The White Boy Saved Us All Again in Gladiator II
A direct fall into the white savior narrative

Bank janitor has comical misadventures and ends up training in a Police Academy.
A direct fall into the white savior narrative
I hadn’t heard of it either until recently—and yet, it’s one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
Overall, “Dark Fate” is a run-of-the-mill flick. Together, Reyes and Davis have excellent chemistry, but their characters’ story is nothing new, lacking surprise and deep emotion. During the middle points, the film drags considerably, and when the action hits, it feels consistently tight, eliminating the rhythm and fluidity of conflicts.
The Bluff unravels its mystery slowly, opening on the capture of a ship captain named Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and the swift execution of his entire crew. Then, viewers are treated to a tranquil British settlement in the Cayman Islands in the 1850s, where a mother bakes a coconut birthday cake for her son in a house suspiciously rigged with makeshift tripwires and burglar alarms. As it turns out, that mother is Priyanka Chopra’s quick witted and resourceful ex-pirate Mrs. Ercell Bodden, and her husband’s captors are on the way to the island to hunt her down for abandoning them and stealing their loot. The pirates of the Libertas land on the beaches of Cayman Brac, and the scenes that follow show a Viking-esque slaughter of half the island.
“There’s always something you can do…to make people feel like they’re welcome”
If a movie about a strange and crazy day is commercially successful, why not recycle it and double the kookiness quotient? That seems to be the logic behind this followup to Freaky Friday.