As a lifelong fan, I so wanted to love this latest Star Trek film. I’ve been hooked on the optimistic future, melodrama and visual effects of the show since William Shatner was helming the original Starship Enterprise. When J.J.Abrams brought his flair and action sensibilities to the reboot of the franchise after ten increasingly dull films, I loved it. The 2009 reinvention of the entire mythos was excellent, from its gripping opening scene to the…Read More
Review: The Gunman
It’s no surprise that the blockbuster The Bourne Identity has inspired more than one subsequent tough guy action thriller. While The Gunman isn’t a complete rip-off, there are definitely a number of aspects of the story that are inspired by the exploits of Jason Bourne. The title character of The Gunman is Jim Terrier (Sean Penn), a sniper who assassinates the Minister of Mining in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, and is then immediately whisked…Read More
Review: Pacific Rim
It’s Transformers meets Godzilla. Or perhaps it’s more like Real Steel meets Jurassic Park. However you slice it, if you can check your brain at the door, Pacific Rim is a rollicking good time, a film that’s all special effects and essentially no storyline at all. Okay, okay, there’s a storyline. Sort of. Through a deep sea rift that turns out to be a portal to another dimension (through a transdimensional connection that we humans can map…Read More
Review: Prometheus
I so wanted to love this movie, I’m such a big fan of director Ridley Scott. How can a film that purports to offer the backstory behind the blockbuster 1979 film Alien not be amazing? I rank Alien as one of the ten most influential science fiction films ever made, and getting its director back behind the camera to make another epic when his last sci-fi flick was the equally superb Blade Runner seems like…Read More
Review: Takers
The premise of Takers couldn’t have been better tailored to my cinematic interests. A team of criminals who engineer and pull off perfect robberies, with timing down to the fraction of a second, deciding to do one last job, even as they’re suspicious of the source of the information, while an obsessive cop is hot on their trail, determined to break the case. Unfortunately, the film itself was so sloppy and riddled with clichés that…Read More
Review: The Losers
Is there something written that good, enjoyable films have to make sense, be internally consistent and not have dumb continuity gaffes? I hope not, because that perfectly describes my reaction to The Losers, yet another Hollywood film based on a graphic novel. This time it’s from Dark Horse comics and it’s about a group of CIA “black ops” bad boys who are left for dead in Bolivia after what appears to be a drug lord…Read More