Tag: Action

I think the thing that infuriates me the most about 3 Days To Kill is the trailer.

The trailer didn’t come out until late December, only a few months before the actual movie, but when it did it quickly oversaturated the movie going experience. I probably saw this trailer for at least 80% of the movies I watched in January and February before it came out.

The only reason why I am upset is because A) the trailer itself isn’t that good, which I will discuss further later, and B) they only had one trailer. Some films have as many as 4 trailers to help build up hype and showcase different elements. If you are going to flood me with trailers from one movie, they shouldn’t be the same thing every dang time.

You will hear a similar trailer based rant when his next movie Draft Day comes out.

Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) is a lifer for the CIA. He is an agent on the ground, never advancing up the ladder, but he is really efficient at killing people. During an attempt to capture The Wolf (Richard Sammel) and his main hit man The Albino (Tomas Lemarquis…sigh), a lot of factors go wrong, people die, and Ethan finds out he has cancer.

Crud. He gets dismissed by the CIA, and he attempts to live out his remaining time with his ex-wife (Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld).

But when he only has a few months left to live (5? 3? 1/10th?), Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) walks into his life, needing him to re-enlist, as the only person alive who has probably seen The Wolf’s face. She will give him a big bonus to his family, huge life insurance policy, and an experimental cure to maybe save his life. You know, if he works for her to bring down The Wolf once and for all.

But…but…family!

But…but…cure!

Holy fuck, Lady Gaga is in this movie?

Alright, let’s go back to the trailer. It is bad for one HUGE reason. The trailer is super deceptive in its showcasing of the film. Not only does it mash up multiple scenes and dialogue constantly to tell a false narrative in the trailer (making it seem a bit hokey in my mind), but it also doesn’t match the pace or style of the movie at all. If you like the trailer for 3 Days To Kill, you might still hate the movie because they are so damn different.

Argh, bad and deceptive trailers are the worst! Trailers are usually made by advertising companies, not the people who made the movie, and sometimes they do a really shitty job. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty had an amazing trailer, partially because it was made by Ben Stiller himself.

The actual movie is also a mess. I blame most of it on timing and pacing issues. We are told he has about 5 months to live after his first faint, so he goes home a day or two later to see the wife and kids. All of the sudden, without an explanation (like his cancer being much worse? or anything?) he only has a few days left. There was no montage, there was no large passing of time, nothing.

I can’t tell if the script is horribly written, if they accidentally cut out transition scenes, or they just didn’t care.

It wasn’t just that issue. Pacing was bad all over the place, as they tried to put in the family plot that not only slowed it all down, but never felt real. There was an extremely awkward “club” scene about halfway through, and it wasn’t really brought up afterwards. The ending itself would bring up a lot of problems that they also choose to ignore.

After more research, I found out that Luc Beeson wrote a lot of this movie, and now it all makes perfect sense. All of the issues, being so euro-centric, crime plus family, all of it.

Avoid 3 Days To Kill or else you might start questioning time as you know it.

How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

That is the question I ask myself, heading off to see Pompeii. But first, maybe some back story!

When I was an undergrad, I majored in Geology and History, with a focus on Ancient Rome. Clearly, the perfect crossover for research on both subjects would be in Pompeii, Italy, where Mt. Vesuvius exploded in 79 AD, wiping out an entire city and basically freezing them in place like statues. It is perhaps my FAVORITE historical event ever and I have been waiting forever for a movie version of it.

Unfortunately, Hollywood has churned out a few “historical” tales lately and they have been some of the worst movies I have ever seen. I am looking at you, The Legend Of Hercules! So, no, I don’t know how I will be an optimist about this.

Mr. Eko, why must you die in everything?

Hmm, where do we begin? The rubble or the sins? The sins of course! The rubble is the second half!

Pompeii is a strange movie in that we already know how it ends. Everyone dies right? Huge explosion. It is sort of like a disaster movie, but also a historical film. They have an advantage here too, where they can kind of just tell any story they want to and then end with everyone dying and no one can say they are wrong.

In this story, a Roman Senator, Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland) in 62 AD takes out an entire Celtic village who were showing resistance for a trade route, with his bodyguard Proculus (Sasha Roiz). Well, they missed a kid, who later gets caught my slavers, and 17 years later he is now a really good fighter. He was trained as a gladiator, because why not.

As luck would have it, this Celt, Milo (Kit Harrington) is packaged up from his small time market and sent to the bigger leagues in Pompeii! There a lot of coincidences happen, such as meeting the fair Cassia (Emily Browning), basically a Pompeian princess. Her parents (Jared Harris, Carrie-Anne Moss) want to expand Pompeii with Roman money, so they have to put on a show for a senator, which just so happens to be Corvus.

So, Milo is in the same city with the people who murdered his whole tribe! Too bad he has to also fight Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who is about to earn his freedom if he gets one last victory.

Oh, and of course, while all of the human stuff is happening, Mt. Vesuvius decides to get its boom boom on and explode for a ridiculously long time, causing a lot of destruction. During the climactic finale, the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we learned to love. There were great great clouds that rolled over the hills, bringing darkness from above.

Then a lot of people died.

Oh look, Kiefer is in a movie where shit is going down in less than a day. Huh.

I was left to my own devices to really analyze this movie.

So let’s start with the story! Gladiator redemption is always a nice story to choose, just like in Spartacus and Gladiator. Most of those movies give our heroes a lot more time to work with, in terms of training, and battles, and eventual redemption, so time was the real enemy here given the explosive finale. I think it did a decent job at conveying it all quickly, with the appropriate motivation for most of our main characters. The battle scenes themselves were generally pretty awesome, although some felt a little bit too close to Gladiator.

The effects from the volcano were also decent, not amazing, just decent. During the ending, it became more of a hindrance as there were possibly “too many effects” going on at once, that it all felt choppy and a bit blurry, so that was disappointing.

In terms of acting and dialogue, it kind of went all over the place. A few scenes felt repetitive and the quick love didn’t feel right to me. Sutherland appeared to actually be acting in this movie, so he stood out more than normal playing the pompous jerk.

I think it would have been a sexier movie if they added some other historical relevant material. Maybe a cameo involving the only real story we know associated with this eruption with Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger.

Overall, Pompeii didn’t blow me out of the water as much as I hoped it would. I am also grateful that it didn’t poop all over the walls either. I plan on visiting Pompeii in my life, hopefully sometime in the next year. When I get there, I hope I can just close my eyes and have it almost feel like I have been there before. But until then, I can only speculate and use this film as a source for how it might have felt.

Eh. Eh oh. Eh oh.

Motherfucking RoboCop.

The Hero of Detroit.

Why he doesn’t have a statue yet, I still do not know. Fucking politicians, corrupt as always.

Anyways, when I heard there was a remake, I was fine with it. When I heard it was PG-13, I was confused. Do they understand the point of that franchise? Besides the satire, of course.

He is black, because black is cool and sexy.

Needless to say, no, RoboCop remake isn’t as bad as everyone said it was before they gave it a chance. I even had a popular tweet a few months back claiming it would suck, and really, it wasn’t super terrible, it just also wasn’t super amazing.

Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is a Detroit detective, and working on uncovering a huge drug and weapons king pin. The detectives meant to monitor him are on his payroll, lots of corruption everywhere. During an encounter, his partner (Michael Kenneth Williams, for authenticity) gets injured.

Murphy really wants to bring him in. So they bomb his car to kill him. Unfortunately they only really leave him super badly disfigured.

At the same time, Omnicorp is making robot police men! But America doesn’t want them to patrol the streets, no trust for whatever reason, so instead they are used to keep peace in the Middle East. Their owner (Michael Keaton) is at war with the government, to overturn their policy making robot guards no longer illegal. Eventually he gets the idea. Why not put a human in a robot, and win the public that way?

Yes…yes…that will allow him to make lots of money. As long as the Robot Human Cop is as good as just a Robot of course. Yet also somehow maintain his human characteristics. Can it be done?

Gary Oldman plays the bio-scientist who has the capabilities of putting a man in a robot body. Jackie Earle Haley is a militaristic trainer. Abbie Cornish is the wife. Jay Baruchel is in here for some reason. And Samuel L. Jackson plays some sort of Bill O’Reilly motherfucker, with a nightly TV show that can warp the American point of view.

He is black because of genetics.

There are at least 3-4 references to the Detroit Red Wings in this movie. This is excellent. In this universe, the Red Wings still exist in all of their glory in like 20 years.

One other amazing thing happened to me in this movie. They played the song Focus by Hocus Pocus. It is a song I have been trying to find the name of for the last 4-5 years, but as it is an instrumental with yodeling and other weird noise, can’t exactly look it up. Thank you for your contributions to my sanity.

Oh you wan’t actual review? Okay.

Well, RoboCop wasn’t completely sucky. It wasn’t completely amazing either. They spent a lot lot lot of time before we actually got RoboCop into the streets. We had to watch the set up, the idea, the training, the tests, everything. Once he was about to hit the streets, he had another quick breakdown that they had fix again. Far too much of the movie was given to these factors, probably as they were trying to keep it PG-13 and not have him, you know, being a Cop.

I do think the film did capture the spirit of the original. Corrupt corporations and what not, so that is fine.

It had its entertaining moments and they increased the intensity of the ED-209, those big two legged walker robots.

I also really enjoyed the ending. And by that, I mean that they ended it on a nice note and didn’t automatically set up a sequel. That happens a lot more in movies nowadays. Fuck that.

Finally, it is February, which means theaters are allowed to show good new movies again! Both The Monuments Men and The Lego Movie are out the same weekend, which adds some credit to the theory that studios literally wait to release their movies right outside of January, to separate themselves from the junk.

This movie in particular has an all-star cast, directed by George Clooney (his fifth overall), and a World War II story. Yeah, it has a lot going for them.

Typical rag tag group of men to save the day.

The Monuments Men tells the true story of a group of seven men, mostly art historians, curators, and museum directors, who join up with the Allied forces to preserve culture and art that might be destroyed during World War II. Most of these men are old, or out of shape, but they believe in their goal, and convinced the men in charge to let them help.

They were brought together by Frank Stokes (George Clooney), who had the idea after they almost lost The Last Supper when the UK bombed a city. His hand picked team included James Granger (Matt Damon), a painter, Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), an architect, Walter Garfield (John Goodman), a sculptor, Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), a historian. They also have Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville) and Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin), a British officer and a French man, for culture purposes. They are later joined by Sam Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas), a German translator.

These men split up around the war front from 1943-1945 searching for lost and stolen treasures. The Germans hid the art in their country and intended to destroy them should Hitler be killed. They also are racing against the Russians, who have lost so many men in the war that any stolen art they find they will steal right back and keep for themselves as a sort of reparations.

Also starring Cate Blanchett, as a very convincing French art curator, who really enjoys a nice painting. Like. A lot.

Bill Murray looks like a fucking giant in this movie.

Well drat. Turns out, The Monuments Men ended up being the antithesis to That Awkward Moment. If you remember, That Awkward Moment looked bad, but turned out to be decent.

Clooney took an interesting piece of history, put in great actors, and gave us a mediocre movie overall. It is incredibly disappointing that this movie wasn’t amazing, but I have to make sure my review still accurately reflects the overall quality, and not just say it is bad because I am feeling betrayed.

This movie did surprise me in a few ways. One, I saw Murray give a real and convincing cry, which I definitely did not see coming. I don’t think I have ever seen that man cry, it was heartfelt, and I almost teared up as well. Two, I did learn about some famous art pieces in Europe, and it is awesome how close they came to being destroyed/lost forever. Three, there isn’t a number three.

All of the funny moments made it into the trailer, leaving not a lot more for the movie. That is incredibly disappointing, as it was advertised a comedy, with not a lot of laughs. The rest of the movie was slower and more dramatic, but most of the times I didn’t really care enough about the individual characters to care what was happening to them.

The Monuments Men will be forgotten with time. It was a decently acted movie, certainly not bottom of the barrel in terms of quality, it just didn’t have a lot more going on for it.

I am probably going into Vampire Academy with some biases. I am fucking tired of all these mother fucking vampire movies in my motherfucking queue. All of them, trying to modernize vampires, to make them the stars, to not make them evil, to make them just like us but blood sucking, to make them as normal teenagers or college students. Fucking tired of all of it. It is no longer original.

But this one is based on a book, so it gets a pass? Nah, the first of the six book series was made in 2007, so it was just riding the supernatural romance wave that Twilight had created, like all of the other similar books and stories.

“LOL we are totes unique right?”

Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) is a totally weird teenager. We know this, because she says so, and people who say they are weird are usually the weirdest people. (That is a joke). She is a Dhampir, which has small amounts of vampire associated with it. Not a full fledged blood sucker. No, those are the Moroi, and they are the best of the vampire types. They have royal bloodlines, and generally the Dhampirs serve as their protectors. Like her best friend, Lissa Dragomir (Lucy Fry), a vampire princess.

Both of these types are mortal. There is a third type, the Strigoi, who are undead and evil and immortal. They are much stronger and cause a lot of havoc, and can advance their species through their bites. They hate the Moroi. There you go, the plot in a nutshell.

The movie begins with them having escaped from the Vampire Academy for some reason. They felt unsafe there, and would rather live in the real world with the Strigoi. But then they get captured and brought back. Lame. High school. Cliques. Prom. Ugh!

Unfortunately, when they get back to school, everyone hates her, including one adulterous whore, Mia (Sami Gayle) who is hopefully behind the threats coming after Lissa at school, and not someone more sinister.

Starring Danila Kozlovsky as Dimitri, a powerful Dhampir bodyguard, Gabriel Bryne as Victor Dashkov, a royal, and Sarah Hyland plays his niece. Dominic Sherwood plays the dark and brooding love interest, Cameron Monaghan a friend vampire who never gets the girl, Olga Kurylenko as the headmistress, and Claire Foy as a missing teacher no one cares about.

Technically not prom, because they are their own school thing, we all fucking know it is just prom.

Vampire Academy, the movie, was directed by the man who directed Mean Girls. Fun fact! When I first saw Mean Girls, I knew it was an amazing movie, and it has held the test of time. This director does not mean instant success, although I guess there were some similar thematic moments between the two. In terms of how people react to people.

But the entire plot felt rushed. Everything happened so fast, time changed so quickly. The entire point of the movie was “Hey Vampires! They are just like people, being all catty and shit”. But, as I said already, it has been done to death before. The characters don’t feel unique. Our main gal Ruth is a fast talker, but she never really does enough early on to earn that cocky attitude. Who am I kidding, by the end, she really still doesn’t do enough to earn that attitude.

Certain plot lines began in the movie, and then they just kind of felt forgotten about by the end. I guess they are hoping this six book series becomes popular enough to turn into seven movies (because you will have to split the last one in half), and in books stuff like that happens. But is almost unforgiveable in a movie, in my opinion. The ending itself was a sort of cliff hanger, and it made me feel robbed of an actual story line. Clearly, the story line that was hinted at was way cooler than the one this movie actually gave us, where at no point did anything feel serious or threatening.

Let me just say, having the relationship between student and old dude was also super awkward. Why are you doing this movie? Why?

Maybe the movie was actually okay and I am a bitter old man. Or, or, hey hey, listen. Or maybe. Maybe it just sucks.

I watched this movie, because I allowed a vote and gave vague descriptions. Sure, I obviously was going to watch it anyways, but by golly, Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li is first!

Eh. Well, I have only seen the early 1990s Street Fighter movie a few times, but I remember it was at least somewhat enjoyable and super campy. I mean, it had JCVD and Raul Julia (one of his last movies!), great people right there.

So, I won’t compare this to the game story-line at all, because really, I don’t know it.

Shit. He is in this movie? I am sad now.

When Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) was a little girl, everything was just swell. She learned some sweet fighting moves from her father, Xiang (Edmund Chen) and also some piano skills. That is, until some thugs busted down the doors to her house and started wrecking shit! They steal her father, and well, that is that.

Many years later, Chun-Li is a concert pianist, living it up. Apparently she wasn’t too badly affected by the kidnapping, until she receives a mysterious scroll. Basically, it tells her to stop doing shit, and fix other shit. So she has to seek out Gen (Robin Shou) and learn how to fight better to save her father.

He was kidnapped by M. Bison (Neal McDonough)! And his gang of thugs, Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and Vega (Taboo). And uhh. He is also a bad man in real life. The cops are after him, for some reason. Non street fighter characters Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) and Maya Sunee (Moon Bloodgood).

This is the closest you will get to her outfit.

Awww, fuck. It is bad. Thankfully not rage against the Earth bad. The badness just made me super super board. Street Fighter has a rich history, lots of fun characters, and this one shows like…what? Four of them? Fuck all of that. Wheres my green electric person? Wheres my actual badass Bison? Where is my stretchy arms dude, or fat Asian man? Wheres my red and white shirt Karate people? You can tell, I know a shit ton about Street Fighter.

Either way, the action in this film was boring, and the plot was even more boring. I had to battle falling asleep, even though it was still early evening.

Story and plot were rough too. No one really seemed to fit their role. Even Michael Clarke Duncan, he was way too large/slow to be some epic boxer dude.

The one good news about even attempting this movie is finding out about Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist. Some TV show happening eventually. The poster looks super awesome. Could it help the series as much as Mortal Kombat: Legacy helped that series? Hopefully better, because nothing actually came from MK: Legacy.