Tag Archives: action

Shooter

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As winter ebbs into spring, so too do a young man’s fancies turn from horror movies to action movies. (Okay, that’s just not true, I could watch a new horror movie every day and, save for the effort of reviewing everything, not get tired of it. But that is kind of the cycle that Hollywood thrusts upon us on average, and so here we are.) Anyway, the first action movie of the season that I’ve noticed is Shooter, in which Mark Wahlberg [SPOILER ALERT!!!] shoots people. See? Totally an action movie.

Of course, I was nearly derailed right at the beginning, when our hero’s military partner was named Donnie. But I recovered from that bit of amusement (luckily, there were no Dirks) and settled into a pretty engrossing action drama. See, this sniper guy has retired from the military because of a difference of opinion between him and a commanding officer about whether he should have been left behind without support during an illegal incursion into another country. (He was against it, you see.) So now that he’s living the quiet isolationist mountain lifestyle with a lot of guns and a dog and no human contact, Danny Glover decides that he actually has gotten too old for this shit, and it’s time to contract out saving the President’s life to someone else. See, some other awesome sniper is about to assassinate our gunnery seargent’s estranged commander in chief, and only an equally awesome sniper can figure out how he’ll do it, so they can stop him. Except, Danny was always lying about that age thing, and is instead a bad guy setting up someone to take the fall after the assassination. Luckily, Marky Mark somehow manages to survive the first fifteen minutes and then enlists the help of a hot red-headed chick and an idealistic FBI agent to trace down the conspiracy and get his life back.

Except, he finds out that it goes All The Way To The Top! (No, not really. The President is not targetting himself. I promise.) Anyway, there’s lots of fugitive-y stuff, a fair amount of wargames and shooting, the occasional sniping, a helicopter explosion worthy of having been accomplished by James Bond, and also cool conspiracy elements like I mentioned previously. My only complaint is that I liked the dark ambiguous ending to the film that occurred about seven minutes before the actual ending better than the one that preceded the credits. But the explosion and the hot redhead make up for that, so.

TMNT

The problem with not reviewing things right after you finish consuming them is that you run the risk of acquiring a debilitating sports injury and having a hard time remembering what you might have wanted to say through the haze of pain, tiredness, and general malaise that accompanies such events. But, y’know, through such tribulations I forge ahead.

So, it was like this. On Sunday, I went to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie with a few of the guys and mostly the kids. It was a kid friendly movie, of course, in that there were lots of kid-laughs that tended to make me roll my eyes, but it definitely had a little bit of depth shining through the stylized art and sporadic comic relief. A couple of paralleled but different takes on the meaning of family and teamwork, thoughts on vigilantism, good hint-dropping for a sequel, plus all kinds of mutant ninjas vs. regular ninjas vs. regular mutants three-way combat action. If that’s not enough to convince you but you’re still fan in general, I should point out that this is clearly Raphael’s movie. Since he’s the best one, that should persuade any remaining foot-draggers.

300

I find that I haven’t got much to say about 300. I think this is because everything that you need to know about it, you already knew long before you ever entered the theater. It’s a historical tragedy, which means that everyone is going to die. But it’s a Greek historical tragedy, which means that none of them will mind dying, because all that talk about your name being remembered down through the ages was actually true in those days, for those people. So, death and glory; the rest is just the details.

However, it must be acknowledged that the details were quite awesome. At least, they were after the plodding introductory exposition on the youth of King Leonidas of Sparta had finally run its course. Lots of cheesecake and beefcake? Check. Creepy giants and hunchbacks and monsters that would not look out of place in a Resident Evil videogame? Check. Political intrigue? Absolutely. Piles and piles of bloody violence? You’re damn right. Stilted dialogue that sounds like it could have been written 3,000 years ago? Well, but that’s kind of a feature, right? Unfortunate imagery that forces comparisons to Gladiator? Well, you can’t win ’em all.

On balance, it pleases me that these graphic novels are being written, and it pleases me that they’re being adapted. There are other reasons, but the fact that Stylized Comic-Book Movie is a genre that still feels fresh and new would be reason enough all by itself.

Ghost Rider

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And now I will demonstrate the usefulness of lowered expectations. Going into Ghost Rider, I expected a big pile of badness surrounding some enjoyable special effects. The special effects were, as predicted, pretty enjoyable. Of course, the fact that they can be in a February movie says more about the current state of the art than it does about the care taken on this particular project. But my sense of wonder has not yet faded on this axis, so I’ll let that part slip by unnoted. Then there’s the plot and the acting.

Acting first, as it’s easier. The scenery-chewing characters chewed scenery appropriately. (The Devil, the animatronic actual Ghost Rider, the bad guy, etc.) Sam Elliot made the best of his restrictive archetypal role. Eva Mendes made the best of her role as Bringer of the Cleavage. And Nicolas Cage played per usual. Any time he tried to be funny or dramatic, I was forced to cringe. Any time he tried to be soulful, he was fine. Best of all, though, any time he didn’t really try to be anything, he was pretty good. Especially with deadpan humor, possibly because he wasn’t told it would be funny? I really don’t get how he can be so hit or miss, but he definitely had some amount of hit on this one, which helped a lot.

And then there’s the plot. Well, really, the two plots. They’re inextricably tied together, but still pretty distinct despite that. On one hand, you have the origin story. Why did Johnny Blaze decide that jumping motorcycles over things wasn’t enough to get out of life, that he had to melt off his flesh and go all flamey and collect evil souls? How did he get that awesome chain whip? How has it affected his romantic life? Will the cops disapprove? And so forth. This part was pretty good, more engaging than any of the other February Marvel releases I can remember. And on the other hand, you have the story of the Ghost Rider vs. some demons. This was choppy and boring, and the payoff at the climax was too little, too late.

I wish I was in junior high or something right now, because ‘Ghost Rider: A Study in Contrasts’ would make an excellently pompous title.

Smokin’ Aces

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So here’s a discovery. Ever since I started reviewing stuff, I’ve been more apt than previously to only see something I’m pretty excited about seeing. I hadn’t really noticed that trend, until last weekend I went to a movie wholly because someone else wanted to without much impetus of my own, only to discover that I’ve been able to come up with nothing much to say about it for at least three days now. Which is kind of sad when you consider that I still enjoyed it; it just didn’t seem to give me any kind of craggy surface to latch onto and get an impression from.

Smokin’ Aces is one of those collision course films. You take a lot of different characters, wind them up, point them at some common target, and watch the body count start piling up as they inevitably interfere with each other. In this case, magician Buddy “Aces” Israel is the common goal of a number of assassins, a few bail bondsmen, and an FBI protection team after word leaks out that the mob boss Israel is scheduled to testify against has promised to pay a million dollar contract to The Swede when he brings him Israel’s heart. Bloody violence, games of cat-and-mouse and occasional hilarities ensue. Also, it’s the Nevada mob, so there are a lot of hookers.

The film doesn’t have a lot of depth, which is okay; it’s not supposed to. It carries you through sheerly by force of adrenaline. In fact, the only bad thing I can say about it is that the closing reel has enough depth that it feels like part of a different movie. But if you can forgive that, there’s a reasonably star-studded list of journeyman actors and a beltload of bullets to get you from start to finish. If you’re cool enough to get past the velvet rope and the bouncer at the door, that is. It’s just that kind of movie, and it knows it full well.

Casino Royale (2006)

MV5BMTM5MjI4NDExNF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDM1MjMzMQ@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_As so often promised, James Bond has returned.

And it’s a good return, too. Casino Royale has a Bond that, at the beginning of the movie, isn’t even a Double-Oh agent yet. I spent a little bit of time in skepticality, but there was a single moment in the first action sequence, when he jumps over the wrought-iron fence and into the [spoiler elided]; in that moment, I could tell that this new guy was still James Bond. From there on, I was able to lean back, stop analyzing and enjoy the ride. Sure, he’s the new guy, but going back to the beginning made that work pretty well. You see him making rookie mistakes and bouncing back (or not), and you get a brand new impression that he’s a human. Lately, these movies have shied away from that kind of character, and it’s refreshing to be able to worry about him and not just his sidekicks.

Bond’s mission is to follow some terrorist money and prevent it getting to the terrorists. Only, he discovers that the guy doing the laundering has accidentally lost all of it himself and hopes to win it back in a $150 million game of, well, Texas Hold’Em. (Apparently, that is now the only version of poker that officially exists.) So, Bond is bought into the game by MI6 and pursues a high stakes game of cat and mouse with the evil money laundering guy, wherein his dual goals are to find enough proof to capture the guy for questioning and, if possible, to make sure someone else wins the money. It’s actually quite a bit more exciting than it sounds, for all that there’s a lack of perfectly plotted gadgets and insane, overpowered supervillains. (Or, more likely, because of that lack. Humanized, I said.) The ending gets a little convoluted, but apparently the fault lies with the original author. (Well, sure, and some to the screenwriter for not finding a way to fix it at least a little bit.) They do win my respect, despite all that, for providing me with what will probably be the coolest thing I’ll ever see happen in Venice.

Two things I wonder, though. Will they start remaking all of the old Bond movies, and cause them to more closely follow Fleming’s work? I think that might not be a bad idea, though I doubt it’s what will happen. And, why is there such a big brouhaha over ‘James Blond’? Seriously, after putting together a solid Bond to rival the best performance of any of the previous ones, we’re focused on his hair? Lame. This must be how Reese Witherspoon feels when she reads In Style the day after the Academy Awards.

Most importantly, though, I stuck around through the credits and received the eternal promise: James Bond will return.

Snakes on a Plane

I know what you’re thinking. I’ve been talking about Snakes on a Plane since even before Jon Stewart heard about it, and now it’s been out for a week with nary a peep from me. I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully, so far) to resolve the spam issue hereabouts, and that has been taking almost all of my attention. It sucks, but there it is. (Incidentally, spammer people. I delete all of it. It’s not going to help you any to put it here. I guarantee you send me more spam in a given week than I get hits, even if all of my readers were gullible idiots. What you are doing is useless. It’s not going to make you any money. I promise. Please stop. Or when you get indicted and are being transported to the trial, I may very well… but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

What you have to understand is how very, very tired I was. Running on low sleep from dealing with new job, 90 minutes of commute per day, grandfather in the hospital, and still trying to have some semblance of a personal life. So by 10 PM on Thursday night, I was already more than able to go right to sleep. Staying awake for an extra couple of hours to watch a movie instead, that was the stuff of insanity. And yet, it was motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane, man. How am I supposed to turn that down?

Well, it’s like this. I have a history, when it’s late and I’m tired, of falling asleep. Shocking, I know. But I even mean when I have every intention of staying awake. It’s a combination of comfort and darkness that is usually unbeatable by my higher brain functions. And I was a lot more tired than usual. The point of all this is to make it clear that when I say I stayed awake for the whole movie, that’s not just some idle aside which should have been obvious before you ever started reading. I was motherf-. Well, I was really tired, is my point.

Even despite all my protestations, I’ll admit that this isn’t the finest endorsement ever. But really, how much better of an endorsement could I give than the title of the movie? Well, for one, I am able to confirm that there were moth- *ahem* snakes on that plane. And they bit people in all kinds of excellent places. And a wide variety of two-dimensional characters were in danger of dying at any moment, and often did. Scripted lines and situations alike were laugh out loud funny, and if you didn’t really care what happened to most of the characters, well, that’s kind of okay, because the point is the spectacle of it. It was, in short, the very archetype of an action/horror movie.

Now, go see it.

X-Men: The Last Stand

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So a few years ago, they made an X-Men movie. Despite having played an X-Men video game for the NES in the 80s, I really knew nothing about them except that Nightcrawler was fun to play in that game and Wolverine was supposed to be pretty cool. Comics and me have never really gotten along to the extent that I would expect them to, considering how much I enjoy the movies and games and other trappings of the comic book industry, not to mention how much I enjoy, y’know, books and television. So, there I am, with no expectations. And the movie met or exceeded them. It was fine for what it was, but nothing crazy exciting or groundbreaking. Then they made another one, and man, it was really good. Meaningful character interactions, tough choices with tough consequences, that storytelling meme where the guy that you used to dislike turns out to be really stand-up and helpful when compared against the new opponent that hates all of the characters equally, so the established people have to put aside their petty squabbles and face the new thing together. That’s an idea that has rarely failed to wow me.

And now, the trilogy has been completed. X3 is kind of a weird movie to me. I mean, not the plot. The plot was fine, with its paired external struggles of mutants against government and mutants against mutants and internal struggles between certain sets of key characters, its allegorical hearkening back to the original film, and its pyrotechnics and combat by virtue of leaping through a lot of air at your opponents. So, that was all fine. (Okay, I’m lying about the leaping through the air thing. It didn’t take very many such leaps to start looking really dumb. But, whatever.)

No, X3 is weird to me in that it has so many successes and so many failures. On the one hand, you’ve got the subtle brilliance in the contrasting character development between Magneto and Wolverine, even including an ironic mention of it in conversation between them. But on the other, you’ve got reference to the comicbook love triangle between Rogue, Iceman and Kitty Pryde that goes absolutely nowhere despite ample screen time to make some kind of point. Mix that in with a choppy editing job early on, and I’m forced to conclude that although the spectacle of it was almost total greatness and although the story from all three movies was wrapped up cleanly by the conclusion of this one, it nevertheless falls well below the bar set by X2. Still, though, far better than the original. After all, unlike that (and unlike a lot of first entry comicbook movies, really), it had a plot with deeper complexity than good guys versus bad guys.

Mission: Impossible III

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Here are the problems with the summer movie season.

1) It starts too early. First weekend in May? Inevitably, by mid-July all of the exciting movies are over, and you’re left watching previews for a voodoo horror flick for 3 straight months because it’s the only thing the movie studios think anyone will actually bother to see, and by the time it finally comes around, all you can do is thank God that the previews aren’t on anymore, all desire to actually look into the movie having been leeched away by repeat after repeat of that stupid, terrible, no-good preview.

2) Hollywood has learned, like an undisciplined child, that all attention is good and to be craved, regardless the actual quality of the action that garnered the attention. That is, any movie that is a sequel to a successful movie or has stars I’ve ever heard of or has explosions and car crashes, people will go see it in droves, cranking millions of dollars of profit into the studios, regardless of whether the film in question is actually good. The goal isn’t to make a lasting product, just to bring in money. Used to be, they’d make their money over time by having a film people wanted to see, instead of making it all in the first weekend. (I openly admit to being a part of the problem in this regard. But still, it would be nice to see good movies.)

3) No boobies. All of the nudity in the year comes in December when people are trying to win Oscars for Important Roles where shirts come off only because it is Relevant to the Plot, or else in February/March, aka horror movie season. (And I think we all know those pickings are getting slimmer even as they’re getting fatter.)

The good news, though, is this. Mission: Impossible III has glossed right over the failure of point #2, coming up with a sequel that’s actually worth seeing. More amazing still, it followed a pretty bad sequel, which is usually the kiss of death for an ongoing franchise. I think most of the credit for this can be laid squarely at the feet of J.J. Abrams and his skill with the Alias series. He may still be finding his sealegs in the mysterious / spooky sci-fi genre, but the boy knows how to handle spies, both (obviously) the exciting wetwork and (less commonly by far) their lives outside of those deadly mission into Prague. I mean, get this: I cared what happened to Tom Cruise’s love interest. That right there is an impossible freaking mission, let me tell you.

The only real flaw, and it’s minor, is that the villain is a bit of a hollow shell. Hoffman certainly pulls it off well, creating a sufficiently cold, unaffected, and downright dastardly bad guy that I didn’t notice that there was nothing really there until the credits were rolling. Evil and diabolical, sure, but nothing like reasonable motivations or character development. A pretty cool obstacle, and nothing more. I’d expected better after all those seasons of Alias I’ve washed down over the past year, but then again, it’s only a two hour movie. (I should also say that my ability to map out all the twists and turns an hour in advance is a flaw, but I’m enough used to that to only count it as a plus when a movie actually succeeds in tricking me, these days.)

16 Blocks

Obligatory action movie time! Except, 16 Blocks wasn’t quite as action-oriented as I thought, which was mostly good and slightly bad. Sure, there’s gunplay and chases and car crashes and whatnot, but with neither explosions nor fountains of blood. It’s mostly a talking movie, between Bruce Willis and his fellow cops, Willis and his somewhat crooked grand jury witness, Willis and his estranged family. Mostly, they talk about right and wrong and redemption, and about the line between any two of the three. It wasn’t especially trite, but it was definitely a retread. On the bright side, it had heart.

That said, I’m not sure about Willis’s career these days. ‘Cause, seriously, who can remember the last time he didn’t play a sad-eyed cop trying to protect a person or people from a corrupt system? (Okay, sure, that one time he was a sad-eyed psychiatrist instead.) I know for a fact that he was once funny. Can’t we have that guy, every now and then? This is an unreasonable complaint, though, because I am in no way dismissing his sad-eyed talent. That man can carry the weight of the world on his shoulders at the drop of a hat, and I believe it every time. I bet it’s because he has a kid named Rumor. That would wear on anyone.