix of Predator and Mortal Kombat;
and b.) remember Christopher Lambert’s Raiden in Mortal Kombat? Remember how
silly but extremely entertaining he was?
Now, imagine that character being in this movie, but played by Nicolas
Cage.
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