In baseball terms, Pierre Morel’s [Transporter 3, District B13] best pitch is the high, hard heater – the shoulder high fastball. His movies tend to start off with a bit of scene-setting and then shift into high gear for the rest of the ride. So it is with From Paris With Love – a movie filled with shootings, stabbings and stuff getting blowed up real good. If Joe Bob Briggs was still doing regular reviews, he’d give this three explosions out of five.

(more…)

Crazy Heart is the story of a burnt out country & western singer who drinks too much, sleeps around and hasn’t written a new song in many years – and how love redeems him without making life all that much easier. Bad Blake is the burnt out C&W star and Jean Craddock [Maggie Gyllenhaal] is the reporter and single mom whose request for an interview leads to much more than either of them expect.

(more…)

Despite the fact that Mel Gibson is a troubled religious nut with numerous personal problems, Edge of Darkness comes along to remind us why we all love him anyway. Edge of Darkness is a talkier version of last year’s Taken. Here instead of having a father who is an ex spy with skills, the father is a current Boston Detective who is hell bent on finding out who killed his daughter. At first everyone assumes the killer was for revenge against Detective Craven (Mel Gibson) as the mystery unfolds he finds out his daughter got involved with an activist group and he didn’t really know her as well as he thought he did.

(more…)

She hasn’t even been home a full evening when Emma Craven [Bojana Novakovic] is killed by a shotgun blast fired by a man in a ski mask – right in front of her father, police detective Thomas Craven [Mel Gibson]. His search for vengeance turns up disquieting things – like the possibility of Emma being a terrorist, or the possibility that she might have been about to blow the whistle on the company for which she worked, for making nuclear weapons.

Based on the ten-year old BBC mini-series of the same name, Edge of Darkness marks Gibson’s first appearance in a movie in almost eight years. While it doesn’t have the scope of the mini-series – especially in terms of the politics and illicit nukes angles, it does work as a revenge thriller for a few reasons…

(more…)

Beth [Kristen Bell] is the youngest curator at the Guggenheim Museum and in charge of her first big show – fourteen major works that deal with pain. When she takes forty-eight hours off to attend her sister, Joan’s [Alexis Dziena] wedding in Rome, something weird happens – she meets Nick [Josh Duhamel], a guy whom she likes almost as much as her job. But when she sees him kissing a spectacular brunette in a tight red dress, she gets drunk and stumbles into the Fountain of Love.

In a moment of ill-conceived defiance, she takes four coins and apoker chip from the fountain – causing the men who tossed them there to suddenly fall passionate in love with her: Antonio [Will Arnett], a struggling artist; Lance [Jon Heder], a street magician [take that, Criss Angel!]; Gale, [Dax Shepard], a narcissistic male model, and Leo [Danny DeVito], the King of Sausage. Beth comes to believe that Nick is the fifth …

(more…)

CBS Films makes its debut with Extraordinary Measures, a fact-based [if compressed and composited]tale that follows a family where two of the three children have Pompe Disease [a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy] and a curmudgeonly scientist who is persuaded to move from pure research to developing a treatment for the disease.

(more…)

I’m not sure who Legion will affront more – Christians or horror movie fans. The story, simply put, is that God has lost faith in humanity and ordered his angel, Michael [Paul Bettany] to slay an unborn baby and lead the rest of the angels to destroy humanity. Michael said no and was cast out into the world, where he has cut of his wings to show his love of humanity. Now the angel Gabriel [Kevin Durand] is sent to kill the baby and destroy the world. Only Michael – and a handful of stranded customers at a diner in the middle of nowhere – stands between Gabriel and the apocalypse.

(more…)

Much has been made of the The Book of Eli as a platform for Christian beliefs as its protagonist carries the last remaining Bible across America, headed west to… we don’t know what. What matters is what Eli [Denzel Washington] believes – and he believes that a voice, a voice as real as any he’s ever heard, told him where to find The Book and to take it west. That, in essence is the film’s plot – along with the obstacles that Eli finds in his path. These obstacles include a band cannibal killers who use a woman chained to a shopping cart as bait; an elderly couple who are full of surprises, and the mayor of a small town who rules with an iron hand.

(more…)

The Hughes Brothers are back baby and in fine fashion. I really wasn’t in the mood to see a movie today, and certainly not a post apocalyptic one. I’ll admit I was ready to walk out ten minutes into The Book of Eli but the movie’s slow pacing actually sucked me in.  As Eli (Denzel Washington) walks this dirty, dank, desolate world we see how low humanity has sunk and the mystery of who this man is deepens.  This movie is literally and figuratively about faith on all levels – faith in God, faith in your fellow man, faith in the will to survive. It’s a message movie that doesn’t try to beat you over the head with its religious overtones – ok, it does, but for some reason I didn’t mind it as much and I’m a borderline Atheist.

(more…)

The release of The Lovely Bones – adapted from the novel by Alice Sebold – is one of those instances where I’m glad I haven’t read the book. From everything I’ve heard, the novel is brilliant – something Peter Jackson’s film is not [except for the overabundance of overly vivid color where it shouldn’t be].

(more…)