Action - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘John Wick’

“John Wick” is a near-perfect action movie, in which they did so many things so well that it is kind of easy to overlook some of the smaller, silly flaws, things that would almost be nitpicking when compared to the great action, sweet cinematography, awesome build ups and pay offs, an interesting underworld, and the iconic bad ass character on which this whole thing is centered around, played perfectly by a guy who just doesn’t get enough credit when it comes to his body of work. Is “John Wick” the best action movie of 2014? I think that might be a given at this point, cause it really is awesome.

So there’s this guy named John Wick (Keanu Reeves) and he’s a retired hitman. At the start of the movie, his lovely wife is freshly dead due to some unnamed illness and the only thing he has left is his sweet antique muscle car. Oh, and the world’s cutest puppy, bought for him by his dying wife so he would have something to love and love him back after she had passed. And when some idiot Russian criminals decide to steal his car, beating him up and needlessly killing his puppy along the way, he finds himself a man at rock bottom, with everything he ever cared for taken away from him. What’s a retired, bereaved and wronged hitman to do in a situation like this? We all know. We’re right there with him. He makes a few inquiries, a phone call or two, he finds out the person responsible is the son of the head of the Russian mob in New York City, and, well, things escalate quickly from there.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Fury’

War is bad, right guys? We can all agree on this? Actually, I don’t think we can. So maybe we still need to see movies like “Fury,” which simultaneously condemns and revels in the iron-forging fire that was World War II, what with all the bodies and devastation and brotherhood and bonding and bloodletting and whatnot.

What sets “Fury” apart from other World War II movies? Is it just the focus on the tank warfare? The emphasis on the violent end of World War II, as opposed to D-Day or Pearl Harbor? The chance to see Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf share scenes together? Surely these are aspects of this movie that haven’t been emphasized in other war films, but is it enough to truly set it apart from the pack?

“Fury” centers on one tank in particular, the titular tank named Fury, and the five-man crew operating said tank as it makes its way through Germany, beating down every possible Nazi soldier. Right at the start of the movie, this five-man crew is suffering through the loss of one of their men, and then they immediately get assigned a baby faced fresh recruit, enlisted into the Army as a clerk and re-assigned to the German front lines as a tank driver, despite the fact that he has no experience at all with tanks or war. So obviously the rest of the crew of Fury resents him at first, probably because his innocence and wide-eyed look at the horrors of war cruelly reflected their own callousness and battle-hardened psyches, but then predictably the men all bond together by being forced to go through some harrowing situations. Their newest crew member unfortunately has to lose his innocence in order to be accepted as a member of the team, but then again it is apparent that this war left no man untouched.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Guest’

“The Guest” takes a lot of elements of my favorite movies and some of my favorite genre elements and cliches and tropes and puts it all together in a slick, sexy, cool package, so I guess this is a bit of a disclaimer up top just to say that this movie kind of hits me in my cinematic sweet spot. Basically if I was making a movie like this, I would make it in the same style, if not go even harder with it, and I loved just about every choice made in every aspect of this low budget yet totally off the wall flick.

First off, the trailer for this movie is crap, and thank the movie heavens that I didn’t see the trailer or see out to watch it before I saw this movie. I advise you to do the same and try to avoid it. Now of course I DID put it at the end of this review, cause SOME of you will still want to see the trailer first, but trust me on this one, just see the movie. As for my review here, I am going to give out as few plot deets as possible while still trying to explain why I enjoyed this movie so much.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Left Behind’ (2014)

“Left Behind” is the second feature length adaptation of the first book of a hugely successful series of Christian books from the 1990s, a series of thrillers set against the backdrop of the Rapture, a worldwide event in which all of the world’s Christians, along with all the babies and children in the world, get instantaneously sucked up into Heaven, leaving behind their clothes and their possessions and oh yeah all the stinking non-believers who now have Armageddon and what not to look forward to, you know, all the worst parts of the Bible. And who better to usher us into this horrible wasteland than the one and only Nicolas Cage?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Equalizer’

“The Equalizer” may be the best bad movie I have seen this year and I mean that in a very particular way, in that the story is filled with these ridiculous cliches and tropes and conventions and plays heavily into them and is also filled with these absurd moments and insane side stories but meanwhile the whole thing is being done by people who know how to make films so it is technically proficient and there are a number of cool moments and beautiful shots and in the end they even tie it all together with a nice little bow, set to rock guitars and drums, so it all comes together for a good time at the theater. A dumb good time, but a goo time nonetheless.

“The Equalizer” is about The Equalizer, a gray haired man working at a Home Depot-like home improvement store. His name is Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), and despite being very friendly and full of smiles and very willing to help his coworkers with their personal goals, he also lives a very austere and simple lifestyle, one fit for a monk, and oh yeah he’s harboring a very violent past, one commissioned by the government to boot. And when the people around him get in trouble with criminals and corrupt cops and whatnot, he secretly gets involved and corrects the situation, leveling the playing field, equalizing the score, if you wil- ooooohhh I get it, I see why he’s named that, oh man these people are clever.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Maze Runner’

So, like, there’s this maze, right? We’ll call it The Maze. And in the middle there is this, like, open glade area with trees and shit. We’ll call that The Glade. And there are all these teenage boys forced to live in The Glade in the middle of the Maze. And they like totally call themselves Gladers. Except for the new guys. They’ll call them Greenbeans. And Greenies! So the Gladers and Greenies live in the Glade in the middle of the Maze, which has weird monsters that they will caaaaallll…let’s see…I don’t know, fuck it, they’ll just call them Grievers, for why I have no idea. Because they grieve? Anyway, the Gladers also split themselves up as Builders and Slicers and Runners, and there’s a virus that causes The Changing, in which the infected, like, uh, changes. And there you go, boom, we got a story. That was easy, let’s go get something to eat.

End Scene.

That’s how I imagine the writing session for “The Maze Runner” took place. The whole movie, based on a popular (I guess, so I’ve read on the interwebz) young adult fiction sci-fi fantasy novel, is full of these archetypes, the characters have names for everything that exists within this universe and it gets really silly really fast when every time the main character Thomas turns around, someone else is telling, “This is such and such. We call it The Something” or whatever. There were even a couple of times where it felt like they could have given things more names and identifiers but didn’t do so and all I’m saying is why not go all out. “This is the time of day we get together and eat some food. We call it The Feedening.” Or how about “This is when we all go to sleep. We call it…The Sleeping.” Just keep doing it. Everything has a name.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Drop’

“The Drop” is a small little crime drama that is more about reputation and name recognition within a certain segment of society than it is about any one crime in particular. Despite the trailer making this seem like a movie about a mob-backed bar being knocked off and the bar managers being tasked with finding out who did it, there is actually more going on with multiple characters and an old unsolved crime and a puppy that was thrown away but then saved and then got stuck in the middle of an ownership dispute and there’s something also about a church closing down but that doesn’t really matter. It’s well made and well acted, it just doesn’t add up to much in the end. It’s good, just not great. And there are worse things for a movie to be.

So Tom Hardy plays some guy named Bob and Bob is just a New York boy working for his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini’s last role) bartending at his little shitty tavern, a tavern that Marv operated but no longer owned. Apparently the local Chechen mob bought out Marv’s sometime ago and they really run the show. So when some punk kids rob the bar of $5,000, the Chechens go a little overboard in their mandate to Bob and Marv to recover the money.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The November Man’

“They used to call you The November Man, because once you came through, everyone would be dead.” That’s actually said in this movie, as if it was supposed to mean something, and as you can see with your own eyes, it does NOT mean anything at all. But that’s why Pierce Brosnan’s old man grizzled (yet suave) special agent veteran was apparently called the November Man at some point and that’s the name of this movie so god DAMMIT we are keeping it in, you got me? Say the line of dialogue, you piece of shit! You want to get paid? That’s how I figured that day of filming went anyway, with Brosnan off to the side eating a plate of cheese and crackers and watching with bemusement.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’

So I guess “Sin City: A Dame For Which to Kill” didn’t sound sexy enough, so here we are with “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” the sequel to the hugely popular and pioneering 2005 surprise hit “Sin City.” When that original movie came out with it’s entirely green screened environs and over the top comic book mentality and hard boiled, R-rated approached, it hit everyone like a shotgun blast to the chest. It was new, fresh, original and different, and when it was over, we all wanted more.

But they took too long to give us more, because here we are almost a decade later and “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” does not pack the same punch. And rest assured, they try to deliver the same impactful blow with the style and content, but it’s just not there, not like it was back in 2005. The sight of real actors working against entirely computer generated sets is no longer novel, comic book based movies are being rammed down our throats now more than ever, and also this movie recalls just as much of “Sin City” as it does the disastrous and woeful “The Spirit” (which was written and directed by this movie’s writer and co-director Frank Miller, a legend in the comic book industry and something of an anomaly in the movie industry). As it is, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” has all of the same over the top style and violence and intensity, but it lacks the fun and meaning and inventiveness of the original.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’

Well even though this is a PG-13 film featuring numerous acts of violence and many instances of gun play, as well as a scene of general mayhem and carnage which surely and undoubtedly resulted in the deaths of numerous innocent bystanders, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” the 2014 edition is still a kids movie and it feels like bad form to just come out and shit all over a kids movie. Yet sometimes these things must be done, in the name of all that is right and most excellent.

Starting out as a satirical comic series for more adult-minded folks in the early 1980s, and then quickly becoming adapted into a television show for kids, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” has somehow managed to stick around for all of these years, constantly being reinvented, new television shows made for new generations of children, a trilogy of movies made in the 1990s and a recent animated movie, Turtle Power has turned out to be a real thing, which is pretty incredible considering how insanely ridiculous this whole mutated turtles in their teenage years using their karate skills to be ninjas concept really is. Something about it resonates though and keeps people coming back for more. Which is why we are here, in the year 2014, with a big budget live action movie featuring CG-turtles, as well as a CG-talking rat guy.Continue Reading …

Prev Page...
1
…
5
6
7
8
9
…
13
...Next Page