Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
You know what, I’m not sure we do. I don’t want to give that little bastard the satisfaction.
Director Lynne Ramsay’s gritty reboot of the PROBLEM CHILD franchise is a beautifully shot, cryptically edited suspense story about a woman (Tilda Swinton) who just can’t seem to connnect with her son (Ezra Miller). Even as a baby he’s a total asshole, almost Michael Meyersian in his silence and lack of emotion. Nobody else seems to notice – the doctor says “I wouldn’t worry about it,” the dad (John C. Reilly) seems to think she’s being paranoid. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: evil kids, John C. Reilly, Lynne Ramsay, Oscilloscope Laboratories
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 50 Comments »
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

You know what movie’s good? SCHINDLER’S LIST! Why did nobody tell me this before?
Would you believe this was my first time seeing SCHINDLER’S LIST? It’s getting toward 20 years old and I remembered I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it yet. It’s kind of a heavy decision to make one day: hey, I got 3 hours before I gotta leave for work, maybe I should watch SCHINDLER’S LIST? Never had the urge I guess. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Kingsley, Best Picture winners, Liam Neeson, Steven Spielberg, WWII
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 121 Comments »
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
Okay, the first thing you’re gonna have to do is completely forget the trailer for THE GREY. It deliberately tricks you into believing something cool is gonna happen in the movie that is not gonna happen in the movie, and it gives away most of the major events, including the very end. It’s a mean trailer. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, James Badge Dale, Joe Carnahan, Liam Neeson, post-action, wolves
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 40 Comments »
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
Steven Soderbergh’s take on an action/spy thriller – built around “The Face of Women’s MMA” Gina Carano after he saw her on Strikeforce while flipping channels around – lives up to my high expectations. It’s written by Lem Dobbs and it’s like the kid sister of THE LIMEY, mixing the style of that Soderbergh classic with kind of a more upbeat ex-Marine-badass-operative-betrayed-and-on-the-run type of story. It has THE LIMEY’s sense of quiet, deliberate pace and dread and also its dry you-just-fucked-with-the-wrong-person type of humor. Of course, professional fighter Carano has different strengths as a performer than Terence Stamp does, so her movie has less emotion and more punching, kicking, choking, armbars, heads broken through furniture, foot chases, etc. Gina’s not gonna mourn the loss of the daughter she never knew, and Terence isn’t gonna climb up onto a roof. In my opinion. And it’s great to have both of them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antonio Banderas, arthouse badass, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Gina Carano, J.J. Perry, Lemm Dobbs, Mathieu Kassovitz, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, MMA, Steven Soderbergh
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews, Thriller | 165 Comments »
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
(KILLER ELITE is enjoyable if unspectacular. Luckily it’s more in the vein of the sort-of-classy studio action thrillers like THE BANK JOB than the gloomy Millennium Pictures joints I halfway expected it to be like. So it co-stars Robert DeNiro, the legendary actor, and not Robert DeNiro, that old man from the 50 Cent movies. But the star is definitely Jason Statham, looking exactly the same in 1980-81 as he does in any other time period (minus the track suit). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: assassins, Ben Mendelsohn, Clive Owen, Dominic Purcell, Jason Statham, Robert DeNiro, true story
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 28 Comments »
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
This review, should you choose to read it, contains some spoilers.
Man, this is the most disappointing movie I’ve seen in a long time, because of the misleading title. Before you waste your money, please know that there are no ghosts in this movie at all. I hope that lady that tried to sue DRIVE for not being THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS will consider throwing some of her legal fund at this one too. It’s just shitty to take advantage of worldwide ghostamania like that. In all other aspects though I really enjoyed it.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: based on a TV show, Brad Bird, good part 4s, Jay-Jay Abrams, Jeremy Renner, Michael Nyqvist, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Tom Cruise, Tom Wilkinson
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 98 Comments »
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011
Okay, let’s do some DTV math here. If there’s a new Jason Statham movie, I’m probly gonna watch it. If it also has Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone and Ben Gazzara in the cast I’m even more probly gonna watch it. All of these people do crappy movies sometimes, but they’re actors I like, so with all of them together that adds up to hope.
If 50 Cent is also in there, though, that’s a detracting factor. Not that I think he’ll do that bad of a job, just that he does not have much of a track record for participating in movies that people should spend their time watching. And actually while the presence of Mickey Rourke in a movie can make it interesting or even great, Mickey Rourke + 50 Cent actually reverses Mickey Rourke and turns him into a likely negative. But in this case there is also the Statham/Winstone combo which could easily overpower the force of Rourke/50, especially when you factor in Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon, ’cause he’s in it too.
So I crunched all this data and according to my calculations 50 is not gonna ruin 13. He already did a DTV movie called 12, he probly just stuck around ’til they starting filming 13 and they just let him be in it because he seemed nice and was passing out Vitamin Water to everybody. So they made the movie with him and later I rented it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 50 Cent, Ben Gazzara, Jason Statham, Michael Shannon, Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, remakes
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 21 Comments »
Monday, November 14th, 2011
THE HIT LIST is a DTV suspense thriller with a great, almost Larry Cohen type premise: 2 drunk guys in a bar commiserate over their shitty days; one claims to be a hitman, the other plays along and writes down on a napkin the five people he’d like dead. And then of course, in the hung over haze of the next morning, he finds out that #5 on the list, the boss that passed him over for a promotion, has been assassinated. Oh shit. So he has to put the kibosh on this thing, if not immediately then at least before the motherfucker gets to #1 on the list. I mean yeah, he caught her cheating, but he doesn’t want his wife dead. They haven’t even tried counseling. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cole Hauser, Cuba Gooding Jr., DTV, William Kaufman
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
This is gonna be pretty short. It’s easy to think of Nic Cage movies in binary terms, like he does good movies and he does terrible ones. And you just hope whichever one it is he’s uncaged enough to make it interesting or funny. But just like there is grey area and overlap between evil Castor Troy and heroic Sean Archer there are various shades of good and bad Cage. For example I thought he was great in KICK ASS but the rest of the movie wasn’t necessarily on the same level. I thought NEXT was a funny-bad classic despite his restrained performance. I thought him being normal in DRIVE ANGRY seriously held the movie back. Even THE WICKER MAN, one of his all time top 5 mega-acting performances, has some pretty boring stretches between classroom rants and bee attacks. (I love it though.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cam Gigandet, Joel Schumacher, Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 99 Comments »