Archive for the ‘Action’ Category

Doc Holliday’s Revenge Review

Posted: June 23, 2014 in Action, Reviews
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2When you get about 15 to 20 minutes into Doc Holliday’s Revenge, you’ll be ready to give up on the movie.

Don’t. It gets worse. Gloriously worse.

Doc Holliday’s Revenge is wake-the-kids, call-the-friends, must-see-it-again terrible. It’s not so bad, it’s good. It’s so bad, it’s great. Supremely bad. Magnificently awful.

It’s March 19, 1882, according to the graphic at the beginning of the film. But wait, the calendar in the house shows it’s September 1884. That’s the same house with an electrical light ceiling fixture, next to an air conditioning vent. Hmmm, no-fault divorce and the modern screw bottle cap, both 20th century inventions, are around as well.

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Cold in July Review

Posted: May 31, 2014 in Action, Reviews, Thriller
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Cold-In-July-2Jim Mickle and Nick Damici.

Remember these names. Write them down if you need to. Set up a Google alert. The pattern of cinematic excellence these two have established warrants constant attention for what will come next from the duo. Cold in July, the fourth feature film film from this creative team, is a solid kick in the balls of conventional fare, a tricky, tough, violent carnival ride put together by a couple of carnies whom you just can’t trust to have followed the safety code.

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The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review

Posted: April 17, 2014 in Action, Reviews
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THE-AMAZING-SPIDERMAN-SCREENCAPS-00If you are wondering whether The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is as good as the first one, you are asking the wrong question. You should be considering the possibility that the new movie, which opened in Europe this week in advance of its May 2 premiere in the United States, is as bad as Spider-Man 3, the movie that put the stake through the heart of the franchise the first time around. Actually, this latest tale blows past the badness of Spider-Man 3 and winds up in the company of Superman 3 and 4 and both Fantastic Four films as one of the worst major character comic book movies since the modern era began with the Christopher Reeves Superman in 1978. (Catwoman, Daredevil, Elektra, and Ghost Rider are second-tier titles at best and do not merit inclusion in the discussion.)

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Snowpiercer Review

Posted: April 4, 2014 in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction
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snowpiercer-15In 1979, NBC broadcast nine episodes of one of the worst and, at the time, most expensive television series ever aired: Supertrain. Boasting a disco, swimming pool and shopping mall, not to mention a weekly turnover of B-list celebrities, this was no ordinary train. This was Supertrain.

Thirty-five years later, director Joon-ho Bong brings Supertrain to the big screen, only it’s called Snowpiercer, and it’s not as awful.

But it’s not good.

In the near future, mankind attempts to reverse the effects of global warming by releasing a chemical into the upper atmosphere, and it basically works, with just one niggling problem. The earth is plunged into an ice age that freezes everything and everybody, except for a train that is filled with the remainder of humanity traveling the world in an endless loop.

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier Review

Posted: March 28, 2014 in Action, Reviews
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timthumb.phpCap is back, and so is the franchise.

With two misfires in the first two superhero movies after the megahit The Avengers, quality control questions in the Paramount Galaxy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe surfaced. Iron Man 3 was little more than an empty shell in comparison to its predecessors, and Thor: The Dark World was execrable, playing like a Roger Corman-ripoff of the Hobbit movies. A lot was riding on the shoulders of Steve Rogers, but like with every fight he’s been in since World War II, the Super Soldier prevails. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the most crowd-pleasing comic book flick since the original Iron Man.

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Wu Ren Qu (No Man’s Land) Review

Posted: March 15, 2014 in 2014 Berlinale, Action, Foreign, Reviews, Thriller
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ImageWhen the lights went up after the premiere of Wu Ren Qu (No Man’s Land) at the 64th Berlinale Film Festival in February, the twists and shocks that came with the feature were not quite over. Director Ning Hao and three of the stars, Xu Zheng, Yu Nan und Huang Bo, took the stage to acknowledge the well deserved applause of an appreciative audience.

There they delivered the final surprise: Xu Zheng, who plays the bespectacled and shaggy-haired lawyer in the feature, had assumed the physical appearance of his adversary, Huang Bo, who portrays the film’s bald, stocky villain. Bo, meanwhile, now sported an almost Elvis-like pompadour. It was more than mere make-up, hairstyles, and costumes, the quartet explained. They looked different (the exception being Nan, familiar to Western audiences from her role as Maggie in The Expendables 2, who remains as lovely as ever) because of the amount of time that had passed since filming. The movie was completed four years earlier, but had been kept from release by Chinese censors who deemed it too nihilistic.

And the censors were half-right. Wu Ren Qu is nihilistic. But wonderfully so.

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La voie de l’ennemi (Two Men in Town) Review

Posted: March 12, 2014 in 2014 Berlinale, Action, Drama, Reviews
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ImageThe two men in town are an ex-con and the sheriff. The two actors playing the two men are Forest Whitaker and Harvey Keitel. That alone is enough to pique interest in La voie de l’ennemi (Two Men in Town). Yet, director Rachid Bouchareb squanders the opportunity and good will that such a pairing and such a scenario engenders with an uninspired, meandering movie that drew scant attention at the 64th Berlinale Film Festival in February.

The problems begin with the screenplay, credited to Bouchareb and two others. What is needed is a narrative with taut, constant pressure reflecting the vise the ex-con finds himself in, with the screws being alternately turned by a vengeful sheriff and the local crime lord. Instead, the film is a tepid tale, a loose remake of the 1973 French film Deux hommes dans la ville, but without the outrage and passion that director and screenwriter José Giovanni, who was on death row in the French penal system at one time, brought to the previous version. (more…)

’71 Review

Posted: March 8, 2014 in 2014 Berlinale, Action, Drama, Reviews
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ImageThe familiar story of the soldier trapped behind enemy lines, who against all odds must somehow traverse hostile territory, while outwitting and outfighting those bent on capturing or killing him, continues to be the basis for films for one simple reason: it works.

The twist in ’71, a UK entry seen in the 64th Berlinale Film Festival competition in February, is that the setting is something less than war, yet somehow more terrifying. Director Yann Demange sets his first feature in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1971, when sectarian violence was spiraling out of control and the growing number of British troops being introduced were adding gasoline to the fire. (more…)

The Midnight After Review

Posted: March 6, 2014 in 2014 Berlinale, Action, Foreign, Reviews, Science Fiction
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ImageIn his new film, The Midnight After, director Fruit Chan learns a hard, but familiar lesson: while it’s relatively easy to strand people in a phantasmagorical situation, it’s quite difficult to find a fantastic way to explain why and figure out what’s next.

The premise Chan conceives is as intriguing as any Rod Serling offered for your consideration. A disparate group of passengers board a minibus late at night in Hong Kong. En route, the bus goes through a tunnel. When it emerges on the other side, the city is empty.

Shortly, thereafter, the bus passes a blinking billboard that reads in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese: “A great film pitch does not always a great film make.”

If only. (more…)

Zwischen Welten (Between Worlds) Review

Posted: March 4, 2014 in 2014 Berlinale, Action, Drama, Foreign, Reviews
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ImageThough the war stories of Afghanistan and Iraq are still being written, the overarching theme is increasingly clear. This generation’s tales will not be of heroism, although that has been on display, or cowardice, although that is inevitable, or of atrocities, triumphs, intrigue, or geopolitical struggle. The ground truth of these conflicts as reflected in the movies already made and those still to be filmed is ambiguity. Setting aside the motivations – real or supposed – for the onset of hostilities, the question of whether the noble commitment of bringing freedom to oppressed people through armed intervention by outsiders is possible or whether the definitions of freedom, oppression and commitment differ so greatly across cultures that the matter can never be resolved will continue to overshadow a more traditional military cinematic narrative.

This maddening, unresolvable ambiguity is at the moral heart of Zwischen Welten (Between Worlds), a simple, powerful tale of one German army unit’s experience in Afghanistan as seen through its squad leader. (more…)

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