Bad Dads Film Review

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Cris review Message from the King, the 2016 revenge-action thriller directed by Fabrice Du Welz and starring Chadwick Boseman as Jacob King, a South African man who lands in Los Angeles with very little money, a very flimsy explanation for immigration, and one mission: find out what happened to his missing sister Bianca.

What begins as a missing-person search quickly turns into a grimy revenge story involving a horrible motel, a bag of clues, a trip to the morgue, Mediterranean gangsters, a bike chain wrapped around...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris review Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, starring Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a reclusive Oregon truffle hunter whose beloved pig is stolen in the night. On paper, it sounds like the setup for a strange little revenge thriller. In practice, it is something quieter and much sadder: a film about grief, food, memory, authenticity and the terrible fact that not every loss can be fixed.

The dads begin with Cage in full anti-Cage mode. Robin lives in the woods, barely speaks, looks as if hy...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris kick off Dan week with Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 South Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder, a bleak, funny and deeply unsettling film inspired by the real Hwaseong serial murders.

The film takes us to rural South Korea in the late 1980s, where a local police squad is completely unprepared for a serial-killer investigation. The opening crime scene says it all: a body in a drainage ditch, farmers and kids wandering around, clothes being handled, evidence being trampled, and the one useful footprint destroyed by...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris review Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue, the first part of the director’s famous trilogy inspired by liberty, equality and fraternity. This is the liberty one, although the film’s idea of freedom is less “joyful self-expression” and more “what if grief made you sell your life, bin the furniture, delete your feelings and move into a Paris flat with only a blue lamp for company?”

Juliette Binoche stars as Julie, a woman who survives the car crash that kills her composer husban...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris take aim at Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, the 1990 psychological cop thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis as rookie police officer Megan Turner, Ron Silver as Wall Street lunatic Eugene Hunt, Clancy Brown as Detective Nick Mann and Tom Sizemore as the unfortunate convenience-store robber who sets everything in motion.

The episode starts where the film starts: with a gun. A very lovingly photographed gun. The dads talk about the title sequence, Brad Fiedel’s industrial score, Bigelow’s moody New York visuals, and Megan’...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Reegs finish “Reach Around Week” with Jack Reacher, the 2012 Christopher McQuarrie action thriller starring Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s wandering ex-military investigator. After watching Alan Ritchson’s Prime Video version in the Midweeker, the dads now turn to the film that gave many book fans their first major complaint before the opening credits had even rolled: Tom Cruise is many things, but he is not 6'5".

The episode begins with the real main event, which is obviously walking football. The dads’ team has beaten Madeira 3–...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Reegs head to Margrave for the first episode of Prime Video’s Reacher, “Welcome to Margrave”, starring Alan Ritchson as Lee Child’s wandering ex-military policeman, blues enthusiast, pie-denied murder suspect and extremely large problem for corrupt small-town criminals.

The dads start with their own Reacher experience. Sidey has not read the books and is watching the series for the first time, Dan once started one but did not finish it, and Reegs is currently listening to Killing Floor, the first Jack Rea...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris take on Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, the Oscar-winning 2000 ensemble drama about the war on drugs, starring Michael Douglas, Benicio del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle, Luis Guzmán, Erika Christensen, Dennis Quaid and several thousand other people you recognise from better-lit rooms.

The episode begins with Reegs back from France, a heroic return to walking football, a 6–2 win, snacks from Grand Marché, Rioja on the table and the usual sense that the podcast might be more structured if anyone genuinely wanted that. Recent viewin...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Cris review Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton and Sydney Pollack. It is a legal thriller without grandstanding courtroom speeches, a corporate conspiracy movie without cartoon villains, and a George Clooney film where the star power is deliberately worn down into exhaustion, debt and moral compromise.

Sidey has loved this one for years, Cris remembers liking it, and Dan arrives as a Michael Clayton virgin after realising the “Michael” film i...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, the dads review Giant, the Prince Naseem Hamed biopic starring Amir El-Masry as Naz and Pierce Brosnan as legendary Sheffield trainer Brendan Ingle. It is a boxing film, a mentor-protégé story, a study of fame and arrogance, and a surprisingly knotty argument about whether loyalty, recognition and money can ever stay clean once a child prodigy becomes a multi-million-pound champion.

The episode opens with Reegs still absent in French France, which means no clever intro but plenty of warnings about swears an...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Dan, Sidey and Cris revisit Universal Soldier, the 1992 sci-fi action thriller from Roland Emmerich starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren as Vietnam soldiers killed in action, frozen, revived and turned into government-controlled super-commandos. Naturally, nothing about that plan goes wrong apart from absolutely everything.

The episode opens with the realisation that the podcast has not covered nearly enough Van Damme, despite some hazy memories around Bloodsport, Kickboxer and the sacred word “Kumite”. From there the dads head into...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Wolf Week continues as Sidey, Dan and new dad Jamie sink their teeth into Martin Scorsese’s riotous financial crime epic The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau and Joanna Lumley. 

With Reegs absent and therefore no proper intro to keep things vaguely professional, the dads begin by catching up on what they’ve been watching. Dan has largely swapped screen time for Cold War spy histories while his wife is away in the Czech Repub...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, it is Wolf Week, which means we are heading to the moors, the Tube, the London Zoo wolf enclosure and one of cinema’s all-time great transformation scenes for An American Werewolf in London.

Sidey and Dan are joined by guest dad Jamie for John Landis’s 1981 horror-comedy about two American backpackers, one very unwelcoming pub, and the worst possible way to discover that “stay on the road” was not just local colour.

Sidey had somehow never watched the whole film bef...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we review True History of the Kelly Gang, Justin Kurzel’s bleak, stylish and aggressively unromantic version of the Ned Kelly myth, starring George MacKay, Essie Davis, Nicholas Hoult, Charlie Hunnam and Russell Crowe.

Before we get to Australian outlaw trauma, we discuss the important stuff: Dan’s adult-nappy experiment, whether “pound a piss” is a viable subscription model, and Sidey’s long-standing policy of treating every body of water as a toilet.

Our top five i...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we review Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein’s A24 sports-hustle drama starring Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a table-tennis prodigy with Olympic-level confidence and almost no visible concern for anyone else.

Only Dan and Chris have done the homework this week, leaving Sidey and Reegs to interrogate them on the plot, the tone, the ping-pong, the Gwyneth Paltrow of it all, and whether Chalamet can truly carry a film when he still looks like a haunted Victorian child who has discovered hai...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, it is prison week — although with Riggs and Chris missing, Sidey and Dan are doing hard time as a two-man crew.

Before the main feature, we look at memorable prisons and prison stories from film, TV and music. That means everything from miscarriage-of-justice anger to escape-movie comfort food, brutal borstal drama, wizard prisons, sitcom prisons and, naturally, George Clooney being offensively cool in Out of Sight.

Along the way we discuss:

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we head back to 1938 for Angels with Dirty Faces, Michael Curtiz’s classic gangster drama starring James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan.

It is very much an old-school Hollywood crime picture — street kids, reform school, crooked lawyers, corrupt city rackets, priests, gangsters, ledgers, shootouts and plenty of “what do you say, what do you know?” patter — but the dads are surprised by how modern and effective parts of it still feel.

We start with young Rocky...

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we complete our accidental trilogy of “third things.” After covering Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the midweek show, we turn to Army of Darkness, Sam Raimi’s third Evil Dead film, and use that as an excuse to dig into the noble, messy and often suspicious art of the threequel.

There is no formal intro this week — time has apparently been attacked by Deadites — so we open with a catch-up on what everyone has been watching. Reegs has been busy with Backrooms, Obsessio...