The Bride! plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

“I would prefer not to”

(a response frequently uttered by females in this film, noting their independence from norms;

taken from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.

 The Bride! (Maggie Gyllenhaal)   rated R    127 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy).  To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows: 

⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.

WHAT HAPPENS: We begin with the ghost of long-dead Mary Shelly (Jessie Buckley) expressing frustration at not living long enough to publish an even-more horrific sequel to her famous Frankenstein novel.  Then we’re in 1936 Chicago where Ida (Buckley also), employee of top gangster Lupino (Zlatko Burić), has her consciousness taken over by Shelly, starts revealing her boss’ crimes, is thrown down stairs to her death by henchmen Clyde (John Magaro) and James (Matthew Maher).  Across town, the Frankenstein monster (Christian Bale)—now Frank—visits Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) who’s reanimated animals, so he, alive/lonely since 1810 wants her to create a companion which they accomplish not by piecing together body parts but bringing life back to a corpse which (for some reason I didn’t catch) is Ida, still possessed by Shelly.  Ida’s lost her memory so he tells her she’s Penelope (Penny), they’re married, she’s only scarred because of an accident, although she’s hesitant to embrace him yet.  They go to a movie starring his favorite song-and-dance man, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), then go dancing at a club where 2 men try to assault her so Frank kills them, tells her to leave him, but she stays.  They hitch a train to NYC, he kills a security guard who discovers them.  They arrive, go to another movie, but Shelly takes over, berates an obnoxious patron so they have to leave, end up at a big party where Frank meets Reed, dances like him, as does Penny who leads this whole crowd into wild, energetic moves.

 Then, Chicago Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his “secretary” (no lady cops, please) Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), tracing Frank’s murders, show up; Wiles recognizes Ida, but she kills a cop in the action that follows; she and Frank escape in a stolen car as they head to Niagara Falls.  The crime spree becomes national news leading to Lupino executing James for (mistakenly) thinking he didn’t kill Ida, sends Clyde to finish the job.  Wiles and Malloy are also on the trail of the monsters, catch up with them, Wiles tells Penny she’s actually Ida, then wounds Frank before she shoots Wiles in the foot.  Frank tells Ida/Penny the truth of her situation, just as Wiles tells Malloy he and Ida were going to take down Lupino, foiled when she disappeared; he retires, gives his badge to Malloy.  ⇒Clyde shows up, kills Frank (he was sure more resilient in those old Universal movies).  The Bride (her new self-chosen name) takes Frank’s body back to Dr. Euphronius, followed separately by Malloy and Clyde, with Clyde killing The Bride in the doc’s lab.  Malloy arrives with cops who arrest Clyde even as Shelly somehow encourages the doctor to revive the monster bodies which she does.⇐ If you’d like more plot details and production background, please go to this site.

SO WHAT? When this film first came out I was interested in seeing it due to my love of what it’s somewhat inspired by, Universal Studios’ Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), which is on my long-standing list of Personal Favorites.  In that older movie, a fine mix of horror and humor, we have Colin Clive as the reanimator (“It’s alive!”), Boris Karloff as the Monster, Ernest Thesiger as the hilarious fully-mad-scientist, Dr. Pretorius.  It also features Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelly, telling this tale, and, much later, the Bride created as a mate for the Monster, just as in The Bride! we have Buckley as both the ghost of Shelly and the evolving Ida/Penny/The Bride (makes it a bit confusing at times as to what she’s saying is actually Shelly talking or the ongoing evolution of Ida).  Other cinematic references briefly woven into what occurs in The Bride! include Ronnie Reed as a Fred Astaire-like on-screen charmer (with Penny seemingly as Ginger Rogers when she dances with him), Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), and Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974)—there could be others, but these are the ones which I recognized.

 

 Still, The Bride! is much more than a collection of movie references as it focuses on Shelly’s anger at not living long enough to publish her intended, more disturbing sequel to Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)—although in that novel there’s already a foundation for The Bride of Frankenstein as the Monster demands a mate but the doctor refuses (as is shown in del Toro’s film)—followed by her inhabiting revived Ida to put her literary intentions into reality, even as Bale’s Monster is more sympathetic than we’ve seen him before.  As in the David Rooney review below, some critics are not impressed with the DEI (if you will) emerging-female-consciousness attitudes screenwriter William Hurlbut provides here, but such rejection is countered by director Nicole Ackerman, whose article’s title, “Hollywood still isn’t ready for women to take risks,” makes clear how her argument will proceed, so I encourage you to read it as it provides a useful exploration of what Gyllenhaal seems set to accomplish with this film.  (Although you might well ask both why Shelly, who died in 1851, wasn’t able to write her intended sequel [even though she wrote several other books] given the first novel came out when she was 19 yet she died at 53, as well as why her ghost would wait until 1936 to seek her long-simmering revenge, but we shouldn’t be too demanding of what generally works as a fictional story, should we?)  Logic concerns aside, I found The Bride! to be fascinating in its concepts and unanticipated developments, a marvelously-unusual addition to Frankenstein lore, what Buckley should have gotten an Oscar for, not Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025).

BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: The Bride! opened in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on March 6, 2026 (taking in $12.7 million [$23.8 million worldwide]), but now is available on streaming where it rents for $9.99 from Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV, although many in the critical establishment dip into OCCU territory, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 57%, the Metacritic average score at a surprisingly-close 55%.  Despite such mediocre numbers, though, there are some who agree with my rating such as Caryn James of the BBC (MC 80%, 4 of 5 stars, same as me): “At times it's as if the film itself was stitched together from the parts of other movies, but collecting all those bits and pieces is a sign of Gyllenhaal's huge scope and ambition. […] For much of the film the Bride is more an idea of female empowerment than a person, and the presence of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, doesn't help. [… Yet] throughout, even when The Bride! is short on emotion, its bold vision is exhilarating.”  However, a more typical reaction comes from David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter (MC 40%): "In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s aggressively punky reconsideration of the reanimated monster spouse, she becomes a laborious study guide for a Feminism 101 class, emphatically indicating points on sexual violence, consent, bodily autonomy and female power. She even yells ‘Me too!’ late in the film. […] The implied terror is merely grating dialogue and a central performance so loud, fussy and mannered that it mutes any power to unsettle that the story might have had. […] If any of this were amusing or suspenseful or frightening or tender or soulful or something, it wouldn’t be such a joyless slog.”  Didn't like it, huh?

 

 For me, it’s no slog at all, just an intriguing collage of other cinematic elements which takes so many unexpected turns with Buckley and Bale providing nuanced elaborations on what we might know from previous depictions of these characters (including Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein [2025]—but with no presence of a Bride, despite the monster’s insistence—which earned another 4 stars from me).  Still, if the clear feminist foundation of this latest exploration of what happens when you bring someone back from the dead’s not fully appealing to you maybe you’ll like my standard device of a review-wrap-up Musical Metaphor, this time "The Monster Mash," a 1962 hit for Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (on their 1962 album The Original Monster Mash) which I was debating using as the film neared its end but thought “No, that’s too silly” until Gyllenhaal used it as the credits rolled, so if it’s good enough for her as another twist on The Bride’s tale it’s good enough for me.  Also, “For you, the living, this Mash was meant too”; if you sing along just say Two Guys sent you!

          

SHORT TAKES

                  

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

We encourage you to visit the Summaries of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list).  Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page.  We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!  Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.  You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us there in order to comment (FB procedures: frequently perplexing mysteries for us aged farts).

 

*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.

  

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please 

use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.

                    

OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.

             

Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 77,380.  (As always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers.)  Below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):

Apex plus Short Takes on some other cinematic topics

Danger on the Rocks (shaken, not stirred)

Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke

I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.  However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon.  (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)

My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”

(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)

However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.

           Apex (Baltasar Kormákur)   rated R    96 min.

Here’s the trailer:

        (Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size; 

        activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)

If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy).  To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows: 

⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.

WHAT HAPPENS: We begin with intrepid mountain-climbing couple Sasha (Charlize Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana) attempting to scale Norway’s treacherous Troll Wall when he tells her he’s tired of such demanding adventures (she’s not), then makes an unexpected exit when he slips, she can’t carry his weight, so she has to let him go in a fall to his death.  Then, 5 months later in tribute to him she goes to Australia’s Wandarra National Park to run the rapids in her kayak even though a ranger (Aaron Pedersen) says it’s a dangerous place for a lone traveler as there have been a lot of disappeared folks over recent years, but she moves on anyway.  At a gas station she’s harassed by 2 local hunters (Matt Whelan, Rob Carlton) until another guy, Ben (Taron Egerton), sends them away, then gives her a tip on where to start her journey.  The next day she maneuvers the rapids well, camps overnight, finds her backpack missing the next morning.  She continues down the river, comes upon Ben’s camp where he offers her some food and supplies, but also tells her he knows who she is, he’s the one who stole her bag (he gives it back), then pulls out a crossbow and starts a song on a boombox, telling her she’s got until the end of the song to try to get away from him.  She’s back on her kayak for awhile but falls out of it, runs along the riverbank with Ben in pursuit, occasionally shooting arrows at her, until she stumbles into a bear trap.  He opens the trap, takes her captive, then they go to a cave where bodies of those missing people hang (all dead now) because he’s fascinated by some lore of ingesting a person’s spirit by eating their liver (yes, that's an allusion to Hannibal Lector, as if we need anything more scary to be disturbed by in this eerie plot).  

 

 As she pretends to be close to him she bites off his ear, frees herself from her leg shackles, runs away, him in pursuit until a steep drop knocks him unconscious so she works on trying to remove her hand shackles until he revives, they struggle, she manages to damage his leg with a rock.  ⇒She convinces him they must go up the rock walls to escape this canyon, her climbing, him pulled up in a harness so he unlocks the handcuffs.  As she nears the top, hauling him part way up she loosens his rope so he falls to his death, allowing her to move past her ongoing guilt about letting Tommy fall.  She makes it to the top, hails down a passing car, tells everything to the ranger.  Later, she goes to the ocean to throw away Tommy’s beloved compass as she’s about to face the next phase of her life.⇐  (I’ve given you all the essentials, but if you want a bit more plot detail you can visit this site.)

 

SO WHAT? For these last 3 postings I’ve found my suggestion for something to see, then write about in The Week magazine (a publication I highly recommend for its summary coverage of national, international, entertainment, food, housing, tech topics), with my following those blurbs leading to some unusual cinematic experiences but with minimal OCCU response (Outcome [Jonah Hill] Rotten Tomatoes 31%, Metacritic 37%, me considerably more generous with 3 of 5 stars; Balls Up [Peter Farrelly] RT 26%, MC 34%, me even more generous with 3½ stars) so these choices weren’t disasters from my perspective, although I could easily see many might have faint interest in them.  This week’s choice, though, managed to get into CCAL territory (details in the next section below) with me and my wife, Nina, finding it even better than the scores from the critical establishment.  Nina calls it “gripping,” which relates well to the flow of the film’s plot while also being an unintentional pun on Sasha’s determined climbing up difficult rock walls at the beginning and end of this story (I have to wonder how much of what we see on screen is actually being done by Theron, what was the work of stunt doubles [no credits to such that I’ve seen] and/or what has been enhanced with computer graphics where there is acknowledgement given); no matter how these images came to be, though, they’re heart-stopping as Sasha carefully finds tiny crevices as crucial bare hand and foot holds to allow her desperate journeys up along these seemingly-sheer surfaces.  

 

 There’s little complexity to keep up with or become narratively-challenged here as the story clearly unfolds in a properly-structured, taut running time, with much of the imagery devoted to Sasha’s fearless handling of the swirling rapids or slowly, carefully making her way up those unforgiving rock walls so there’s lot of reason to be impressed with her wilderness skills, even in her various escape attempts.  At the other end of a spectrum of human personality attraction, Ben’s demented focus on self-sufficiency at all costs makes him an effective cold-blooded villain, easy to hate/be fearful of.  You may feel uncomfortable in those scenes of Sasha bound in various ways with her intended demise always on the verge of execution, yet she constantly proves herself capable of preventing Ben’s plan of simply adding her to his long list of overpowered victims.  If you’d like to explore a bit deeper about this film, go here (7:04 video, Spoilers of course) or you'll find even more at this site.

BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: As noted above, the CCAL’s considerably more supportive of Apex than they were of Outcome and Balls Up, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 65%, the Metacritic average score at a more-usual for them lower result of 57%; as also noted above, I found all of these to be more worthwhile than did the critical establishment, especially Apex, which you’ll be able to find only on Netflix where it’s free to subscribers or you can sample their catalogue for a month for $8.99 (with ads) or $19.99 (no ads, my choice).  If you’d like to see some agreement with my (humbly-noted always insightful) opinion, here’s John Anderson of The Wall Street Journal (whose 80% MC score matches my 4 of 5 stars): “It will prove a literally breathtaking adventure, depending on one’s phobias about heights, water and psychopaths. But it is an ordeal saga, a predator thriller with horror-film accents—and a considerable amount of violence and pain for the character played by the ageless Ms. Theron, who may be giving the most athletically demanding performance of her action-movie career.”  More like the CCAL averages is Guy Lodge (MC 70%) in Variety: “For this is, at heart, a proudly pleasurable B-movie lavished with the benefits of A-movie craftsmanship […] it’s a happy throwback to a time when more junk-food cinema got to look and sound and feel this good, albeit on a far bigger canvas.”  (It is very visually-dynamic.)

 But, you can always count on contrarians like Stephanie Zacharek (MC 50%) of Time: “Apex is efficiently made, and Theron is such an assured performer that she doesn’t allow the audience to linger unduly on Sasha’s suffering. But Apex fails to work either as a vehicle for sick thrills or an excuse for lots of feminist butt-kicking. Ben’s twisted misogynist savagery is exhausting from the start. It’s a wonder he doesn’t die in the movie’s first half, struck down by the deafening clatter of our collective eye rolling.”  Choose to watch or just sing along with my Musical Metaphor about Sasha’s ordeals with Ben, The Doors’ "Riders on the Storm" (1971 album L.A. Woman)—which I’ve used 9 times before, as lyrics like “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad […] If you give this man a ride / Sweet memory will die” give you a sense of the wealth of miserable situations I’ve encountered up on the screen.  Maybe next week’s offering will be of a more pleasurable nature.

          

SHORT TAKES

             

Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:

 

We encourage you to visit the Summary of Two Guys Reviews for our past posts* (scroll to the bottom of this Summary page to see additional info about your wacky critic, Ken Burke, along with contact info and a great retrospective song list).  Overall notations for this blog—including Internet formatting craziness beyond our control—may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  If you’d like to Like us on Facebook (yes?) please visit our Facebook page.  We appreciate your support whenever and however you can offer it unto us!  Please also note that to Post a Comment below about our reviews you need to have either a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.  You can also leave comments at our Facebook page, although you may have to somehow register with us there in order to comment (FB procedures: frequently perplexing mysteries for us aged farts).

 

*Please ignore previous warnings about a “dead link” to our Summary page because the problem’s been manually fixed so that all postings since July 11, 2013 now have the proper functioning link.

 

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here at the blog please 

use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work.

               

OUR POSTINGS PROBABLY LOOK BEST ON THE MOST CURRENT VERSIONS OF MAC OS AND THE SAFARI WEB BROWSER (although Google Chrome usually is decent also); OTHERWISE, BE FOREWARNED THE LAYOUT MAY SEEM MESSY AT TIMES.

              

Finally, for the data-oriented among you, Google stats say over the past month the total unique hits at this site were 71,591.  (As always, we thank all of you for your ongoing support with hopes you’ll continue to be regular readers.)  Below is a snapshot of where those responses have come from within the previous week (appreciation for the unspecified “Others” also visiting Two Guys’ site):