I SAW THE DEVIL is the latest from the team of director Jee-woon Kim and star Byung-hun Lee, who did BITTERSWEET LIFE and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD (which I’m really gonna have to see now). Lee plays Soo-hyun, a secret agent type dude whose fiancee is killed by a serial killer. On her birthday. While he’s at work. He is not happy about this.
So through his connections he gets the police files on the four suspects the cops have, and he gets a high tech device or two, and he goes after them. He basically torments the four guys, quickly figures out which one did it, and exacts a complicated method of torture/revenge (torvenge).
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EXCESSIVE FORCE is a pretty generic cop-who-can-kick action movie from Jon Hess, the director of ALLIGATOR II: THE MUTATION. That would be funny if it was the same guy that did NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, but I guess that was Jared Hess. It’s written by and stars Thomas Ian Griffith.
SAVAGE DAWN is a post-apocalyptic-town-harassed-by-bikers movie very similar to 
First of all, let’s take a moment to pause and reflect on the miracle of the THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS series. It started in 2000, a studio b-movie, a dumb subculture exploiter with hot up-and-coming stars, quite good for a Rob Cohen movie and with a star-making performance by Mr. Vin Diesel, but undeniably corny. I don’t think anybody could predict that 11 years later it would be Universal’s most valued franchise/trademark/anti-intellectualproperty or that a part 5 would be bigger and better than the previous ones. Especially when you consider that Diesel ditched out on part 2 and Paul Walker bailed before part 3 and that even the naming of the movies poses a challenge. You don’t see I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER still coming out with new chapters but they keep doing FASTs and FURIOUSes even after running out of sensible combinations of those words.
God DAMN I’m excited for FAST FIVE. It’s only April and that’s my most anticipated movie of the summer by far. But I gotta wait a couple more days, so in honor of Dwayne “The Rock is a registered trademark of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.” Johnson’s addition to the series I decided to finally catch up with his last movie, which I never saw because when I went to see it the showing that I chose turned out to be an “open captions” deal, and I decided to bail. (Ironically there’s so much mumbling in the movie I had to turn the subtitles on a couple times anyway. But at least it was my choice. It’s about freedom.) 
As successful as they may be in their own countries, global superstars always seem to have their eye on the juicy, low-hanging grape of Hollywood. It doesn’t matter how many soldiers have fallen before them, stumbling on a new language, style and approach to filmmaking and bleeding away everything that made them great in the first place. It’s still hard to resist the temptation. They’re still gonna jump and try to bite it.
Hanna (Saoirse Ronan from ATONEMENT and THE LOVELY BONES) is a young girl raised by a single dad (Eric CHOPPER Bana). She grew up away from the city and was home schooled, so she’s different from other kids. And by that I mean she grew up completely isolated in a remote cabin near the Arctic Circle and spent all her time training in combat, hunting and the speaking of multiple languages. Her dad is a rogue CIA guy but instead of doing freelance work like Seagal he just spends all his time growing a Unabomber beard and turning this bright little girl into a murder machine. She’s the girl Beatrix Kiddo hopes Vernita Green’s daughter never turns into. Some day when Hanna decides she’s ready she’ll literally flip a switch that will set off a war with the bitch (Cate Blanchett) that killed her mom.
Stone Cold Steve Austin (THE EXPENDABLES) plays Jim Rhodes, badass Border Patrol agent and former FBI partner of Eric Roberts (THE EXPENDABLES) who has to save his daughter when she’s taken hostage by a group of ruthless thieves, including Gary Daniels (THE EXPENDABLES). Also he has a bow and arrow.
S.W.A.T.: FIREFIGHT is the straight to video sequel to the movie everybody kinda forgot about, based on the TV show that people only know of if they know the fucking awesome theme song. So before we get into this particular movie, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the one and only reason for the continued existence of the S.W.A.T. franchise of trademarked intellectual properties and likenesses and what not: 
SUCKER PUNCH is such an extreme movie stylistically that I feel like I oughta have an extreme reaction to it. Something along the lines of either I want to set up a bunch of traps to torture this movie while I preach to it through a series of self-aggrandizing recordings and puppet displays or I am currently giving this movie an erotic massage and we’ll see where it goes next but spoiler alert it’s not gonna be Biblically approved. Unfortunately I am too much of a centrist. Actually I feel kinda similar about all of Zack Snyder’s movies so far: it doesn’t entirely work, but it’s kind of awesome, I enjoyed it. I guess he’s consistently inconsistent. 
