The Humanity Bureau (2017)

This feels a little retro: think Soylent Green. The story is the point here, and the descent of humanity following it's devaluation by a government that no longer cares. It is exactly what it seems to be and it isn't pretending to be anything else.

Fmovies: Very sad to see Mr Cage who obviously are broke to accept to go this low. He is not even close to his former days and this is the last one I will see with his name on it.

Movie in general is low budget and actors are doing terrible.

This is an old-school paranoia thriller, with just enough near future sci fi for fun. Think an Outer Limits episode. it is mostly well written, Cage and his main charges are quite decent in it, and the supporting cast (control room workers, the gas station attendant...) are good to excellent. Unlikely characters like the mountain man (and his clan) are, somehow, entirely believable. Sets and locations outside the big shiny city are very nice.

The main sin it commits is thinking it's more than it is. A good example is right up front, and I suspect why a lot of people watched a few minutes then turned it off. There's a simply horrible visual effect of a drone that buzzes the car. For, no reason at all. It added nothing to the film, but was so badly done (poor quality shot, and the drone acts unlike a real one would or could) that it makes the movie look like a third rate 1990s video game.

Secondary sins are overly bad baddies. This would have worked better if the agency he worked for was more bureaucratic, indeed even boring. Fewer empty concrete rooms, and more wood paneled conference rooms and worn out cubicle farms. Same for the whole city generally, especially as they drive old cars because (they say in the film) there are no new ones. Most specifically for bad guys, Hugh Dillon was way too arch, a caricature of himself, the very definition of scenery chewing. Even if restrained, bald eyepatch is a bit too on the nose for our hero's former best friend; he's just The Baddie, and it's too trite to be easily looked past.

But overall quite decent. Not great. A bit too predictable-but so was "Time Enough at Last" and it's a classic!-and a bit too cheaply done but when looked at as a B movie, not bad at all.

The Humanity Bureau fmovies. "The Humanity Bureau" (R, 1:35) is a dystopian sci-fi action thriller directed by Rob W. King ("Hungry Hills") and written by Dave Schultz ("Considering Love and Magic"). The plot revolves around how the government deals with its population when climate change and other factors cause such harm that resources become scarce and the divide between the haves and have-nots becomes uncrossable.

Noah Kross (Oscar winner Nicolas Cage) is an agent in The Humanity Bureau, a governmental organization which assesses whether people who live outside of the city walls are able to care for themselves and are being productive members of society or whether they should be resettled to a mysterious location called The New Eden. Although he is up for a promotion, Noah allows his personal feelings to influence his judgment when he takes pity on a single mother (Sarah Lind) and her young son (Jakob Davies) and goes on the run with them (trying to get to Canada) so they won't be sent away.

"The Humanity Bureau" is even more ridiculous than it sounds. The set-up envisions a combination of science-based doomsday scenarios which are scientifically impossible - and the situation it sets up for society and government isn't much more plausible. What's more, the plot points seem random and silly, while the twists are either predictable, exasperating - or both. And the characters rarely behave, react or speak like rational people do. Regarding the acting, there is no weak link - all the actors are equally weak. The script tries to make some good points, but the messages it tries to deliver are wholly ineffective in such a mess of a movie. Oh, the humanity! "D"

I might be unfair, I only watched the first 20 minutes or so, and only because I wanted to give Nicolas Cage a chance (I really enjoyed many of his early movies). But these 20 minutes where unbearable. Poor acting, slow, predictable, boring, unconvincing. Credits (and the one point I have to give) to the guy in front of a computer screen asking: "since when is that standard procedure?". That was actually the best performance and most interesting line of the movie. It lasted for about 2 seconds, there was some magic in the air, something was building up, there was a tangible tension. But then the other guy said something and the first guy shrugged and the moment was gone. Gone, as far as I'm concerned, forever. That was the last new Nicolas Cage movie I will ever dare to watch again.

Bad dialog, terrible plot, horrible acting. I seriously can't believe I watched it. What was keeping me in there was the realization that once it's finished I'm going to register to IMDB and rate it as negatively as possible (1 is way too high for this film), just to get that little tingly feeling of revenge.

My cat could have acted, written and directed a better film than "The Humanity Bureau".