The Expendables: Clever homage or silly excuse for explosions?

Barney Ross leads a ragtag group of mercenaries called The Expendables that take on assignments most teams would not. Their latest, however, might be their last as they are tasked with overthrowing a tyrannical South American despot with shady ties to a group of Americans.

It is unclear if writer/director Sylvester Stallone intended The Expendables to be a cleverly disguised homage to the kind of action films that made him a megastar in the 1980’s, given the fact that the story was as thin and transparent as the moustache drawn on his face and that there were more explosions in the final fifteen minutes of the movie than a person sees in a typical round of Call of Duty: Black Ops, or if it was a “serious” attempt to create a slick and entertaining action film. However one chooses to interpret it (I prefer the “homage” take personally), The Expendables delivered the goods and provided enough gun/fist fights, explosions, and continual violence to satiate action fans of any and all age. The all star cast surrounding Stallone (including names like Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren) played their parts well but Sly was right to focus parts of the film on his co-star (and seeming replacement as the new action film leading man) Jason Statham. There is only miniscule development in both he and Stallone’s characters, but it is enough to pique the audiences’ curiosity and give their ear drums a rest before the next round of deafening explosions and gun play started. The part that truly helped to make the film watchable were the cameos by two of Stallone’s follow action hero icons, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The verbal jabs that Sly and Arnold exchanged were enough to have most in the audience rolling in the aisles.

This film is destined to become a staple on the cable channel Spike TV because it is the prototypical guy film.

Grade: C

Predators: Finally, a sequel that delivers!

A group of warriors are dropped into the jungle of an alien world with no explanation. But soon after they realize that they were brought there for a nefarious purpose, to be hunted. If they want to survive, they’ll need to band together and fight off their hunters.

No one expects to go into a film such as Predators and see Shakespearian style acting and storytelling. For the most part, an audience is just looking to be entertained for an hour and forty-five minutes. Not only did Predators have to capture the attention of people new to the film series, but it also carried the extra burden of having to satisfy fanboys and girls of the Predator franchise who had suffered through two lousy Alien Vs. Predator films and were ready for something good.

Thankfully, the fanboys and girls have no reason to fear this new take. Under the watchful eye of Producer (and Predator fan) Robert Rodriguez, director Nimrod Antal delivered a highly entertaining action movie with an effective mix of homage to the Schwarzenegger classic to go along with new characters, environments and creatures. Adrien Brody is no Schwarzenegger, but he more than held his own as Royce, a former Black Ops soldier turned mercenary whose sole purpose in the beginning of the film was to get off the planet, with or without the help of the others. His character seemed to mirror, in a broader sense, that of the current “Me” generation that has to tweet their every move and then post a clip of what they did on You Tube moments later. Schwarzenegger’s Dutch was a soldier, a leader, so his struggle to defeat the Predator in the original made it easy for an audience to pull for him. With Royce, there needed to be some internal conflict in which he was given the opportunity to possibly change and grow from a selfish bastard into a redeemable man an audience would root for. His dilemma of staying a self-interested mercenary or teaming up with the other “targets” (including the beautiful Alice Braga as Isabelle, an IDF sniper) formed the emotional backdrop to the story and succeeded in further sucking in the audience when they were not busy squirming in their seats as Antal effectively built the tension throughout the movie.

Predators is a welcome return to what made the original such a blast to watch.

Grade: B

Law Abiding Citizen

After his wife and child are murdered and their killer set free, Clyde Shelton decides to take matters into his own hands and begins punishing all of those people (the killer, the judge who set him free and even the prosecutor) who were responsible for the miscarriage of justice.

For the first part of Law Abiding Citizen it was easy for the audience to get wrapped up in the story. They were shown just what happened to Clyde, his wife and child and could empathize with him as he watched prosecutor Nick Rice (played in a very uninspiring fashion by Jamie Foxx) let the killer walk free. In their minds, they were confronted with the same dilemma Clyde was, what would you do if the legal system failed you? The morality of the situation formed the backdrop of the rest of the film, with Clyde choosing the “eye for an eye” approach when it came to dealing with criminals and Nick (obviously) representing the side of the law. Each tried to convenience the other that their way was the way justice should be done, however after the major twist to the story was revealed (regarding Clyde’s past), that moral showdown was put on the backburner in lieu of bigger explosions and more insane ways for the people surrounding Nick and the case to be killed. Perhaps most disappointing, aside from this incongruous change in tone, was Nick’s own actions at the end of the film. His final solution for how to deal with Clyde ran counter to everything he had said and fought for up to that point, rendering the entire meaning behind the film mute and making Law Abiding Citizen just another monotonous crime thriller with nothing new to say.

Grade: D+

Jonah Hex: As bad as the scar on his face

Former Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter Jonah Hex is a scarred man, not only physically but mentally as well. He is haunted by the memories of his murdered family and the man who killed them (a guy named Turnbull). When the Union Army ask Hex to hunt down Turnbull, he jumps at the chance for revenge.

You feel bad for Josh Brolin (a good actor in his own right), because he was given so little to work with script and story wise. He tried to make Hex a likeable (or as likeable as a bounty hunter could be) character but the lack of a cohesive story and total absence of character development truncated that and the audience was never given the chance to start to root for him in his quest for vengeance. Not only was the story sloppily hacked together from the remnants of other comic book film adaptations but the action was lacking, which made the running time of about an hour and fifteen minutes feel like an eternity. And what of the other major actors in the film, could they save it mediocrity? Sadly not, John Malkovich had it on cruise control as the baddie Turnbull, Will Arnett was on the screen for only about two seconds and Megan Fox showed why people should start thinking that Michael Bay was a genius for firing her from Transformers 3.

Hollywood has once again succeeded in turning a very cool anti-hero from the comic book world into a clichéd, one-liner saying joke of a character. Jonah Hex is an awful mess.

Grade: D-

A Nightmare on Elm Street: One, two, this remake is nothing new!

Nancy and her friends are having problems sleeping. They are being haunted by a man with knives for fingers who has a strong desire to do them harm.

Unfair or not, this film is going to draw comparisons to the 1984 modern masterpiece of the same name by director Wes Craven. The director of the remake, Samuel Bayer, was able to utilize superior sets, subtle CGI and other visual goodies in order to give this version of Nightmare a very slick look and some impressive visuals. Jackie Earle Haley produced his own unique take on the infamous movie monster Freddy Krueger. Whereas Robert Englund’s (the actor who portrayed Freddy in the original) Krueger carried a Joker - ish glee when he stalked the teenagers in the original, Haley was just creepy with a capital "C" and more apt to mangle than crack wise. Even though Haley’s Freddy was more vicious in the remake, there were not many scares to be had as the jumps were predictable and standard for newer horror films (which seem more concerned with showing buckets of blood rather than merely hinting at mayhem and letting the audiences’ imaginations fill in the nasty details). In the end, what separated these two films was the fact that the original had some sustenance behind its story whereas the remake lacked not only in story but in characters as well. The original had an underpinning of social commentary in that the story seemed to be exploring the disintegration of the American household thanks to divorce and other factors unique to the Reagan Era. In order for Nancy’s mother to deal with the implosion of her life, she turned to alcohol and drugs, and expected her daughter to do the same when her friend’s started dying. But Nancy (an ultra whiny but still affective Heather Langenkamp) was willing to take on the problem of facing Freddy and not slip into the bottle. The result of this was that the audience (teenagers for the most part) were better able to relate to Nancy’s struggle for self-preservation and root for her while at the same time have the bejesus scared out of them. The Nancy in the remake (played by Rooney Mara), had little to no personality and, again, the story focused more on the many ways Freddy could dispatch the teens as opposed to drawing in the audience with a substantial story to punctuate the scares.

In light of this, it begs the question, why remake a superior horror film when you cannot hope to top it?

Grade: D+

Get Him to the Greek

Intern Aaron Green wants to rise to the top of the music business. To do this, and impress his boss Sergio, he accepts the challenge of getting unruly rock star Aldous Snow from London to Los Angeles for an anniversary concert.

A film like Get Him to the Greek can be a challenge for an audience to watch. There were a number of absolutely hilarious sequences, usually involving Aaron cleaning up or covering for Aldous for any number of things including (but not limited to); hiding drugs in an unusual place or partaking of all of the drugs Aldous was carrying (in order to keep him clean) and destroying the set of The Today Show. Russell Brand was a hoot as Aldous, reprising a role most people remember him playing in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He behaved exactly like most people think rock stars behave and indulged in the drugs, money, debauchery and insanity excessive fame brings. The guy who stole the show however was Sean Combs (or P. Diddy as the kids still call him I think). As record executive Sergio, almost everything he did or said was hysterical, the best bit being when he joined Aldous, Aldous’ Dad and Aaron in partaking of a drug neapolitan called a “Jeffrey” and destroying a Las Vegas hotel room.

The challenge for the audience was trying to connect to any of the characters. Aldous was a morally bankrupt rock star that the audience wanted to root for but could not thanks to all of the horribly destructive things he did to himself and Aaron. He was a callous man, and even when he “found” himself via his music at the anniversary concert, the happy ending felt and hollow and tacked on. Aaron’s character arc was not any better. In his quest to get Aldous to Los Angeles he did some very bad things, all of which were conveniently pushed to the side when the time came to successfully patch things up with his girlfriend Daphine. Again, another tacked on happy ending that seemed to come out of nowhere.

There were a number of thing that made you laugh out loud in Get Him to the Greek, it is just too bad the film did not have the heart to make it a complete comedy.

Grade: C

Gamer: I liked it better when it was called "The Running Man"

In the year 2034 a large scale online game called “Slayers” allows people to control convicted felons and them face off in a life or death struggle. But a wrongfully convicted soldier named Kable looks to change this by bringing down the online worlds’ evil architect, a man named Castle.

From its chaotic beginning, which dumped the audience into one of the online Slayer battlefields and left them to dangle as they tried to figure out just what was happening, to the obscenely pornographic levels of violence throughout the multiple battles Kable (a sadly underutilized Gerard Butler) went through in order to get to Castle and gain his freedom, Gamer was an absolute mess of a film which failed to be entertaining. The only thing the directors (there’s your first sign that a movie is not going to be Oscar worthy, the need for two directors) seemed interested in was trying to show newer ways to dispatch human lives. There were no redeeming qualities to the characters, no logic to the story or any remarkable special effects.

If you’re looking for a film that somewhat successfully entertains an audience while positing and even attempting to answer the big moral question of whether allowing prisoners to win their freedom by participating in a death match for the amusement of the masses, check out 1987’s The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger and keep a safe distance from Gamer.

Grade: D-

Legion: When good premises go bad

A group of survivors has taken shelter at a truck stop after the apocalypse. All hope seems to be lost until they are visited by the archangel Michael, who has joined them in order to protect one of the survivors who is baring the Messiah.

The premise behind this film was that God was angry and had essentially lost faith in all of human kind. Therefore he unleashed the apocalypse in order to rid the world of most of the bad apples and start again. Michael intercedes in this for he loves mankind and believes that man can change. On paper the film sounded like it could have been an intense theological thriller, however you do not watch a film on paper. Legion failed on every level to be anything close to entertaining. The characters were unlikable, so much so one halfway through the film one started hoping that God’s little reboot would work. The story was never fully developed and the plot had major holes in it. So director Scott Charles Stewart decided to see how many inept shoot outs or car crashes he could plaster on the screen in order to kill the rest of the film’s running time when the characters weren’t emotionally bashing one another or spouting dialogue for which the term “dreadful” would be complimentary. Worst of all he turned the character of Michael into a pseudo “Terminator” who seemed more worried about killing folks than protecting the mother of the Messiah and carried more guns than a Special Forces unit.

Uninspired, dull and silly, Legion was an insipid waste of time.


Grade: D-

Date Night: A good watch for married people

Phil and Claire Foster are your typical married couple with jobs, kids and a number of other responsibilities and problems which have made their lives somewhat stale, especially in the romance department. To rekindle the romance, they head to the big city for a date night, but when they take the reservations of the Tripplehorns at a fancy restaurant, their evening takes an interesting turn.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey made for a terrific on screen couple and each was able to bring their own unique comedic style to the table against the backdrop of some truly outlandish situations and circumstances. Carell delivered the laughs with his dry style while Fey was able to make the audience chuckle with her sharp wit and reactions to being a “fish out of water” as Mrs. Tripplehorn. The laughs were there, but director Shawn Levy also took the time to show how Phil and Claire were feeling when they were not being chased by thugs or working the pole at a strip club (one of the more hilarious comedic bits in the movie). Without the serious conversations between the two of them regarding where their marriage was going or why the romance had stopped and what they needed to do in order to reconnect, Date Night could have been nothing more than a series of slapstick setups with no real heart to it. Thankfully however, there were those quiet moments where Phil and Claire were able to talk and draw the audience in.

Date Night has its amusing parts which were punctuated by the fact that its main characters were easy to relate to and faced the same problems most real life married couples do (minus the whole being mistaken for another couple and then having to endure a number of crazy situations in order to clear their name thing).


Grade: C+

Iron Man 2: Another average sequel

Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, has made the world a safe place again. But his days of being a superhero might be cut short after he is asked by the US Government to hand over his incredible suit and its technology. He also faces the threat of a new villain named Ivan Vanko, who teams up with one of Stark’s corporate rivals in order to destroy not only Stark Industries, but Iron Man himself.

Credit needs to be given to director Jon Favreau, screenwriter Justin Theroux and Robert Downey Jr. for they tried to further develop the character of Tony Stark and make this sequel stand out in its own way. Downey still played him like the narcissistic ego-manic with a good heart and a desire to make the world a better place that audiences could not get enough of in the original but there was also a tinge of self-destruction to him this time around. Stark looses faith in himself and his ability to be the hero the world expects him to be, and Downey was able to portray this devolvement masterfully. The audience felt the weight of the world on Tony’s shoulders, when they weren’t busy chuckling at his sharp witted retorts, and for an actor to accomplish a feat like that in a comic book adaptation is remarkable. Another enjoyable aspect to the film was the relationship and interplay between Downey’s Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts. Their snappy dialogue and crackling chemistry provided plenty of laughs and tender moments. However these juicy bits of character development and intrigue were overcome by an inordinate amount of tedious backstory which made the film drag and the audience loose interest. Add to that a couple of lackluster villains in Justin Hammer (an uber sleazy Sam Rockwell) and Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke, who looked like a ghetto version of Dr. Octopus when he had his suit on), some mediocre action sequences (including the final showdown between Iron Man and Vanko which redefined the term “anti-climatic”), plus Scarlett Johansson's lack of any meaningful screen time (we only get to see her kick butt for a minute or so) and you get a so-so action film which wasted the efforts of its two greatest assets, its lead actors.

It’s true that Iron Man 2 is supposed to serve as a sort of pre-cursor to a number of other Marvel comic book film adaptations that will be heading to the big screen in the coming years, (Thor, Captain America and The Avengers to name a few), but setting up all of these other characters and stories could have been accomplished without watering down Iron Man 2 so much that it became more of a tedious exercise than a good old fashioned popcorn flick like the original was.

Grade: C