Once every 7 years, in a different town each time, high stakes gamblers run a secret competition where the world’s greatest assassins all try to kill each other and the last one standing gets ten million dollars. With that premise and generic title this doesn’t sound like the kind of DTV I would like. And with Ving Rhames and Robert Carlyle starring I have to wonder if this was intended for theatrical release, which could also be a bad sign. We don’t want another EDISON FORCE on our hands. But the great Scott Adkins (UNDISPUTED II, SPECIAL FORCES, etc.) is in this so I’d been keeping my eye out ever since I spotted it on his IMDb page. It was released by the fucking Weinsteins with their pain in the ass exclusive deals (how the fuck do I get my friend to watch MARTYRS if he can’t find it anywhere?) so I didn’t know it came out until I got some emails about it. Two different people said it was even better than BLOOD AND BONE, which I’d pre-emptively declared best DTV action movie of the year. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Robert Carlyle’
The Tournament
Monday, November 9th, 2009
28 Weeks Later
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007I never did write a real review of the popular Danny Boyle picture 28 DAYS LATER, just a little blurb in a summer recap column. To make a short story stay short, I liked it but did not understand the hooplah. It seemed to me most of it had already been done in Romero’s movies, and I liked it better when it was a real movie instead of a home video. So I was kind of annoyed by all the hype at the time that Boyle had “reinvented the zombie movie.” Even the controversial running zombies were straight out of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Somebody give Dan O’Bannon some credit. When he did that in 1985 it was a clever new take on zombies.
But I gotta tread carefully here because there are people out there who will flip out if you use the word “zombie” to describe the zombie-like people doing zombie things in this movie that is clearly based on the zombie films of George Romero. Zombies, it turns out, are people who die and then come back to life as zombies. They are not people who are infected and become zombies, unless they are infected to the point of death and then become zombies. In the case of these movies they just get infected, they do not necessarily die as far as we know, so they are something else. Nobody knows what it’s called, but it’s not a zombie. It’s just some thing that is exactly like a zombie and has every quality associated with zombies, but you can’t call it a zombie, that’s like using the N word almost. So I apologize to all the things who are not zombies but are exactly like zombies in all respects but they have not died and therefore are not zombies that I offended in my previous blurb. I will be more sensitive this time.
(By the way, you zealots on this issue better go after the supposedly fact-based book and movie SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW, since they argue that real life Haitian zombies are people who have been given a poison that slows down their heart rate to make them appear dead, then they come back as zombies. They have not technically died and yet they are using the word zombie, you better make some signs and get down there.) (more…)
Formula 51
Monday, March 20th, 2006FORMULA 51 aka THE 51st STATE
Here’s a movie I always meant to see just because it was directed by Ronny Yu (BRIDE OF CHUCKY), but I skipped it because I never heard a single good word about it. Until the day Paul wrote to disagree with my MUNICH review and then, possibly to avenge me for the review, recommended I watch this one.
Okay, so the movie’s not terrible, it has it’s moments of inspiration, but to me it was a big mess and a little on the cheesy side. When it was over I realized that a better score would’ve gone a long way toward making it more acceptable. Ronny Yu does the whole thing in a goofy, frinetic style and then the cheeseball dance music done by some guy named “Headrillaz” makes it seem like some out of touch commercial trying to be cool.
If I describe what the movie’s about though, it might sound cool. Samuel L. Jackson plays Elmo McElroy, rogue pharmacologist. Batman started when his parents were killed in an alley, and Elmo McElroy started on graduation day 1971 when he was pulled over smoking a joint while still in his graduation robe and lost his right to practice medicine. Skip forward to the 2000s when he works for an overacting Meat Loaf as “the Lizard,” who always refers to himself in the third person and somehow passes as a feared crime boss. He’s supposed to meat with The Lizard and various other kingpins to demonstrate his new super drug POS 51, but instead he sets up a fancy Rube Goldberg contraption to blow them up. (There’s a nice shot of Meat Loaf laying in a giant pile of dolls, maybe a reference to BRIDE OF CHUCKY.)
Elmo heads to England where he meets Robert Carlyle, who is supposed to take him to a chemist and the boss who wants to buy his formula. On the same plane with him is Emily Mortimer as the Lizard’s hired gun Dakota, and this is probaly the first and last time Emily Mortimer will ever play a sexy assassin. At the airport is the villain from MONEY TALKS as a cop trying to catch Elmo. (more…)
The Beach
Saturday, January 1st, 2005This is a movie that looked pretty promising, but shit if I even liked it at all. It is hard to come out with a Fight Club type of picture in the same year that Fight Club came out and not end up looking like a bunch of garbage. But that is what these folks did.
Yes, this is the Fight Club type of movie. You know, the type of movie that is released by Fox, based on a popular novel, crammed full of first person narration criticizing the culture. These type of movies have really beautiful widescreen photographical techniques as well as little showoffy computer camera gimmicks and wall to wall techno music. They are generally about a character who is fed the fuck up with American consumerism and superficiality who wants to leave it all behind and push himself to the limit and seek out danger and blah blah blah. Then they get involved in a secret counterculture which at first is fun and utopian and represents everything they want out of life. But there is always a hint of danger and then one of the colorful supporting characters gets some kind of injury – usually a gunshot blast to the head or shark bite – but the counterculture handles the situation in a heartless bastard of a manner which signals the turning point when you start to realize WELL FER CRYIN OUT LOUD, the counterculture is just as fulla shit as the culture itself. At this point in these type of movies the character either goes crazy or finds out he’s been crazy all along, and then they start having delusions about the founder of the secret counterculture, who is some kind of intensely charismatic wacko, who starts to take on sort of superhuman powers, and blah blah blah. You know the type of movie I’m talking about.
Anyway the Beach is not the best in this type of genre. The star is Leonardo DiCaprio who is a young boy who I believe also starred in one of Sam Raimi’s pictures if I’m not mistaken. His acting is okay but he is such a goofball that it is hard to get involved in the story. His narration is not funny like in Fight Club it is just corny. It takes itself too god damn seriously. And whenever he does something to push himself, like cliff dive, there is a long scene of him yelling and raising his fists in the air like he just won the fucking championship belt or some shit. And the music gets all triumphant like you’re supposed to go sing “For he’s a jolly good fellow” to him. Even in one of the deleted scenes on the dvd where he joins a drum circle, the little fucker can’t play the damn bongos without getting an intense crazy look on his face. I mean jesus boy why can’t you just smile. playing a drum isn’t exactly an extreme sport. (more…)
