Guardians of the Galaxy Movie Review
And all this for a superhero team that not many people know, and the first Marvel film not to feature one of the Silver Age group of characters created by Stan Lee.
The Guardians are a bunch of undesirables who find themselves fighting together to prevent one of the Infinity Stones from reaching Thanos. If that all sounds a little crazy, then welcome to the Marvel Universe (not just Earth, or Asgard, or wherever it is that Agent Coulson buys his suits) where universe destroying gems and ...
Lucy Movie Review
The story of a forced upon drug mule, in this case the radiant Scarlett Johansson whose stitched in cargo ruptures and floods her body with an intelligence enhancing drug is only the start of the strain of credibility.
What comes next is an example of one of the most crazed usages of computer enhanced imagery ever seen on the big screen as Besson covers a staggering array of ideas. This even includes another cinematic take on the big bang theory (as if The Tree Of Life’s example was ...
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Movie Review
The plague created by Will Rodman's Alzheimer's ‘cure’ has spread throughout the globe and decimated the human population and, presumably, empowered ape populations worldwide. Caesar's simian refugees build a growing community in the redwood forest while a splinter group of human survivors eke out an existence within the ruins of San Francisco. The diminishing fuel supply the human's require for electricity generation inevitably bring them into contact with Caesar's community who ...
How To Train Your Dragon 2 Movie Review
Hiccup is clearly in a loving relationship with Astrid and Hiccup's dad, Stoick, is talking wedding bells. But there's a darkness that accompanies this maturing of the story elements and it proves to be a double-edged sword.
The unbridled fun of the first film (probably Dreamworks' best animated feature) takes a heavy hit in this one with the story centering around loss, love and loss again. Hiccup's discovery of his long lost mother (voiced by Cate Blanchett impersonating Emma Thompson, ...
Safe House Movie Review
He's too... nice. Even when he's playing a bad guy he's almost impossible to dislike, and that's why I dislike him. And his films are usually vehicles to show us how nice he is (even when he's a bad guy). So I was expecting very little from Safe House, which is what makes it so surprising.
The first indicator that Safe House may not be as asinine as it first appears is the impressive cast that also includes Ryan Reynolds, Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard and Robert Patrick. ...
RED 2 Movie Review
Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, Mary-Louise Parker and Bruce Willis reprise their roles from the previous film and this time they're joined by Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Asian action star, Byung-hun Lee. As the central and most-grounded character, Willis is almost boring; instead the flash and colour is supplied by the peripheral characters and, as before, Mary-Louise Parker remains the heart and soul of the film
The plot? It has something to do with a weapon of ...
The Dark Knight Rises Movie Review
The Dark Knight Rises sees Ra's al Ghul's League of Shadows try yet again to wipe Gotham City off the map with yet another device developed by Wayne Enterprises. The problem is, we've been here before. The films plot amounts to a rehash of ideas from Batman Begins, even the leader of the bad guys is (again) not who he appears to be.
While the ‘Ra's al Ghul’ storyline was an interesting one in the context of Batman's origin, it made for a relatively weak finale to Batman Begins and ...
Snow White and the Huntsman Movie Review
The story is not helped by the casting of Hollywood’s blandest starlet in Kristen Stewart nor in Chris Hemsworth whose main claim to fame so far is a comic book character. In Hemsworth's defence, though, he doesn't have much to do bar getting angry and hitting things with a hefty weapon and somehow falling in love with the heroine (I'm still not sure exactly where in the story this happened but it did… apparently). After half an hour it's abundantly clear this is going to be a generic ...
Iron Man 3 Movie Review
The first film worked so well at creating Iron Man’s back-story and showed how well certain rock music can lift a film’s energy just by their mere presence. The second film squandered most of that good will with a poor choice of casting and weak story. Welcome round three and in the now almost obligatory for films of this type, 3D format.
Try as the film does for some real surprise story moments and to flush out the main characters lives, it really lets the side down but as an ...
Iron Man 2 Movie Review
Iron Man 2 is certainly bigger, with an obviously enlarged budget, the film is packed with more expensive looking special effects and even more gratuitous over the top action. The film’s final duke-out is magnified as well with the addition of a very large number of baddies and an overabundance of explosive effects. The story also gets ramped up as we meet Tony Stark’s father (in flashback home movies) and get some welcome insight into his childhood.
Some of the relationships from ...
