Bad Dads Film Review

Bad Dads
  • 5.0 (16)
  • Film Reviews
  • Updated Semiweekly

Several years ago 4 self confessed movie fanatics ruined their favourite pastime by having children. Now we are telling the world about the movies we missed and the frequently awful kids tv we are now subjected to. We like to think we're funny. Come and argue with us on the social medias. Twitter: @dads_film Facebook: BadDadsFilmReview Instagram: instagram.com/baddadsjsy www.baddadsfilm.com

  1. 5d ago

    Dentists, Teeth & Pig

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris review Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, starring Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a reclusive Oregon truffle hunter whose beloved pig is stolen in the night. On paper, it sounds like the setup for a strange little revenge thriller. In practice, it is something quieter and much sadder: a film about grief, food, memory, authenticity and the terrible fact that not every loss can be fixed. The dads begin with Cage in full anti-Cage mode. Robin lives in the woods, barely speaks, looks as if hygiene has become an optional philosophy, and shares his cabin with the pig who helps him find valuable truffles. His only regular contact is Amir, played by Alex Wolff, a young buyer who arrives in a yellow Camaro, listens to self-improvement classical-music lessons, and seems desperate to perform the role of a successful man. When Robin is attacked and the pig is taken, the film appears to be lining up a “John Wick with a pig” story. Instead, Robin and Amir move through a hidden Portland restaurant underworld where reputation matters more than violence. The trail takes them from a furious pork-belly seller to junkies in a trailer park, then into an underground service-worker fight club where Robin simply allows himself to be beaten so that the right people will remember his name. That name is the key to the film. Robin Feld was once a legendary chef, and the city’s food world still treats him like a myth. The dads especially enjoy the restaurant scene at Eurydice, where Robin confronts a former employee now trapped in a sterile fine-dining performance. He does not shout or threaten him. He just tells him that the food is technically correct but dead, reminds him of the honest pub he once wanted to run, and gently dismantles the life he has built around pretending. The conversation naturally detours into fine dining, restaurant pretension, Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay, The Fat Duck, street food in Bangkok, and whether chefs are artists, monsters, addicts, or simply people who would like to smoke something and go home. Cris, having actually worked with chefs for decades, is particularly unconvinced by the romantic idea that a chef would remember exactly what every customer ate years earlier. The emotional climax comes when Robin cooks for Darius, Amir’s father, who arranged the theft. Rather than fight him, Robin recreates a meal he once cooked for Darius and his wife, a meal Amir remembers as one of the only happy moments from his childhood. The food unlocks memory and grief, and Darius finally admits the truth: the pig was killed the night she was stolen. Robin’s search was already too late. The ending refuses easy satisfaction. Robin does not get revenge, does not rescue the pig, and does not return to the life he had before. He washes the blood from his face, goes back to the cabin, and finally listens to the tape of his late wife singing Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.” Reegs finds that lack of catharsis frustrating at first but ultimately fitting, because life does not always end with you getting your pig back. Verdicts are positive. Sidey enjoys the quieter Nicolas Cage performance and gives it a bacon recommend, even though he wanted the pig restored. Dan appreciates the 90-minute runtime, the odd characters and the way the film uses cooking rather than violence as its final weapon. Reegs likes that it resists the revenge-thriller version of itself and becomes a parable about grief and letting go. Cris enjoys the look and mood, while remaining extremely suspicious of all chef mythology. So the Bad Dads verdict on Pig is a bacon recommend: a small, mournful, oddly funny Nicolas Cage film that promises a stolen-pig revenge quest and instead gives you blood, truffles, restaurant trauma, Springsteen, and the painful truth that sometimes the pig is not coming home. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Dentists, Teeth & Pig

  2. Sep 30

    Midweek Mention... Memories of Murder

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris kick off Dan week with Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 South Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder, a bleak, funny and deeply unsettling film inspired by the real Hwaseong serial murders. The film takes us to rural South Korea in the late 1980s, where a local police squad is completely unprepared for a serial-killer investigation. The opening crime scene says it all: a body in a drainage ditch, farmers and kids wandering around, clothes being handled, evidence being trampled, and the one useful footprint destroyed by a tractor. From there, the dads follow a case built on hunches, violence, false confessions and the painful absence of proper forensic tools. At the centre is Detective Park, played by Song Kang-ho, who believes he can spot guilt by looking into someone’s eyes. He clashes with Detective Seo from Seoul, who arrives with more method and a belief in evidence, but the longer the case goes on, the more the film shows how easily procedure can collapse into obsession. Park starts as the thug with the hunches, Seo starts as the rational outsider, and by the end those roles have become horribly unstable. The dads dig into the police culture that Bong presents almost as black comedy: suspects beaten into saying what officers want to hear, tape recorders paused so confessions can be corrected, footprints fabricated, and vulnerable people dragged into the woods and threatened. It is often absurdly funny in the moment, but the joke curdles because the consequences are catastrophic. People are brutalised, leads are lost, evidence is ruined, and the killer keeps going. They also talk through the killer’s ritual: rainy nights, women in red, a particular binding method, underwear over the head, and a recurring radio song request that becomes one of the investigation’s key clues. The female officer is the one who pieces together the song pattern, despite being ignored and patronised by the men around her, which makes her one of the few genuinely competent figures in the film. As the case develops, the film keeps swerving between tension and farce. There is the traumatised survivor who remembers the killer’s soft hands, the suspect in women’s underwear who turns out to be guilty of something much less murderous but still deeply awkward, and the quiet factory worker who seems to fit too many pieces of the puzzle while still leaving the police without proof. The dads especially focus on the way Bong refuses to turn the film into a satisfying puzzle-box mystery. The point is not just who did it, but what happens when the people chasing him are violent, panicked and under-equipped. The ending leaves a mark. Years later, Park returns to the original site and learns that an ordinary-looking man had recently visited and said he had done something there long ago. The killer, if that is who it was, looked completely normal. Park’s final stare into the camera becomes the film’s last accusation: at the killer, at the failed system, and maybe at the audience too. Verdicts are broadly warm but mixed around the edges. Dan admires the direction and performances but does not rank it among his favourite Korean films. Cris finds the tonal shifts confusing and thinks the film is too long. Sidey thinks it drags a little and shows Bong still refining his craft, but he enjoys it and gives it a strong recommend. Everyone recognises the power of a film that turns a serial-killer story into something stranger and more troubling: a blackly comic study of incompetence, brutality and unresolved guilt. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Midweek Mention... Memories of Murder

  3. Sep 25

    Blue & Three Colour: Blue

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris review Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue, the first part of the director’s famous trilogy inspired by liberty, equality and fraternity. This is the liberty one, although the film’s idea of freedom is less “joyful self-expression” and more “what if grief made you sell your life, bin the furniture, delete your feelings and move into a Paris flat with only a blue lamp for company?” Juliette Binoche stars as Julie, a woman who survives the car crash that kills her composer husband and young daughter. After a failed suicide attempt, she decides not to die but to detach from everything: the house, the music, the money, the memories, the people and any emotional bond that might hurt her again. Unfortunately for Julie, life keeps refusing to leave her alone. A witness from the crash returns her necklace, a neighbour draws her into an unlikely friendship, Olivier tries to complete the great unfinished concerto, and the discovery of her husband’s pregnant mistress forces Julie to confront what compassion might look like after devastation. The dads talk about the huge Prime subtitles, the opening crash, the funeral, the failed overdose, the destroyed manuscript, the swimming-pool scenes, the blue lighting, the sugar cube, the street musician, Lucille and the sex club, Julie’s mother, the mistress Sandrine, the concerto for Europe, and the way the film uses reflections, glass, music and sudden cuts to black to show memory and grief breaking through Julie’s carefully constructed numbness. Verdicts are a clean sweep. Dan finds the filmmaking so strong that the heavy subject matter becomes surprisingly easy to watch, and he now wants to see the rest of the trilogy. Sidey thinks some viewers might accuse it of being pretentious, but for him the story is simple, moving and beautifully made, with Juliette Binoche giving an exceptional performance. Reegs loves it and calls it a banger. The official Bad Dads verdict: a strong blue recommend. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Blue & Three Colour: Blue

  4. Sep 23

    Midweek Mention... Blue Steel

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris take aim at Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, the 1990 psychological cop thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis as rookie police officer Megan Turner, Ron Silver as Wall Street lunatic Eugene Hunt, Clancy Brown as Detective Nick Mann and Tom Sizemore as the unfortunate convenience-store robber who sets everything in motion. The episode starts where the film starts: with a gun. A very lovingly photographed gun. The dads talk about the title sequence, Brad Fiedel’s industrial score, Bigelow’s moody New York visuals, and Megan’s disastrous first day on the job, where a justified shooting quickly becomes a professional nightmare because the weapon disappears from the crime scene. Unfortunately for Megan, the man who takes it is Eugene Hunt, a witness who becomes obsessed with both the gun and the woman who fired it. From there, Blue Steel turns into a strange mix of cop thriller, stalker movie, serial-killer melodrama and sweaty gun psychosexuality. Eugene scratches Megan’s name onto bullets, kills strangers, romances her under false pretences, reveals himself far too early to be sensible, and then gaslights his way out of trouble with the help of a lawyer. Megan, meanwhile, keeps telling the truth and keeps being doubted by almost everyone around her, including the police force that supposedly brought her back in to help. The dads dig into what works and what really does not: Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop nobody believes, Ron Silver going full mega-acting mode, Clancy Brown’s strong hair and unexpected nudity, Tom Sizemore’s brief but important appearance, the father subplot, the gender politics, the fetishised gun imagery, the rain, the smoke, the subway shootout, the hot dog stand, and the ending that suggests Megan’s next enemy may be internal affairs. Verdicts are all over the place in the best Bad Dads tradition. Sidey enjoys the brisk runtime, the style and the villain. Dan gives it something like a medium-to-blue recommend, mainly for Ron Silver and the direction. Cris is still annoyed about paying £2.50 to rent it and bailing out halfway through. Reegs admires the look and the lurid energy while also noting that Megan Turner may be one of cinema’s more catastrophically questionable police officers. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Midweek Mention... Blue Steel

  5. Sep 18

    Short People & Jack Reacher

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Reegs finish “Reach Around Week” with Jack Reacher, the 2012 Christopher McQuarrie action thriller starring Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s wandering ex-military investigator. After watching Alan Ritchson’s Prime Video version in the Midweeker, the dads now turn to the film that gave many book fans their first major complaint before the opening credits had even rolled: Tom Cruise is many things, but he is not 6'5". The episode begins with the real main event, which is obviously walking football. The dads’ team has beaten Madeira 3–0, Dan has scored, Sidey is still protecting his clean-sheet record, and the squad has somehow been told off at half-time despite being ahead. Christian is missing after a suspected bout of sunstroke, while recent viewing includes Reegs watching The Patient, Dan falling into YouTube pinball and arcade content, Sidey continuing through Barry, and a new version of The Grand Tour that appears to have enough Amazon money behind it to launch a car into another tax bracket. Before the film, the Top 5 theme is short people, or at least people who are not especially tall. That means Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Hepburn, the Oompa-Loompas, Mickey Rooney, Martin Short, Al Pacino, Daniel Radcliffe, Prince, Danny DeVito, Verne Troyer, Hervé Villechaize, Warwick Davis, Charlie Chaplin, Napoleon, Michael J. Fox and Michael J. Anderson all come up in a list that moves freely between Oscar history, Jersey trivia, Austin Powers, Twin Peaks, Bill & Ted, The Simpsons, Purple Rain and the frankly irresistible existence of a 2 foot 9 Filipino action star called Weng Weng in For Your Height Only. Then it is time for Jack Reacher, which opens with a cold and nasty sniper sequence. A man sets up in a parking garage, watches ordinary people through a rifle scope and kills five of them in public. The sequence is not especially gory, but the dads find it grim and effective, especially because the victims seem so arbitrary. The police quickly gather evidence pointing to James Barr, an ex-army sniper with previous, and the case appears open and shut until Barr writes one message during interrogation: “Get Jack Reacher.” Reacher arrives already wrapped in myth. The authorities describe him as a decorated military-police ghost with a ridiculous list of medals, only for him to appear at the door before anyone can find him. He knows Barr from the army and once warned him that if he ever killed again, Reacher would come for him. That means he is not initially there to prove Barr innocent; he is there to make sure the right punishment lands on the right man. Rosamund Pike plays Helen Rodin, Barr’s defence lawyer and the daughter of the undefeated district attorney. Reacher agrees to investigate while sending Helen to learn about the victims, because he has already started to suspect that five random deaths may not be random at all. From there, the film becomes a conspiracy thriller about a staged mass shooting, a framed sniper, a murdered woman who may have been the real target, and a corrupt network hiding behind official certainty. The dads enjoy several of the action beats. Reacher’s bar fight works because he predicts exactly what will happen before it happens, tells the men they wanted it, and then has to take a few shots while still finishing the job. The car chase is a highlight, partly because the film goes out of its way to show that Cruise is really doing the driving, with clean practical shots rather than incoherent cutting. Robert Duvall also turns up as Cash, a grizzled shooting-range owner who only agrees to help after making Reacher prove he can still hit the target, because apparently crucial murder evidence must sometimes be unlocked through old-man range banter. Werner Herzog is the secret weapon as the Zec, a shadowy villain with a damaged eye, a Gulag backstory and the sort of voice that makes every line sound like a cursed bedtime story. The dads particularly enjoy the scene where he demands a subordinate prove his worth by chewing off his own fingers, because the Zec once did exactly that to survive. Herzog is so strange and sinister that the only real complaint is that the film does not use him more. The final stretch takes the story to a quarry, because action thrillers love a quarry almost as much as they love corrupt cops. Cash provides sniper support, Reacher works his way through the henchmen, fights Jai Courtney’s Charlie, exposes Detective Emerson as part of the plot, rescues Helen, and then deals with the Zec in the most Reacher way possible. The villain explains that prison will not scare him and that the case may not stick, so Reacher shoots him. When Helen asks what happened to justice, he says he just delivered it. Verdicts are positive but qualified. Dan thinks the film was more fun to discuss than to watch and prefers Alan Ritchson as the physical idea of Reacher, though he still credits Cruise’s stunt work and the film’s better action moments. Reegs also prefers the series but sees this as a solid, well-made, pulpy thriller with patient pacing and clear set pieces. Sidey likes the procedural shape, the conspiracy reveal, the car chase, Robert Duvall and Werner Herzog, but finds the film grey and a little sterile, and thinks Reacher’s low-charisma wandering-avenger persona can be hard to fully love. So the Bad Dads verdict is a moderate-to-strong recommend: Jack Reacher is not the definitive version of the character, and Tom Cruise is never going to be the 6'5" human wall from the books, but as a tough, slightly overlong, well-staged action conspiracy thriller, it does enough. Also, any film where Werner Herzog quietly explains finger-eating survival tactics deserves at least some respect. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Short People & Jack Reacher

  6. Sep 16

    Midweek Mention... Reacher

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Reegs head to Margrave for the first episode of Prime Video’s Reacher, “Welcome to Margrave”, starring Alan Ritchson as Lee Child’s wandering ex-military policeman, blues enthusiast, pie-denied murder suspect and extremely large problem for corrupt small-town criminals. The dads start with their own Reacher experience. Sidey has not read the books and is watching the series for the first time, Dan once started one but did not finish it, and Reegs is currently listening to Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel, on audiobook. This naturally becomes a brief celebration of audiobook actors, a debate about whether Ritchson has borrowed from the narrator’s delivery, and the important possibility that Jack Reacher might be read by Alan Carr or Julian Clary in another, better universe. The episode itself wastes no time establishing the essentials. Someone is murdered in the dark by a professional-looking killer, the body is beaten after the shooting, and then Reacher arrives in town as a pair of boots, shoulders and pure physical inconvenience. He spots a man being aggressive to his partner outside a diner, says almost nothing, and the man wisely decides that perhaps today is not the day to find out what happens if you square up to a human wall. Reacher then enters the diner, orders the famous pie he has been told about, and is arrested before he can properly eat it. The police cannot get handcuffs around his wrists, so they use cable ties, which tells you most of what the show wants you to understand about Alan Ritchson’s version of the character. Detective Finlay, a Harvard-educated outsider in a tweed suit, interrogates him, only for Reacher to dismantle the murder theory, explain that there were multiple people involved, and profile Finlay’s life with the calm confidence of Sherlock Holmes after a very aggressive protein phase. The dads follow the plot through Hubble, the terrified banker who confesses to a murder he clearly did not commit, the mysterious phone number hidden in a shoe, Chief Morrison’s suspiciously convenient evidence, and the decision to send Reacher and Hubble to prison for the weekend while the police chase bus-company footage. In prison, Hubble immediately becomes fresh meat and Reacher immediately becomes the one person you would want standing between you and everyone else. He gives Hubble practical advice, refuses a cavity search on legal grounds, and then demonstrates his conflict-resolution style: a tiny bit of verbal warning followed by broken noses, eye gouging and very efficient shower-room violence. The appeal, as the dads see it, is not subtle but it is very effective. Reacher is huge, clever, calm, decorated, right about nearly everything and capable of doing horrible things to people who have earned them. Reegs describes him as a hulking serial killer crossed with Sherlock Holmes, while Dan lands on “Sherlock Schwarzenegger.” The show leans into that fantasy rather than apologising for it, especially once Finlay discovers Reacher’s military-police background, secret medals and experience leading the 110th Special Investigations Unit. The first episode ends by making the case personal. After Reacher and Hubble are released, Reacher is allowed into the morgue, where he studies the body and realises before anyone says it out loud that the murdered man is his brother. It is a strong cliffhanger, and Dan admits it worked well enough that he and his wife carried on through the whole season together, partly because the show keeps dropping just enough cliffhanger bait to make the next episode very easy to press. There is also the unavoidable comparison with Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, though the dads try not to completely give away the film-review conversation. Alan Ritchson feels much closer to the book’s conception: enormous, intimidating and physically central to every scene. Reegs likes the way the character’s size informs his philosophy, especially the idea that Reacher hates seeing bigger people push smaller people around and exists to push back harder. That gives the violence a simple moral shape, even when the show is gleefully pulpy about it. Verdicts land warmly. Dan thinks the series is predictable and guilty-pleasure television, but also very watchable and stronger than the film version they are about to discuss elsewhere. Sidey is a little weary of the mysterious stranger arriving in a small town as a one-man army, but thinks this is a good version of that setup, likes Ritchson, and may download more for a no-Wi-Fi trip. Reegs is firmly on board, praising Ritchson, the character and the way the later seasons apparently widen the idea of who Reacher is beyond medals, machine guns and being very difficult to handcuff. So the Bad Dads verdict on Welcome to Margrave is a strong recommend: pulpy, chunky, well-shot Amazon action comfort food about a giant clever man arriving in a corrupt town, not getting his pie, and making that everyone else’s problem. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Midweek Mention... Reacher

  7. Sep 11

    Soderbergh Movies & Traffic

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan, Reegs and Cris take on Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, the Oscar-winning 2000 ensemble drama about the war on drugs, starring Michael Douglas, Benicio del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle, Luis Guzmán, Erika Christensen, Dennis Quaid and several thousand other people you recognise from better-lit rooms. The episode begins with Reegs back from France, a heroic return to walking football, a 6–2 win, snacks from Grand Marché, Rioja on the table and the usual sense that the podcast might be more structured if anyone genuinely wanted that. Recent viewing includes Dan on Early Man, Ted Lasso and Grown Ups, Reegs going deep into Reacher, Cris bringing a bit of cartel-adjacent homework energy, and Sidey watching Barry plus Netflix serial-killer thriller The Whisper Man, a film he enjoys until the last-minute ghost business turns up and starts knocking over the furniture. Before the main film, the dads count down Steven Soderbergh and Soderbergh-adjacent favourites. Cris explains how Benicio del Toro led him towards Traffic and Che, while the conversation takes in the myth and reality of Che Guevara, Soderbergh’s habit of editing and shooting under pseudonyms, and the frankly annoying fact that he appears to have made several films since this paragraph began. The list includes Solaris, Contagion, Syriana, Logan Lucky, Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Thirteen, Haywire, Her, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Sidey’s beloved Out of Sight, which he still considers a 10-out-of-10 film thanks to Clooney, J-Lo, Luis Guzmán, Catherine Keener, David Holmes and the sort of charm that should probably be illegal. Then it is time for Traffic, a film the dads remember as serious, long, colour-coded and very much trying to win awards, which, to be fair, it did. The review follows the film’s interlocking stories: Javier Rodriguez trying to do good police work in Mexico while the system around him is already captured by cartel politics; DEA agents Montel Gordon and Ray Castro attempting to protect an informant long enough to bring down Carl Ayala; Helena Ayala discovering that being a wealthy pregnant society wife becomes much more complicated when your husband is dragged away by federal agents; and Robert Wakefield becoming America’s new drug czar just as his own daughter Caroline falls into addiction. The dads dig into the film’s bleak central point: the drug war is not really a war that can be won, because every apparent victory is also part of somebody else’s business model. Sidey describes the film as showing where drugs come from, how they move, how people try to stop them, where demand lives and why the whole machine is so futile. Cris particularly likes the Mexico storyline and the way the film’s colour palette helps you instantly know which world you are in, while Reegs connects the whole thing to the kind of institutional fatalism later explored in The Wire. A major talking point is the subtitle disaster. Dan and Sidey both watched versions where the Spanish sections were not properly translated, which is not ideal when huge parts of your Oscar-winning bilingual drama are in Spanish. Dan’s version apparently just told him people were “speaking Spanish”, which he had already managed to work out by being awake. Reegs uses this as a chance to grumble, correctly, about the loss of physical media and the way streaming platforms can serve up broken versions of films without anyone seeming to care. The film itself gives the dads plenty to chew on: Benicio del Toro’s quiet moral centre, the funfair arrest and “don’t shoot the clown”, Luis Guzmán’s excellent Ray Castro and his brutal car-bomb exit, Catherine Zeta-Jones going from shocked wife to ruthless operator, Dennis Quaid sniffing around the Ayala money, Caroline Wakefield’s awful spiral, Michael Douglas having to confront the war on drugs happening in his own house, and Javier’s beautifully modest final request for electricity so kids can play baseball at night. Verdicts are positive, but not breathless. Sidey thinks Traffic is extremely well made, handheld, fluid, serious and still strong, but also calls it a one-and-done rather than a film he would rush to revisit. Dan struggles more, partly because the missing subtitles kneecapped the experience and partly because the film is long, worthy and occasionally lost up its own arse; if forced to choose, he is watching Gladiator twice before watching Traffic twice. Cris is warmer on it, praising the acting, the structure, the Mexican material and the way the separate stories connect without turning into a neat crossover event. So the Bad Dads verdict lands somewhere between strong recommend and medium-well: a serious, grown-up Soderbergh drama about drugs, power, money, family and futility, admired more than loved, and improved enormously if your streaming service can manage the advanced technical feature known as subtitles. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Soderbergh Movies & Traffic

  8. Sep 9

    Midweek Mention... Michael Clayton

    This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Dan and Cris review Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton and Sydney Pollack. It is a legal thriller without grandstanding courtroom speeches, a corporate conspiracy movie without cartoon villains, and a George Clooney film where the star power is deliberately worn down into exhaustion, debt and moral compromise. Sidey has loved this one for years, Cris remembers liking it, and Dan arrives as a Michael Clayton virgin after realising the “Michael” film in his head was actually Michael Collins. The dads begin with the film’s strange, non-linear opening: Arthur Edens spiralling through a voiceover, Michael being dragged away from a backroom poker game to clean up a rich client’s hit-and-run, and the early reminder that Clayton may have a fixer’s reputation but he is not a miracle worker. He can tell a man to face the music; he cannot make the consequences vanish. The review digs into Clayton as a man trapped by other people’s mess. He is the firm’s problem-solver, not a partner. He has an ex-DA past, a failed restaurant business, a brother whose addictions helped put him in debt, and an $80,000 hole that makes him useful to Sydney Pollack’s Marty Bach. Clooney plays him as tired rather than cool: still sharp, still well-dressed, but visibly sick of being sent into the night to mop up disasters for people richer and worse than him. At the centre of the film is Arthur Edens, played brilliantly by Tom Wilkinson. Arthur’s breakdown during the U-North deposition is spectacular and humiliating, but the dads keep coming back to the idea that his madness is tangled up with moral clarity. He has spent years defending a company whose weed killer has damaged and killed people, and once he finds the smoking-gun memo proving U-North knew the truth, he can no longer keep doing the job. His obsession with Anna, one of the plaintiffs, and with the fantasy book Realm and Conquest gives the film its odd spiritual thread, leading eventually to the horses on the hill that save Michael’s life. Tilda Swinton’s Karen Crowder becomes the face of corporate panic. The dads talk about her sweaty armpits, her rehearsed speeches, her desperation to satisfy U-North’s board and her terrible decision to hire surveillance operatives who turn into assassins. Arthur’s murder is one of the episode’s key talking points because it is so coldly procedural: no big struggle, no dramatic villain speech, just sedation, injection, staged suicide and the awful efficiency of people doing a job. As Michael follows the clues Arthur left behind, the film becomes a study in compromised people trying to survive a rotten system. He finds the marked book, learns about the memo, realises Arthur had thousands of copies printed, and starts to suspect that the suicide story is nonsense. Yet when Marty offers him the money he needs, Michael takes it. That is part of what makes the film work for the dads: he is not pure. He sells Arthur out for $80,000 before finding his way back to something like decency. The finale is pure thriller satisfaction. After the bomb in Clayton’s car fails because he has walked up the hill to look at the horses from his son’s book, he confronts Karen at the U-North settlement meeting. She thinks he is dead, then thinks he can be bought. Michael pushes her into saying enough, reveals he is wearing a wire, and walks away as her world collapses behind him. The final taxi ride, with Clooney silently processing everything as the credits roll over his face, gets praised as a perfect ending. Verdicts are emphatic. Sidey gives Michael Clayton the strongest possible recommend and says he could watch it again immediately. Dan calls it one of the best midweek films the podcast has done this year and wants more undiscovered films like it. Cris loves that the legal world is not glamorised: it is late-night rooms full of lawyers billing hours, protecting corporations and turning human cost into numbers. The dads praise the whole cast, especially Clooney’s pared-back performance, Wilkinson’s haunted intensity, Swinton’s Oscar-winning panic and Pollack’s completely believable law-firm authority. In short: a brilliant grown-up thriller about corporate greed, moral exhaustion, legal compromise and the terrifying power of a memo everyone wants buried. You can now text us anonymously to leave feedback, suggest future content or simply hurl abuse at us. We'll read out any texts we receive on the show. Click here to try it out! We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.   Until next time, we remain...   Bad Dads

    Midweek Mention... Michael Clayton
See All (648)

Trailer

5
out of 5
16 Ratings

About

Several years ago 4 self confessed movie fanatics ruined their favourite pastime by having children. Now we are telling the world about the movies we missed and the frequently awful kids tv we are now subjected to. We like to think we're funny. Come and argue with us on the social medias. Twitter: @dads_film Facebook: BadDadsFilmReview Instagram: instagram.com/baddadsjsy www.baddadsfilm.com

Information

  • Creator
    Bad Dads
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    648
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Bad Dads Film Review
  • Show Website
    Bad Dads Film Review

You Might Also Like