Posts Tagged ‘Jessica Alba’
Wednesday, November 20th, 2024
TRIGGER WARNING is a b-action vehicle for Jessica Alba (MACHETE, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION). You don’t see her in big movies anymore but she looks basically the same as you remember and she’s playing a CIA covert ops badass whose father dies, so she comes home to her small town, uncovers a criminal conspiracy and fucks up some motherfuckers.
When I saw the trailer I was thinking it was like how Netflix gave tough lady action vehicles to Allison Janney and Halle Berry and different people. But then it opens with a war scene in Syria and I thought oh no, this is more like a recent made-for-VOD movie that Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke would each have a couple scenes in. That’s the general feel of the thing, and storywise it’s all well-worn tropes, very low on original spins. It’s generic – all the numbers are there, all in order – but slightly above average for this sort of thing. Alba seems very dedicated and is cool in it, so at the bare minimum level of “is it a movie where Jessica Alba beats up a bunch of chumps?” it is successful. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Brown, Gabriel Basso, Halley Gross, Jake Weary, Jessica Alba, John Brancato, Josh Olson, Justin Yu, Kaiwi Lyman, Mark Webber, Mouly Surya, Tone Bell
Posted in Reviews, Action | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, August 30th, 2016
Jason Statham returns as Arthur Bishop, his character from the 2011 Simon West film THE MECHANIC. He is not the type of mechanic who might help out his driving characters in THE TRANSPORTER, THE ITALIAN JOB, DEATH RACE and FURIOUS 7. He’s the type that is a euphemism for an assassin-for-hire, as seen in the original THE MECHANIC starring Charles Bronson and Jan Michael Vincent.
Having faked his death at the end of the first one, we find Bishop living an appealing lifestyle in Rio de Janeiro. (Do the people of Rio ever get tired of Hollywood helicopters swooping around that Jesus statue?) He’s now known as Otto Santos and he lives on a nice houseboat where he sits and enjoys his espresso and reconstituted vinyl collection.
But one day a woman comes up to him, knows who he is, says her employer wants him to kill three people. Arthur “Otto ‘The Mechanic’ Santos” Bishop is no chump, though, so he fights her and her henchmen, escapes in spectacular (though blatantly green-screeny) fashion, and gets ready for a fight. There’s almost a running joke about how many stashes he has around. When he self destructs his boat he goes right to a shipping container with guns and passports. When he resurfaces at his old hut on a picturesque beach in Thailand there’s another stash under the floorboards. I bet if you dropped him off at any random spot in the North Pole it would turn out he hid some guns under the ice there years ago. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dennis Gansel, J.J. Perry, Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Michelle Yeoh, Sam Hazeldine, sequel to remake, Tommy Lee Jones, Vic Armstrong
Posted in Action, Reviews | 40 Comments »
Monday, December 1st, 2014
I’m not saying I liked SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR exactly, but it wasn’t as bad as reported. Considering that its two directors’ last films were THE SPIRIT and MACHETE KILLS, which I would consider among the worst things I’ve ever paid to see in theaters, this almost seems like a real movie.
It has all the same problems as the first SIN CITY without the novelty of being a weird new approach to a comic book adaptation, and with very little technological or stylistic advancement considering it was done 9 years later. But I think maybe things bugged me about the first one that people overlooked at the time and now are having a problem with, so they’re being harder on it than me. I don’t know. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Frank Miller, Jessica Alba, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Josh Brolin, Lady Gaga, Powers Boothe, Ray Liotta, Robert Rodriguez, Rosario Dawson
Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Reviews | 36 Comments »
Monday, October 14th, 2013
There are lots of funny things in MACHETE KILLS. For a while it coasts on enjoyably stupid jokes, like the ridiculous trailer for part 3 of the series that it opens with. Early on it has a little faux-serious melodrama, playing it almost straight when a clash with rogue soldiers, a Mexican drug cartel and an army in lucha libre masks leads to the death of Machete (Danny Trejo, DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN, MARKED FOR DEATH)’s partner. I like the setup, with a redneck Arizona sheriff (William Sadler, DIE HARD 2) failing to hang Machete before he gets called in by the president (Charlie Sheen, NAVY SEALS, credited as Carlos Estevez) who offers him citizenship in exchange for doing a dangerous mission. I thought the joke of casting him was to have a guy as crazy as Sheen as the president, like wasn’t Mickey Rourke the president in MASKED AND ANONYMOUS? It honestly didn’t occur to me until seeing him on a White House set that his dad played the president in The West Wing (not to mention playing Kennedy). Anyway, the best part is the idea that this unsavory slasher/wife-and-daughter-fucker/assassin gets to sit in the White House and hear his offer.
Trejo’s face is even more rugged than ever, if possible, and he doesn’t have to joke around. He’s fun to watch just being that same character, but now equipped with various high-tech variations on machetes to chop people up with. Robert Rodriguez (credited as sole director this time, and also with his name above the title, but only a co-story credit) once again fills the movie with a huge, unlikely cast, mostly playing colorful gimmicky characters: Mel Gibson (PAPARAZZI) as a weapon inventor/space cultist planning to blow up the world, Demian Bichir (2012 best actor nominee for A BETTER LIFE) as a revolutionary/terrorist/something, Amber Heard (DRIVE ANGRY) as a government agent undercover as a beauty queen, Walton Goggins/Cuba Gooding Jr./Lady Gaga/Antonio Banderas all playing the same assassin called El Camaleon, Vanessa Hudgens (SPRING BREAKERS) as a girl that’s in one part, Sofia Vergara allowing Salma Hayek some dignity by stepping in to play the deadly Madam character with army of killer prostitutes (see also Lucy Liu in THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, Zoe Bell in BAYTOWN OUTLAWS, etc.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexa Vega, Amber Heard, Antonio Banderas, Charlie Sheen, Cuba Gooding Jr., Danny Trejo, Demian Bichir, Jessica Alba, Lady Gaga, Marko Zaror, Mel Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert Rodriguez, Sofia Vergara, Tom Savini, Vanessa Hudgens, Walton Goggins, William Sadler
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 45 Comments »
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
MACHETE is the story of Machete, a man with alot of machetes. That is why he is named Machete. Danny Trejo (MARKED FOR DEATH, URBAN JUSTICE) stars alongside Steven Seagal, Robert DeNiro, etc.
You know what, I just remembered that you guys already know what MACHETE is. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Don Johnson, fake trailer adaptations, Jeff Fahey, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert DeNiro, Robert Rodriguez, Seagalogy, Shea Whigham
Posted in Action, Reviews, Seagal | 156 Comments »
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
FANTASTIC 4 2: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER 1
Man, I don’t know how this works, but somehow just putting a silver guy in a movie brings me in. When FANTASTIC 4 PART 1 came out I had no interest, but when they started advertising part 2 I thought, oh, who am I fooling? Nobody can resist a silver guy. So I rented part 1 to catch up. And I gotta say, as bad as I pictured that movie being, it was actually alot worse. Definitely in the lower tier of comic book movies, which puts it in the lowest tier of movies overall unless you include immoral material like child porn, snuff, crush videos or TRANSFORMERS.
Basically the first one is the story of four unappealing dorks who get in a space accident that gives them magical powers so they put on shiny blue scuba suits, make bad puns in a big cheesy laboratory set and fight some prick that shoots lightning. The makeup on “The Thing” looks stupid, the digital effects are surprisingly terrible for a big budget movie and any attempt at turning this ridiculous shit into actual drama or excitement is immediately undermined by the constant stream of groan inducing “jokes.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chris Evans, Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Julian McMahon, Marvel Comics, Michael Chiklis, Tim Story
Posted in Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, April 1st, 2005
There’s alot of comic strip books turned into movies but usually they Hollywood em up alot. They change the story and the super hero clothes and turn brits into americans and alot of the fans are fundamentalists so they get pretty upset. Batman doesn’t have nipples because bats don’t have nipples, Super-man isn’t supposed to wear that shade of blue it is actually a different shade of blue, that kind of thing.
So what Robert Rodriguez did for this comic strip SIN CITY, he actually brought in the writer/cartoonist from the comic, made him co-director, and apparently pretty much used the comic as storyboards and script. He used his cool digital movie cameras and convinced a great cast to come in and fuck around in front of green screens and used computers for almost all the backgrounds. According to my team of expert nerds, there are scenes and lines from the funny pages that they cut out here and there and they mixed things together a little bit at the beginning in order to combine three stories into one. But for the most part the shots are based on the drawings and everything written on the page is said out loud in the movie. An obsessive level of faithfulness never thought possible even by Harry Knowles himself. Maybe the most faithful movie adaptation of anything ever, including plays, novels and trading cards. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Benicio Del Toro, Bruce, Bruce Willis, Carla Gugino, Clive Owen, Frank Miller, green screen, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke, Robert Rodriguez
Posted in Action, Bruce, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 2 Comments »
