Saturday Night occasionally descends into boring, clunky exposition with more than a few “chubby hmm” moments that don’t pass the sniff test. But its heart is in the right place, and that’s not nothing. The performances are solid across the board, but it’s interesting to see how much the tenor of the film changes when a genuine star like Rachel Sennod is on the screen. And Jon Batiste’s wonderful propulsive, anxiety-making soundtrack does an incredible job of underscoring the chaos of the story.
40 years later and this is still a magical experience. From a purely visual standpoint, it looks like nothing else, and every song on the soundtrack is a top-class banger. I watched it with my kids and they were completely rapt and delighted at pretty much every turn (their favourite character was the ’ello worm, naturally).
The fuckin balls it takes to trick an audience into thinking they’re just getting a sweet geri-action heist film by drawing cute comparisons to Mission Impossible films where the action isn’t running full speed across roofs and jumping impossible gaps but is instead just getting a thing down from a high place. But then to pull the rug and reveal the whole thing has been built above a deep, deep well of heartbreak that only occasionally bubbles to the surface? Incredible.
A slow burn horror about exhuming bodies to appease restless spirits. The film almost imperceptibly layers superstition upon superstition until there’s someone covered in blood and carving up pig carcasses and you’re like “okay, sure!” The middle section is old-school proper terrifying, to the point where the actual ending and final act feels like a tiny bit of a let-down. It went in a completely different direction than the rest of the film had me expecting. If I hadn’t been receptive or hadn’t allowed myself to be pulled along by the story, I can imagine it would cross the line into ridiculous. But I should also caveat this by saying there’s a strong possibility that this is another one of those films that probably has a deeper layer to the horror that I’m unable to tap into because of my ignorance of historical geopolitics in that region.
Rob Harvilla and Yasi Salek are my favourite music podcasters and Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessy are my favourite movie podcasters. So this special live episode was a delight.
The cartoon boi-oi-oing sound effects over the opening credits had me worried this was going to be just another extremely broad Soviet-bloc comedy. And for the most part, that’s exactly what this it delivers. But in the last act, when the timey-wimey shenanigans kick in, the film jumps into another gear with some of the most enjoyable time travel antics I’ve seen in a while. Really entertaining.
Some of you might know that I track the films I watch over on Letterboxd. Sometimes I even write about the films I watch over there too. For me, 2025 is the year of POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), so I’m going to publish anything I write about films here first before they go up to Letterboxd.
(Also I can’t wait to write about my system for this which is absolutely bonkers).
So I’m back-filling a few of the most recent watches here, which might mean a flood of new entries for any RSS subscribers. Sorry about that!
I try to avoid lazy “this film is like <other film>” comparisons but I feel like the Den of Thieves films actively invites them, being so blatant with their uhhh let’s call them “homages”? So if the original film is dirtbag Heat, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is dirtbag Ronin (“Ronin” is used as a callsign here and is one of the first words in the film ‐ like I said, blatant), or maybe dirtbag Oceans 12. Or maybe even dirtbag Miami Vice. Or maybe all of these things.
Point is, it has a very different vibe from the first film. Much looser. There’s less swagger and more swanning. Less out to impress the Boondock Saints crowd. More out to impress the Le Circle Rouge crowd .And it kind of suits it more? They have some fun with it, and they use Big Nick’s fish out of water schtick to great effect (“FUCK NATO!”).
Don’t get me wrong, despite its aspirations, this is still a very, very dumb film. But it’s never not entertaining and holy hell can Christian Gudegast film an action scene.
I’m delighted that Hollywood has started embracing sex again but I feel like I was oversold on how horny this film was. Not nearly as torrid or thrilling as it seems to think it is.
Apparently this started life as an episodic TV show for Disney+ and was hastily retrofitted into a full-length movie and oh boy can you can feel it. The obvious TV adaptation structure pokes through pretty hard, especially in the first half of the film. The songs, in particular, feel shoe-horned in. They’re completely forgettable and have no magic and really cement the feeling that we’re hitting the Aladdin: The Return of Jafar level of rushed cash-grabbery.
But what do I know? I asked my kids (9 and 6) if they thought this was better or worse than the original Moana and they said “much better” and they absolutely loved Maui’s “Can I get a Chee Hoo” song.
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