All war, no substance

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2016)

I like to pride myself on not being a fanboy of anything, not even Star Wars, the biggest franchise of all time, featuring one of the greatest and worst film trilogies of all time, both curtesy of George Lucas. So with "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" I tried to stay away from any reviews of this film, so after finally seeing it 4 days after release...I can say that the wait was definitely not well worth it. "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is a mostly flat film, from its unmemorable cast of characters to its poorly written script, say whatever you want about "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" being a carbon copy of A New Hope but at least that film introduced some memorable characters, there's NONE in this entire film, Jyn Erso can't hold a candle to Rey, Felicity Jones is a wonderful actor but there's just nothing in her performance, there's one emotional scene between her and a hologram of Mads Mikkelsen where she's trying SO HARD to cry but there's just nothing there, this is a Star Wars film that lacks any real heart, one of the complaints I hear about director Gareth Edwards is that he does not know how to direct actors, and that's pretty evident here, at least in his 2014 "Godzilla" reboot you had Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen as an emotional connection, there's none of that in this film, God bless Forest Whitaker but man is he overacting his ass off in this film, and so is Donnie Yen, but at least they're trying, Ben Mendelsohn as our villain of the film is absolutely wasted in this film, his villain is pathetic, he's either yelling at people or acting like a wuss in the film. Gareth Edwards delivers some very well executed action scenes but overall his direction just doesn't fit well with Star Wars, this isn't the Bourne films, this is Star Wars, put down the fricking camera for at least two fricking seconds. If it weren't for the last twenty minutes, I would have NOTHING positive to say about this film, this is STAR WARS we're talking about here. I can't wait to see what Rian Johnson has up his sleeves for Episode 8, hopefully it's much better than this sorry excuse for Star Wars.