The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (30) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (25) | Rotten (5) | DVD (6)
A tightly assembled didactic thriller.
A moderately compelling thriller about the potential perils of nuclear energy, whose major fault is an overweening sense of its own self-importance.
All a bit too earnest, despite the seriousness of the subject, with Fonda setting her jaw and stepping into father's footsteps as Tinseltown's very own protector of humanity; but it's tightly scripted and directed, and genuinely tense in places.
A terrific thriller that incidentally raises the most unsettling questions about how safe nuclear power plants really are.
The three stars are splendid, but maybe Miss Fonda is just a bit more than that. Her performance is not that of an actress in a star's role, but that of an actress creating a character that happens to be major within the film.
It's a gripping drama and one which feels all too feasible for comfort.
Scary, absorbing thriller predicts risks of nuclear power.
What we must quarrel with is the heartless, devious, and appallingly manipulative manner in which the authors of the film have drawn their good-guys-and-bad-guys battlelines ...
The film is one of those rare modern thrillers that manages to combine fantastic acting and intelligent dialogue with real, heart-stopping suspense.
Not a comforting film, but an undeniably potent one.
It's an exciting and worthwhile old-fashioned thriller about the dangers of a nuclear power accident.
File this one under 'Hasn't Aged Well.'
An effectively tense thriller that must have been even more terrifying when it came out, when fear of nuclear power was greater, and it is very well directed (the car chase scene is nerve-wracking) and has three amazing performances from its leads, especially Jack Lemmon.
Super Reviewer
A fantastic true to life film, with great actors, and intense suspense. I loved this movie and I highly recommend it.
Jack Lemmon plays a shift supervisor at a nuclear power plant who narrowly averts a core meltdown while being surreptitiously filmed by Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas' visiting TV news crew. When Lemmon's superiors pooh-pooh his reservations about the safety of the plant in their haste to get back into production, he turns whistle-blower. The China Syndrome, which with uncanny prescience was released just 12 days before the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, is a hybrid of two of the genres most closely associated with the 1970s, the paranoid conspiracy thriller and the disaster movie. Intelligent, suspenseful and brilliantly acted, especially by Lemmon in one of his great 'straight' roles, my only reservations are that it hasn't aged especially well, and Michael Douglas drives me crazy every time he says the word 'nuclear'. It's not 'nucular', you asshole!
Jane Fonda plays a tenacious reporter whose news crew chances upon an incident at a nuclear power plant that could have led to a meltdown, and goes on to try and uncover the conspiracy of silence concerning the plant's safety. Essentially a disaster movie without the disaster, this worthy political thriller's main claim to fame is that the meltdown it predicted actually happened at 3 mile island a few weeks later. The plot follows the usual disaster movie convention of morally courageous hero attempts to alert the public to danger, hampered by the interference of big business who are afraid of the damage to their profits, but it is done in a rather more serious-minded way; there is more science and less histrionics and special effects. This can feel a little dry and sterile however, as a little too much of the drama relies on watching concerned looking men in hard hats looking at pipes and dials but Jack Lemmon is as excellent as always, bringing real human drama and pathos to his role. It drags a little in places, but the powerful climax is worth persevering for.
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