Tennis sim just has too many faults
AO Tennis 2
Some features of AO Tennis 2 might be seen as innovative.
Your custom racquet can be kitted out with jewellery.
You can trigger positive or negative reactions to influence your profile among the audience. You can tweak loads of game aspects, from stamina levels to the structure of tournaments. Fundamentally though, the traditional“charge and release” tennis gameplay is unchanged.
AO Tennis 2 may be an improvement on the original but this visually-unimpressive sim is still plagued by inconsistent umpires, low-grade sound, awful audiences, unresponsive controls and AI opponents who’ll make one error to every 10 of yours.
Horror remakes get a bad name – often justifiably so.
Not many genre entries enter second reboot territory, though, and those that do get greeted with loud alarm bells.
In the case of The Grudge, it already had a perfectly acceptable American adaptation of the superior Japanese original back in 2004.
That remake was followed by two dire sequels which would make you think this is one movie universe unworthy of a return trip.
Alas, writer-director Nicolas Pesce resurrects the vengeful ghost that dooms anyone who enters a cursed house.
The finest remakes take the best elements of the original and add their own spin or fresh ideas.
The Grudge 2020 instead chooses to tread the same path as its predecessors – and include familiar tropes and trends you’ll find in hundreds of other horror flicks.
Pesce was the brains behind 2018’s Piercing – a film I didn’t like as much as many critics but was undoubtedly bursting with creativity and otherworldliness.
Conversely, this is paintby-numbers filmmaking and incredibly lacking in effective scares.
Andrea Riseborough’s
Detective Muldoon often looks like she’s about to fall asleep – and I can understand why!
After his outstanding work in Searching, this feels beneath John Cho and Demián Bichir should be having serious words with his agent after his unenviable onetwo of The Nun and this misfire.
Earning The Grudge an extra star, though, is the ever-reliable presence of horror queen Lin Shaye.
She’s rescued a few of the Insidious movies and her terminally ill gran is an unsettlingyet-sympathetic presence.
Gore hounds will be satisfied too as the blood – and nasty looking water – flows.
Sadly it’s slim pickings for positives as The Grudge 2020 will leave audiences feeling like they’ve been cursed.
There’s no denying the tension of this take on the 2008 terrorist attack at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
Fingernails will be bitten, however we don’t really get under the skin of anyone involved.