Posts Tagged ‘Action’
Last Updated on Thursday, 14 March 2013 05:37
Written by rik
Thursday, 14 March 2013 05:23
After a smaller role in Expendables 2 in 2012 Arnold is now officially back in the Hollywood game.
My expectations of this movie weren’t very high. Its trailer had been shoved in my face a couple of times during previous Smex movies and it looked a bit cheap to be honest. Added to this that my opinion of Mr Schwarzenegger has very much gone down over the last 10 years since he totally abandoned his duty to deliver me top shelf entertainment on the big screen. He completely left me hanging. The bastard.
Anyway, cut to the start of the movie. I immediately got that cheap movie feeling. The acting was bad (he really can’t act), some obvious hooks are thrown out (for instance the cool red car that the jerk parks in a firetruck zone only to be wrecked later on by Arnie) so I was thinking this was going to be a long hour and a half. And for the first 30 minutes or so I was right. The movie offers you nothing original or surprising. A convict gets busted out of jail, a police officer tries to catch him, boring.
But at some point, I don’t know exactly when (I think it was when the small Mexican deputy grabs a medieval sword and says: “You never know”) you realize that the makers of this movie are fully aware of their weak plot and decided to capitalize on this by making it a fun movie. And as soon as you look at the movie in that light your appreciation goes up from a mere 4 to at least a 7. The actor that deserves most of the credit for this is not Arnold but good old Johnny Knoxville. His retarded behavior completely lifts up the movie and will have you laughing on numerous occasions. Add to that a couple of cliche stunts and one-liners by Arnie and you are definitely good for the remaining hour of the movie.
So, in my eyes this movie was good, very unexpectedly good. And because of this element of surprise I might call this movie, dare I say it, the best one so far of this SMEX year.
Tags: Action, arnold, badass | Posted under Reviews | 2 Comments
Last Updated on Sunday, 28 October 2012 03:06
Written by olegm
Sunday, 28 October 2012 03:06
SMEx movie #199 – Looper: a fresh sci-fi with Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
When watching a trailer, I thought those two are way too different to be playing the same character, but the movie proved me wrong. The way Gordon-Lewitt was talking, smiling and even joking – were way too familiar. And then, by the time Willis appears in the movie, you know for sure that it’s the same guy, only much older.
Looper can be called original, mostly because Rian Johnson decided to steer away from the classic time travel formula and try something new. Moreover, Johnson did not want to show his story from only one angle, bringing up different parts of life of the main character. It can be sometimes puzzling, yet the trick brings even more depth and variety to the experience.
While the first half of movie is rather plain – a monotonous routine workdays of the “erasers” of the future; with the appearance of Bruce Willis, “Looper” rapidly grows and becomes something more than just a cool fantasy about magic tricks with time. Although, I was expecting much more shooting from a Bruce Willis movie.
All in all – if you’re a fan of fiction movies, puzzles, and/or Bruce Willis, Looper is definitely a movie worth seeing: bold, emotionally played, inventive and all round wonderful. And most importantly – original.
Tags: Action, bruce willis, puzzle, sci-fi, time travel | Posted under Reviews | 1 Comment
Last Updated on Saturday, 29 September 2012 09:01
Written by eleven
Friday, 28 September 2012 05:59
Let’s start off by saying that a Bourne movie without Matt Damon was something that I think everyone was a little hesitant about as we ambled our way to Ringen Kino on another cool Sunday evening. How, we wondered, could the directors forget the main ingredient in a Bourne movie!? It was going to be a tough ask.
The CIA is still running ‘The Program’ – a top secret program that aims to create an elite group of soldiers. Unlike in Treadstone version 1.0, having been able to just seemingly will Jason Bourne in to being an awesome killing machine the CIA have now run out of ideas and they’ve had to resort to developing special drugs to produce the next batch of killer mercenaries. Surprise!
Our new hero in this movie is Aaron Cross, number 5 in The Program. Cross is one of the agencies pill-popping drug addict agents. In Cross’s case though, and for the other participants in the program also, the drugs just happen to give you exceptional mental and physical agility. There’s a blue pill to make you smarter, a green pill to make you stronger and a brown pill to make you poop on time. That last one is made up. I think.
The Bourne Legacy is really a re-telling of a classic story about drug addiction and the lengths people go to to get their fixes. The agents need their drugs. Those drugs are in short supply. The agents need to step over (ahem…kill) a few people to get their drugs. The masterminds of The Program, having decided that a media leak of The Program is imminent, decide they need to shut down The Program now. That turns out to be very easy when you’re feeding all of your agents pills. The masterminds simply replace the pills with a blue triangular pill that just happens to give you a brain haemorrhage and kill you. So they all die.
But wait! We’ve got one of the agents, Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), high up in the Alaskan mountains and he hasn’t got access to the new pills! And so begins the drama: a cat and mouse game where the CIA is trying to kill the one that got away much like in the previous Bourne movies. Thinking they’ve finished the job with the use of drones in Alaska, the agency turns their attention to wiping out scientific evidence of the program also.
This is where we are introduced to Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) who is one of the scientists that developed the secret pills and who is, naturally, also being hunted by the CIA in their effort to eradicate the program.
Shearing and Cross ultimately end up teaming up as they meet while Cross is trying to find more drugs to feed his addiction. She’s got what he needs: the drugs. He’s got what she needs: protection from the CIA trying to kill her. What follows are high-octane action sequences culminating in a rather long chase scene in Manilla in order to get what he wants. I’ll leave you to guess what that is.
Ok. It’s drugs.
The Bourne Legacy turned out to be a movie that was both entertaining enough and enjoyable enough to count as a couple of hours well spent at the cinema. It was a little predictable in places, but the constant change of scenery (the movie is beautifully shot) can be enough to keep you entertained and the film is also intelligent enough in places to make it highly watchable. If anything the film could have varied from the classic drugs story but really, it didn’t. The Hollywood action sequences were good (if not a little long in places) and the story was fairly credible, the acting was good and the direction well executed.
All in all, it’s a film worth watching if you get the chance. Maybe not as good as the original Bourne movies but others may disagree.
Tags: Action, bourne, cia, drugs, legacy, treadstone | Posted under Reviews | 2 Comments