Things I Want from Movies (and did this film deliver them):
Engaging characters (no; no one is really likable or relatable at all)
Well-written dialogue that feels natural and helps develop our understanding of both characters and their environment (no; this is the sort of movie where the writers won't let the characters use contractions because they think always saying "does not" instead of "doesn't" is a shortcut to some sort of gravitas. It actually just makes everyone sound like they are doing a dramatic reading of an instruction manual. Also, almost every line delivered by anyone who isn't Bill Nighy is strained and clipped like some nugget of Tolkeinesque wisdom even when it's just some piece of incidental information. It's tiresome.)
Good acting (there are some good actors, but seeing them struggle with the terrible cliché dialogue was just depressing. Nighy looks like he is going to top himself.)
A well-evoked setting (no; heavily stylised cities can still feel vibrant and real, like Gotham or *Sweeney Todd*'s London, but this nameless city is just a big, empty, soulless playground for the Demons and the Gargoyles. It seems to have almost no civilian life and its stylings are Gothic but in a way that just looks copied-and-pasted from other movies, bringing nothing of its own style).
An interesting storyline (meh; I couldn't tell whether the plot was itself bad, or whether it was just the crap dialogue and unengaging characters dragging it down, but either way, I found it hard to care about what was happening).
Good pacing (no; the plot jumps forward tens and hundreds of years in a jarring fashion, characters who - from their perspective - haven't seen each other in hundreds of years are "dramatically reunited" two minutes of screen-time after we last saw them together, scientific breakthroughs occur in one night, etc.)
Nice visuals (no; the stark lighting and "grungy" cinematography are overdone to the point of becoming boring to look at. The world looks artificial and set-bound, and everyone has some kind of distracting Photoshop sheen on their skin. The special effects are just okay but sometimes look laid on top of the scene rather than part of it.).
Internal consistency (no; the movie doesn't play by its own rules: Demons and Gargoyles talk about "fighting in the shadows" moments before having a big pitched battle with hundreds of combatants right in the middle of a city. This huge city seems to have no cops most of the time, despite the fact that we see one get killed near the start, nor does it seem to have any bystanders or witnesses whenever the streets are filled with fire and the skies with flying monsters, despite showing us busy nightclubs and glittering shots of the skyline at other times).
I can't think of anything this film did particularly well.
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