Tag: Michelle Rodriguez

There is a Crisis in America! And no, don’t go running to Ted Cruz, he won’t care.

But I should be more specific — there are a lot of active crisis’ in America. One crisis at a time is for small time nations. We have problems that span hundreds of years, so we are pretty good at having bad things happen, whether they are naturally occurring, or due to systematic issues.

Which crisis is this one going to tackle? Well, let’s just say that it involves the cops.

That literally narrows it down zero. 

See, drugs are bad, mmkay. And this is a movie that is going to talk about all of the badness of drugs, specifically, Opioid based drugs, since they are the hot commodity now that is fucking up things more than other substances.

What we have is three slightly interconnecting stories.

There is Agent Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer), who has been undergoing drug stings and trying to get not just the local dealers, but the suppliers, which requires the long wait and time.

There is Claire Reimann (Evangeline Lilly), a mother, whose son, who wasn’t perfect, was found overdosed with the drugs, and she didn’t even know or he had drugs before in his life!

And of course, Dr. Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman) who is a professor of medicine stuff, and is helping do clinical trials for drugs as part of his research. And he is finding a new opioid, that is supposed to be less addictive, might not be as advertised.

Also, some other people and criminals and cops and more! Starring Greg Kinnear, Michelle Rodriguez, Luke Evans, Veronica Ferres, Kid Cudi, and Lily-Rose Depp.

Someone covering up science? Unheard of!

Ahhh drugs! We have to fight the drugs, the war on drugs is killing us!

That sentence is meant to sound extreme, because the war of drugs has been a big failure for many reasons that this review has no reason to get into. But that doesn’t mean this movie doesn’t make good points, because it does. This opioid thing mostly sucks because the makers of it claimed it was great, without knowing the addictive properties (or maybe they did?!) and got a lot of people hooked on painkillers, doctor prescribed.

But I do have a hard time getting really annoyed at the real life aspects they want me to be pissed at, when also parts of it are made up. I know for legal reasons, they probably couldn’t name a real drug. But did this professor research story actually happen? Like for something else? If so, that does bring an extra level of fuckery to the mix. I know in my life opioids are addicting and not as advertised, but it is hard to draw that conclusion when it is also paired with exaggerated or potentially made up plotlines.

What truth should I go out and shout?!

Overall, the plot is okay. I do wish it had some more edited out of it, as it dragged in parts for me, and strangely, the cop parts were the weakest for me. I did get sort of lost before the end. I couldn’t remember who backstabbed or pissed off who. Is that on me? Maybe. But Crisis could have been more entertaining as well.

2 out of 4.

Who is Danny Trejo? Okay, well, for this one, you might not know his name, but you have likely seen him in a movie. As of this moment he has 383 acting credits to his name, from TV shows, to movies, to things still in production.

The title, Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo, comes from the fact that many of his early roles in films since the 1980’s did not have a real name for the character. He was known as Boxer, Inmate, Prisoner, Tattoo Artist, Chink’s Gang, Costello’s Bodyguard, and even once apparently “Mean” was his character, which I assume was not a name either.

So how did this man, this tough burly Mexican, get into acting at the age of 40, and how did he get over 300 roles in less than 40 years?

Well, the main and obvious part of this documentary is that he didn’t start as an actor, but as a regular kid who was involved with crime. He was in a gang, his family members were in a gang, and he did a LOT of bad stuff. Robberies mostly, but having weapons and threatening his community, he was in and out of juvenile detention. And once he got to being an adult, he did more that got him put away for a long time. And when he was in prison for real, that is when his life really began to change.

Let’s assume that backdrop was a green screen. Would be fucked up to do an interview in what looks like an actual prison or…abandoned school or whatever this is. 

So how can someone go from being a life long criminal, with lots of trauma in his life, to being an actor that no one seems to have any problems with, and is known for his huge amounts of work ethic? Well if I tell you all of that, why would you watch the documentary?

But needless to say, things happened in there that changed him. His life took on new meaning, and once he got out of prison he had a focus to make not just his own life better, but the lives of his friends, family, and the community he had wronged. He has spent the second half of his life writing those wrongs, and what came as part of that? Well, a vibrant movie career.

And he was able to take that and evolve from scary background Hispanic man, to friendly scientist in Spy Kids and eventual leading man of his own over the top franchise, Machete. He was SIXTY-SIX YEARS OLD when Machete came out, which is probably the oldest aged person to lead a new franchise (who also had never been the lead man before). Hell, Liam Neeson was in his 50’s when Taken came out (but again, he was already known as a leading man).

The reason I liked this documentary is it presented Danny Trejo as a real person. His flaws, and his successes. He has a message of hope coming from someone who was a pretty bad dude into someone who wasn’t. He has grown from his mistakes and in order to do that, you have to admit you have them. Pretty easy to admit mistakes when they are on public record of course, but still, admitting them is important.

Thank you Danny Trejo for bettering your life and showing people there can be a way out if you can get help from your community.

Also featuring some of his friends and famous people telling stories (along with his former crime buddies and family). You will see Cheech Marin, Michelle Rodriguez, and Robert Rodriguez in here, amongst others.

3 out of 4.

Being a Widow must suck. You know, getting married, being in love maybe, marriage for decades possibly! And then your spouse dies. I also learned recently that the term widow only refers to a woman who lost their partner. I guess that is good, because then I never have to be a widow. And you know, I just talked about how that must suck.

Widows is a movie brought to us by Steve McQueen, who has not been too busy since he had a movie win best picture. He famously directed 12 Years A Slave for a 2012 release, and since then this is his first theater film. Someone clever might say 6 Years NotInTheSpotlight for McQueen. Does this mean that Widows is going to be 3 times as good as 12 Years A Slave (because 12 Years came out 2 years after his previous film)? Yes. It has to mean that.

You can’t argue with science.

Having the funeral really cements in the widow status.

Veronica (Viola Davis) is wealthy, giving, and in love with her husband (Liam Neeson). He might be into some corrupt shit, working with political campaigns an doing jobs, but she doesn’t know the specifics and it does put her life in a good place. And then? Well, a job goes poorly, and he gets killed dead along with three other men, leaving her to feel quite sad, notably poorer, and alone.

But she isn’t given time to grieve. It turns out in this final job, her husband stole from some powerful people, and they know who robbed them. So they have to now harass Veronica, to look into their savings accounts or whatever to pay it back. Or else.

Unfortunately, nothing like that really exists, as far as she knows. She does end up finding a notebook, with plans on robbing an even bigger fortune. If she can pull off this heist, she will be able to pay off the goons and have a lot left over to live comfortable and worry free after that. She just needs a team, and she isn’t the type to know about this sort of stuff.

There is an idea for a team though. She wants to find the other women who just lost their husbands. They are probably hurt and need funds as well. Maybe they are all desperate enough to join her.

Starring Michelle Rodriguez, Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Debicki, and Cynthia Erivo. Also starring Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Molly Kunz, Jon Bernthal, and Robert Duvall.

It is impossible for the guy in purple to be a Widow. We talked about this.

If you are thinking about 12 Years A Slave still, which scene do you think about? It is likely the one where the main character is being hanged by his neck for a few minutes, with kids playing in the background, him struggling to breath, and of course, eventually not dying. It was scary, and intense, and the camera did not move away.

I love a long scene that doesn’t cut, and there is one very exciting scene in Widows that is similar. It doesn’t show violence, and it isn’t scary, but it is just a long cut of a very short car ride in Chicago, showing how quickly it takes for one to go from a poor to a rich district. During this scene is a conversation as well, and it would be one of the best scenes of 2018, if we got to see the characters talking as the drive occurred. The camera didn’t focus on them, just on the scenery, so it is most likely that they did the conversation later and just edited it on top. But it is still a great scene and shows that McQueen has a lot of tricks up his sleeve.

Davis is the star of this film and has to carry a lot of it with her face and eyes. There is no doubt she is a great actress and does a fantastic job in this one. I do want to point out another actress though, because it was a surprise. Debicki, who has been in plenty of films, and never been the one reason you want to see it. Her character had a lot more going on than her normal characters, and by golly, she felt like a real actress and not just a model who is in a bunch of movies. Hell, she could have a best supporting from this for all I know. It was also great to see Erivo in this film, who was one of the best parts of Bad Times At El Royale. She is having a great year and she came out of nowhere.

To highlight one male actor, I will point out that Kaluuya was scary. He felt like a wildcard in the realest sense of the word, and I loved seeing him on the screen.

Widows is suspenseful, with a few twists that I didn’t fully expect. It hits hard and is not afraid to throw any punches. It could have been better, but the over two hour film just flew by and it was good enough for me to just love.

4 out of 4.

The Smurfs and The Smurfs 2 were met with a lot of mixed results, especially on this site. But you know what? A lot of things really worked.

Like Hank Azaria as Gargamel. He was great as the voice and character himself and felt perfect. I also enjoyed Neil Patrick Harris as our human contact.

But the sequel bombed because it was a poor movie. However they blamed it on the real actors for whatever reason and promised that the next Smurfs movie would stay in Smurfs land. No real people, just CGI for everyone. And now we have Smurfs: The Lost Village as a sort of reboot on the franchise where people won’t realize that things are different.

Hundreds of smurfs, and we will only focus on a handful of course.

In this movie we are reminded again that Smurfette (Demi Lovato) was created by Gargamel (Rainn Wilson) to find the smurfs and be evil, but Papa Smurf (Mandy Patinkin) did some of that smurf magic to make her blonde, and thus, nicer. However, Smurfette feels weird because she doesn’t know what her smurf talent is. After all, all the men smurfs have an adjective to describe their talent, but her talent is just being a girl I guess.

After some fun time, Smurfette, Brainy Smurf (Danny Pudi), Hefty Smurf (Joe Manganiello), and Clumsy Smurf (Jack McBrayer) find some other smurf like thing who runs into the forbidden forest, blocked by a huge wall. And through some plot, Gargamel finds out that in that forest is a hidden smurf village that no one knew about before. If he can’t get the close smurfs, he might as well get the ones that don’t even know he exist!

So now these smurfs go out on an adventure, alone, to try and race to the lost village to warn the smurfs about Gargamel before it is too late.

Also featuring Ariel Winter, Dee Bradley Baker, Ellie Kemper, Frank Welker, Julia Roberts, Meghan Trainer, and Michelle Rordriguez.

Blonde just has to stand out I guess. Blue all the way down otherwise.

Why is it really that whenever we get a smurfs movie, they can only handle an actual handful amount only, and never like 10 or more? Oh we get one off jokes for a few of the smurfs. Vanity and Nosy got a few jokes I guess, but everyone else was one scene and done for the most part. Such a goddamn waste when there are like a hundred of them. Such lazy writers. Clumsy being there is just for comic relief, at least Hefty and Brainy have a purpose.

Wilson does a terrible Gargamel. If Azoria was never Gargamel in the past, I don’t know if I would be saying that, but at least comparison, it is so much worse. It just feels like some dude talking, not an evil grouchy balding wizard. He has lost his snarl in this movie and never feels threatening.

The story itself is just so generic. The adventure has bullshit perils, generic bad plantlife and lacks any amount of creativity.

But the worst part is that the ending is complete crap. For whatever reason, Smurfette is suddenly immune to a spell from Gargamel because she really isn’t a smurf. However, that same spell worked on rats and Gargamel, who also aren’t smurfs, so I am not sure why that it is relevant. And apparently what that really means is that Gargamel can’t cast spells on her at all. And that is how the plot gets finished, because she saves everyone by tricking him. And it serves absolutely no logic at all.

There are few okay moments and decent jokes, but it is a huge shit show. And it is not because of any human people this time. Also, Demi Lovato as Smurfette is a poor man’s Katy Perry. It is true and you know it.

1 out of 4.

Okay, let’s start this with my fast and the furious order of liking the films.

1, 5, 3, 7, 6, 4, 2.

And now that I have seen The Fate of the Furious, I would either put it after 7, or after 6. The trend continues, that I would have mentioned in a few of the previous F&F reviews I have done.

The even ones are not as good as the odd ones. It is science, bitch!

I think this is also some science.

F8 begins with Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) in Havana, Cuba on a honeymoon. A honeymoon! Hooray! And it comes complete with a street race so absurd and contradictory, you can accept anything else the film has to offer.

While walking around, Dom runs into a stranded woman. Car problems, sucks to suck. Turns out it was a trap, this lady is named Cipher (Charlize Theron) (A name that always means villain in any movie that features it), and she has something to blackmail Dom with. She needs him to run a mission, he can’t tell anyone, and yes, it will involve betraying his friends and loved ones to do it. But part of the film is learning about the mystery, so why would I tell you now?

We have a lot of returning characters, including: Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), Tej (Ludacris), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), Deckard (Jason Statham) and Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), Elena (Elsa Pataky) and Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell). For some reason, no Brian, although he is mentioned a ton.

But also new characters! Mainly featuring Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood), underling of Mr. Nobody who is going to be geared towards our new Brian, Rhodes (Kristofer Hivju), Cipher’s main muscle, and Helen Mirren doing something or another.

Ending with Mirren is like popping out a secretive submarine out of nowhere, right car guys?!

What is it like to enjoy this movie? I truly cannot fathom it. It seems to be plagued with issues, from ridiculous character decisions, to plot points, to plot twists. I understand that not every character should be smart, but this group of people has now turned into an international task force that deals with apparently world ending problems, so they have to have some intelligence.

But instead we get a main character who says that ¨It doesn matter what is under the hood, but who is behind the wheel¨ before a street race. So when he is called out on that quote and given a shitty car, what does he do? A whole lot of quick modifications in order to change what is under the hood. Ah, thanks Dom, so it does matter, okay.

And that was just the beginning of the film, with the rest of the movie falling straight in line with those scenes.

We have a few mentions of Brian, but terrible reasons for not involving him. We have returning bad guys, meaning you actually have to remember the inane plots from previous films, and then watch as these bad guys gain sudden redeeming qualities and everything is fine again. We get a build up of a big fight, and it never gets to occur.

And again, we get poor decision after poor decision. In one of the above pictures we have all the cars driving in reverse to keep the middle car in place. Before that, they were just breaking to keep him stopped. But at this point in the film I had to scratch my head, wondering what their plan was going to be to actually stop him, because keeping him in place with a lot of moving tires is clearly not a good idea with no end goal. Before this scene we had a great idea with cars being hacked and forced to get in the way and block up traffic, but for whatever reason, that tactic had to be thrown out of the window for these scenes.

And you know what? The ending explosion and save rivals Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That might sound harsh, but it is true.

Some amusing banter aside, if you like superhero films where there power is driving and surviving explosions, while also having lower than average intelligence, you will enjoy The Fate of the Furious.

1 out of 4.

To start things off, I am not sure what this movie is actually called. I am decently sure at the time of this review being written, it was called The Assignment. Which yes, sounds like a sexy college film.

But before it was called Re-Assigment. And it might be changing to Tomboy, it is really hard to tell.

All of the titles make sense once you find out just what this movie is about though, and all of them seem to be various levels of offensive.

The beard is a lie.

Meet Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez). A famed mercenary killer. Deadly, accurate, sly, and he has a manly beard. He is so manly, we get to see him have sex with a woman Johnnie (Caitlin Gerard)! And she gives him her number for future sexy time, because he is a great lover. Oh we also get to see his penis after he showers. He is not a grower, he is all there always ready. What a dick!

Apparently Frank has made the wrong enemy though. While doing a job for Honest John (Anthony LaPaglia), a gangster, the tables are turn, Frank is captured. And when Frank wakes up, his beard is gone. And his dick. Oh hey, he has breasts and a vagina!

What in darnation!

Turns out Frank killed a guy, and his sister, Dr. Rachel Kay (Sigourney Weaver), a pissed off plastic surgeon, is…well, pissed off. And she does a gender reassignment surgery when Frank gets knocked out. A really great one, can’t see any scars, just perfect female body. And she provides hormones and everything, considering it an experiment.

Well, Frank wants revenge. He just has to deal with his hooters and presumably a now ticking biological clock. Or something. Also featuring Tony Shalhoub, as a psychiatrist, evaluating Kay after the fact.

Frank has to tape those bad boys down, how else could he function?

Wow. Where to begin. Um.

Well, there is a lot of nudity in his film. I cackled early on because of an unnecessary shower scene, generally reserved for females in a movie, but at this point, Rodriguez is a dude. And to flash us his chest and penis, just to show how much of a man he was. After the transition, we had Rodriguez nude a lot, of course in the early confusion, but in several scenes taping her body down to help prepare for a kill. And no, it isn’t even her naked, but a body double for those scenes.

Genitalia aside, the film is told from two narrators. Are doctor, in a straight jacket, talking to a psychiatrist about the events, and a video diary from Kitchen as a woman. So we know immediately that Kitchen will be successful. This is where the how is supposed to be a mystery, but it isn’t. It isn’t like a giant magic trick. It is just someone going and killing a ton of people, no surprises there. Although, she does use her sexuality in ONE scene, to distract a guard. That definitely happened.

Acting is bad, plot is bad, action is bad.

Now, is this movie offensive? Fuck if I know. I am not qualified to answer that question really. On the surface, it definitely sounds offensive. But at he same time, it does show a male-to-female character kicking ass and being consistently the coolest person in the room. And on the other hand, it was a magical forced transition that makes everything seem like a fairy tale.

Yeah, it is probably offensive. But really, I am just offended by how bad it was.

1 out of 4.

After the success of my Saw Franchise review as a Milestone Review, I knew I wanted to do it again at some point in the future. Films that were mostly too old to be reviewed individually on the website, but as a whole, could make a pretty decent Milestone Review investment, for whatever relevant reason I could think about. And yes, I was a bit surprised that it was review 550, when it doesn’t feel like that long ago.

And I knew the next one of those I would want to do would be the Resident Evil Franchise for a variety reasons. The fact that this is review 1750 makes it extra special in my eyes.

1) When I moved to Ames, I started to review EVERYTHING that hit our theaters, both new and the cheap-o theater. I made that declaration the week AFTER Resident Evil: Retribution left the main theaters apparently. I had no worry, I would watch it when it hit the cheap theaters, because I would even watch “horror” movies now. And then the cheap theater never got it.

2) End of January, a new Resident Evil film comes out, and hey, I need to watch these in order to prepare for it.

And finally, 3) I own all five of these films on Blu-Ray, bought a couple years ago on Black Friday real cheap. So, uhh, I really need to watch them already. Also, I never rushed to watch them, because I have never really played any of these games. I played like, 5-10 minutes of Resident Evil 4, found it too scary, and didn’t touch it again.

And I will finally have some context for The Kick Heard Around the Video Game Movie World.

Resident Evil

Let’s talk about Resident Evil, the first movie based on a horror video game, based on the first horror action video game. This film starts us in the Umbrella Corporation facility. They do tech stuff around the world, basically Google, but they also secretly did weapon stuff around the world, making them filthy rich. After some disease juice gets loose in their facility, the AI who runs the whole thing (The Red Queen), kills everyone inside the facility. Every single scientist, worker, peon.

So a military group of soldiers are being sent down there to investigate why and to turn off The Red Queen. Before this happens, we see Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up naked in a bathtub, in a mansion, with some amnesia. And that is when the soldiers bust in. The group, led by “One” (Colin Salmon) bring Alice along into The Hive (the name of the underground research facility) and let her know that she works for the Umbrella Corporation as well and is meant to guard the entrance. The rest of the team includes Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Crewes. They also have Matt (Eric Mabius) as someone who they recently arrested, and Spence (James Purefoy), Alice’s husband and also guardian of the mansion.

Don’t get your pants in a twist, this monster is coming.

When they get down there, they find destruction, death, and weird shit everywhere. Getting into The Red Queen’s server room is difficult and people die, but damn it, they shut down The Red Queen. Yay! Time to leave and go back to the fun outside in Raccoon City, good job everyone. BUT WAIT. With the AI shut down, all of the locks and operations shut down as well. And it turns out that the virus, the T-Virus, basically made zombies. And shit like that thing in the picture above to deal with.

Somehow Alice is like, super incredibly, awesome. She fights so well. Turns out that Spence is the one who spread the virus, because he was trying to stop Matt and his sister from telling the world about what they were doing. So Spence has to die, and Alice and Matt barely escape to the top before bad things happen, with Matt dying from a claw mark, the antidote so close… And then they are found by Umbrella operatives and taken away.

When Alice awakes, she finds herself in an empty hospital. After she gets out of there, she finds Raccoon City in ruins. Crashed cars, fires, and apparently the T-Virus got out and it is zombie time in the real world. MOVIE 2!

2 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the extremely high bar setting subtitle, take place right after the events of the first film. Because of the team going in to capture Alice and Matt, they accidentally also let off a wave of the infected zombies onto the city. And this spreads like wild, against Umbrella’s interests. They set up a perimeter wall around the city and only have one area for people to leave, assuming they pass the test to show they are not infected or bitten. But when the dead get to that area to, they close off the last gate and leave the people inside to deal with it on their owns, even willing to fire on regular citizens.

And this is a problem. This is what Alice wakes up to. Umbrella tried to get its best scientists out of the city as well, including the inventor of the T-Virus, Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris). They were unable to get his daughter out though, Angie (Sophie Vavasseur), clearly the inspiration for The Red Queen. So he wants people to go in and find her, anyone really, promising them a way out.

It takes a lot of skill to keep that outfit together in a high action zombie apocalypse.

People like Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), an ex-cop who hated Umbrella, and her old friend, Sargeant Payton Wells (Razaaq Adoti). People like Umbrella soldiers Carlos (Oded Fehr) and Nicholai (Zack Ward). And eventually all of them meet up with a news reporter Terri (Sandrine Holt), and T.J. (Mike Epps), a guy with guns, and Alice and the girl.

Also running around the city is a giant monster, named Nemesis, working for Umbrella and killing soldiers, not citizens. He is controlled by Umbrella, namely Major Cain (Thomas Kretschmann). Eventually they find out that the monster is actually Matt, from the first on. He was experimented on, just like Alice, except she just got super strong and looked the same while he mutated as he was already scratched. Oh snap!

Also Dr. Ashford gets killed, a lot of fighting ensures, and the survivors escape on a helicopter as Raccoon City is fucking blasted with a nuke! Their helicopter crashes in the wave, Alice is killed saving the girl and Umbrella finds them some time later. Alice wakes up a few weeks later, in a Detroit Umbrella facility, by Dr. Sam Isaacs (Iain Glen), restores her own memories, breaks out and goes on the run with T.J., Jill, Carlos, and Angela, with Isaacs letting her run, knowing she is still controlled. Or something.

1 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Exctinction takes us five years further into the franchise. The T-Virus has spread throughout the world, and basically life sucks. It is all desert-y and dead, very Mad Max-esque. Alice is now driving on her own, abandoning her friends because she is being tracked by satellite. She also has some sort of psychic powers now, thanks to experimentation.

Somewhere near Las Vegas is where we find them all now, Alice wandering and killing bad people and bad zombies alike. And a big caravan of survivors looking for a place to call home. It is led by Claire Redfield (Ali Lartner), and features some returnees like Carlos and T.J. Yay! No idea where Jill went. Some of the new “survivors” include a girl named K-Mart (Spencer Locke) and other actors (Ashanti, Christopher Egan, Matthew Marsden, and Linden Ashby).

Shit, sand got everywhere. I hate sand.

And uhh, well, eventually Umbrella attacks them again when they are in Las Vegas trying to get supplies. They want to go to Alaska, where they heard there is a settlement. More people die, and Alice goes to the local Umbrella facility to put a stop to them and take their helicopter, so the survivors can go. And she does that!

Inside the lair is of course Dr. Isaacs again, but this time he was weak, so he injected himself with the T-Virus too. This turned him into a hybrid fighting entity, with arms that could be elongated with tentacles. Fun! Alice kills that guy, finds out that this facility has hundreds of Alice clones, and she plans to use them to take down Umbrella. Looks like they are located in Tokyo for sure now, they didn’t like Isaacs, and some guy in glasses (Jason O’Mara) is the new, bad guy. Survivors to Alaska, Alice plans to take out Tokyo Hive, end of film.

2 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Afterlife begins with showing how Tokyo got infected. Then we see Alice storm in after Extinction, clone army and all, and clear house. But Wesker (Shawn Roberts), Mr. Sunglasses himself, now played by a new actor, escapes. During their battle, he removes Alice’s super powers, of which she is happy, they both crash and explode and somehow, Alice survives. So she makes her way to Alaska.

There she is attacked by Claire, with a metal spider on her chest. Once she removes it, Claire stops, with some amnesia and doesn’t talk. But Alice finds no other survivors, just a lot of planes and emptiness. So she flies a plane to LA with Claire and lands on top of a prison with some survivors flagging her down. The survivors include Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), Crystal Waters (Kacey Clarke), Angel (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Bennett (Kim Coates), and a prisoner who calls himself Chris (Wentworth Miller).

Indoor rain scenes are all the rage these days, not at all for sexual reasons either.

And yeah, they are now in a prison, surrounded by zombies. Not just zombies, but a giant one with a big axe/hammer weapon, called Axeman. Turns out Arcadia, the Alaskan settlement, was actually the name of a ship, which is off the coast. They want to get to the ship, to see the other survivors, makes sense. So they do that. They escape, some people die, but when they get to the ship, turns out it also is an Umbrella trap.

They have everyone in tubes under ground, for testing or who knows what. And surprise! There is Wesker again, this time, super super fucking powerful, and fast, and he can regenerate. Much fighting occurs, eventually he is on a ship that explodes and everyone is free! Yay, the survivors are freed from the tubes, when…suddenly! More Umbrella ships show up, with guns. And our old friend, Jill Valentine, now blonde and not at all looking like her former self. But she has a robot spider on her chest, and then…movie ends!

0 out of 4.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Don’t worry, at the start of Retribution, we will see what immediately happens to Alice in crew, but in slow motion and backwards! Then she will tell us about the first four movie plot, then it will show the attack in regular motion at regular speed. Then we find Alice waking up in a suburban house, with a husband, a deaf child Becky (Aryana Engineer) and no zombies. Weird. Okay. Until zombies attack their neighborhood! Lot of people start dying and of course, then real Alice wakes up, again, in an Umbrella facility.

Sigh. Okay. But the computer that runs it starts to malfunction. So she escapes, a lot of weird things happen, and somehow she finds herself in Tokyo right when the plague begins? What in the fuck? Blah blah action, blah blah plot, eventually we get some knowledge. She is in a large Hive base (They are all really big), but it is a testing facility in Russia. They built huge areas to simulate T-Virus attacks in a few major cities, to sell the tech to governments against each other. It is also underwater and under ice. But don’t work she is being rescued by…Wesker?! What, he survived?

Oh and Ada Wong (Bingbing Li) his assistant. Apparently they want to free her to finally bring down Umbrella, because now Umbrella is being run by The Red Queen herself. They now have to escape, with Becky (who things Alice is her mom, despite just being a clone), in a two hour timer before the facility explodes. Also rescuing her on the other side is a crack team of warriors. Including Luther West! Also Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and two guys who are totally not as important (Robin Kasyanov, Ofilio Portillo).

Resident Evil always had the most appropriate outfits for fighting AND doing that BDSM thing.

That’s right, this is another movie where they have to escape a place before they all die. But this one features a lot of returning members, because apparently a lot of them were actually clones the whole time. So people from the first and second movie are back, just to fight her with Valentine, still controlled by a robot, while the base comes crumbling down. And more Axemen, zombies, infected, and guns.

Needless to say, eventually they win, and get picked up by Wesker. Where is Wesker? In the White House, with the “last remaining survivors” ready to finally rid the infected threat once and for all. Maybe.

0 out of 4.

Conclusion

Oh where to do we begin. I guess the first film. Despite having CGI that has aged terribly over the last 14 years, the first film in the franchise is dreadfully okay. The acting isn’t great, but the concept it is introducing is original for the time and it creates a potentially scary situation. Out of all the five films, it is the scariest because everything is new, but again, bad CGI takes away some of the frights. Some of the scenes felt straight out of a video game, but it still wasn’t high art in any sense of the word.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse introduces us to some video game characters and a lot more action. Action at the expense of horror. Like, there are no fears at all in this movie. The zombies aren’t scary, and Nemesis NEVER feels scary, just threatening and powerful. For a horror franchise to immediately drop large portions of horror is a terrible move to make. But at least this film feels like the next step in the franchise and continues the plot along decently, despite the dumb teaser at the end. It is still bad and should feel bad, but there were some attempts there.

Resident Evil: Extinction takes the series in a completely different direction than anyone expected. The point of it was to make a scarier movie with a lot of it set during the day instead of night like normal zombie flicks. The plot was a bit of a weaker point in this film as well, but it would have been stronger had the next two movies not done what they did. It did increase some of the horror elements from the first film, not to the same level, but that is why I left it as okay. Mad Max and Zombies is a fun crossover idea and the film once again got a closer to some sort of closure.

Wow how did Umbrella get their logo to burn on a building like that? Is that a metaphor?!

Resident Evil: Afterlife is where the franchise starts to hit garbage fire mode. To talk about both films, neither really seem to feature that strongly of a horror element. Once again, these films feel incredibly action oriented, with very weak plots. And by weak plots, I mean the films should barely exist. After the third film, we have Alice heading to stop Umbrella Corp’s main office in Tokyo. Awesome, she does that early in the film, then most of the film is instead dealing with this being stuck in a prison, trying to get on a ship situation. This is not really a new plot line from this franchise or from zombie films in general.

And in the fifth film, we start off once again LOCKED IN A GODDAMN UMBRELLA BUILDING. And the entire focus of the movie is to get out of the building. Just like movie one. Just like movie four. They are just rehashing the same plot line and not moving the plot along. Sure, at the end of the movie, they escape the place that they were. But they are solving problems that the films itself create.

After the third film, we can sort of assume where the franchise is going and will go. And instead of delivering that outcome, the fourth film is almost entirely a filler plot line. At the end of the fourth film, we know where the franchise should go, and instead of getting there, it is entirely filled with a different fucking filler plot line. They create and solve issues in the movie itself at the expense of telling a story and it is downright furious.

Sure, they might have some cool sequences in them. They were movies made for 3D and IMAX screens. But they abandoned the genre of horror, retold the first plot in worse ways, and refused to give us growth, which is goddamn necessary that late in to a franchise.

I can hope and hope amongst all things that the next film, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, will bring us the plot we have been looking forward to. But I honestly am just assuming it will also end on a bad cliffhanger and not actually be the final movie. Because money. And dicks.

2 out of 4.
1 out of 4.
2 out of 4.
0 out of 4.
0 out of 4.

FAST FAST FAST.

Nope. Too slow. Now you are just Furious 7. Look down. Look up again. You are Vin Diesel upset that Chuck Norris stole all of your internet jokes. Look at my hand. It is full of movies. THINK AGAIN. Just odd numbered Fast and Furious movies!

Blah blah blah. I have said before. I think the even numbered movies are either shit (2 and 4) or just okay (Fast and Furious 6). Some are well known to be bad, I went against the grain for the last one. Tokyo Drift has a good story though, which is why I like it and the first and fifth are entertaining. I was super stoked to watch Furious 7, before the death of Paul Walker, because I wanted the continuation from Tokyo Drift! I was ready for it all. And you know, 7 is an odd number.

And hey, Vin said this movie was amazing. Tears would flow and it should win Best picture awards. In that case I expect also hard hitting dialogue, some true events maybe, a new look at a modern topic, and maybe some death.

I don’t expect too much butt though.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT ALL OF OUR FRIENDS COULD RETIRE AND JUST ENJOY LIFE. Just right then. Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) shows up and starts killin’ people. He is the brother of the Shaw dude from the last movie and he wants revenge. Deadly revenge.

Well that is great, they have to deal with this asshole who has money, power, and explosives, and he will follow them around the world just to get his sweet deadly revenge.

Thankfully (?), a covert ops team lead by Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) wants to use Dom’s (Diesel) team to track down a computer program(er) (Nathalie Emmanuel) and a terrorist (Djimon Hounsou). If he stops the terrorist, they can use the special facilities to take out Deckard as well. Deckard of course will continually interfere with each step of that operation before he can be fully dealt with. Dom wants his crew though for the job. So he gets the leftover parts of the crew (Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris).

Action, cars, people being mad. Dwayne Johnson is back in his role, Jordana Brewster is still Walker’s wife, Lucas Black reprises his role kind of, and Ronda Rousey is in this movie because modern action films secretly hate us.

Furious 7 is making shit tons of money. It is also is breaking records while doing it. Why? Is it because of its extremely diverse cast? (which is by the way, ridiculously diverse. Look at that group shot and tons more not featured). No, probably not.

The thing is, this franchise always made a lot of money. Six made almost 800 million, so the fact that this one already hit a billion isn’t a surprise. Because let’s face it, regardless of how good or bad it is, people wanted to go see it because of Paul Walker’s death. Just like The Dark Knight.

Now, sure, I might have had a tear near the end. My emotions are easy to manipulate in a movie. But I am still disappointed with their choice. I think a much stronger movie could have been made if they went real crazy and intense with it. I even knew I wouldn’t get the more intense and tear inducing finale to Walker’s character, because they announced what would happen to his character months ago. A literal ride into the sunset. Kind of disappointing, but I get it. I do.

Either way, some of the stunts in this film were insane. Most of them just involve literally the cars flying through the air and surviving big crashes. They are thankfully in vehicles a lot, so it keeps up with the theme, despite only one (and a half maybe) street races. And it didn’t feature an incredibly stupid ending like the last film. And the characters, all of which were still decently over the top, didn’t feel like superheroes which was another complaint I had.

But also, this one featured The Rock in a great scene involving a cast. That scene made the movie for me. I just really hope they don’t make another one. End up on top. Please no more. Don’t piss off Paul Walker’s ghost.

3 out of 4.

Machete started out as a fake trailer in front of the Grindhouse movies, Death Proof and Planet Terror. Robert Rodriguez decided that the fake trailer needed to be made into a real movie and Machete was born! A movie that was made on purpose to be bad, it had plenty of potential, but to me just felt boring. I wasn’t impressed.

I basically forgot about the franchise until they announced both a sequel and a third film coming down the pipelines. The sequel, Machete Kills just hit theaters, but the third film really caught my eye thanks to its title of  Machete Kills Again…In Space. With a name like that, this franchise can’t be that bad!

Yeah, it looks like he is about to kill it here.

After the death of his partner (Jessica Alba), Machete (Danny Trejo) finds himself at the wrong end of the law, blamed again for a murder he did not commit. To get out of the jam, the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen / Carlos Estivez) has asked him to go on a suicide mission into Mexico. His mission? To stop revolutionary/mad man Mendez (Academy Award Nominated Demian Bichir) from sending a nuke straight to Washington DC.

Sure, a simple enough mission, but there are a lot of factors that stand in his way. Million dollar bounties, crazed heart monitors, multiple personality disorders, priests seeking redemption, a hitman called El Camaleon, brothels, space scientists that know the future, a madam with a grudge, former friends, and clones stand between him and his goal.

There are so many celebrities, trying to list them all would be insane, but I will do it anyways. Telling you their role in the film almost seems like a disservice, and plus, you probably wouldn’t believe me. The movie includes Mel Gibson, Amber Heard, Michelle Rodriguez, Sofia Vergara, Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas, Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Alexa Vega, and Vanessa Hudgens!

One of the best “jokes” in this movie is having Alexa Vega in close to nothing. Since he worked with her on Spy Kids 12 years ago.

As I mentioned before, Machete was trying to make a good/entertaining “bad movie,” in honor of all the poor quality B-movies of the 70s/80s. It is pretty hard film type to make correctly, the last one I really enjoyed being Black Dynamite. The first film had a lot of appropriate jokes for genre, but the overall plot and tone bored the crap out of me.

Machete Kills corrects these mistakes and more. First off, it was actually entertaining. Over the top action from start to finish and nonsensical plot lines that will cause you to stare at the screen in confusion. Normally that would sound terrible, unless terrible was the goal, in which case it sounds great! Machete Kills put a lot more detail into purposefully editing the film in a sloppy way to increase its humor potential. The film has a rampant disrespect for obeying the natural laws of our reality: where a broken car can drift 500 miles in mere hours, and where several days can pass in only 20 minutes.

Most of the jokes are smaller references or in the background, outside of the absurd characters themselves. Despite how outrageous everything is, the characters themselves for the most part are incredibly serious. After all, their lives are on the line. The movie sports a lot of death and violence, which is all packaged in creative ways.

Machete Kills improved a lot from the first film, but I think it still has a lot of untapped potential that it just hasn’t reached yet. Assuming the third film actually gets made, it might finally cross into the “So Bad, It’s Amazing!” territory that the series is striving for. As for now, it is not a must watch, but more of a watch eventually (maybe) type of movie.

2 out of 4.

After Fast Five premiered, there was a lot of talk about the future of the franchise thanks to the scene in the credits. It left many people confused. How could Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) be alive, when she clearly died in The Fast and The Furious?

We will get to that later. More importantly, the time line of the films became more clear.

They mentioned that Fast & Furious 6 (Trailer) would follow 5, and part 7 would be set AFTER Tokyo Drift. Basically, films 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 of the series are in the correct order, and 3 is set after 6, but before 7. They also went through a little bit of development hell, where they were going to break 6 into two parts, but thankfully went back to just one film. Either way, the questions you have at the end of 6 will be answered next summer when part 7 comes out.

I don’t give a fuck about any of that, because HOLY SHIT A TANK! Long story short, there is a highly tactical gang of drivers out there in Europe, who are trying to assemble a device that can shut down an entire city for 24 hours. That is a pretty dangerous weapon and could kill a lot of people. Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and his new partner Riley (Gina Carano) know the only people who can help them out are a group of lesser international criminals on the run from the law.

Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker) obviously refuse to help, but when Hobbs shows pictures of Letty, his love who they thought died years ago, they assemble the team (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot) to find out how this picture exists and if she is really alive. Saving the world isn’t on their mind, just finding the girl.

But with Shaw (Luke Evans) being a criminal master mind, always a few steps ahead of the authorities, can their rag tag group even follow in their exhaust fumes?

Of course the women have to fight each other. Gender equality people, let’s see some. Fast & Furious 6 is being lauded as one of the best films in the franchise, and action movies in general. I will give the movie that. There is action throughout the movie, from car chases, to scenes completely void of cars. It doesn’t apologize for anything in the film, and goes at completely ridiculous lengths for an explosion or two.

But personally, it completely changes the genre of the film, which grinds my gears the most.

To me, everyone felt like a super hero in this film. There are TONS of hand to hand combat scenes between the two groups, and it felt like watching a live action Dragon Ball movie. Ridiculous feats of strength and long battles where neither side got hurt, when most of these people are just retired car racers. It bugged me to no end that they all basically became invincible just for the sake of a bigger action movie.

On top of that, I don’t think it flowed well. Almost every scene I felt confused due to the plot of the movie. The heroes were constantly doing nonsensical things. Nonsensical to their character and to a normal human being. They wedged a street race into the movie that plot wise didn’t make sense (nor did anything out of that London woman’s mouth before the race). At one point four or five of the bad guys get arrested and end up making their escape, yet one of the group is no longer seen in the movie. I guess they just decided to write him out of the movie.

The climatic plane ending is ruined for me thanks to it apparently being the longest run way known to man, making the ridiculousness too much to bare. It also features an Amnesia plot line, which I feel is one of the laziest plot developments you can ever come up with.

Yes, if you changed the movie to be something completely set apart from the Fast & Furious universe, I would probably enjoy the movie more. But we have five movies that are grounded (mostly) in reality, a shift in genre I can’t get over. It is breaks all the rules of the series, despite trying its hardest to include the previous five films. If it was an original movie (and better acting), I might have loved it.

2 out of 4.