Leary comes across as wearingly naïve, constantly beholden to others for his protection.
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The conflicting, dubious accounts by authorities; the insistent, dismissed accounts by eyewitnesses; collusion by a wider legal system; and a trail of broken black bodies will feel wearingly familiar to many viewers today.
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Sure, Senator Sanders's embrace of the presumptive Democratic nominee included all the inclinations that many of us have come to find, shall we say, a tad grating about the man: his interminable, self-congratulatory stump speech, wearingly bereft of humor, argument, story or anecdote, more a listing of all bad things in the world and how they must be put right, delivered in his usual droning shout.
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Then, in a series of bone-wearingly predictable developments, it turns out that some ecoterrorists also want to find the monsters for nefarious means, and that some of the good guys might actually be bad guys, and that humans both caused the impending END OF THE WORLD (by provoking the rise of the monsters) and could maybe also save it, yadda yadda yadda ... Look, if you have seen any summer blockbuster made in the past decade, I'm confident that you could write a plot outline for King of the Monsters on the back of a napkin in a matter of minutes.
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" A reviewer in the Evening Standard argued that "Bond's lugubrious, monotonous writing transforms the potent subject matter into something wearingly reductive. [...] Bond's tone and range is limited". Ismene Brown of The Arts Desk wrote, "It's a damn good set-up, not nice but plausible - still I’m not sure that this really adds up to a play about characters who change, rather than a tiptilted hommage. [...] Bond guns the social issues, but stumbles over the necessary language to make these ancillary characters sparkle - they prate, they strike attitudes (proto-feminism, proto-socialism), they’re even boring.
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Louis Pattison, reviewing for NME, said that the album would not be considered a classic, but complimented the material for a reduced emphasis on shock value. A reviewer for Consequence of Sound wrote that "A lack of 'oomph' prevents the album from landing a gut punch that would cover all of its flaws. Like an aging boxer, Manson lands jabs and the occasional uppercut, but he never topples his opponent." Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph compared the record to the early work of English gothic rock band Bauhaus, and said that while it was "undeniably effective [...] in small bursts," he found the whole "wearingly abrasive".
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In The Guardian, reviewer Lucy Mangan noted: "The on-Brand need to be noticed is there on every page, his unwillingness to get out of the way of the story tripping the reader up at every turn" and adding that Chris Riddell's illustrations "give the book a beauty it does not deserve and a coherence the text does not deliver". Nicholas Tucker, in The Independent, was even less impressed, noting the book's "wearingly offensive" language, and writing: > Were it not for his celebrity, this book in manuscript would surely have > been returned to its author by any publisher along perhaps with some kindly > advice for seeking out an anger-management course. But Brand’s take on The > Pied Piper of Hamelin is the first of a series of riffs on traditional fairy > and folk tales. If they are all as bad as this one, British children’s books > will have hit a new low.
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