Transporter 3
Bringing a Bazooka to a Knife Fight Starring: Jason Statham, Natalya Rudakova By Tom Bevis There’s no question that Jason Statham was made for action movies. He’s got that mean face that can also manage to be suave when needed and a keenly trained body. Not to mention he’s bald. Action movies gotta have bald guys. So, with that in mind, I’m not surprised that this guy keeps showing up in the latest action pictures. Movies like The...
Body of Lies
Crowe Overweight; Unhealthy Starring: Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio By Robert Patrick Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies begins with an explosion that eradicates a building complex – leaving the screen purged by a flash of light. It’s certainly not an innocuous opening scene for the director’s esoteric political thriller, but it does set a rather evident tone to the rest of the two hour film. Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a...
Lakeview Terrace
Murphy’s Law Flashes the Badge Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson By Robert Patrick There is no question about it that Samuel L. Jackson has a propensity for theatric performances. In director Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace, Jackson further sharpens his vociferous attitude to the point of near satire. Jackson, playing as a Los Angeles police officer and single father of two, rehashes his serendipitous gift for being volatile,...
Traitor
Action Movie with a Brain… Kind of Starring: Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce By Robert Patrick Don Cheadle is a remarkably gifted actor who, despite his acceptance of sometimes bad screenplays, always comes off as an unabridged force of talent. He can be seemingly effable in the face of bigger star power, see the Ocean’s franchise, but the man is not just a unique supporting cog, he’s a dominant player in today’s cinema. In...
Mirrors
Mirrors, director Alexandre Aja’s ode to the supernatural, isn’t anything to write home about, let alone write a script about, yet it still exists. Maybe that’s the spooky part in this whole thing. The movie, starring Kiefer Sutherland as an ex-detective turned security guard, is a flat character study intermittently jumpstarted by cheap scares. Sutherland’s character, the disgruntled and grizzled Ben Carson, decides to take a...
The Dark Knight
Batman Begins, with Christian Bale taking the helm of the caped crusader, was pretty melodramatic, unimpressive business. Finally, after watching the second installment of the revisionist franchise, I realized what had been lacking in the first film – a quality villain. No matter how mentally tortured and physically obliterated Batman may be at the end of a scuffle, we want a deviant being, even more malignant than the...
