Review of Code 8 (2019) by Stream2Bigscree — 18 Apr 2020

Welcome back all you streamers, work-from-homers and friends! We hope you all are staying safe during this global pandemic. To help you stay indoors, we continue to review movies that may keep you entertained during this endless nightmare. This week I was able to watch, Code 8. This actually debuted on Netflix in December of 2019, but it just now got on my streaming radar.

Code 8 is about a young man, Conner Reed (Robbie Amell), with special abilities who is trying to make it in the world. This world commonly has people with "special" abilities that have to live in poverty, but Conner also struggles due to having an ailing mother with expensive medical treatments. We follow Conner as he tries to make money and falls into a lucrative criminal world led by Garrett (Stephen Amell, Green Arrow), who works for a drug lord (Greg Bryk). So let's get to the review.

Does this story sound familiar? I mean come on man! The marginalized, powerful person has to scrape up resources to save their family. Another, we have powers, so lets rob something movie? Okay, you get what I'm saying. You've seen this movie before! The really bad part about this movie is that it's a mash-up of like 3 or 4 different movies that you've seen before. At the end of the movie, my wife and I looked at each other and said, "how did we get here?" Now, this disjointed storytelling could be the writing, the direction, or the editing. Most likely, it is all the above. I mean shoot they never even really explained the title of the movie. No single one of those elements was completely bad but the mixture of mediocre direction, writing and editing makes me think I know exactly what happened, I knew exactly what was going to happen and yet I'm still confused at what I was supposed to take away from all of it. It's quite underwhelming. In fact, they left it off as if there could be a second movie; and, for some reason, I have way more hope for that sequel than what I just watched.

Speaking of underwhelming, the acting was the most forgettable part of the movie. Green Arrow is always flat, but he didn't have to bring that to this movie too! John Mak, sorry Sung Kang, too was tragic. I actually enjoyed his character on Power, but he did nothing with the limited screen time he had. In fact, all of the characters did nothing interesting. It's the most frustrating part of the whole thing.

In fact, everything except for the action sequences in the movie was frustrating. The movie is saved by some cool display of powers and brutal violence. But even the powers were held in check. We've seen these same powers before in other Netflix shows and movies, and they were done much better elsewhere. Again, just frustrating.

Needless to say, Code 8 was unimpressive. The predictable and disjointed storyline leaves the viewer wanting more. But do we really want to waste another hour and half? Sure, why not – we’re all stuck at home. The fight scenes are pretty cool, but nothing to write home about. If I were bored, like I was, I’d suggest watching this movie. A handful of streaming popcorn is the height for this film because you might feel under duress by the end.