Action - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Fantastic Four’

Okay, right off the bat, let’s address the elephant in the room, the fact that according to Rotten Tomatoes, “Fantastic Four” is the worst reviewed comic book movie of all time. OF ALL TIME. This movie is not liked by just about everybody. And I feel like I have to write about this movie with this framework in mind, because while I would never defend this movie as being “good,” there is no way it is as bad as people like to say it is. Quite simply, there are too many good ideas and interesting decisions made to simply write this off like it is some sort of Nic Cage January movie release about whether or not witches were real during the Crusades.

Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is a young scientist and inventor, who I believe in this movie is a senior in high school. That’s one thing in this film that can be chalked up to typical movie wonkiness, in that most of our main characters are played by actors in their late 20’s or early 30’s, yet are consistently referred to as “children.” So Reed and his buddy Ben (Jamie Bell) have worked together to figure out how to transport matter from point A to point B and then make it return back to point A. By doing this, they unknowingly found a way to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and opened a portal into an alternate dimension to another world parallel to ours. This experiment gets them noticed by the Baxter Company, and they are recruited to help with a larger scale version of the same machine. Reed joins Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and her father Franklin (Reg E. Cathey) to make the experiment work, and they are joined by original project mastermind Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) and Franklin’s son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), who isn’t that smart seemingly (not like the others anyway) but is great with his hands and “can build anything.” In a manned experiment to the other dimension gone horribly wrong, everyone gets powers, Victor gets stranded, and shit generally hits the fan for the rest of the movie.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’

“Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” is the fifth in this film series started in the mid-90’s and based on a television show from the 60’s and 70’s, and it is kind of surprising how long this particular piece of spy-based entertainment has stuck around, and by most accounts, continues to age like fine wine. Cool gadgets and effects, great stunts and action scenes, fun stories with interesting outcomes, the M:I movies have come along way since dangling Tom Cruise on a rope in an all white room almost twenty years ago, and have become a reliable source of serialized, big screen entertainment.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Ant-Man’

After years and years of movies about costumed superheroes fighting random bad guys in attempts to save the entire world (if not the whole universe) from destruction and death, often resulting in films that end with twenty-plus minutes of CG-enhanced mayhem, whole buildings being destroyed, entire cities reduced to rubble and ash, often at the hands of some giant energy beam, Marvel has finally made a movie with smaller stakes, a more emotional story, and more relatable characters and situations, and quite frankly, it is one of their best movies. No one was expecting “Ant-Man” to be the answer to the question we all wanted to ask, and yet here it is, intimate, fun, energetic and delightful, a wonderful movie that is a pleasure to watch.

“Ant-Man” centers on Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who starts the movie fresh out of prison. He just finished a stretch for stealing millions of dollars from some corporation and Robin Hood style returning that money to The People, and now that he’s out, he wants to be a proper father to his little daughter Cassie, which is hard to do when people won’t give him a job or rent him a place to live due to his status as an ex-con. The only way he has any shot of making any money is by meeting up with some friends from prison who have a tip on a job that would require Scott’s cat-burglar skills. Unbeknownst to all of them, this job leads directly to Scott meeting a scientist with a secret piece of technology that would change the way the world sees matter itself.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Terminator Genisys’

When “The Terminator” came out in the early 1980’s, it hit like a bomb, a low-budget B-movie about a time travelling killer machine, expertly made, blending a chase thriller with science fiction and horror, and it was an instant success. It spawned a fantastic sequel almost a decade later which helped usher in a whole new era of special effects, and then…well, and then more sequels kept happening. They got goofier, sillier, dumber, not as impressive, and somehow worse with each new installment. Here we are in 2015 with the fifth film in this unkillable franchise, and it appears that “Terminator Genisys” just may be the worst of them all.

The story ties directly into the plot of the first movie, in that this film’s set up starts with Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) being saved by John Connor (Jason Clarke) and becoming his right hand man in the war against the machines, and how John Connor leading mankind to victory against the machines directly led to the start of the events in “The Terminator.” Kyle Reese gets sent back in time to save John Connor’s mom Sarah (Emilia Clarke) from the T-800 sent back to her kill, but when he gets to 1984, he finds that events aren’t happening as he expected them to because the timelines have been changed. Skynet has been sending back Terminators to different times to try to stop mankind from having a shot in the future against the machines, and this has changed everything. Sarah was saved by a Terminator when she was nine, and it raised her and trained her so by 1984 she was already a bad ass and really didn’t need Kyle Reese except to maybe father her child so John could be born. And also she plans to travel to 1997 in order to stop Skynet before it goes online and destroys the world, but for some reason Kyle knows they need to go to October 2017 to the true start of Skynet so they can stop them then.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Jurassic World’

No one really asked for it, yet here it is, “Jurassic World,” the fourth installment of the dinosaur-centric film franchise famously started by Steven Spielberg in the early 1990’s, based on a best selling book by popular novelist cum film maker Michael Crichton. Are you okay with more rampaging dinosaurs and scared kids running for their lives and only half-lively banter between a pair of normally very likable leads? Then we got the movie for you.

“Jurassic World” starts with a pair of brothers, high school aged Zach (Nick Robinson) and younger wide-eyed Gray (Ty Simpkins) getting sent off to a fully functioning “Jurassic World,” the official name of the theme peak carrying out the dreams and ideals of its founder and featuring a couple dozen dino species in the forms of different rides and exhibits, and the reason they can apparently go is because their aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) works there as the theme park operations manager. And Claire does the movie-typical thing of letting work come first so she offloads the kids to some assistant so she can conduct some business while the kids check out the park. For no apparent reason they ditch their chaperone and check out some rides on their own.

In the meantime, a giant genetically modified and improperly raised dino-monster escapes from its enclosure and makes its way to the park. Bad timing.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Spy’

Melissa McCarthy and Paul Feig killed it with “Bridesmaids,” and they even made some of that sweet cash money with the not-as-good “The Heat” (a movie that I didn’t dislike but felt could have been developed more beyond it’s initial premise), and here they are with “Spy,” their third go-around together in the form of a spy movie spoof. And let me tell you, as unpromising as “Melissa McCarthy spy movie spoof” sounds, this thing actually works damn well on a few levels and may be the biggest surprise of the summer for me.

“Spy” is about Susan Cooper (McCarthy), a CIA Agent who works at the headquarters as a desk jockey, talking to a field agent through an ear piece and providing important and life saving information during each mission. The agent she has been working with is Bradley Fine (Jude Law), a total James Bond type of spy, and they work really well together and she also obviously loves the guy very much. So when a mission goes wrong and he is killed by a wanna be nuclear weapons dealer named Rayna (Rose Byrne) and it turns out that Rayna knows the identities of all of their field agents, Susan volunteers to go into the field for the first time on a simple “search & report” mission. And of COURSE she gets in way too deep and does much more than just report, as she feels she can stop Rayna and the nuclear weapon deal herself.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘San Andreas’

Dwayne Johnson should be the world’s biggest action star right now. Why he isn’t, I have no idea. Why can’t he can’t into better projects that feature him? Because when he gets inserted into something like a “Fast & Furious” movie or a “G.I. Joe” sequel, or even as a sidekick in a Michael Bay-Mark Walhberg movie, he is easily the best part of those films, whether they are good or bad. But then we have something like “San Andreas.” When he gets the chance to be the lead, it is almost always in a movie that is just not good, no matter how much charisma he pumps into it. Like “Hercules,” we have Mr. Johnson bringing his A-game to a movie that just doesn’t work out, for a myriad of reasons.

In “San Andreas,” Ray (Dwayne Johnson) is dealing with the recent separation and impending divorce from his wife whom he still clearly loves Emma (Carla Gugino), and it’s one of those separations that seem to be as amiable as it gets. Emma has a new super rich architect boyfriend named Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) which does make things a little awkward. And in the middle of all this is Ray and Emma’s college age daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario). And when the movie starts, despite Ray having to break plans with his daughter because of work related stuff and despite the divorce, all of these people get along pretty great. Whereas other movies would use this to make Ray seem like a workaholic and his family resentful of it, Blake is super understanding of her dad’s job. And when Ray and Emma have a little tiff over her plans to move in with Daniel, Ray gets in touch with Emma the very next day and apologizes and she accepts it and it is all hunky-dory. And when it seems like Daniel would be trying to move in as “new dad” and possibly have a hard time relating to Blake, he turns out to be kind and thoughtful, and he’s all like “I’m not here to replace your dad or what you have with him, I just wanna be like cool and stuff,” and Blake is all smiles and she’s like “hey thanks man I really appreciate that.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Tomorrowland’

“Tomorrowland” arrived with much promise – a wholly original sci-fi film starring George Clooney and more importantly developed by a wondrous filmmaker by the name of Brad Bird, he of “The Iron Giant” and “The Incredibles” fame. His second live-action film after the hugely entertaining “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” this was supposed to be the antithesis to the same old, same old, an antidote to the parade of boring installments of mega franchises that regularly populate the multiplexes this time of year (and now seemingly year round). Tired of comic book movies and film adaptations of old television shows and remakes of movies that were perfectly fine to begin with? Then “Tomorrowland” is supposed to be your answer. So why did it just land with the most resounding of thuds?

“Tomorrowland” is the story of Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), who lives in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is trying her best to fight against the dismantling of the space program which employed her father for many years and which inspired her long ago to look up at a starry night with wonder. This determination and hopeless optimism gets her on the short list of people who are granted access to Tomorrowland, a sort of alternate dimension place designed by geniuses and meant for society’s best and brightest, a place for them to experiment and develop their radical ideas and attempt to make the world a better place. She spends a short amount of time in Tomorrowland, which looks mostly like The Airport of The Future, and then spends most of the rest of the movie trying to get back there. In order to get back, she is introduced to Frank (George Clooney), who was a citizen of Tomorrowland when it was first conceived, but found himself excommunicated from the place for reasons not made entirely clear outside of “ideological differences.” Frank is a total grump, but he reluctantly agrees to help Casey go back to Tomorrowland in an attempt to “save the world.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

“Mad Max: Fury Road” is the big budget action blockbuster that puts all the others to shame. Whereas so many big summer movies have devolved into convoluted and uninteresting stories wrapped up in a shit-sheen of hyper editing and shaky camerawork that reach bladder-busting lengths of time, here we have the antithesis – a wonderfully simple script, incredible and eye catching action scenes, and a sense of vitality that has been apparently missing from movies for the last decade-plus.

Review: ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’

We’ve all seen the other Marvel movies right? We’re all up on our “Iron Mans” and our “Thors” and we’re all caught up on the continuing misadventures of Captain America? Because if not then why are you even bothering with this review of the sequel of the biggest comic book movie of all time? Okay, so we’re all on the same page, I am not going to pretend you don’t know the back stories and what not of all the characters, we’ll just jump right into this review of “Avengers: Age of Ultron” without all the unnecessary preamble.

And you know what, that is the same approach the movie itself takes. It starts in the middle of an action scene, with all the Avengers working together as a team to infiltrate some random compound to retrieve Loki’s scepter (introduced in prior Marvel movies). When they do, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) decides he’s going all Cyberdyne on everyone and he uses the power in the scepter to create an artificial intelligence system designed to protect all of Earth and humanity.

But when this program, called Ultron (James Spader, being as James Spader-y as possible), comes online, it immediately decides that in order to fulfill his peacekeeping mission, he must destroy all of humanity so that the next phase of evolution can begin. With the help of a pair of “enhanced humans” (don’t you DARE call them mutants!), Ultron sets out to destroy the world, while the Avengers have to figure out how to stop him.Continue Reading …

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