Mark Wahlberg

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Spenser Confidential is a bad film so I wrote a bad review

    Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 20th March 2020

    This is going to be one of those reviews that mostly just describes what happens in the film, with no real insight into the plot or themes - not that there are much of either - but it's the only way I can think to get across how monumentally idiotic Spenser Confidential is. Another way would be telling you it's a direct-to-Netflix action movie starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by Peter Berg and letting you make up your own mind, but I had to suffer through it and now so do you.

  • Analysing THE SHEER INSANITY of a day in the life of Mark Wahlberg

    Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 13th September 2018

    Mark Wahlberg is most unlike you or I. For starters, he's a rich and famous celebrity, who is so rich and famous and blessed with over-confidence he can get away with inventing hypothetical scenarios whereby he averts the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and face almost no backlash. His career trajectory is uniquely insane, running the full gamut from teenage thug to white rapper to underpants model to Hollywood actor to hamburger magnate. And despite his obvious handicap of looking permanently like he's not sure what floor his lift just stopped at, Wahlberg is inexplicably popular, not just with people who go and see movies with titles like 'Max Payne' and '2 Guns', but with actual, credible filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese and James Gray. He's one of a select circle of actors - including Adam Sandler and Nicolas Cage - who can lurch from atrocious dreck to proper cinematic fare without even changing his facial expression.

  • We really need to talk again about Transformers: The Last Knight

    Movie Feature | Matt Looker | 17th July 2017

    This year has seen the first female-led superhero movie, two Apocalypse Now inspired monkey movies, a curtain call for Logan, a launch of Universal's Dark Universe, and the return of Cars, Captain Jack, Renton and Xander Cage. And yet there's only one film I can't get out of my head right now.

  • Transformers: The Last Knight

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 21st June 2017

    Michael Bay finally did it: he exploded history. Not content with retconning the dinosaurs in the last part of his ever-growing Transformers universe, Bay has now officially changed the course of human history. The Last Knight not only rewrites Arthurian legend (myth, history, whatever), it puts an Autobot spin on World War II, the mystery of Stonehenge and even Stephen Hawking, via scenes that stretch from the depths of outer space to the bottom of the ocean. It's a miracle there isn't a scene where we find out Jesus was a robot too: the Crucifixicon. It is, I shouldn't have to say but will, an extraordinary payload of absolute horseshit: a Buster Gonad-style wheelbarrow of bollocks that will leave you flabbergasted as to how incoherent, lazy and contemptuous it is. I should say, however, that I haven't laughed so much in a cinema in years.

  • The 13 most incredible sentences from Wikipedia's plot synopsis of Transformers: Age Of Extinction

    Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 19th June 2017

    I am just a man. I don't claim to be perfect. So even when I stun strangers with my sick film trivia knowledge and straight up dunk on the critics with my professionally-honed reviewing skills, know that there are still gaps in my viewing history. I have never seen Citizen Kane, for example, possibly due to a highly comedic mixup where, for a good few years, I thought it was a sitcom starring Robert Lindsay. I have never seen a David Lynch film, principally because I think I hate him, but still. Never have I ever seen a Kristoff Kieslowski film. I don't even know if that's how you spell his name, and I didn't even bother to check. And so, I humbly admit to you, precious reader, that I have never seen Transformers: Age Of Extinction. For shame.

  • Patriots Day

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 2nd March 2017

    How soon is too soon? Is it when the real-life victims of a tragedy are still raw from the experience? Is it when artistic licence just isn't appropriate for events that are still fresh in everyone’s minds? Is it when unseemly facts about those involved might detract from their otherwise brave and heroic actions? Or is it when - as is the case here - overcompensating for all of the above results in muddled, mawkish melodrama?

  • Daddy's Home

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 18th December 2015

    I have it. The secret of comedy. That which even the greats could not bottle and sell. Get a comedy actor guy, right, and stick him in a film with a serious actor guy, right, but then the SERIOUS actor guy says funny things too. See, Spy! Ride Along! 21 Jump Street! And now ... oh, wait.

  • Ted 2

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 3rd July 2015

    10-20 years from now, future generations will look back on this decade and cringe at how their parents and grandparents belly-laughed at the offensive, nonsense humour of Seth MacFarlane, in much the same way as we do now at old sitcoms from the 70s. Clips of Family Guy's most near-knuckle gags will be shown in TV documentaries that explain how the 2010s were a less civilised era, before society learned to behave like better people. Luckily, we are already on the cusp of more progressive times as the tide has started to turn against the squeaky-faced MacFarlane’s now-familiar string of stoner/racist/pop culture/left field references. 2015 is truly a cornerstone year as MacFarlane Fatigue has firmly set in and, on the basis of Ted 2, it's easy to see why.

  • Entourage

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 16th June 2015

    It is hard, as a fan of a TV show, to divorce yourself from your feelings for it and watch the end-of-series movie without prejudice. And probably you shouldn't: it's meant for you, as a sort of valedictory reward for your loyalty. But then releasing it in cinemas suggests a pitch to a wider audience, so while it might satisfy the existing viewer, as Entourage sort-of-just-about does, you wonder who else they're expecting to queue up for tickets.

  • Transformers: Age Of Extinction

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 3rd July 2014

    An age of extinction. Well, it does go on for ages, but Michael Bay's fourth Transformers movie, while offering some CGI spectacle to knock your block off, threatens the eradication of the human race but never treats the prospect with much more than an afterthought.