Thor Movie Review
Thor (the movie version) is played by Australian actor Chris Hemsworth and he has come a long way from his days on Home And Away. He now has the pre-requisite comic book superhero physique and has muscles on top of muscles. The rest of the cast features some surprisingly well-established A-list thespians. The list includes Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins. Wait a minute on that last selection; with some of Hopkins’ recent paycheck films he might be in danger of ...
Captain America: The Winter Soldier Movie Review
Captain America is an old world hero transplanted into a modern age and this made for some fun exchanges in the context of The Avengers but can this be sustained in a film all his own? The result, The Winter Soldier is mixed bag of successes and well, not quite failures, but certainly non-successes.
The film features a well-written, intricate story with broad elements of Minority Report and Robocop and it's nice to see how these components weave together through the course of the film. ...
The Avengers Movie Review
Compared to that other great superhero ensemble flick (no, not Fantastic Four!), Bryan Singer's X-Men, The Avengers is the kitschy one of the two but it is no less a film. Whedon shows that he knows how to do kitsch without descending into a tired, boring, groan-inducing cliché (like Fantastic Four). Of course Whedonphiles have known this for many years and now the rest of the world will know it.
The primary difficulty in an ensemble film such as this is making sure that each character ...
Gangster Squad Movie Review
The story line mainly focuses on real-life gangster Mickey Cohen and the extremes the authorities back in the day used to bring him down. Cohen’s real life story makes for fascinating reading but the movie only taps into a fraction of that but the parts they do use succeed in making Penn as Cohen one of the most over the top villains in screen history. He chews up and spits out so many gangster clichés, it become quite hilarious.
The original cut of the film was modified after the ...
The Expendables Movie Review
Which is why it is especially perplexing that The Expendables has so many talky bits in it and lengthy ones at that. Do we really care about Jason Statham's endless diatribes on his lucklessness in love? Um… no. Do we care about how Randy Couture got his cauliflower ears? Hmmm… not really. Do we want more shooty bits and explosions? Oh, yes please!
Sly Stallone's new flick is the epitome of WYSIWYG movie making, what you see is definitely what you get. With an all-star gym-jockey ...
Fast Five Movie Review
For although the F&F films are well known for their dubious (albeit spectacularly exciting) car play, the opening scene in this episode stretches implausibility to a level which is hard to swallow even for these movies. It pays to only follow this film in the broadest of strokes as the details rarely add up.
The tagline from the previous film – ‘new model, original parts’ - is even truer this time around as Fast Five nicely consolidates all the entries to date by drawing ...
Fast & Furious 6 Movie Review
The Fast and the Furious (2001) was practically a carbon copy of Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break and Fast & Furious (2009) had elements very reminiscent of Bill Duke's Deep Cover. Finally Furious 6 presents an original script that doesn't completely suck like its predecessors: 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Fast Five.
The film begins with a nice round up of all the films so far over its opening credits, foregoing the big opening action sequence of its ...
Elysium Movie Review
The story follows Max (Matt Damon), a downtrodden underclassman vying for asylum in the privileged celestial city of Elysium. Like his poverty-stricken brethren, Max is an oppressed would-be saint crushed under the iron heel of an elitist upper class that is evil beyond redemption.
Emotionally-laden key words such as 'homeland security' and 'no-fly zone' are bandied about to ensure we don't miss the point and one of the bad guys is Apartheid incarnate with his penchant for authoritarian ...
22 Jump Street Movie Review
The fish out of water theme has returned but this time the background has changed to college life (as opposed to high school) and the roles are reversed with Schmidt (Hill) being the outcast and Jenko (Tatum) being the stud/jock who fits in. It’s also slightly less of a challenge in the suspension of disbelief while seeing these two thirty something actors in college instead of high school.
The story line taps into drugs on campus (this time of the performance enhancing variety) and ...
21 Jump Street Movie Review
How this happened is no real mystery. First it must be said that out of the ten or so people I spoke to before the screening, none had actually seen even a single episode of the eighties era television show, so the slate seems to be clean for a new interpretation with no baggage of having to adhere to fans that know every nuance of the original. The film also steers firmly into the direction of parody and as such takes as many swipes at eighties era society as it does the television of the ...
