Tag: Rachel Nichols

Rage starring Cage.

I think that was the reasoning behind this entire movie. It is a tagline that I don’t think anyone ended up using though. Come on guys, it was right in front of you.

Nick Cage has been in a lot of movies, always. He is the type of guy who never says no, going for the intense indie numbers like Joe, and for the straight to DVD shitty action movies like…well, a lot more of his recent stuff.

So why did I watch Rage? Well, I needed to watch a movie and wanted something about 90 minutes. One of the first random ones I saw on Netflix at all. Knew nothing about it outside of my fictional tag line, so I was ready to be surprised either way.

The good news is we still get some intense new CageFaces.

This story is about Paul Maguire (Cage), an honest business man who cares about an honest days of work. He earned an empire starting a construction business in Alabama and is pretty successful now. Good job! But of course he had mob help. He used to be in the mob with his buddies Danny (Michael McGrady) and Kane (Max Ryan). They got a lot of cash from the Russians, thanks to some thievery, and he used it to help finance his business a few years later.

Well, on a night out, a couple of thugs break into his house. His daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples) is taken (not like the movie), and her two friends (Jack Falahee, Max Fowler) were beat up and left behind to tell the tale. Shit. Look’s like Paul’s past has caught up with him. Now he has to figure out if the Russians finally figured out what he did or not, before his daughter pays the price!

Just kidding, they later find his daughter dead. Too late. No, this is not a rescue mission like Taken. This is a revenge flick.

So Cage is mad, and he won’t let anything stop him from getting revenge. Not his wife (Rachel Nichols), not his former boss (Peter Stormare), not the Russian mob boss (Pasha D. Lychnikoff), and not even Danny “Getting Too Old For This Shit 27 years ago” Glover.

His face just looks like an angry plastic mask the entire film.

Ah, see. This isn’t just an action shoot em up revenge movie. There is a some drama/thriller stuff too. And twists and turns! And mob warfare.

And it is still incredibly boring. The plot twists I couldn’t see coming, mostly because they were pretty fucking stupid. Strong words, strong opinions. All true.

Man, was this movie stupid. I couldn’t believe how much of a waste of time this 90 minutes felt to me. It offered nothing new and had some shitty action. It also had some shitty backstory plots.

So why not a 0? Because of one dang scene. Cage was yelling at a friend and being all intense about things. I felt real emotion from Cage during this one scene and thought it would have taken a lot of takes to get that sort of intensity. That one scene saved this boring as fuck movie.

I almost made a mistake and didn’t look up a single detail about Alex Cross before I went to see it in theaters. Thankfully, a friend of mine let me in on a not so secretive secret. Alex Cross is actually a pretty famous character, and has been in sixteen books! Maybe if I knew how to read I would have known that sooner. But more importantly, I found out that this is not the first time Alex Cross has been in film, this is his third time! The first two were over a decade ago, Kiss The Girls and Along Came A Spider, both times being played by Morgan Freeman.

Pretty big shoes to fill.

But technically Tyler Perry has big feet.

So who is Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) and why is he so important? Well, in this version he lives in Detroit, is a homicide detective, and also has a doctorate in psychology. Yep, he can read people, one of those guys. The FBI really wants him to move to DC and become a profiler, but moving his wife (Carmen Ejogo) who also has a career and kids to a new city would be quite difficult.

Besides, he has a good thing going with his partners, Tommy (Edward Burns), a friend of his since grade school, and Monica (Rachel Nichols). The hours can suck, but at least he is doing a good thing for Detroit.

But when a man who calls himself The Butcher (Matthew Fox) begins to target high income individuals who are working on bringing back Detroit to its past prime, Cross is given the problem of trying to analyze someone who might be so far off the rails psychologically that he is entirely unpredictable.

No no no, that’s not what I meant by off the rails.

Never before have I been so torn after watching a movie. While watching it, I was shaking my head at how bad overall it was. The dialogue never felt natural. Most characters just seemed fake, no realistic characteristics at all. The plot was actually very basic, the reason the killings I figured out pretty early, and Matthew Fox creeped me out.

However, multiple times throughout the movie I found myself shocked and surprised at the events that were unraveling. Yes, I knew how it would end, but could not guess the journey. Most of it came from death, because hey, people die in this movie and each time I didn’t think it would happen. I did almost tear up a little bit during one scene with Cross and his daughter.

Usually when I can’t tell how I feel about a movie, I give it a neutral review and run away. But here is some more anyways. Technically, Freeman wasn’t that good in those movies either. They were normal crime based films, and Alex Cross didn’t seem too special. Also, originally this role was supposed to be played by Idris Elba. That should just make you rage with the potential energy that film would have created.

Overall, I think this film will most likely be ignored, and I am not just saying that because of there only being three people in the theater on an opening night showing.

Conan the Barbarian! Another reboot of another movie that is commonly considered an original. As always, I won’t compare this to the “original Conan“, nor will I compare it to the Conan books, (because I never do. And because I’ve never read them). All I really know is that the Conan creator was good friends with HP Lovecraft, so if we could just get a Cthulhu in the movie, that’d be perfect.

“Dead by dawn! Dead by dawn!”

The story begins with Ron Perlman, running around on a battlefield. He finds a wife. Oh shit she just gave birth. ON A BATTLEFIELD. What can this mean? They call this baby…Conan.

Then some guy comes over like, 10 years later, and is trying to collect the pieces of a mask. Each chieftain has a piece of the mask. Conan is too weak to stop the army, and the chieftain kills everyone but him, and gets the last mask piece. The mask gives ultimate power….eventually. Because for some reason, another ~10 years later, the world is still not completely shit. The guy also has to kill a pure blood thing, in order to unlock its powers. Apparently it takes a LONG time to find one of these people. Because now Conan, older and more Jason Momoa, can stop them.

Pirates. Accidentally finding the pure blood woman (Rachel Nichols), fighting, vengeance. This is the rest of the plot. Rose McGowan also plays a super creepy looking sorceress chick. Like. Way too much forehead. Was very surprising to look at. Oh yeah, there is some narration done too, of course, by Morgan Freeman.

There is a lot of blood and gore in this movie. Nudity too. You’d expect both in a movie all about killin’ and fightin’ though. The music that went with it was pretty good, and the visuals were pretty decent. The overall plot was of course super weak, and I was getting bored by the end. So much that I started listening more to the music and replacing the bass lines with words like “Fight” and “Action” to enjoy myself more. What?

There was no Cthulu, but there was a weird octopus monster thing! So that is close. Also there was a very exceptional fight scene with this sand warrior thing that kicked so much ass, it is pretty much worth it, for at least that.

And for people who really like Rose McGowan’s head.