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Posts Tagged ‘David Arnold’

Four Brothers (20 years later revisit)

Tuesday, August 26th, 2025

August 12, 2005

I reviewed John Singleton’s FOUR BROTHERS twenty years ago and hopefully I’ll have a few new things to say about it, but the sad truth is my verdict has not changed. This is a movie that starts off with a real good hook and then doesn’t do enough with it. It’s thoroughly okay.

SUMMER 2005The screenplay is by David Elliot (THE WATCHER) & Paul Lovett, the team who later did G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, and the hook is that an old lady named Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan, THE EWOK ADVENTURE) is in a convenience store in Highland Park, Michigan when it gets robbed, and ends up shot to death. It turns out she was a beloved member of the community who helped hundreds of troubled kids find foster homes. But there were four kids so bad nobody would take them, and she adopted them herself. So her funeral brings all four brothers back home, they get to talking, and decide to go find out who did this.  (read the rest of this shit…)

The Musketeer

Monday, January 18th, 2021

I have very little familiarity with Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, or even any of its many famous film adaptations. I think I mainly know the characters from the cartoons on The Banana Splits. So this review is not coming from the perspective of a true Muskie or Musketmaniac. Instead, I come to THE MUSKETEER (2001) as a fan of two movements in ‘90s/2000s cinema that improbably collided in this movie. Those movements are:

1) The Old Timey Adventure movie – contemporary filmmaking based on old (arguably even obsolete) characters, attempting to evoke a nostalgic movie serial type tone

see also: THE MASK OF ZORRO, THE PHANTOM, THE LONE RANGER

2) Hong Kong Outreach Cinema – that wave of films where geniuses of Hong Kong action cinema were recruited to spruce up Hollywood movies

see also: THE BIG HIT, LETHAL WEAPON 4, THE MATRIX, INVINCIBLE, BRIDE OF CHUCKY (read the rest of this shit…)