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: ‘Chappie’

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“Chappie” is an update on the “Pinocchio as a robot” story, the sentient cyborg wants to be real sort of thing, a kind of South African “Short Circuit” blended with a little “Robocop.” With a mix of comedy, science fiction, action and a bit of social satire, “Chappie” is a good movie blending some cool ideas and featuring incredible special effects, and would have been great if the story itself was just a little more developed.

It is the very near future and things, as always in these kinds of movie, have gone to complete shit. In Johannesburg, South Africa, the police have contracted a weapons company to provide hundreds of drone cops, robots that accompany the police officers and are helping to drop crime rates everywhere. Engineer Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) is the creator of these robots called Scouts, yet he himself just is a worker drone within the massive weapons company anyway. On the side he’s managed to create an artifical intelligence program that he could install into a robot to test out, but when his boss (Sigourney Weaver) refuses to give him a discarded robot to work with, he ends up stealing it so he could do the A.I. testing on the down low. But wouldn’t you know it, Deon gets kidnapped himself by a trio of gangsters who then end up stealing his robot with the brand new A.I. program, and they name is Chappie (Sharlto Copley) and teach it to gangsta lean, curse and throw ninja stars, all so they can use it in a heist to make a bunch of money.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Leviathan’

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Want to experience a long and slow yet brutal kick in the ass? Have any desire to see a piece of art that is so sure-handed in its vision and ambition as to make the final result unassailable in its veracity? You want to remember why some people make movies in the first place? Then time for you to check out this new classic of Russian cinema, “Leviathan,” a film that is simultaneously enormous and intimate, and which also acts as a scathing indictment of life in Russia as well as personal relationships that can easily fall apart.

Kolya is a mechanic living in a house right off the river in a small rural Russian town with his rebellious teenage son Roma and his new wife Lilya, and everything would be okay if it wasn’t for the town’s mayor Vadim and the actions he has taken to seize the land on which Kolya’s house sits. When the movie starts, Kolya has already been fighting the local government for awhile, trying to get them first to stop the land seizure and then finally just trying to get fair compensation for the land instead of the paltry sum the government has decided is reasonable. The movie actually starts with Kolya picking up his old Army buddy Dmitri, who is now a hot shot lawyer in Moscow, and Kolya gets to work in trying to get Vadim to either a) leave the house to Kolya or b) get the right amount of money for Kolya and his family.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Maps to the Stars’

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“Maps to the Stars” is a satirical dark comedy about Hollywood and its denizens, namely the psycho-babble loving, attention whoring, secret hiding folks who pop up within the movie industry all over the place. A family with multiple shameful secrets, an aging actress trying to revive her career, a limo driver with acting aspirations of his own, and a mysterious girl all come together to form this weird little tale of hidden regret, sought redemption and psychosexual revenge.

“Maps to the Stars” initially focuses mostly on Havana (Julianne Moore), an actress with a famous, very respected and very dead mother, who is on the verge of an emotional breakdown, with the root causes for this being her quickly declining stature as a working actress in Hollywood and her memories of a mother whom she felt abandoned and mistreated her. Havana’s mother made a movie called “Stolen Waters,” and a remake of this movie is being planned, so Havana wants to play the same role her mother did, with the hopes that this would be her comeback. But people really don’t want to take Havana seriously, and it is kind of hard to take her seriously when she comes across as super flakey very often, as well as emotionally needy and somewhat unpredictable. It feels like Havana, especially as she is played by Moore, is a middle-aged version of Lindsay Lohan – once promising and in demand, but now washed up and the butt of all the jokes, she spends her time smoking cigarettes in her mansion, doing yoga and wondering why no one will work with her.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Focus’

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“Focus” is a movie about a con man and his elaborate operation of conning, but it is also about the relationship this con man develops with a much younger con woman, so the story is about this con man making a big score but it is also about whether or not two people who make their livings ripping other people off and being deceptive could actually get together and have a trusting relationship with one another. And since this movie is about both of these things, it actually isn’t really about either of them, as neither story line gets enough time to grow into something special. Instead it is all kind of perfunctory and by the numbers, and that leaves the whole thing falling just a little short.

Nicky (Will Smith) meets Jess (Margot Robbie) when she very randomly decides to try to rip him off through some elaborate con that Nicky knows all about and sees right through. He explains that he let himself get “conned” out of professional curiosity, tells Jess she sucks at what she does, and leaves her, only for her to track him down and beg for some help. He shows her a few quick pointers without really teaching her anything that she couldn’t learn from a book or watching Youtube videos, and then he leaves her again, only to have her track him down, pretty much forcing her way onto his team of con artists. He eventually agrees because she is attractive (no other reason is offered so this makes the most sense), she joins the team, and despite being told by Nicky initially that she is a terrible pick pocket, she turns out to be extremely skilled at it after only a little bit of practice.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: ‘Jupiter Ascending’

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“Jupiter Ascending” feels like an accidental cousin to other recent movies featuring female leads who have been chosen to change their world. Whether it be “The Hunger Games” or “Divergent,” movies in which entire worlds are built with their own rules, in which a hero is picked seemingly at random, and for whom a greater purpose is revealed. It’s like a young adult version of “The Matrix” but with way more space travel and alien creatures.

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an illegal Russian immigrant, having been brought over by her single mom and extended family, and she is unfortunately in the family business, which is to say, she’s a housekeeper, going around to rich peoples’ homes all around Chicago and being envious of their possessions between breaks from cleaning toilets. She misses her father, whom she never met, and she says more than once that she hates her life, which is understandable because it looks like a pretty miserable existence. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, there is a royal family in outer space known as the Abrasax family, and they are having themselves a little land rights dispute, with the argument centering around Earth and its resources. And thanks to reincarnation, they know that the true heir to Earth is actually on Earth, and they want to find this person, with each family member having their own reasons for wanting to do so. So there is a race to see who finds her first so she can be brought to the family.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Black Sea’

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In “Black Sea,” we have a classic men on a mission set up, coupled with a “gold/green can change a man” story as well as some apparent anger over the haves and the have-nots, all of this done in the guise of a submarine-based thriller, which is a genre of movie making that is not nearly explored enough. The inherent tension of such a situation is already enough for drama, but then you add in a story involving gold and betrayal and murder and you have a pretty damn good movie.

“Black Sea” starts with Robinson (Jude Law) losing his job as a submarine driver for a salvage company. Getting laid off, with a meager settlement from the company and a lack of pension, leaves him reeling a little. Having already lost his family when his wife took his kids and left him because he was spending too much time on the job, the added pressure of losing his job and not being able to find another one is too much for him. So when a shady job comes around involving a downed Nazi submarine possibly filled with gold, Robinson is ready to take the risk to go get it. He gets an old shitty Russian sub and a crew of half Russians and half Brits (plus one American) and they all head into the Black Sea, in search of this buried treasure while trying to evade the Russian fleet above them.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Two Days, One Night’

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“Two Days, One Night” is a small little character drama that still manages to pack a strong emotional punch, which seems to be the modus operandi for the Dardenne Brothers, who have built careers out of making small, intimate, smart dramas about characters that come across as very real people. These aren’t movies about crime sprees or superheroes or government spies, there are no car chases, or CG-filled set pieces. Their movies lack space battles and time travel and future wars. They just make movies about people, dealing with people problems, and they are almost always great, and this movie is no exception.

Sandra (Marion Cotillard) finds out on a Friday that a ballot was taken at her place of employment, and 14 out of 16 employees voted to retain their significant bonuses at the expense of her job, as their boss explained that they could not afford to have both. This devastates Sandra because her family depends on her salary in order to not have to go back to government housing (there is a real sense of shame and despair from several characters in this movie at having to go “on the dole“), and it also makes her feel unwanted and insignificant. This is particularly bad because she is still getting over a pretty bad bout with depression and it doesn’t take much for her to want to just curl up on her bed and try to ignore the rest of the world, so right away she has to battle her depression just to deal with the idea of losing her job.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Loft’

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“The Loft” is a twisty, turny thriller trying to be like a mix of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and definitely falling short. If you like movies that have multiple plot twists because 2 or 3 just aren’t enough, then this is the movie for you, if you don’t mind some hyper editing and weird camerawork and overall silliness.

Vincent (Karl Urban) is a successful architect with a doting wife, four friends and a spare loft. He tells his friends that the five of them can share the loft and they can use it for their secret extramarital trysts. One morning, they find a dead woman in their loft and no one knows how she got there. Are they being set up? If so, then by who? Or is one of them lying to the others? As the five of them stand over the body and accuse each other of stuff and yell and scream and cry, we also get flashbacks of their whole story, starting with the introduction of the loft into their lives and then the different ways these guys used the loft, and how all of that may have possibly led them to their present moment of discovering a murder.

This movie might have been okay if they took a more straight forward approach to both telling the story and the visual approach of the movie. The whole flashback structure seems unnecessary. It may have been more interesting if they just told the whole story in chronological order, so that the murder is discovered about halfway through the movie. The constantly cutting back and forth feels very 1990’s, like splitting up the timeline would somehow make the whole thing more interesting or exciting, but really it is just kind of hacky. And then there are a lot of close ups of characters and a camera that moves around a lot, with lots of quick editing, and none of it was impressive or improved the story or helped tell the story visually. It just seemed like a lot of stuff designed to make the movie seem cooler than it was.Continue Reading …