A retired spy’s daughter is kidnapped to be sold as a sex slave [the slightly skeevey part]. The ex-spy hunts the men who kidnapped her. As premises go, this one is simple, direct and a bit odd to find in a PG-13 film – but we are talking about a Luc Besson production, so maybe […]
Tag: 20th Century Fox
MOVIE REVIEW: The Day The Earth Stood Still: Well Mounted But Empty
The Robert Wise film, The Day The Earth Stood Still, was a metaphor for a cold war that was threatening to go hot. The remake is an ecological horror tale – if we can’t take care of the earth, we – and everything we’ve created – will be removed. It seems that we are at […]
MOVIE REVIEW: Max Payne – Overused Plot Not Juiced by Superficial References to Norse Mythology!
Take the basic Punisher plot [cop’s family killed by bad guys], add some designs by Constantine and top with a superficial gloss of Norse mythology, and you get the videogame-based Max Payne. Max Payne [Mark Wahlberg] is the cop whose wife and son are murdered; Alex Balder/Baldur [Donal Logue] is his ex-partner who discovers a […]
MOVIE REVIEW: City of Ember: The World Ends But Life Goes On… For Awhile!
When a movie begins with a narrator intoning, “The day the world ended…” you can be sure that there’s a caveat somewhere. With City of Ember that caveat is that a bunch of the best and brightest built an underground city so mankind could live on. An ingenious device was placed in a box that […]
DVD REVIEW: War Games: The Dead Code: Sleek Can Still Be Boring
War Games: The Dead Code is the straight-to-DVD sequel to the Cold War thriller starring Matthew Broderick as a teen computer whiz who almost starts World War III while under the mistaken impression that he’s playing a computer game. In The Dead Code, Matt Lanter is Will Farmer, a hacker who plays an online game […]
MOVIE REVIEW: The Happening: Almost… by Sheldon Wiebe
Any great mystery, espionage or horror movie lives or dies on its writer and director combining to provide suspense – the ominous shadow here, the piercing music sting there – while creating characters we can relate to and placing them in situations that leave them more and more unable to cope, or adapt, until some […]
Jumper: Read the Book!
Doug Liman’s Jumper is an adaptation of a far superior novel by Steven Gould. It is a total travesty in terms of story and character – and will probably do well with the ADD crowd. Pity.