Salmaan

Disappointing. It felt so rushed and underwhelming. It wanted to be a romance, horror and crime drama all at once. Visually, you could see the budget’s limitations. Gotham looked neutered here, void of any sort of soul or spirit. VFX and practical effects over-seasoned the sauce whilst the narrative had overcooked the steak. Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie were good additions but the rest of this cast was simply just not good enough. It felt uncanny at times, as if they were purposefully phoning it in. The film is plagued with underwritten characters, janky tonal shifts, and ear-grating dialogue. I wasn’t interested in anything that the film had going for itself besides a few moments of intense and interesting body horror. It’s just a standard supervillain movie that we’ve come to expect. I personally wanted it to be more. It had all the makings of a great experience but ultimately is held hostage by its budget constraints and is poorly executed; narrative, storytelling, visuals and violence. It simply lacked any sort of bite to leave a mark on me.

Felt like there was another level that hadn’t been explored here. It could’ve been more horrific but it chose to be safe and stick to the narrative’s intended path which was boring. What it did well was everything surrounding the whale and predicament that the character was placed in. I was hooked but wanted to reach the pinnacle of the experience but the film fell down the mountain in a Sisyphean manner.

The pacing in here is atrocious. I didn’t even get a room to breathe as it felt like the entire thing was running at 2x speed for no reason. It’s got great animations and is telling a narrative that isn’t bad but the edit is truly mind-boggling. It’s zapping from scene to scene as if it’s ticking off a checklist rather than existing with its premise. It soured what would’ve been a great original animated film, still things to like about it but just not at all what I expected or wanted.

Ehh, it’s pretty much standard practice. Intellectual property used to create a wider-franchise. It’s uninteresting at this point.