Infinite

If you enjoy reading my Spoiler-Free reviews, please follow my blog @ https://www.msbreviews.com I really appreciate Antoine Fuqua's career as a director. From the beloved classic Training Day to the highly entertaining The Equalizer films, Fuqua has demonstrated skillful handling of action sequences. As expected, Infinite delivers several fighting scenes and car chases, mostly riveting and quite enjoyable. The third act gets extremely over-the-top concerning the action set pieces, which are only tolerable due to a special yet underdeveloped character trait that ultimately justifies the more absurd moments. Mauro Fiore's camera work and Conrad Buff IV's editing are decent enough, but the last act features too much shaky cam and excessive cuts for my taste. Story-wise, that's where things get tricky. Ian Shorr's screenplay boasts a genuinely interesting premise with exciting world-building to support it. However, the tiresome voice-over from Mark Wahlberg - who offers a good performance just as the rest of the cast - holds heavy exposition that's then repeated in dialogues across the movie, stretching the runtime unnecessarily. This narration rarely adds anything relevant to the story or impacts the viewer's opinion about the protagonist. In addition to this, it's one of those films that carries tremendous storytelling potential but never reaches it. Personally, I truly find the concept intriguing, but its development doesn't leave the base of its premise. In fact, just by watching the main trailer, most of the world-building is given to the audience in those few minutes. Honestly, in better hands, this movie could have been the beginning of a new franchise with infinite - no pun intended- possibilities to make sequels, prequels, spin-offs, or even trigger the start of a TV show. As it is, Infinite is nothing more than an inoffensively entertaining flick that could have been much, much better. Rating: C

Pretty good watch, could watch again, and can recommend. I feel like I had a lot of problems with this movie. The concept is good, but not very cinematic, so it feels like they tried to add action to "Ad Astra". With Mark Wahlberg as the main protagonist, a lot of the movie, as I could think was "Somwon stohl mah teddy bwear" so that ruined the vibe a little. A large part of it is that the story takes place over centuries if not millenia, so clearly that's not part of the movie, so we miss out on caring about who these immortals are as characters. You're sort of just told to care about them. For at least part of the movie I identified with the villains more because their plan is actually laid out with some level of clarity and a surprising amount of reason: kill everyone and there is nowhere to resurrect. Sort of a fun interpretation of "When your enemy goes to ground, leave no ground to go to.". Ultimately this is a high end cast, with plenty of money behind the production, so it looks good, and has an interesting concept, but just sort of falls flat on the execution. I just never really cared about the characters.