Crime 199 results

The American Movie Review

The story revolves around a hit man played with icy cool by George Clooney who is on the lame after the tables have been turned on him and he finds himself an intended target for termination. He hides out in a small Italian town that seems familiar to him and pretends to have a somewhat normal life. Unfortunately this normalcy is only applicable to someone with no discernable job but lots of money and one whose only real human contact is with a priest with a secret and with a hooker with ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Wolf Of Wall Street Movie Review

It’s a sign of the expertise at work here that the 180 minute long film literally flies by. It’s also helped along by Leonardo DiCaprio’s most manic performance yet. If you thought he was full on in Django Unchained, he ramps it up ten fold here. Quite a few of the support cast members also turn in career defining roles. This includes Jonah Hill, who get the mix of powerful and pathetic just right and Aussie soap star Margot Robbie’s clothing optional performance that proves her ...