(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…)
Archive for the ‘Thriller’ Category
Killer Elite
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011This 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.
13 vs. 13 TZAMETI
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011Okay, 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…)
The Hit List
Monday, November 14th, 2011THE 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…)
Trespass (2011)
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011This 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…)
Miracle Mile
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011MIRACLE MILE is a really good and unique movie that would be better if you just saw it not knowing anything about it, which is how I first saw it. So here, let me just give you the quick sales pitch and then you can bail out if you want: Anthony Edwards hears a payphone ringing, decides to answer it, on the other end is a panicked guy apparently calling from a missile silo to warn his dad that a nuclear war has started and he needs to get as far east as he can before we get hit in an hour and a half. It sounds real, so he has to decide what to do with that information, how to escape, who to tell. (read the rest of this shit…)
I Saw the Devil
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011I 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).
(read the rest of this shit…)
The Disappearance of Alice Creed
Monday, April 25th, 2011THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED is a simple story about two kidnappers and their hostage. And it’s not one of those stories where they become friends. It’s a simple, well-executed thriller and especially before the plot starts thickening this thing is deeply unsettling.
It had me right from the great opening scene: a montage of these two nefarious individuals (Martin Compston and Eddie Marsan) shopping at a hardware store and then preparing an abandoned house as a kidnapping hideout. It just goes through step-by-step as they add locks, cover windows, soundproof the walls, put together a bed with chains on it… it’s like a sinister version of one of those home makeover shows.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Largo Winch
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011(here’s another one I watched because it played at ActionFest this year)
Largo Winch (Tomer Sisley) is an unusual hero: he’s a globetrotting adventurer and/or vagabond, he knows how to fight and how to escape, he likes to rebel against authority, tends to fall for beautiful aid worker women helping the poor… and he’s the CEO of a huge Hong Kong-based international corporation called the W Group.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Source Code
Monday, April 4th, 2011SOURCE CODE is a fun thriller with a clever sci-fi premise: what if for some reason they remade GROUNDHOG’S DAY as a DE JA VU type thriller, and instead of Bill Murray it’s the guy who looks like the guy who used to play Spider-man and instead of having one day to cover the weather he has 8 minutes to figure out who planted a bomb on a train? That would be kinda cool, right? (read the rest of this shit…)