Tag: Michael Chiklis

In case you haven’t been keeping count, The Do-Over is movie #2 of the Sandler-Netflix collaboration. Netflix has said they don’t care about having the best movies, they just want a very diverse set of films, films that reach many different demographics and personality styles.

So they don’t always care about the critics. Which is why they offered Adam Sandler a four movie deal, because some people really like his brand of comedy, including the overseas market. Go figure.

Movie #1 was The Ridiculous 6, which I found very disappointing. The Do-Over seems to be going in a very different direction, both in terms of style, genre, and size of the cast. So there is a chance that this one ends up much better.

Holy crap, the promo images for this film are crap!

Charlie (David Spade) doesn’t like his life. And no, its not because the actor hasn’t had a hit in a long time. He is at his ten year high school reunion, watching his constantly cheating wife (Natasha Leggero) get down with the old high school prom king (Sean Astin). He is a bank manager, but the bank is inside of a grocery store. There are two step kids who treat him like shit. But then he sees Max (Adam Sandler).

Max has changed and seems really chill and cool now. And when his life goes on a vacation with him, Charlie decides to hang out with Max on a boat and have a great bro weekend. Then the boat explodes, Charlie is drugged, and Max takes him away.

Why? No, not to kill him. Max thinks that Charlie hates his life, so he decided to fake their deaths taking the identity of two people who recently died. They had a lot of money, a sweet vacation home, and they can just get away from it all and get a second chance at life. Or, you know, a do-over.

But there are problems with their plan, especially since the two men were murdered and those who are after them are going to come after them too. But that is a problem for later. Right now it is time to party party party.

Also starring Paula Patton, Kathryn Hahn, Nick Swardson, Catherine Bell, Michael Chiklis, Luis Guzman, and Torsten Voges.

Seriously, what do I do with any of these pictures? So generic.

The Do-Over just may very well be one of the okayiest movies I have ever seen this year. Almost on every front the film just feels average. The acting is as expected, the jokes are average, the twists are too many and the plot a little bit stupid. But some of the action scenes are entertaining, some of the jokes made me smile, and some of the twists were actually decent.

but taking it as a whole, there are a lot of stale moments. The intro goes on for too long. Too many fake identities for Sandler, and just too many twists overall.

It isn’t super strong on comedy or action, making the jokes and shots seem like after thoughts.

But when compared to the last 15 or so films, it is at least better than 12 of them. That is saying a lot about Sandler’s recent film career, but what it really says is that I loved You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and didn’t think Just Go With It, Pixels, or That’s My Boy were that bad. These comparisons still probably don’t sell the movie for you, and honestly, they really shouldn’t.

Would not super recommend.

You know what sport has been unrepresented in film lately? Football. You might disagree with me.

First, let’s ignore all the bullshit smaller titles, the made for TV stuff, the documentaries. I will not accept The 5th Quarter, it was a straight to DVD thing basically.

Looking at only big releases, we had Draft Day this year which is more a generic sports-ish movie since it could have been almost word for word with any other sport and still work. Just change name of positions and teams and boom, all football elements gone. The Blind Side? That is a dramatic biography, not a football movie. That takes us all the way back to 2008 where we had The Longshots and Leatherheads. Yeah.

So a movie actually about the sport, with sport stuff going on hasn’t been out in a big release for awhile. When The Game Stands Tall is a true story, so it has that going for it at least.

Players wearing gear is one step above Draft Day already!

De La Salle High School is a Roman Catholic private high school in Concord, California. Close-ish to San Francisco. All men school, too. They never had a winning football season until they signed Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel) in 1979. He then coached the team for decades, and starting in 1992, his teams had 12 years of undefeated seasons, leading to a 151 game winning streak. True story.

But the start of the 2004 season had changes. Their conference was tired of them destroying them, so they limited the De La Salle Spartans to only 5 games of league play, making them look elsewhere for opponents, where only the best of the best would accept. And wouldn’t you know it? While playing their first game of the season against the Washington state champion Bellevue Wolverines, they lost 39-20, breaking their record.

Heartache. Depression. Sadness. What are they going to do? Well, apparently lose their second game too, but at least it was a closer game.

Can the coach turn it around? Especially before game three, against the biggest meanest school in California, in 100 degree heat? And can they also get back into a championship winning team? Maybe?

What about side stories? WE GOT YOUR SIDE STORIES.

Like Chris Ryan (Alexander Ludwig), a running back, going for the California state record for TDs in a high school career. Only needs like 36 this year and has a whole lot of dad (Clancy Brown) pressure. Or the friendship between Cam (Ser-Darius Blain) and T.K. (Stephan James), of where they are going to go to college, and how there is a lot of death in their lives, and how one of them totally dies.

Can Tayshon (Jessie Usher) stop having a superstar attitude and work with the team? Can lovable Beaser (Joe Massingill) do…good at stuff? Will Arturo (Matthew Frias) ever get to play and feel important? How about Coach’s wife (Laura Dern), can she nag even more? And will his son (Matthew Daddario) get to have a good senior season with his dad as his coach?

AND WHAT ABOUT THE ASSISTANT COACH (Michael Chiklis)? WHAT ABOUT HIM HUH?

The most impressive part of this movie was getting Michael Chiklis to look like a cross between Jason Alexander and Wayne Knight.

From my estimations, 87.3333%, repeating of course, of this movie is completely made up. What? Something based around a definitely true event is fake? Well, let’s go into spoiler territory. You don’t care, you probably won’t watch this movie.

For sure, there was a Bob Ladouceur. The streak was 151 games and it was De La Salle high school. The dates of most of the stuff they mention work out. There was a T.K. and a Cam and one of them died. His son was a player in their first losing game. Everything else is just made up and fabricated drama.

For instance? Chris Ryan was not a real player. There was no one ever on their team working on beating this TD record for high school and it definitely didn’t come down to the final championship game. What really irked me and made me knew that this couldn’t possibly be real is that the coach, for their final drive, winning by a lot, let the players call the shots. They get down to the 1 yard line with about a minute left. And Chris becomes the QB, and takes a knee, three times. That’s because his dad beat him and wanted the record more than the son, and he thought the game should be about the team and not his record. Also because Jesus.

I knew there was no way that could have happened, it would have been everywhere on the news. The second tipoff was that at the end of the movie, they only did the “And here they are now!” screen for the coach, no one else. The other real players were either dead or failed at college ball, basically. So I had to look it up.

Then I found out they also made up the arrogant wide receiver on their team. Okay. Whatever. His plot sucked anyways. Most of the plot was the random death, the dad abuser/TD count, and the game winnings.

But then those fuckers even made up how they did that season. Literally the easiest part of a sports movie to get right. They got their first loss right and score. Sure. The second loss right after? Wrong team and wrong score. Made it seem like they were close. Then in real life they tied, they finally won in their first league game a ridiculous 49-0 versus a shitty private school team. The movie said they played the best team in California, had all of these problems, that team had a 100 player roster versus their like, 40 guys, and over 100 degree heat. They said they barely won that, then went on to win the rest of the season.

THEY DIDN’T EVEN WIN OUT THE REST OF THAT SEASON, WHAT THE FUCK? They had another tie and another loss.

They changed even the fundamental basics of their story, the easiest thing to get right, the records/schedule/score?

Outside of that, this is a huge First World Problems movie. Oh boo hoo, you guys are all sad because you lost a game after a bunch of guys before you never lost? Get the fuck over yourselves.

An inspirational sports movie has an underdog, a rag tag team, a group of losers, coming together to win over all. This one takes a bunch of winners, has them lose two games, and then go back to winning a bunch. Get the fuck out of here.

And it is a shame. If they kept to the real story, this would have been a decent movie. Because the football scenes were pretty interesting and shot really well.

Whew, this might be one of the longer reviews I have put off writing. After I saw Pawn, I meant to write it later that night. Then I probably wandered off and fell into a movie coma.

Then I kept watching more and more movies, so although Pawn was on my list to write I kept just picking different movies to write about instead.

Well, eventually laziness catches up to all of us. Not to mention making sure I write it before I forget basically everything.

Hover over this image. What do you see? You see that I am really fucking clever.

Basically, Pawn tries to turn a simple robbery into a complicated game of cat and mouse. Like Derrick (Michael Chiklis) is British. That on its own is pretty complicated. He has a group of thugs, and for whatever reason they are slowly robbing a night time diner. They came in early, but the safe is time sensitive so it will only open at a certain time every night. Shit. Looks like they just have to play it cool.

Hard to do that when customers are frightened, and random cops (Forest Whitaker) come strolling in. There is also Nick (Sean Faris), who is on parole, and looking to get his life back on track for his wife (Nikki Reed) and kid. Last thing he wants to do is get mixed up in any wrong doing. We also have Charlie (Stephen Lang), the owner who is getting far too old for this shit.

And who can forget fucking Ray Liotta? Ray Liotta is some sort of evil guy, but just who he is working for is the bigger question.

Basically, everyone is an asshole, and everyone might have secret motives for either being there that night, or what they are out to get. There are some things far more important than money.

Like good old fashioned bromance.

Well, in movie terms, this one has plenty of twists and turns, but not enough to make you annoyed. Again, everyone seems to be playing a game, except for our hero Nick (good name), who is unfortunately caught up in this. Doesn’t help that his brother works in Internal Affairs. Lot of cops hate those guys. Lot of crooked cops in this town too.

I actually enjoyed parts of this movie for what it was, but overall it is just an average movie. Chiklis had a pretty bad British accent. The ending is hard to remember, mostly because it seemed really silly. Similarly, not all of the plot twists made complete sense.

I do think this film could have used more chess references though.

I miss sexy movie titles. Just a last name (or even a full name) are boring titles. They don’t even say anything about the movie unless you already know the character they are based on. Parker is actually not the first time this character has been in film. At least five other movies have featured Parker as the main character, based around the crime novels by Donald Westlake/Richard Stark, but most of them at least have interesting titles.

On an unrelated note, I am a little bit interested in the movie Bullet To The Head.” I bet you can figure out why.

Because Stallone wont be attempting to be a British man faking a Texas accent.

Parker (Jason Statham) is just your ordinary crook with a few simple rules. Don’t hurt anyone innocent, don’t steal from those who can’t afford it. That usually means organizations with insurance, and the money goes to himself, so don’t consider him a Robin Hood character. His girlfriend (Emma Booth) knows all about it, because her father (Nick Nolte) is an ex partner of his, who now just sets up criminals for bigger scores.

Which of course he does with Parker and another group of guys. Robbing the Ohio State Fair, a score of about a million dollars, $200k each. Pretty solid. But it turns out the other four members of the crew (Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins Jr., Micah A. Hauptman) have their eyes set on a bigger prize. Another job for five people, worth millions, but they need some start up cash first, all of what they just got.

Well, they are vague, Parker says no, they try to kill him and run away. But of course he doesn’t die. That would be a sad and short movie. So he creates a new identity, and heads off to West Palm Beach to stop the guys who tried to kill them by killing them first, and of course getting his money back. Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, Jennifer Lopez plays a real estate workers strapped for cash, being chased romantically by a local cop (Bobby Cannavale). Parker basically has his own small army with J-Lo!

Too bad it will take at least 3 small armies to remove his grimace.

The previews for Parker make it seem like a giant revenge action flick. A crime occurs, guy gets wronged, he goes back for vengeance. If anything, it was the exact opposite. Yes, the heist goes off and he gets wronged, but he doesn’t start killing all the people involved on a warpath. No, he has to plan it all first. Here is where my brain starts to get all weird.

I like that it is planned, that the movie looks before leaping and sets everything up first. That way we get to see how smart our main character is! Smart and his great ability to survive despite all these injuries. But then it became too detailed, and a little bit boring. Honestly, after the two hour movie, I had felt like I was in the theater for four hours. It is hard to describe, but things definitely go way too slow.

It didn’t help that watching every little step of his recovery/run/planning made me  hate the Parker character. Apparently Parker hates people who break his rules and his creed! Well, so much for the stealing only from those who can afford it. It was almost comical, watching him steal car after car, location to location, without actually knowing anything about the owners of any of them. His creed didn’t mean a dang thing when it actually mattered.

His actions ruin the image of the charismatic thief for me, just a bit. Compiled with the snail crawl of the film makes it hard to recommend to anyone.

I was forced to watch Eagle Eye. I really didn’t want to. When someone asked me, “Hey man. Want to watch Eagle Eye?” I said this.

That was my way of both answering the question, and providing a reason why.

The movie begins with the US Army fucking up some terrorists. Or else that is what it looks like. They are at a funeral, but is also a guy they have been looking for, for a long ass time. It might not be him, but 51% chance it is! The secretary of defense (Michael Chiklis) says no go, but the President says go. So they do it. Whoops, civilians.

Long story short, this movie is about a super computer. That supercomputer can gather intel from pretty much anything electric or connected via remotes or on a network. Computers, cell phones are the big ones. It doesn’t like that the president and others put people at risk by ignoring its advice. The Secretary of Defense is cool though, in its mind, and thinks he should be president. So she tries to kill off the president and the other people on the chain of command.

Shia LaBeouf (slacker with a twin brother who was in the army, died, was super good at computer stuff) is being blackmailed, and so is Michelle Monaghan (single mother, who is being told her son will die if she doesn’t do the plan) are both being called by the mysterious woman (computer) and told to do things.

Which is basically get a bomb to DC and blow up the president. No biggie. Also Rosario Dawson and Billy Bob Thornton are trying to stop em, and figure out why they are so good at escaping shit.

“Is this Michelle? No no nononononnono!”

Know what I hate? Shia LaBeouf, and Spielberg’s fascination with him.

Know what I like? Super computers. Super computers being too good.

Argh! Opposing forces! This has a ridiculous number of action scenes and chase scenes, that also go on for long periods of time. Heck that is most of the movie. None of them even seem plausible, even with the possibility of a super computer. But hey, you can stretch some imagination. But that is all the movie has going for it. Those scenes, because there is very little down time or real development. So its just okay. I like my super computer movies to have some nice philosophical discussions in them too.