Tag: Neal McDonough

The original Paul Blart: Mall Cop came out very early in 2009, which was a weird time in America. A lot of people lost their money and jobs, so they wanted entertainment to take them away from this brutal thing called life, to help them pass the time until something good finally happened.

That movie was just another kick in the nuts for America. In fact, it was so bad, no one even noticed when Observe and Report came out two months later. That ended up being the better film, but no one wanted to watch something with another mall security guard.

Now, six years later, the movie gods have decided that we have forsaken them over and over again, with shitty film after shitty film. So they have decreed there would be a sequel, aptly named Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2!

And unless we change our ways, they have even threatened us with a television show for his story to continue, guaranteed eight seasons. This news blurb came to me in a deep theater based prayer.

Bow down movie watching mortals and repent! For he acts for your sins!

Paul Blart (Kevin James) was lucky. That is what we have learned since the first film. Six years later he is still working the same crappy mall security job, doing what he loves. However, his wife that he met in the first film left him after six days. And then his mom died after getting hit by a vehicle while checking the mail. Yep. Everything is shit for Paul. At least he still has his daughter, Maya (Raini Rodriguez) who loves him. However, she got accepted into UCLA, and that would have her move far from home. Best to ignore that until a critical moment later in the film.

Thankfully, there is the perfect distraction. Paul gets invited to a security guard conference in Las Vegas, very exclusive, only for the best of the best!

Unfortunately, bad things are also afoot at the conference. Vincent Sofel (Neal McDonough) is there with a bunch of bad guys! They are going to steal works of art from the hotel that are worth millions! Mwhaha!

Too bad they are going to underestimate the small security guard conference sharing a hotel with them. Typical bad guys, ignoring mall security. Have they learned nothing in six years?

A lot more people here, but none of them are really important enough to talk about their characters. But they are played by David Henrie, D.B. Woodside, Nicholas Turturro, Loni Love, Gary Valentine, Ana Gasteyer, Eduardo Verástegui, and Daniella Alonso.

This picture makes it look like Kevin James has a tiny mouth under his real mouth.

I don’t hate Kevin James, I actually like him. I am not saying he is a great actor, but he can be a funny dude. Remember Hitch? Hitch wasn’t that bad. And I thought Here Comes The Boom was way better than it had any right to be. My first media intake of James was actually his stand up special Sweat the Small Stuff (I never watched The King of Queens) and loved it for years! It just seems that no one outside of Adam Sandler is giving him any work to do which is sad. Everything is also super family friendly. He could do great with some more at least upper teenager material.

Unfortunately instead we get shit like Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, where everything is a fat joke, slap stick, or just awkward in the worst ways.

The acting is bad, the plot is worse, the characters are boring and not funny. Nothing works in this movie. Sure, technically it tells a mostly cohesive story, but it does it in the lamest ways possible. It doesn’t even want to treat its hero correctly. Watching his mom get killed by the car and the divorce so soon into the film, it was clear this was a movie to make fun of a man and shit all over him and not to laugh with him. Those things felt mean, not funny, and set the tone for the entire rest of the movie.

Kids might find this movie funny, but I would never show it to my own. I try to only show them good material and not just the lowest common denominator film for the cheapest laughs. That is why they will never see Planes under my watch. And hopefully they won’t even have to live in a world where a third one of these films gets made.

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.

When it was released, Red received pretty decent reviews from critics but didn’t do amazing at the box office. It made up for it in DVD/Blu-Ray sales though, gaining a small cult following, which is why they green-lit the sequel, surprisingly named Red 2.

The main notable difference between the two is that this one doesn’t have Morgan Freeman. For shame.

Although, as you can see from the picture, it has a lot of John Malkovich being very very John Malkovichy.

The movie begins with Frank (Bruce Willis) and Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) trying to build a home together. Frank is retired (and still extremely dangerous) but he wants to put his past behind him. Too bad Marvin (John Malkovich) comes prancing in, warning him that he thinks someone is trying to kill them.

Well, it turns out there actually are people trying to kill them! Reports have surfaced that they are nuclear terrorists, who are trying to take out Russia. In fact, the CIA are trying to take them in, including their main man Jack Horton (Neal McDonough, who looks like the white Robert Ri’chard), who has hired the world’s best assassin Han Cho Bai (Byung-hun Lee). The MI6 are sending their old friend Victoria (Helen Mirren), and Russia has Frank’s former fling, Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Sarah doesn’t like Katja.

So Frank, Sarah, and Marvin have to work together and find Dr. Bailey (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant war scientist who has been kept in the loony bin for over thirty years. Together, they hope to clear their name, and possibly stop a nuclear bomb from taking out a huge populatio of the world.

I decided to not talk about John Malkovich with my second image.

I don’t think you need to see Red in order to understand Red 2. All you have to know is that Frank and Sarah met in the first film, and everyone else has a huge history with everyone else. If you had to only pick one to watch, go with the original.

Red 2 isn’t bad per say, but it just doesn’t seem to care too much. Sure, it is entertaining, and funny at times, but not a lot happens overall. They are framed fugitives being hunted by the top governments around the world, yet they still have time to walk around Paris and go shopping. It just seemed odd and ruined the flow of the movie for me. The ending chase scene ended up being really predictable as well.

Red 2, just like R.I.P.D. had its enjoyable moments and was entertaining, just not something I would ever recommend to see more than once. I think Red 2 is not really based on the graphic novel like the first movie. Instead it is based on whatever the writer felt like. I usually don’t care how close a movie is to its source material, but I think in this case, they really didn’t know what to do with their characters. Because of that, it just felt like a mess.

John Malkovich is brilliant as always, and a bit more insane than normal. Malkovich is the main reason to see Red 2, and the only real reason.