Action - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ’13 Hours’

The words subtlety and nuance do not come to mind when thinking of the movies of Michael Bay; on the contrary, he has a style so bombastically singular that it has become known as Bayhem, and the application of this style of filmmaking to certain topics seems, on the surface, ridiculous. A “Michael Bay war movie” is one of these instances, and it does not help that he already bungled a World War II movie, so when it was announced that he was making the 2012 Benghazi attack film “13 Hours,” it seemed like a bad call from the start.

And lo and behold it was a bad call, because “13 Hours” is the kind of movie that your racist uncle, who never served a day of military service in his life, will insist everyone else see because it tells “the truth” about what happened, a one-sided telling of a very intense night, a confirmation of a political bias that Michael Bay never intended, and that dumb uncle of yours will ignore the seven congressional investigations and thirty-two hearings and instead will hold this up as what really happened in that land which he couldn’t find on a map (here it is, next to Egypt).

And if you think that’s an exaggeration, check out these responses from some audience members at the premiere held at a football stadium with 30,000 attendees. Because America.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the seventh feature length film in this seminal sci-fi franchise, has the distinction of being the first of the series to be made without any involvement from the creator of the whole thing, George Lucas. And the irony is that director J.J. Abrams et. al. tried their absolute damnedest to make this movie feel as much like the original 1975 film as possible.

The story very simply involves an underground resistance group waging political (and actual) battles against a large evil force determined to take control of the whole galaxy. Some young rag tag folks meet up with an older wise man with a history against the bad guys, lead by a shadowy figure who communicates with his minions via hologram, one of whom is a fella dressed all in black with a black mask and a distorted voice whom every one else fears due to his Force powers. The rebels and the bad guys race against each other to get the same piece of information, which leads to a big space battle at the end involving a large planet-like space station slash world-destroying weapon. Also there is a stop at a cantina-like establishment filled with all sorts of aliens and creatures as well as a live band, and there are cute android antics.

Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2’

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2” is finally here, bringing yet another film franchise to a close, this time the story of Panem, the land in which wealth disparity is the name of the game and open rebellion is all the poor people have left. After the episodic feel of the second movie and the incredibly boring wheel spinning of the third movie, we finally have here a movie with scenes featuring characters doing stuff, with final goals in sight and ultimate sacrifices ready to be made. It took several years, a number of films, and hundreds of millions of dollars, but we finally have a conclusion, an ending, a sense of finality…but was it all worth it?

In this final film we pick up with Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and the rest of the rebellion, planning their final missions that will have them secure weapons for their final assault on the Capitol, in which they will attempt to overthrow the dominant paradigm by ousting cruel President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and making Panem a free country with open elections…you know, good old democracy. But just as Katniss has been a reluctant participant in the rebellion, offering her services as the face of the rebellion mostly due to her hatred of President Snow, in this last movie she openly questions the actions of the rebels, who are willing to kill many civilians in order to advance their own cause. She sees the horrors of war firsthand and she recoils. She would rather everyone just worked together to take out Snow and be done with it, but war isn’t easy, and the rebellion gets messy, and she doesn’t like it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Spectre’

Here we are again, watching and reviewing yet another James Bond movie, this time in the form of “Spectre,” the follow up to the hugely successful and well liked 2012 movie “Skyfall,” and not only did we get a returning Daniel Craig as Agent 007, but director Sam Mendes came back as well, bringing with him his sense of craftsmanship and detail which has made the last two Bond movies the best looking and most technically accomplished of them all. Lush, gorgeous and epic, “Spectre” arrives as the biggest and most expensive Bond movie ever, but did that necessarily translate into a “good” Bond movie?

For some reason, there are many out there who are really down on this movie and kind of hate it. A glimpse at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic shows a very divided response, with people who didn’t like “Spectre” expressing that they really didn’t like it. Do these people not remember “Die Another Day” or “Quantum of Solace” or the entirety of the Roger Moore era, which culminated with one of the worst big budget movies of the 1980s, “A View to a Kill?” I’m not going to say that “Spectre” is the best of the entire series, and I wouldn’t even say it’s the best of the Daniel Craig Bond movies (cause it ain’t) but this movie is hardly worthy of derision. If anything, it delivers a lot of the classic Bond tropes that have been largely missing for the last few films, while maintaining the more serious edge of these post-Brosnan movies, so while the movie does indeed have a stumble or three here and there, it is mostly quite good and still nails what makes Bond movies fun as well as what makes these Craig-led movies different from the rest.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials’

“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials” is the continuing adventures of Thomas and his friends in yet another dystopian future, this time set in a world that appears to have been burned to death by the sun (or what we call, Arizona). Did you want to see another film in which a ruined future is run by an evil entity which can only be brought down by the chosen one and his/her teenage friends, but only after several films which have no endings and instead only cliffhangers to questions no one cares about? Because boy oh boy do we have yet another one of these movies for you.

Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) wakes up to find himself in the hands of an organization hiding away deep in some giant warehouse or mountain or something, and he is reunited with his friends in a facility housing dozens of other teenagers. The one thing all these kids have in common is their immunity to some disease, as well as their dopiness when they blindly believe that this company simply wants to send them to some far away island where they can live out their days in paradise. Doesn’t that sound a lot like when your parents told you that your family pet was sent to a sweet farm upstate? Only Thomas and one other kid seem to question the motives of this company, and they set out to, yes you guessed it, save the day for everyone by exposing the company.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Everest’

“Everest” is based on a true story of a mountain climbing expedition in the summer of 1996 that went very wrong, mostly because a storm came through that just kind of ruined everyone’s day, some more so than others, but of course this isn’t just a movie about the trevails and spiritual rewards of mountain climbing but instead is a story of survival, perseverance and personal sacrifice, as well as the possibly high cost of human hubris.

New Zealander Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) is a pioneer in the mountain climbing world, as he took the previously impossible task of scaling Mount Everest and turned it into a full on enterprise, as people paid him tens of thousands per person to guide him to the top and back down Mount Everest. He started yearly expeditions, training amateur climbers over the course of several weeks to summit the world’s highest mountain, and it didn’t take long for other professional climbers to copy this business model, to the point in which the mountain was overrun by competing expedition teams in 1996, all of them jockeying for time on the mountain, causing massive delays in each other’s trips, and helping to exacerbate problems that would prove both burdensome and deadly at the most inopportune times.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Turbo Kid’

“Turbo Kid” is one of those throwback movies, an homage to a certain style of movie, in this case the post apocalyptic films of the 1980s, and the 1980s in general, done with the fervor of a child’s imagination set loose with gallons of fake blood, a fever dream of a movie about a “Mad Max” style wasteland ruled by a one-eyed tyrant and his insane and blood thirsty right hand man, in which a young kid all on his own tries to survive one day at a time.

The Kid (Munro Chambers) spends his days scavenging through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of 1997 (oh yeah, this movie takes place explicitly in the future…of 1997) looking for stuff to trade in for potable water. And every now and then he gets his hands on a comic book of a guy called Turbo Rider, who dispatched justice viciously with some sort of wrist-mounted laser beam. He then meets a girl named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) who at first seems insane and dangerous but they of course become friends because it’s the apocalypse, what ya gonna do, turn away a smiling face?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘American Ultra’

“American Ultra” is “Cheech & Chong’s The Bourne Identity,” a mash up of genres and genre tropes, slammed together in a way that feels like an early draft of a screenplay that ultimately needs to be expanded and finished. It seems as if the filmmakers behind this thing thought that simply taking the “sleeper agent” government-trained killer storyline that we’ve seen a lot and adding a bit of marijuana use to the proceedings would somehow magically result in a movie worth watching, and while “American Ultra” isn’t bad, it never rises to the heights promised by the marketing and the concept.

Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) is a heavy marijuana user, often derisively referred to as a “stoner,” and he lives a simple, fairly shitty life in a small Virginia town where he gets harassed by the police and seems to be the only employee at an incredibly shitty convenience store. The only thing making his life bearable (besides the weed) is his live-in girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) and he is planning to propose to her, except that his can’t really get his shit together long enough to do so. Meanwhile, over at CIA headquarters not too far away, an agent (Connie Britton) finds out that her government trained super killer in hiding is about to be killed by a rival agent’s (Topher Grace) own super killer program, so she goes to Mike and “activates” him with a pass code. From that point forward, whenever someone tries to do anything to Mike, he knows how to get out of the problem and also knows how to kill people with whatever is on hand. The rest of the movie is the CIA trying to kill Mike and Mike trying to survive with Phoebe.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hitman: Agent 47’

From “Super Mario Bros” to “Need For Speed,” we have been inundated with dozens upon dozens of video game movie adaptations for years, and if there is one thing that everyone can pretty much agree on, that thing is the fact that all of these movies range in quality from bad to worse to The Worst. There is no such thing as a “good” video game movie. Fun fact: “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” currently holds the highest Rotten Tomato score of any video game movie, and it is sitting at a lofty and seemingly insurmountable 36%. But surely here to save the day and reverse this trend is the latest entrant into this woe begotten genre of cinema, “Hitman: Agent 47,” and it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

Of course it can.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’

Based on a popular television show from the 1960’s featuring spies doing cool stuff with nifty gadgets, teaming up to overcome a shady global terrorist organization, action mixed with comedy, and sex appeal galore, audiences this summer have been treated to the well made spectacle known as “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.”

We also got “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”

To be fair, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” is not a bad movie at all, as it is actually quite an entertaining and fairly breezy romp. The preposterously named Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is a CIA agent who is forced to team up with a Soviet KGB agent named Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer), and they are tasked with finding a kidnapped Nazi scientist who is likely helping someone create the world’s first nuclear bomb.

To get to him, they use his estranged daughter Gabby (Alicia Vikander) to try to track him down, and they get all wrapped in a big ole plot involving an Italian heiress and a fake engagement and faulty torture equipment and an old fishing boat, the whole time with the two agents trying to one up each other and also with Illya and Gabby maybe sort of falling for each other along the way.Continue Reading …