While the title sounds the same, the movie ‘Bagman’ is not an interpretation of the bestselling book by Rachel Maddow and Michael Yaritza, which focuses on Spiro Agnew. Its writers claim that John Hulme wrote the screenplay, but this play gives me the sense of reading an old story that probably Stephen King wrote just to kill time once. Well, that is actually not true because one of those rough drafts of his might have been far scarier than the strongest moments on screen. The closest thing to getting any legitimate chills is if you take a nap and create a more thought provoking nightmare using your imagination.
Having suffered what must have felt like a betrayal from himself in his vision of creating a modern day tree trimmer, Patrick McKee (Sam Claflin) relocates to his childhood memory with his wife, Karina (Antonia Thomas) and his son, Jake (Carnell Vincent Rhodes). He resigns as an entrepreneur and goes to live in his brother Liam’s (Steven Cree) house and appears to go to work at their family annex lumber yard. Before they get stabilized, the set of circumstances changes as quickly as it has started, with Patrick hearing unfamiliar sounds coming from the outside during late hours. in These circumstances develop to where he starts dreaming about someone abducting his son, Jake. Events improve as expectation meets them with completely shocking realism there is something definitely lurking around, and it seems as though some entity is playing house and can’t pick a room, as the normal flicker of lights is nothing but child’s play. New target: every mother’s worst nightmare! The shocking revelation is new arrivals as most dwell up to a particular point but not dolls with a fanged smile sewn into them. There is no evidence though to actually say that something occurred. But for Patrick who has not witnessed images of Jaws yet things are rather bad. Someone there is banging inquiring from another, and these disturbances threaten his family, and most importantly, his son.
In the real world, there is no doubt that Patrick is very intelligent. As a child, he heard Slava’s father tell stories about the alien known as Bagman, an evil character who resided in a copper mine that was close to where they lived. What the legend didn’t tell was that this entity would explain how it usually paralyzed parents before kidnapping their offspring, ‘the good ones, anyway,’ stuffing them into a ravenous bag and never to be seen again. Naturally, he figured it was just one of those tall tales. But later he experienced that very creature which was so prominent in the tales and got off by the skin of his teeth. Cut to two decades from then, and Bagman is back (of all things, we witness him abducting another child just before credits start to roll), and this time he is Christine’s nightmare. Patrick will need to confront the fears that still haunt him if he is to protect Christine.
My apologies, but in my opinion, “Bagman” is not the perfect work, at least in the framework set in the beginning. This statement is not entirely accurate nor is it completely appropriate. To put it differently, this film appears to have been constructed using more or less entirely the most mundane and time worn cliches and tropes that the horror genre still has to offer. There is nothing really new in this type of a picture, but good directors have managed to nourish those concepts this sensation of an effort that probably makes it possible to use them again. In that sense, I am sure it’s Colm McCarthy who hasn’t quite managed to pull through ‘Doctor Who’ or ‘Peaky Blinders’, and quite certainly not the ‘The Girl with All the Gifts’ what a hot mess. He drags through cliches in such a lackluster manner he looks tired for most of this picture alongside the protagonist. I understand why he would assume these things assistant doesn’t and where the story could go, for him over the course of the film. Collin and Hulme are trying to produce an age old terror story; they could only have watched a few Scooby Doo episodes. Those episodes certainly had tighter conclusions than “Bagman” did.
In actual fact to quite the opposite. The portrayal of the music and its instruments nearly struck the level of ruining the movie completely. The only points throughout the plot I felt uncomfortable were during the children’s education and whenever an obnoxious kettle whistling harped blasted some horrid shrieks in an irritating manner. The instrument in ‘Bagman’ is absolutely hilarious on so many levels. And by the end of the film would have an inch off of being complete and utter torture, and the curious aspect about it is that all of it is purely fictional.
Aside from this, it is a complete waste save for the fact that it had the unusual good fortune of securing a theatrical run instead of being dumped on some undeserving streaming platform that you thankfully abandoned a long time ago.
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