Thalcos Reviews

Joseph: King of Dreams (2000 Video)

Solid, but not great

[6/10 · 11 November 2000]

Prince of Egypt was a spectacular animated movie that blended seriousness, clever animation techniques, great voice actors, and a perfect soundtrack that avoided the pitfall of most modern animated movies - overbearing musical numbers.

Joseph King of Dreams came very close to matching Prince of Egypt in a lot of those areas. Though it's not quite as serious as Prince of Egypt, it deftly avoids any kind of slapstick comedy or cute animals. Ben Affleck gives a good performance, and the animation is near feature quality.

Where King of Dreams fails, however, is the music. The songs are not nearly as good as those in Prince of Egypt, tending to be more flowery and flighty. Furthermore, they interrupt the action in most cases and soon become overbearing. Prince of Egypt used songs to advance the story; the songs were in the background, and the characters rarely actually "sang onscreen." In King of Dreams, however, characters will break out into song in the middle of the action, and the song won't really have much to do with the plot of the movie. Fans of Disney animation probably won't have a problem with this, but I was disappointed in both the quality of the music and the timing of it.

The dream sequences in the movie were very well done, each having a surreal art style that reflected the dreamer.

If you were a fan of Prince of Egypt, you'll probably enjoy King of Dreams but be disappointed that Dreamworks didn't get Stephen Schwartz and Hanz Zimmer to do the music for this one.

The Fantastic Four (1994)

This movie is fantastically bad.

[2/10 · 22 August 1999]

Combine a really tedious opening 20 minutes, some awful dialogue, and bad costumes and you get this shelved version of the Fantastic Four. The overacting villains are amazingly weak -- Dr. Doom waves his hands around like he's directing air traffic the entire movie. The Fantastic Four themselves take themselves seriously, which is a plus, but the rest of the cast is hardly watchable. The plot is incomprehensible, and the special effects wanting. Some of the fight scenes -- which could have been cool -- are resolved with the screen spinning around and around like the old Batman television series. If you're a comic book fan, you'll cringe even more when you see that the Thing actually shrinks when he transforms into a rocky behemoth. Avoid this movie, watch one of the old Captain America television movies instead.

Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979 TV Movie)

A flawed but fun comic book movie

[22 August 1999]

A fun television movie. Captain America must uncover a plot by the malevolent terrorist Miguel, who plans to rapidly age the entire city of Portland, OR. Although the Captain's costume needs a bit of help (the helmet is pretty goofy), and the romantic lead is annoying, there's some good super feats and super gadgets evenly distributed throughout the movie. Get some friends who don't mind some comic book camp, and you'll enjoy it.