Review: ‘Furious 7’

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Seven movies into this franchise, we have all now come to expect a certain mood and tone for our increasingly over-the-top sequels to that little “Point Break” rip off from all those years ago, “The Fast and the Furious.” After safely driving cars off of cliffs in “Fast Five” and battling military tanks and planes in “Furious Six” (subsequently renamed “Fast & Furious 6“), the most extreme things that could be done with this new movie not only include dropping cars from planes and car chases down the side of mountains, but also adding the one and only Jason Statham as an iconic villain, something these movies have not had yet. And because “The Fast and The Furious Vs. The Transporter: Dawn of Justice” would have involved too many copyright issues, here we are with the simply titled “Furious 7.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Wild Tales’

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“Wild Tales” is a fun, crazy, over the top movie about six separate scenarios, short stories involving different characters, none of them related to each other at all save for the fact that each story involves some sort of revenge, usually stemming from very innocuous and seemingly simple actions, all of them building to insane crescendos of some sort of violence.

To go into details about each short story and to give away what happens in each one would do a disservice to you, so there will be a lack of deets here. Suffice to say, these stories involve a strange coincidence on an airplane, a mobster getting dinner at a deserted diner, a bit of road rage, undeserved parking tickets, a family cover-up, and lastly, a wedding party gone horribly wrong. In each story, seemingly normal well-adjusted people are pushed to the edge of civility (sometimes they are shoved, and sometimes it just takes a tiny little nudge), and that thin line that separate people from wild animals often gets blurred, if not outright erased. This is evident with the opening credits, as actors names are shown over images of wild animals, like lambs and foxes – sure we drive cars and exchange pleasantries and observe man-made laws, but in the end, we are all just as wild and unpredictable as any animal in nature.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Gunman’

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Sean Penn is all like, “hey, Liam Neeson can’t be getting ALL the tough old man parts, is he?” but he was also like “If I’m going to do an action movie, it has to be ABOUT something, amiright?” and that is how we have “The Gunman” which is about people’s sins coming back to haunt them and is also kind of about the pilfering of natural resources in Congo and how that was made worse by a civil war and political corruption and whatnot but mostly this is a movie about Sean Penn’s biceps.

Gunman (Penn) is doing some contract security work in Congo in 2006, which is really a cover for him being on some team of assassins, and a job he does forces him to leave the country, leaving behind the woman he apparently loved without giving her an explanation. Eight years later, some guys are trying to kill Gunman and he knows this is somehow connected to the Congo job, so he tries to find out who wants him dead and why, and this brings him back into the life of the woman he left behind. Complications and murders ensue.

Not only is this yet another entry into the tough old guy subgenre of action movies, it is directed by the guy who directed “Taken,” the film that really kick started this current trend of flicks that would have starred Charles Bronson in the 70’s and 80’s. And much like that movie and this fella’s other old man action movie “From Paris With Love” with a bald headed John Travolta, “The Gunman” is a reasonably watchable movie, with good actors slumming it in dumb action movies, although this time around this movie tries not to be so dumb.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Run All Night’

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Are you ready for the conclusion to the exciting Liam Neeson – Jaume Collet-Serra trilogy of action movies? Bet you didn’t even realize such a thing EXISTED, yet here we are, three deep into the sneakiest artistic collaboration since the paranoia duology of 2013 by Jake Gyllenhaal and Denis Villeneuve (okay, that one’s for the film geeks). First Liam and Jaume tackled a case of mistaken identity, then they took on airplane murder, and now finally they bring it home with the story of a hitman turned drunkard trying to keep his adult son from being murdered by the mob. You know…THAT old tale.

In “Run All Night,” Jimmy (Liam Neeson) spends most of his time drunk, a washed up hitman for the mob who can’t battle his demons anymore, he’s thrown in the towel, he is a pathetic wreck of a man who can only quietly take it when everyone from his boss’s son to the local police take the time out of their busy days to verbally run him down. The only friend he has in the world is his buddy Sean (Ed Harris) and the problem with this friendship is that Sean is the guy in charge of this particular mob and he is the reason Jimmy went out and did so much killing, so really Sean is the guy who helped put Jimmy in this bad spot. He must feel guilty about it, which is why when Jimmy agrees to play Santa at the family Christmas party but then got too drunk and acted a fool in front of everyone, instead of getting mad at him Sean had Jimmy cleaned up and gave him a bed and a sandwich and was super nice to him. They even bothered to reminisce about the time they were teenagers and had sex with their girlfriends while in neighboring beds, a little bit of the old nostalgia to make everything feel a little better.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’

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“Kingsman: The Secret Service” is a delightful send up of the classic British spy genre, made famous worldwide by a series of films from the UK centered around some character called James Bond. You may have heard of him. This is like a James Bond movie but set in a world in which James Bond movies already exist and their tropes and conventions find their way into this world, only to be either a) subverted or b) amplified.

Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is a street punk, spending most of his time getting in trouble with his friends, drinking pints and just mostly wasting away his life. Through a series of events, he finds himself under the wing of Harry (Colin Firth), who is a member of a super secret, non-government affiliated agency, which is totally privatized and whose members have taken it upon themselves to keep the world safe from major calamities like political assassinations and dirty bombs and stuff like that. The first half of the movie or so is then about Eggsy’s attempts to join this service through a rather tough job interview, which is much closer to military boot camp than anything else. Here he competes against eight other hand selected people, all of whom want this incredible job for themselves.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘American Sniper’

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Rah rah, sis-boom-bah, let’s go Americ – hunh? Hold on, wait a minute there. “American Sniper” isn’t one of them flag waving, we are awesome, kill em all and let God sort the rest out, let’s feel good about what our country has done kind of war movies. Man World War II was good for that kind of stuff. But ever since Vietnam, and especially with the quagmires our country are currently embroiled within, it’s been a bunch of debbie downers, “oh look at what hell War hath wrought upon men’s souls” kind of movies.

So here we go with another of these nuanced, not so black and white portrayals of war, along with a complex look at what is considered one of our greatest military heroes for a number of reasons. So put your flags down, this is not the kind of movie that waves them around, the flags in this movie usually drape coffins and are folded up and handed to widows.

Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a shit kickin’ Texan, a cowboy wanna be who rides broncos at rodeos on the weekends with his brother, feeling like he has more to offer the world. One day he sees news footage about an attack on an American embassy and good old patriotism hits him right in the nuts and he goes to the nearest recruiting office and signs up for the Navy SEALS at age 30. And of course we know he survives the training and since we know the title of the movie, we know he becomes quite amazing with a sniper rifle, coming to it quite naturally. Around this time two things happen to change his life forever. He meets the woman that would become his wife and the mother of his children, which is pretty big. And then there’s 9/11, which directly effects him because he finds himself deployed to Iraq, where he uses his sniper skills to protect his fellow servicemen.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Blackhat’

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Michael Mann is back with this first movie since 2009’s “Public Enemies,” a cybercrime mystery thriller called “Blackhat” featuring characters furiously pounding away at computer keyboards and lots of talk about random access terminals and code writing and servers, and somehow this leads to shoot outs and murders and other real world things.

A cyber criminal hacker person causes an accident at a Chinese power plant and a Chinese government agent specializing in cyber security type stuff named Chen (Leehom Wang) is tasked with finding this hacker. For reasons not important enough to relay, he teams up with the American government, specifically the FBI, to embark on a worldwide manhunt. And to assist them, he manages to convince the US Government to release a convicted hacker named Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) and he becomes part of the team, along with for some reason Chen’s sister (Wei Tang), and they are off to the races, trying to locate and stop this criminal before his next big strike.

Most of the movie is kind of like an elongated television episode of a show that could be called “Law & Order: Cyber Crimes” or something like that. It is very much a procedural, with a small group of people putting together the clues and taking some risks in order to get more clues about who their target could be, and with a couple of little twists and turns along the way to try to keep things interesting and moving along. And of course they gotta throw in a little bit of a romance in there because what’s a movie without two people falling in love and complicating matters? A bunch of bullshit, that’s what.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Taken 3’

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Well here we go again. Sort of. “Taken 3” is here, long after the jokes about “Taken 2” and its inevitable sequels have disappeared into the wind. How many different ways can our hero and his family members get taken? How will it happen a third time? Who got took this time? And is there even a reason to care about it this time around?

Actually, that’s the funny thing. “Taken 3” doesn’t actually feature anyone really being taken. Sure, at some point, a character gets snatched into a van, but that’s not the focus of this movie. Unlike its predecessors, our hero has a totally different problem to deal with this time around. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) still loves his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Jannsen) and someone has her killed and placed in his bed, making it look like he murdered her, which then sets him on the run. “Taken 3” is essentially “The Fugitive,” as Mills is out trying to find out who killed his wife and why, all the while evading capture from the police.

Leading the police is Inspector Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), and he’s supposed to be some sort of savant detective. He notices things the “normal” police officers don’t, and he’s constantly playing with a little knight chess piece, as if it had some sort of unspoken symbolism about something. Or maybe he’s just OCD, because if he’s not playing with the chess pieces, he’s constantly wrapping and unwrapping a rubber band around his hand, all the while supposedly being a genius detective. But the fact is, he figures out a couple of things early on without trying too hard, and then spends the rest of the movie not being so brilliant. And then at the end of the movie he reveals that he figured out a key piece of information at the very beginning, but we’ve seen movies before and we already know what he’s talking about so it’s not much of a big reveal.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’

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Well this is unfortunate. Is there any worse feeling for a movie-goer to finally see a much anticipated film and then come out of the other side realizing that it was months of build up to nothing but disappointment? “Exodus: Gods and Kings” surely has its moments and things about it that work, but it doesn’t come together in the way that was surely hoped by everyone involved when they heard the words “Ridley Scott” and “biblical epic” in the same pitch.

“Exodus: Gods and Kings” (the unwieldy subtitle added after 20th Century FOX couldn’t secure the rights to the title “Exodus“) is the story of Moses (Christian Bale) and how he got 400,000 Hebrews out of Egyptian slavery, though not without some help from God and some well timed plagues of…well…biblical proportions. But before we get anywhere near there (you know, the good stuff), we have to set up Moses and his relationship to both the Pharaoh and his son Ramses (Joel Edgerton), and this takes a good portion of the movie. This problem with this set up is that Ramses’ intentions and true feelings are never really shown, so we get two Ramses in one. First there is the Ramses who grew up with Moses like a brother and who cherishes him and has great affection for him; and then there is the Ramses who is immediately distrustful of Moses and is afraid that he will somehow rise up and take power from him in Egypt, despite the fact that Moses is not the actual son of the Pharaoh. So out of one side of his mouth, he declares his love for Moses, and out of the other side of his mouth he is calling for him to be exiled. This guy is confused, and confusing, and as such, muddles the movie a little.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1’

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Well the latest installment of the newest mega franchise has been released and it has cleaned house already at the ole’ box office, making certain people instantly salivate at the prospects of the overall business for the final film to be released in exactly one year. “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1” is a big, expensive set up for the last movie, the story telling lamb sacrificed at the altar of monster profits, a truly compelling yarn discarded in favor of two hours of preamble.

For those folks not keeping track, there’s this chick named Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), and she lives in a dystopian future of poverty and immense wealth disparity, and she is also a past winner of The Hunger Games, an annual event in which children are pitted against each other in a combat to the death, broadcast to the masses and sold as entertainment. Through her involvement in this, she got mixed up in some rebellion, as the impoverished masses are close to organizing into an uprising against The Capitol, and she somehow becomes the face of the rebellion. Got it? Okay. Because that’s all this movie is about. The rebels, who are literally underground, create propaganda videos featuring Katniss to broadcast to all the different poor districts of their world in an effort to get everyone to rebel at once.Continue Reading …