Tag Archives: action

Non-Stop (2014)

MV5BOTI3NzcxMjkzMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMDY0NTQ0MDE@._V1__SX1217_SY911_Liam Neeson made another action movie. I could say something pithy about that being enough information for you to decide whether to see this one, but since I never even saw Taken 2, it feels disingenuous. Okay then.

I guess the most important thing to say is that Non-Stop never tries to be a good movie. Here’s the example that immediately leapt out at me. After being refused a drink that would have been at least his third of the morning by the stewardess with whom he clearly has some kind of past and receiving unauthorized and also extortionate texts from a mysterious figure who could be anybody at all but probably isn’t air marshal Liam Neeson himself or the redhead sleeping next to him, and who promises to kill a passenger every twenty minutes if his demands are not meant, Neeson pulls out his watch as instructed to set a 20 minute timer, so he will know the mysterious figure is serious. He looks at the time on the watch, clicks a single button on the side, and boom, instant 20 minute countdown timer. From one button on a wristwatch. Because that’s plausible.

Like I said. They’re not aspiring to good. What they are aspiring to, and succeed at, is tension. If you didn’t spend at least a minute suspecting each passenger on the plane, you were not watching the same movie I was.  Here I include the other air marshal, the pilots, the stewardesses, and the obligatory passenger of Arabic descent. (Well, okay, I lie. I actually didn’t suspect him, because come on. I’m never clear on whether the exception that proves the rule is a real thing, or something people say when they didn’t expect there to be an exception and were caught off-guard. But this is definitely one of those two situations.)

Anyway, long story short: sure, it wasn’t a Good Movie. But I’ve watched Good Movies that were bigger wastes of time, and it’s still the time of year when pickings are slim, so hey. Which reminds me, does anyone know if Taken 2 was any good?

Thor: The Dark World

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THURS_003B_G_ENG-GB_70x100.inddFirst things first, to get it out of the way. Yeah, I really liked this movie. There were disappointingly obvious problems with Newtonian physics, and there was, as far as I can recall, no more than one plot turn I didn’t see coming. Nevertheless? Loved it. I mean, to start with, I’ll watch an entire 120 minutes’ worth of Darcy reaction quips and consider it money well spent.

But aside from hammer gags, cool explosions, and Kat Dennings, there are solid reasons to like Thor: The Dark World. Probably the precipitating plot, in which Christopher Eccleston is more or less wasted behind too much makeup as an inexplicably albino Dark Elf who wants to return the universe to eternal darkness and who nearly kicked Odin’s father’s ass several thousand years ago during his first attempt, is not one of them? I’m not saying I dislike comic book plots, because I don’t, but it’s impossible to deny that this one is towards the fringier end of the form.

The broad, vague answer is that I liked the acting. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been immersed in 1960s Thor comics for the past few months, but it was cool to watch Odin interacting with his two sons. Far more than that, though, this movie gave me something I didn’t realize I’d been missing in the annals of Marveldom[1]. I finally have a solid, bone-deep belief that Thor and Loki really are brothers. That’s going to help me later, when I’m still reading 1960s Thor comics and Loki is still a cartoonishly annoying villain instead of nuanced and clever.

Also, Natalie Portman was in it, I guess? In retrospect, I should probably have more to say about someone who got so much screen time.

[1] Except maybe the Loki book I read years ago now, before I’d barely gotten started on my in-depth project here? Who can remember what happened in 2007, though?

The Wolverine (2013)

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MV5BNzg1MDQxMTQ2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTk3MjAzOQ@@._V1_The Wolverine is the first new sequel to the X-Men trilogy in seven years. That’s kind of a long time, right? I’m not going to get into a “worth the wait” discussion, since those never end well and speak to expectations, which I try not to set in the first place. But certainly it was good.

First, a recap of relevant information: Wolverine is a pretty old mutant whose DNA has an impressive healing factor, such that he can recover from nearly any wound you can imagine and he doesn’t really age. Over the past hundred, maybe hundred and fifty years, he’s seen a lot of the world. Also, he has claws that grow out of his hand. Also also, his entire skeletal structure has been coated in adamantium, the hardest substance known to comic-book man. (This was made possible by his healing factor, you see. If you pause a moment to consider what having molten metal forged around your bones would feel like, not to mention the logistics of it, you will see why this would suck more for anyone else than the prodigious amount of sucking it did for him.)

So, okay, that should have you nice and caught up. This movie? Is about a haunted Wolverine, filled with regrets over the outcome of the last X-Men movie. Then, he gets caught up in some Japanese family politics. Since this is a comic book movie, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to promise you some hot mutant-on-ninja action, and also there’s a samurai with a distinctly silvery cast to his features, if you know what I mean and I bet you probably don’t, honestly.

The most important plot issue in a mostly character-driven movie (despite all that ninja action) is in the scene after the credits, when we are promised one hell of a spectacle of a new fully X-Men sequel. So, y’know, yes please.

World War Z

First of all: while it’s possible that this WWZmovie borrowed some small amount of plotting from the book that shares its name, I would be hard pressed to name anything besides the title and its attendant premise. This does not make it a bad film, but it certainly makes it a misnamed one. Second of all: I’m probably fast and loose with spoilers here, although none plot-destroying. You’ll see why I didn’t care much about that.

Okay, disclaimers aside, was World War Z in fact a good movie? Almost. It started off pretty solidly by introducing Brad Pitt (who had gotten too old for this shit) and his family, and then immediately dumping them into Run For Your Lives! And then it exposited about how he’s the kind of guy who could help find out how this[1] happened and therefore save humanity, and then blackmailed him into doing it when “saving humanity” was somehow insufficient. Like rich, pretty people don’t know that they are part of what’s being saved? I dunno.

Then he starts globetrotting, picking up clues, narrowly escaping each place he goes to like a non-parodic version of John Cusack, and just when I started to get the impression that his arrival spelt doom for any place he might show up at, the movie kind of trickled out into nothing. I seriously expected another 30 to 60 minutes of plot, until about 5 minutes before the credits rolled.

So, shorter version: cool, albeit stolen and warped, concept; cool execution; terrible payoff. Hot Israeli soldiers, though.

[1] The zombie apocalypse, obvs.

Star Trek Into Darkness

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MV5BMTk2NzczOTgxNF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODQ5ODczOQ@@._V1__SX1537_SY723_I saw J.J. Abram’s Star Trek sequel on approximately opening night, which raises the entirely valid question of “why haven’t you reviewed it, that was weeks or months ago, and in the meantime it has been universally[1] panned by the internets, and also you could have saved me some trouble over here, so why are you wasting my time now?” Well, the long answer is that there was something that didn’t quite gel for me and I knew I would see it again because of having parents that I see movies with, but then scheduling failures made that never actually happen until yesterday, what with my active camping life and all. The short and far more relevant answer is because I (apparently) was waiting for all of that panning to occur, so that I could write a review in defense of Star Trek Into Darkness[2]. To that end: the remainder of the review contains spoilers. Since I really am pretty sure everyone has already seen it, and also since my cuts survive nowhere except here on the site anyway, I opt not to care so much.

See, what everyone seems to have disliked so much (aside from the standard summer blockbuster lazy shortcuts) is “why are you going back to the Khan well just because this is your second movie?” and “how are we supposed to believe the emotional connection between Kirk and Spock when you haven’t established it yet?” Which are entirely valid questions, but I think Abrams was coming in from the opposite direction. He doesn’t have three years of TV episodes and a decade of fans clamoring and fictioning and relationshipping and all of that to build from, he only has his previous movie, which got Kirk and Spock from visible dislike to something nearing respect.

The first thing that it’s important to remember, then, is that this is not a remake of the Wrath of Khan, certain climactic engine room sequences aside. It’s a remake of Space Seed, with the perfectly fair excuse that Khan and his ilk were found by someone else because Starfleet was crippled by that one Romulan mining ship last time, and isn’t spread out and exploring everywhere yet. So, yes, you can call Abrams cheap for picking a Star Trek villain so iconic they made a movie about him later, BUT, like I said, he doesn’t have the room to explore all these growing relationships comfortably, and I will not fault him for taking a shortcut on the bad guy so the audience understands the stakes immediately. (I also will not blame anyone else for faulting him that, though; it could have been done other ways, I reckon.)

Anyway, my second and much more relevant point is this. The scene I watched at the end of the engine room sequence was not an emotional payoff about friendship and loss that didn’t work on multiple levels, because it wasn’t a payoff scene at all. That was the moment in which Kirk and Spock became the friends we are meant to suppose they were always destined to become. Even knowing the Khan scream and the tribble were around the corner, both actors sold the sense of losing something they had just found, and it was more moving the second time around when it clicked into place than my first time had been.

Which, alas, brings me to the way the movie really did fail. Yes, there’s no fifteen years of accumulated backstory to rely upon, and yes, I was not seven years old when I was watching this particular film. All the same, Kirk’s “death” was terribly cheap. Why is McCoy randomly injecting dead tribbles with super-blood in the first place? Lamest, most random science ever. And as much as I respect the method of finding and exposing that moment of friendship on the screen, a sacrifice is still a sacrifice. I don’t want to watch a contrived third movie in which they race to find a cure for Kirk-on-ice, even more remaketastic than this one was, I admit that. And after just having praised the way the scene started, it’s pretty lame of me to turn around and fault the same scene from the other direction. I can’t say what I would have done differently, but man was it a clumsy band-aid on the problem. The moreso when I compare myself walking out of the theater at age seven, crying because how could Mr. Spock really be dead, and now today’s seven year-old has magic tribble blood?[3]

Upshot: it’s still not as good as it should have been, but I think it’s a lot better than I’m seeing it be given credit for. Upshot of the upshot: I really wish this cast would be put on television instead of making another movie in another few years or being put back on the shelf forever. Because the parts that work, they work really well, and the parts that don’t work are mostly Hollywood’s fault.

[1] Galactically?
[2] It really makes me twitch that IMDB expects that preposition to be capitalized even in the absence of a colon. I will not be defending the title part of the movie, thusly.
[3] I’m well aware that’s not what happened, but I’ve also talked to seven-year-olds lately, and it’s not nearly wrong enough for them to be well aware it’s not what happened.

Iron Man 3

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MV5BMTkzMjEzMjY1M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTMxOTYyOQ@@._V1__SX1217_SY887_Well, it’s summer.

What’s the point, you ask, of seeing a summer blockbuster on opening weekend and yet not reviewing it much sooner than Monday morning? I have two answers. One, I do this for me also, you realize. Two, though, is because public reviewers are completely untrustworthy. Case in point, the Fresh Air review of this movie? I can’t say for certain whether my head would have been spinning with possibilities if I had heard it before I saw the movie, but at least one point raised in that review[1] not only definitively was a spoiler right after the reviewer promised not to spoil anything, but was a spoiler that I predicted he would drop, and in exactly the way he did it. For shame, David Edelstein!

But enough about him, and more about the movie. I cannot say exactly what was wrong with Iron Man 2. It wasn’t bad, by any means, but, as I said before, there was something just slightly not quite there to it. So, the good news is, Iron Man 3 was entirely there. The army of flunky villains was suitable comicky and menacing, Pepper Potts got some solid moments not being a damsel in distress, Kingsley’s take on the Mandarin was superb[2], and for possibly the first time in movie history, the plucky young sidekick trope worked.

But, as always, Robert Downey, Jr. was why you paid the price of admission. In a way, this is true of all Marvel comics. (That sounds like a grinding gearshift, but bear with me, it’s not.) Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby came up with a lot of really cool characters, and it is awesome to watch them swing around and fire their lasers and smash things and do whatever else they can do, but the reason they’re so very good is because Tony Stark and Peter Parker and Bruce Banner are really interesting people with really compelling problems, and the very best issues are the ones where the characters spend as much time in their primary identities as possible.

Hmmm. I wonder what’s out next week.

[1] Obviously I’m not going to give enough information about what he spoiled to spoil it my own self, but trust me, it was relevant information.
[2] I have incorrectly indicated a few times on the internet for sure and probably elsewhere that Marvel’s original Mandarin was not Chinese. I’m wrong, he was half-Chinese and half-British. Do with that information what you will.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

The last thing I did lately was run through the most recent entry in the Modern Warfare trilogy. (You can see from the awkward construction of the previous sentence that I have no idea if it really was a trilogy or if I should expect more to come.) They have a clever thing in the opening credits where it starts as WW3 and then the first W flips to become an M (and their acronym). Because, you see, it picks up immediately after (or, really, probably a few moments before) the end of the second game, in which World War 3 has well and truly blossomed.

The other thing about Modern Warfare 3 is that it took me several minutes to recall just now exactly how it ended, and if said ending would actually count as a completed story sequence. The answer is yes, but my inability to immediately remember what happened a mere eight days after I finished the game tells the rest of the story of this review for me. It was a perfectly adequate game, identical in play to the previous volumes, but without quite the punch and edge-of-my-seatness the others had. Maybe it’s because I’m overly jaded. It was cool and shocking the first time a viewpoint character in the game died, but after three such games, they had taught me not to get attached to anyone, and it turns out that this may be a problem in a first-person game, the inability to be attached to your own damn eyes and ears.

But still, from a purely narrative point of view, yes, I am satisfied by the complete story told in these games. Not, ultimately, as satisfied as I was with the Halo series, but pretty satisfied indeed. Will I later play the Black Ops games as well? Just maybe! It’s nice to have a game I can start and finish over the course of one or two weekends.

A Good Day to Die Hard

The other movie I’ve seen lately is the newest Die Hard. You may recall (or at the least, I do) that I really liked the last one. I am sad to say that I liked this one quite a lot less. But I have a good reason. I mean, I have easy reasons too. It’s all about the chases and the explosions and feels more soulless than most Die Hard movies have, and that would be the easy way out. But there are troubling plot and character failures that make me wonder if it’s possible to make another good sequel in this series.

So, each movie has escalated John McClane’s talent for surviving the wrong place at the wrong time. And that’s fair, as far as it goes. But… as of the last movie, he was escalated enough to do unbelievable things, because, as I said then, he didn’t really have a choice in the matter and he had the knowledge that not-quite-as-crazy things had worked before. The problem with A Good Day to Die Hard is that McClane, at this point, believes his own hype. The plot leads him to Moscow, to determine why his son stands accused of murder. So when he shows up, tall and proud and sure of his own importance, every inch the cowboy Alan Rickman once accused him of being and eager to be in the wrong place at the wrong time where before it had always been bad luck and fate, well, naturally he ruins all manner of secret spy plans that had been in place. And I’m okay with that, it’s fine drama!

Well. It’s fine drama if there are consequences to his actions. Instead, cleaning up the mess without any hint of an apology (or even a sense that he fucked things up in the first place) is the perfect father-son bonding activity. And this, in a nutshell, is my doubt about any possible continuance. You can make a movie with an overly prideful John McClane stumbling and having to get back to his feet. But John McClane the bull, smashing everything in the china shop and being greeted as the conquering hero upon his exit? That is not a metaphor I find myself perfectly comfortable with, after the past decade or so. But, political metaphor or not, the straightforward reading leaves him superhuman and undefeatable for the first time. Without some concern about the outcome, is it really worth watching?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

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A very long time ago, I played a game and thought it was basically fine, compelling even, but not particularly worth following up on the sequels. I cannot tell you a good reason why I would have thought that, beyond the part where I don’t really play all that many games. But considering this was a game I was highly impressed by and able to play through in just a handful of days, you’d think the next one would have gone on the short list. My best guess is I’m used to the rest of the series’ WWII roots meaning I’d be playing the same game over and over with slight variations. Certainly, the thought of a true sequel never crossed my mind.

But then I got the third entry for Christmas in 2011, and when I popped it in to take a look, I quickly realized that, nope, this has some of the same characters and really is a sequel. Which meant I had to get the second entry and for that matter relay the first one and remind myself what was going on even before that. And then, as it does, time slipped away. Which explains why fully a year later, I have only just now played Modern Warfare 2.

On the bright side, it has every last one of the same benefits of its predecessor. Intricate and exciting storytelling, rapid yet challenging gameplay[1], characters to care about who face ethical dilemmas and real consequences, plus the added benefit of characters you have already previously cared about. My only complaint, minor though it be, is that a couple of the scenes really felt like replays of the previous game; and this is easily balanced by the plot following directly from the plot of the previous game, with amplified stakes and a dark ending that leaves me entirely excited for Modern Warfare 3, whenever I get around to playing it.

[1] I finished over the course of a single weekend!

Jack Reacher

Okay, admission time. Tom Cruise is one of those people you’re just supposed to not like, and considering the way he turned Katie Holmes from an actress into a birthing pod for a few years while simultaneously trying to do the most damage to the mental health industry since we elected an actor to the presidency, well, I get why it would be fair not to like him. But Katie Holmes has been set free and there haven’t been any bizarre mouthpiece moments in a while, and pretty much from the scenes where he made fun of himself in Tropic Thunder until now, the man hasn’t made a bad movie. Which is still probably not enough reason to like him, but dammit, the man has charisma on the screen.

It was my mom who picked us going to see Jack Reacher though, not me. Since I retroactively consider this to be a good decision, it’s probably not fair to disclaim the choice, but, y’know. So, I don’t know much about those books and I didn’t know much about the movie except that action would occur and also that some people were pissed about casting a wiry dude who is probably shorter than me to play a 250 pound slab of giant on the page. (Which, incidentally, has anyone read those? Are they any good? Because my unread bookshelf is not already groaning under its current load or anything.)

…I suppose I’ve given away, by now, that I liked it? Because yeah, if this turned into a franchise, I would keep watching. There’s this guy who has very obviously, with evidence all over the damn place, just sniper-murdered a group of five people walking around on their lunch breaks at the waterfront, but he says he didn’t do it and asks them to fetch along Jack Reacher. Reacher shows up, and, under unlikely circumstances, starts investigating what really happened. And instead of punching his way through everyone involved like the previews kind of implied, there’s a smartly written mystery to be unraveled, with lots of tension and comedy to break the tension, and you know, I laughed frequently and all the characters worked, and what more do I need? Plus, Tom Cruise makes for a pretty great PI type. Also, no worries, there is in fact a lot of the gunplay and car chases and judo that you’d expect from an action movie after all, but there’s a lot more here than what I expected is all I’m saying.