Posts Tagged ‘Luke Bracey’
Monday, July 4th, 2022
Any musician biopic, pretty much, is gonna be a legend or a tall tale. What’s great about Baz Luhrmann directing one is that his entire style leans into that. Condensing a whole life and career into an entertaining 2 1/2 hours requires shortcuts, cheats and artistic license that prevent it from being literally true, so here we have a director whose work is rarely about the literal truth anyway. It’s more about how something feels and looks and sounds, or making it look and sound like it feels. Biopics depend on montages to move quickly across time, and this guy speaks fluent montage. He’s also a director whose films have generally been on the verge of being jukebox musicals (going all the way in the case of MOULIN ROUGE!). So what could be more perfect for him than an Elvis Presley biopic?
ELVIS is absolutely presented as a legend, one told by Presley’s long time manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, DRAGNET), who admits “there are some who’d make me out to be the villain of this here story,” and in between his justifications does come off as something of an evil mastermind. He addresses us decades after Elvis has passed, when he’s on his own death bed in a Las Vegas hospital room with a view of Star Trek: The Experience (1998-2008), but in his mind he’s also dragging his I.V. drip around an empty casino. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alton Mason, Austin Butler, Baz Luhrmann, David Wenham, Elvis, Elvis Presley, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Kodi Smit-Mcphee, Las Vegas, Luke Bracey, Mandy Walker, Nelson George, Olivia DeJonge, Shonka Dukureh, Tom Hanks, Xavier Samuel
Posted in Reviews | 50 Comments »
Tuesday, June 7th, 2022
INTERCEPTOR is a new straight-to-Netflix action movie with a story in the tradition of an UNDER SIEGE, but a feel more like a (good) DTV movie. You know – you don’t have the scope or production value of those ‘90s studio action programmers that warm our hearts, and you don’t have an army of veteran character actors in the supporting cast, but the trade off is you get fewer explosions and vehicle crashes and more care put into choreographing and executing exciting hand-to-hand duels between the heroine and her various opponents. Less spectacle, but more intimate.
The thing that piqued my curiosity is that this is an action vehicle for Elsa Pataky, who apparently was in BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR and SNAKES ON A PLANE, but I know her as Brazilian police officer Elena in FAST FIVE. Elena falls in love with Dom, but steps aside when Letty turns out to be alive in FAST & FURIOUS 6, and by the time of FATE OF THE FURIOUS she gives birth to Dom’s son and dies. I like her in the FAST movies but she’s not exactly a standout character, so it’s cool to see a movie all about letting her show off. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Glenane, Chris Hemsworth, Elsa Pataky, Ingrid Kleinig, Luke Bracey, Matthew Reilly, Mayen Mehta, Michael Lira, Netflix, Paul Caesar, Rhys Muldoon, Sam Hargrave, Steve Morris, Stuart Beattie, Tim Wong, Zoe Carides
Posted in Action, Reviews | 25 Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2020
LUCKY DAY is a 2019 crime movie with death and laughs and colorful characters, including but not limited to Crispin Glover. It’s not retro or a throwback, but definitely has shades of the ‘90s everybody-wants-to-be-Tarantino days and Guy Ritchie and stuff, which is not a pose because this is from writer/director Roger Avary (a.k.a. Oscar-winning co-writer of PULP FICTION), his first directing in more than 15 years.
It’s about a crazy day in the life of a guy named Red (Luke Bracey, GI JOE: RETALIATION, THE NOVEMBER MAN, POINT BREAK remake, HACKSAW RIDGE) when he’s released from a two year prison bid and returns to his French artist wife Chloe (Nina Dobrev, xXx: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE) and daughter Beatrice (Ella Ryan Quinn). I don’t think it’s ever specified what he did time for, but he does go to see his friend Leroy (Clé Bennett, JIGSAW) – who has changed his name to Le Roi – and the fact that they run a lock and key shop with a cool basement hidden inside a safe and inside that is a huge safe that he attempts to crack for fun seems like a hint. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cle Bennett, Clifton Collins Jr., Crispin Glover, David Hewlett, Luke Bracey, Mark Dacascos, Nadia Fares, Nina Dobrev, Roger Avary, Tomandandy, Tomer Sisley
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017
HACKSAW RIDGE is a twisted, uninhabitable mass of rock with a steep edge and riddled with secret caves, one of which is home to 2×4-carrying WWF legend “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan. But there is no movie about that so until then we’ll have to make do with director Mel Gibson (APOCALYPTO)’s identically titled HACKSAW RIDGE, the best-picture-nominated movie based on the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN), the only WWII Medal of Honor recipient who was a conscientious objector. See, he wanted to do his part to fight Hitler, but he didn’t believe in killing or even touching a gun, so he went as a medic and was really fucking good at saving people’s lives. A reverse AMERICAN SNIPER.
I wonder if he traveled through time if he would kill Baby Hitler, or just try to give first aid to other babies fighting against Baby Hitler? It really makes you think.
The first half or so is before he goes to war. We see him as a little shit, constantly running and climbing and getting in violent scraps with his brother Hal, with no intervention from his drunk asshole dad (Hugo Weaving, BABE), a WWI veteran. Desmond could easily turn into the town bully, but maybe it’s his intense devotion to the family’s Ten Commandments poster that ensures he’s a big dork by the time he grows into Garfield. On one INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE style conveniently fateful day he discovers the two other loves of his life, because he 1) rushes to heroic action in administering a tourniquet and getting an injured person to a hospital where 2) he spots a beautiful nurse (Teresa Palmer, POINT BREAK remake) and decides he will marry her.
But not until his first furlough, because shortly after successfully wooing her he announces that he has to enlist. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Garfield, best picture nominees, Hugo Weaving, Luke Bracey, Luke Pegler, Mel Gibson, Sam Worthington, Teresa Palmer, Vince Vaughn
Posted in Drama, Reviews, War | 56 Comments »
Wednesday, March 30th, 2016
I got a good laugh when I went to see THE LAST WITCH HUNTER and they showed a trailer for the POINT BREAK remake. They’d been advertising it for a while, but this audience clearly didn’t know about it since they gasped and groaned in disapproval when the title came up. They knew that this was going too far to remake POINT BREAK, even though they didn’t know that a trailer about some guys robbing a bank wearing president masks and then an FBI agent who’s a surfer has a theory that the robberies are being done by extreme athletes and he goes undercover in the group but he gets too close to the guru-like leader whose name is Bodhi means this is a remake of POINT BREAK. They didn’t recognize it until the title.
But they’re kinda right. POINT BREAK cannot be duplicated. It can be ripped off and turned into a great series of movies about globetrotting street racer super-thieves, sure. But it has a unique power that’s a combination of a great/goofy premise, a script with a ton of funny dialogue, excellent sequences directed by the great Kathryn Bigelow at the top of her action game, incredible skydiving stunts and photography, a maybe-not-knowingly-funny performance by Keanu Reeves as surfer dude cop Johnny Utah, and most of all a towering performance of charisma and sincerity by Patrick Swayze, who (like Vin Diesel in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, actually) seems to truly, deeply believe the philosophy his character spews. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Delroy Lindo, Edgar Ramirez, Ericson Core, extreme sports, Kurt Wimmer, Luke Bracey, Ray Winstone, remakes, Teresa Palmer
Posted in Action, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, December 31st, 2014
A quick word on THE NOVEMBER MAN. It’s the recently-released-on-video Pierce Brosnan spy joint directed by Roger Donaldson (SPECIES). Brosnan plays Peter Deveraux, an ex-CIA guy (not MI5, interestingly) who gets called in for one last mission for personal reasons, gets betrayed, has to straighten things out and make those motherfuckers wish December would get here real quick. The intrigue involves a brutal Russian general (Lazar Ristovski, CASINO ROYALE) on the verge of becoming president and various parties trying to find a woman who might have incriminating information about him or something. But to Deveraux it’s just about the fact that the agency had his old protege Mason (Luke Bracey, Cobra Commander in GI JOE’S RETALIATION, soon to be remake Johnny Utah) snipe his old girlfriend Natalia (Mediha Musliovic). What the fuck, CIA.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Smitrovich, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Pierce Brosnan, Roger Donaldson, spy, Will Patton
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 5 Comments »
