Tag: Action

Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time

There was a moment in my life, probably January of 2009 or so. I found an image on the internet, and laughed for three days. This image isn’t as funny anymore, but it was the first poster / image about Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time movie, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

POP
Three. Days. Of Laughing.

Seriously, somehow that was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I loved the PoP games for the last generation of consoles, and don’t even hate Jake G. Yet somehow, that image was so unbelievable it just made me giddy. I didn’t hate it, I just couldn’t stop laughing either.

I did go watch it in theaters as soon as I could, but only now finally got to watch it on Blu-Ray.

The movie is based on the games but not any in particular, keeping somewhat with the same mythos. Jake plays said Prince, Dastan, but he isn’t royal blood. He was adopted by the King, and therefore has some cool brothers! Tus (Richard Coyle), the oldest and strongest, and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell), the smart one. That lets Dastan be the sneaky and very dex based one!

According to their uncle (Ben Kingsley) a rival (normally peaceful) nation is producing a lot o weapons, and plans to attack. So they march on over, Tus in charge, to take em down. Hey look, hot princess (Gemma Arterton) is super confused about it all, but arrested. The king gets assassinated by a poisoned cloak (go with it), presented by Dastan so he also gets blamed for the murder!

He quickly flees from the castle, along with the princess and her kick ass dagger. After she tries to kill him and escape he realizes that the holder of the dagger can go back in time! Assuming it has some special sands of time in it. Hells yeah. He also finds out that of COURSE the uncle planned on killing the king. He also faked the info from the spies to get them to take over the city, just to get the dagger and go back in time to rule the kingdom himself!

So they must go back to the kingdom, without you know, dying or being caught, convince his older brother of the time traveling truth / shenanigans, and maybe protect the world. Maybe. But if he goes back in time all the way, can he get the girl?!?

Pop Wet
If he can keep her that wet in the dry desert, then probably.

Elements from a bunch of the Prince of Persia games can be found in here, including just running up walls and areas that just feel puzzle-ish. But then of course there is a lot not like it, but hey, it works in this universe. The games all tell different stories, so why not this one. The dagger also pretty much works like the first one did in the movie, just sand is much harder to come across in the movie. Magical sand, asshole.

I was disappointed with the graphics in Blu-Ray, didn’t feel top notch for me, so didn’t think there was that big of a difference. Good effects for what they were going for. How many people watched this didn’t think their way of showing going back in time was cool? I did. And there was appropriate amounts of comic relief too.

But also a lot more death than I would have figured. For a Disney movie, I was worried they’d just knock everyone out, and the bad guy would go to prison. Thankfully they are more true to the rugged life than that, and didn’t feel like it was “for kids” completely.

2 out of 4.

Wanted

Wanted is by far one of the movies I have dreaded most to watch. I also have read the book and have no way of doing this in a biased way. Yes, I generally review things and ignore the book. But usually if they have the same name they at least have the same plot. This is not really true with Wanted the movie, way way different than the graphic novel.

fox and wanter
After all, neither character looks anything like their comic version.

This movie is about a group of assassins. The comic is about super heroes and super villains. The main character is more or less the same. Some loser working in a corporation. Clearly a tool. This Wesley (James McAvoy) has a gift though. Genetically he can shoot good with a gun (what?). Again this is not really a superpower, because this is supposed to be considered normal. It is rare, just possible in the world. In the graphic novel of course it is easy to accept, because lots of people have powers.

Eventually he finds out about this gun thing, and got it from his dad, an assassin who is dead. Fox (Angelina Jolie, who is definitely not black), brings him to the organization to meet Sloan (Morgan Freeman, who is) and begins training to join the “family business”. The Fraternity which…kills people based on The Loom Of Fate. Which has a secret code which they use to find names of people to kill. Yeah. Not really well explained.

Some missions happen, he gets to go after the guy who killed his dad, other betrayal, lots of dying, long rage shots and curving bullets. Yeahh. Then some breaking of the 4th wall.

Pew pew pew
Pew pew pew.

Seriously though. This plot has nothing to do with the actual graphic novel and is actually way weirder. Who the hell would say “Lets have a Loom that tells people who to kill! Yess!” What? In the graphic novel, it is a world where the superheroes actually lost and no one believes in super powered people anymore (just tell the stories in comics. Hah). But they have this big organization. Tells of a war between all the different chapters, and search for his father.

This one of course has him go and take down the organization that trained him in a highly predictable pathline. No super powers! No other evil groups. Just…a Loom of fucking fate.

I really can’t get over the loom. I never saw that coming, just knew the one difference between the movie and graphic novel. The acting is dumb, special effects driven movie, and stupid stupid plot.

1 out of 4.

Tower Heist

From the start I think Tower Heist got a lot of bad publicity. Why initially? Because it planned on releasing itself for download only a month after going to theaters, before coming out on DVDs. Apparently a lot of theaters were mad about that, and were refusing to show it. So of course it backed down.

But then after that, people are generally “Ben Stiller? Gross, next.”

Heist that shit
That is the face Ben Stiller makes every time someone walks away and calls him gross.

I think the trailer did a bad job of explaining the overall plot. So here we go. The Tower is actually some large sky scrapper building in NYC, that is basically just apartments. Large staff, super secure, and they don’t accept tips.

Ben Stiller is the overall manager, runs the day to day, keeps his staff in tip top shape and helps all of the top clients. Casey Affleck is his second in command. Matthew Broderick is a formerly rich guy getting evicted and divorced, Michael Pena plays an elevator operator, and Gabourey Sidibe is a Jamaican maid.

And they all get fucked over. The penthouse belongs to rich wall street investor Alan Alda. And he has just been arrested for stealing investments, and getting people trapped in Ponzi schemes. And he also handled everyone who works in the Tower’s pensions!

Stiller gets mad. And he takes it out on Alda’s apartment (as he is now stuck there for temporary house arrest), getting himself and other fired. He then takes the drunk advice of a special agent on the case, Tea Leoni, and decides that the old school method of pitchforks and mobs to storm the castle were appropriate. But instead of storming, they should rob him.

The amount of money he should own versus what they found didn’t match up, so it is likely that Alda is hiding a batch in his apartment, in a safe in a secret wall. Can his team get the maybe 20 million dollars in the safe, escape without jail time, and divide it up amongst the workers to get their money back? Not without a criminal. Thankfully Stiller “knows” a guy, Eddie Murphy, who steals shit!

eddie murphy heist
Potted plants, cash, and scenes, mostly.

Seriously. Eddie Murphy is hilarious in this movie. This is best classified as an action/comedy, despite the action not being that much, and the comedy not being…that much. Oddly enough. There was only a few times I really had a good laugh, some of Eddie Murphy’s scenes, the thing about lesbians, and a few others. But I could just classify it as a “movie” and maybe that genre is specific enough.

But I really enjoyed it as a whole. When I saw the preview, I assumed it wasn’t an apartment, but just some big corporation in NYC. I assumed they were people who had lost their jobs due to budget cuts, and I assumed Stiller used to be a big fat cat, but got screwed over. But they really do a good job of making you feel for and root for them. There are many other workers at the building who aren’t part of the thievery, but they show enough of why their lives were affected by it.

Some jokes and situations, sure predictable. But not all of them, nor the ending really. I was surprised that I liked it that much.

3 out of 4.

The Fighter

I have apparently not reviewed a single movie that includes any of the four main actors/actresses from The Fighter.

That is odd, given the list, and that I know I have seen many other movies from each one of them. I think we can all agree that the fault lies with the reader, for not requesting more of their movies to be reviewed. Yes.

Mark Whallyberg
Really. Isn’t this movie about friendship and not fighting and crack? Right?

Movie begins with a movie! Well, a documentary being filmed. Christian Bale‘s character used to be a decent boxer from Lowell, Massachustes, and claims to have once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard in a fight (When in actuality he tripped). But since then he is on crack cocaine, and kind of a annoyance to the city. He believes the documentary is about his possibly comeback. Also involved is his brother, Mark Whalberg, who never really became a successful boxer, and is more of a stepping stone for up and coming boxers.

Ah-ha! This movie is actually about Marky Mark. Finding possible love in Amy Adams, and possibly disappointing his quite large family. See, Marky is starting to hate his family. In an early fight, his opponent his ill, but they agree to let him fight an obviously bigger opponent, putting him at a huge disappointment, so they can get that monies. He broke his hand and is seriously considering leaving them all, with Amy, to go to a non family operated training facility, where he actually can make money just training for fights. This also makes his mom, Melissa Leo, pretty upset. And her gaggle of daughters.

I feel like going into more detail kind of spoils it all. Lets just say that the documentary isn’t what he thought it was, that someone might end up going to prison, and the movie might end with a certain family member overcoming all the odds to win. And maybe bigger family disputes and eventual forgiveness.

Crack Head
I’mnotsayingthatiswhathappensbutIamjustsayin’.

Fighting aside, the star of this movie is Christian Bale. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and won that shit hands down. Melissa Leo was also nominated for Supporting Actress, and also won. You know who wasn’t nominated? Whalberg, the dang main character. Bale took this role to heart. He lost tons of weight, to the creepy skeleton looking face, to try and be a crack addict. He also did a lot of fast talking and it just felt real.

Only reason I won’t give it a 4/4 is because the the “side story” (arguably still part of the main story, but come on, its not “the main story”) is better than the main story. Marky Mark does a good job, and even Amy Adams plays her roles as Yoko Ono pretty believable. But while watching it I didn’t care as much about the boxing aspects, just the family stuff. Because that was cooler. Unfortunately, it being a “True story” and all, the boxing had to happen instead of something sexy like Curling.

3 out of 4.

Jonah Hex

As a general rule of thumb, I say hooray to all movies based off of graphic novels. As a rule of my pinky, I usually say “Oh damn it, a movie with Megan Fox.”
Thus the overall rule of my hand is that I had no emotion towards Jonah Hex, except one telling me to continue to put it off until I get bored enough to watch it.

Megan Fox
She is why we can’t have nice things.

Josh Brolin plays Jonah Hex, also known as the guy who can’t really die. They tried to kill him, but apparently some nice Indian folk brought him back to life. So he also, having spent time being dead, can now talk to the dead. That’s nice. With his touch, the dead come back until he lets go, and its good for interrogating. For some reason its easier to bring back people who have been dead for a longer time.

He was killed for turning his back on former Confederate leader Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), so Turnbull and his assistant, Michael Fassbender, killed his family, scarred his face and killed him. Or so he thought! Then Hex killed him back, or so he thought!

Later he is a bounty hunter, living on the DL. Sometimes screwing Megan Fox. But the US government wants to hire him, because Turnbull is assembling a great weapon designed by Eli Whitney, that can destroy a nation on the 100th anniversary of America. Aidan Quinn plays President Grant and Will Arnett a high ranking officer (hah!).

Hex hex
Trick is to not look him in the mouth.

So this movie has a lot of negative stigma behind it. I guess bad acting mostly being why. And it is true, casting choices didn’t make sense. Why is Will Arnett in a “serious” action movie? Or Malkovich. He was the oddest casting for me, as main bad guy. I don’t think it worked at all. The only decent role would be Brolin as Hex. I’d say Quinn as President, but he really didn’t have many scenes.

But interestingly enough I actually found a lot of the action early on great. It didn’t bog me down with a lot of back story at the beginning, but gradually showed it throughout the movie. Was great to get you right into the story. Unfortunately the action by the end was a lot less interesting than the beginning. So poor ending, poor acting. That is a poor movie.

1 out of 4.

Faster

For world building purposes in movies I generally like it if the characters have last names. Just makes it feel more “Real” to me, or at least gives the false impression that they spent some more time working on the plot.

But sometimes, movies can say fuck character names in general and go a more simpler route. For Faster, we get characters like Driver, Cop, and Killer! Yeah! Fuck names!

Faster Car
Guess which name he gets!

Dwayne Johnson is…the driver. Yes. Correct. He gets out of prison at the start of the movie, and he is mad. So mad that once he gets out of the gate (of course on an abandoned desert road?) he just starts running. He runs to a car, drives said car, and then kills a telemarketer. Damn.

Mike Epps plays the guy who got him the car, and with that car, a list of names of people who helped put him in jail. He was double crossed after a heist with his brother. They shot him in the head! But it ricocheted around his skull in one way, out the other, avoiding his brain, so somehow he survived.

At the same time, the cops Carla Gugino and Billy Bob Thornton (who is of course about to retire) are looking for him/trying to figure it out. Also also Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays the Killer, who is (re?)hired to kill the Driver, before he enacts revenge on all of the people who have mostly changed their lives around.

Like Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who is now a traveling Evangelist. And the last name on the list. But who actually shot him and failed at being an assassin?

BBT
And why does BBT look so sad when he is about to retire?

The movie is a pretty simple plot, so it will have to rely on at least decent acting or surprises along the way to keep interest. It kind of delivers on small scales. I think I have heard of people surviving shots to the head the same way. Maybe I have heard of that just in movies though.

I think the ending was decent given the premises too, was acceptable. I also liked that they tried to give the other non-Rock characters some story lines too. I really didnt like BBT or the other cops involvement though. Felt like a weaker plot line of the movie.

But hey. The movie is called Faster. What can you expect. Its not like they are going to one up it with an unrelated movie called Fastest, right?

2 out of 4.

Machete

The making of this movie started out as a joke, but ended up, well, still a joke. The Grindhouse movies that came out awhile ago came included with multiple fake trailers. I personally wanted to see the one involving a Pilgrim horror movie, about Thanksgiving. But the most popular of these was a gritty action movie called Machete, starring Danny Trejo. If you have a daily motion account, you can watch the first and arguably fake, trailer here.

Machetetee
But why do they call him Machete?

Machete used to be a Mexican Federale, but was betrayed on a kidnapping mission by the chief, Steven Seagal, who also had his wife and kids killed. Years later he is wandering Texas, doing small work, until Jeff Fahey gives him an offer. The Senator (Robert De Niro) is running on re-election and planning on deporting a whole mess of illegal aliens, and he wants Machete to assassinate him.

But while he has him in the scopes, he finds himself shot in the shoulder by a second sniper, who then also intentionally misses the senator. Ah! Jeff Fahey is an asshole! He set up Machete, to make it look like he, an illegal alien, tried to kill the senator who was trying to stop illegal immigration!

Well Machete escapes, and goes into hiding, into an organization lead by Michelle Rodriguez for illegal Mexicans, and with the help of Cheech Marin, a priest. While Fahey’s henchmen are trying to stop him, Jessica Alba is working as an immigration officer, trying to get to the bottom of it. Oh yeah, Lindsay Lohan plays the daughter of Fahey, whom ends up having a sexual encounter with her mom and Machete, before he kidnaps both of them.

So yeah, the movie involves trying to shed light to what Fahey/De Niro attempted, and free Machete from blame. But if he can also somehow deal with Seagall and the Mexican Cartel at the same time, why not? If anything, it probably means more killing and death.

Cheech
“God has mercy. I don’t!” – Actual awesome quote.

So, I know exactly what this movie was going for. Gritty feel, fake trailer, over the top action, nakedness, whatever. It certainly tried. I just think it could have been more over the top. I don’t think it went far enough. The film obviously had a big political message attached to it, and that annoyed me. I wanted a more carefree mindless action thing, not them attempting to do a political plot. Generally when action movies only try to do a plot, it comes off worse than no plot, or a really good plot.

That is why my rating is low. I think it could have been more awesome.

1 out of 4.

The Mechanic

Remake alert!

Did anyone even know that? Did anyone even care that The Mechanic was a 1972 film? I know I don’t. Back to the violence, please.

Statham hilarious
I am cutting my original joke, because this screen shot from the movie is hilarious.

What is a mechanic? If you answer a guy who fixes shit, that is an acceptable answer. But in the world of assassinations, it is a guy who will kill and make it look like natural causes, or an accident, or suicide. Very useful, that ability to kill and make it look okay. Right?

Jason Statham is one of those guys, of course, and the movie opens showing him do that shit. He gets paid mad monies from Donald Sutherland, one of the few people he gets missions from. Good friends they are.

UNTIL TONY GOLDWYN SHOWS UP. He gives him a new mission, to kill Sutherland! Why? Because he might have intentionally failed a mission in South Africa, and blah blah plot. So he does it. Unfortunately. At Sutherland’s funeral, Statham meets his son, Ben Foster, who has that young guy rage. So JS is all, hey lets make him a mechanic too! So he uses him as bait / to help kills, get him in the know.

Sure, there’s the fact that JS killed his dad, and made it look accidental, but that probably won’t come back to bite him in the ass, right? Right!

Chihauhuahauhauh
That chihuahua is not Photoshopped in.

Overall though, the story I just didn’t find that interesting. It went the obvious route, especially the supposed “twist” near the end. That twist is actually what was expected. Not having the twist would be a better twist. But you know, billing order and stuff, that matters. Jason Statham is the star, damn it. Acting is as you’d expect for the movie.

Action scenes were fine. But its amazing how these professionals tend to have things go wrong so often, despite all the supposed planning. I guess we have to assume that in the movie, that first success he did is how it normally goes, and that every other time in the movie happens to be not the norm, despite evidence showing the contrary.

2 out of 4.

The Big Bang

The Big Bang! Huh. Okay, but are they talking about guns? Or are they talking about the creation of the universe?

MAYBE. Just maybe! A gun that can create universes when it shoots. That’d be wicked, if not super sci-fi.

Big BANG
But Antonio Banderas is normally more subtle than a universe creating gun.

So AB is an LA PI. He is hired to find a missing stripper girlfriend (Sienna Guillory) of a russian boxer (Robert Maillet). She is missing, obviously. But she also has about 30 million dollars in diamonds. But this turns into a zany adventure that might involve the destruction of the world!

And the plot is hard to describe. Lets just say it involves people actually trying to recreate the big bang under New Mexico (inspired by a True story?), and the Feds trying to find out where and stop them, you know. But first AB has to explain is story to the cops! Sam Elliot plays the madman, with Jimmi Simpson as his Physicist. We also have William Fichtner playing an FBI guy, and the Dawson playing another guy.

Oh yeah, and Autumn Reeser plays a waitress in a small town, who gets turned on by particle physics, and is part of probably one of the hotter sex scenes in a movie that came out in 2011, probably. Just so you know. And it is super, super nerdtastic.

Autumn Reeser
Maybe the only reason to watch the movie. Maybe not.

I am torn on my opinions on this movie, which is why I am giving it the 2 out of 4. It reminded me of The Spirit, in terms of CGI cheesyness, mostly involving backgrounds and stuff. Seemed like they were just having fun with it all. But also the first bits were more confusing and made me un interested. But the plot, it was actually pretty smart, in its terminology, and in what ended up happening. It involves a lot of physics, obviously. But also it was super weird? I think it might need to watch it again to understand it all.

I don’t even know how understandable that last paragraph is! This movie is either incredibly great, or incredible stupid, and I just do not know. Try it out? Let me know.

2 out of 4.