Bad Dads Film Review

This week we go fully corporate: Top 5 Corporate & Tech Jargon — the phrases designed to sound like progress while delivering absolutely nothing. We’re talking circle back, take it offline, pivot, blue-sky thinking, synergy, and the whole “results-driven ecosystem” dialect spoken exclusively by people who describe themselves as “thought leaders” on LinkedIn. Then we hit the main feature: Thunderbolts* — Marvel’s surprisingly sincere group-therapy movie disguised as an action film. Think T...

Bad Dads Film Review heads to the Italian Riviera this week for The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) — a sun-drenched, jazz-soaked psychological thriller where gorgeous people do terrible things, and the worst person in the room still somehow isn’t the guy committing the murders. We follow Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a small-time grifter with big social ambitions, who’s handed a golden ticket: travel to Italy and convince trust-fund prince Dickie Greenleaf (prime Jude Law, unfairly beautiful) to come ...

This week’s pick is Train Dreams: a quiet, meditative Netflix drama adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, following the life of Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton) — a logger and railroad worker drifting through early 20th-century America. It’s the kind of film that feels like a memory: sparse dialogue, heavy atmosphere, and a sense of time moving faster than any one person can keep up with. The opening sets the tone immediately: rail tracks, a tunnel, Will Patton’s voiceover, and an image that pa...

This week Sidey watched Roof Man on a flight—and it turned out to be a surprisingly breezy true-crime oddity: part heist caper, part rom-com, all built around one ridiculous (but real) idea. What it’s about Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a struggling Army vet and dad who turns his “situational awareness” into a criminal superpower. His method is brutally simple: hammer through roofs, drop in overnight, hit fast-food joints for cash, vanish. After dozens of robberies he finally gets ...

We went in expecting a messy anthology and came out with a genuinely original love letter to Oakland, 1987 — four stories that start as separate vibes and then click together in the final act like a mixtape that suddenly makes sense. The setup is pure mood: people spilling out of a cinema after The Lost Boys, a bright green “something in the air” glow hanging over the city, and a pulpy, comic-book style that flirts with Sin City / Scott Pilgrim energy. It’s stylish, funny, and—when it wants t...

We start this one the only way we know how: Pete quits his job (casually), we open a bottle of potentially corked wine (possibly poisonous), and then—somehow—end up reviewing Avatar 3, despite half the room not even watching Avatar 2. Pete’s approach is simple: he’s not here to defend or attack Avatar. He’s here to report back from the front lines of three hours and ten minutes of James Cameron doing what James Cameron does. The setup (in plain English) You’ve got: Jungle people (from Avatar ...

This episode begins, as ever, in total disarray: missed jokes, football updates, wine anxiety, and the creeping realisation that the best material always happens before the mic is on. Then Dan drops a bombshell: The Night Manager is so tense he physically struggled to finish it. And that’s the hook. Based on John le Carré’s novel, The Night Manager is a six-part espionage thriller starring Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, a hotel night manager pulled into a covert operation to bring down inte...

Benoit Blanc is back — but not in the way you might expect. In this episode, we dig into Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, and quickly realise this isn’t just another playful, sun-drenched whodunnit. The tone is darker, stranger, and far more morbid than Knives Out or Glass Onion, leaning hard into religious imagery, guilt, confession, and moral rot. Set around a remote church and a fire-and-brimstone priest, the film opens with what looks like an impossib...

Horns, Hostages, and Human Trafficking Santa – Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we go full Finland and unwrap a Christmas movie that answers the question nobody asked: what if Santa Claus wasn’t a jolly gift-giver, but an ancient, horned, child-snatching nightmare buried under a mountain? Our main feature is Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (dir. Jalmari Helander), a wintery sci-fi/horror-dark-comedy that feels like The Thing wandered into a folk tale, go...

Fairs, Fixed Games, and Failed Backhands – Islands (2024) This week on Bad Dads Film Review, we’re off to the fair and then straight to the Canaries for a slow-burn midlife crisis with added camel corpse. We kick off with our Top 5 Fairs – everything from sinister funfairs and pleasure islands that definitely aren’t safeguarding-approved, to world expos, tunnel-of-love metaphors, and the sheer horror of Simply Red – Fairground lodging itself in your brain for days. Along the way there’s a rol...

The Duellists (1977) & Top 5 Jewels – honour, obsession, and very stupid men with swords In this episode of Bad Dads Film Review, we kick things off with our Top 5 Jewels – a glittering mix of cursed stones, crime magnets and wildly impractical accessories. From the Pink Panther diamond and Uncut Gems’ black opal to Titanic’s Heart of the Ocean, Baz Luhrmann’s blinged-out Great Gatsby, Moana’s glowing heart of Te Fiti, and even that doomed chandelier in Only Fools and Horses, we rummage t...

Frankenstein (2025) – Tech bros, trauma, and a super-horny monster movie on Netflix Mary Shelley by way of Guillermo del Toro feels almost too perfect, and Frankenstein (2025) absolutely leans into that match-up: lush Gothic sets, grotesque body horror, tender fairytale beats, and a very modern anxiety about people who build things they can’t control. In this episode, the Bad Dads dig into Netflix’s lavish new take on the classic, framed in the icy Arctic as Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) ...

Christopher Walken, Larry Fishburne, and Abel Ferrara’s moral abyss of a movie. This week, the dads descend into King of New York, the neon-slick crime drama that turns Manhattan into a fever dream of violence, power, and warped justice. Walken plays Frank White, a freshly released drug lord who wants to “give back” — but only by murdering every rival and funding a hospital with blood money. His crew? Mostly Black. His moral compass? Bent beyond repair. His dance moves? Still pure Walken. Wha...

Starship Troopers (1997): Would you like to know more?We’re suiting up for Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously un-subtle space satire—where propaganda pops like bubblegum, the bugs aren’t the dumb ones, and “service guarantees citizenship.” We talk giant arachnids, bigger egos, and why so many people somehow missed the joke. What we cover The Federal Network effect: recruitment ads, newsreels, and how the film weaponises UI/UX to sell fascism with a smile.Rico’s journey: classroom ideology → boot-cam...

In this week’s episode we dive into Better Man, Michael Gracey’s glossy Robbie Williams biopic — the one where Robbie is portrayed as a CGI chimp. Yes, really. It’s a bold swing that reframes a familiar music-biopic arc with unexpected bite: boy-band manufacture, burnout, reinvention, and the messy business of becoming “Robbie” when “Robert” is still in the room. What we cover The Big Swing: Why the CGI chimp isn’t a gimmick for giggles but a visual metaphor for the “performing monkey” person...

The Ballad of Wallis Island This week, the dads swapped blockbusters for something quieter, sadder, and sneakily hilarious: The Ballad of Wallis Island, the melancholic comedy starring Tim Key, Tom Basden, and Carey Mulligan. In a remote Welsh idyll, a lonely lottery winner (Key) invites his favourite long-lost folk duo to reunite and perform a private gig just for him. What follows is a beautifully awkward, bittersweet exploration of nostalgia, grief, and the impossibility of recapturing th...

The dads return to their spiritual home — the grimy, neon-lit world of A24 — for Love Lies Bleeding, a wild, sweaty, steroid-soaked crime-romance from director Rose Glass (Saint Maud). Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager in a desert backwater who falls for Jackie (Katy O’Brien), a drifter and aspiring bodybuilder built like a Marvel origin story. Their chemistry is instant, their passion feral — and before long, they’re injecting more than just steroids together. But this love story’s la...

This week, the dads head into the mosh pit with Jeremy Saulnier’s brutal, claustrophobic thriller Green Room — where a struggling punk band finds themselves trapped in a neo-Nazi club after witnessing a murder. It’s one part siege movie, one part social horror, and all parts grim. When the Ain’t Rights take a last-minute gig deep in Oregon’s backwoods, they expect low pay and bad beer — not blood, dogs, machetes and Patrick Stewart as a terrifying skinhead ringleader. What follows is a night ...

This week we celebrate the late, great Robert Redford the Bad Dads way: with a chaotic Top 5 Roberts and a deep dive into All the President’s Men — the newsroom thriller where Redford and Dustin Hoffman painstakingly peel back Watergate until the whole presidency caves in. It’s cigarettes, typewriters, and journalism that actually mattered. What we get into Redford & Hoffman, peak charisma: why their odd-couple energy (and immaculate 70s fits) makes procedural journalism feel electric.The...

Jennifer Lawrence goes full-send comedy in No Hard Feelings, playing Maddie — a broke Montauk local hired by uptight parents to “de-awkward” their 19-year-old son before college. The setup’s spicy, the execution’s funnier than it has any right to be, and yes, we talk about that beach fight. What we dig into J-Law in chaos mode: fearless physical comedy, tight timing, and why this role works because it’s her.Awkward vs. raunchy: does the film land its sweet/icky tightrope walk?Age-gap discours...