Review: Tom Cruise's 'Oblivion' (2013) Presents a Beautiful Vision of the End of the World

I could easily spoil the vast majority of Oblivion merely by listing the various science fiction films from which it cribs.  From visual cues to plot beats and character arcs, it feels like a mash-up of the various high-profile science fiction thrillers from the last few decades.  But almost despite itself, the film works anyway as its own beast.  Yes the characters are thin and the screenplay doesn't have too much going on underneath the hood, but the film is an absolute visual delight.  Universal originally planned to release this film in America last Friday for an exclusive IMAX-only week-long engagement and it's easy to see why.  The film features absolutely fantastic special effects, yet offers the pleasure of being able to believe your eyes more often than not.  Director Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion may be a triumph of style over substance, but the picture *is* a triumph of style, with strong acting that helps overcome the lack of substance.  Sometimes visual imagination coupled with strong acting is enough.  The end of the world never looked so beautiful.

Review: 42 (2013)

Writer/director Brian Helgeland's 42 is an openly earnest and sentimental bit of old-school hokum.  It is the kind of studio programmer biopic that was once a standard issue release, and it is absolutely successful in its respective goals.  It doesn't aim to be an all-encompassing epic of race relations in the 1940's, nor does it even strive to use the Jackie Robinson story as a grand statement on the eventual Civil Rights movement to come, even as its characters are all-too-aware of the color barrier being broken.  It masks a certain subtly and nuance beyond sweeping music and sometimes obvious monologues.  Released in April instead of October or November, it is surely not intended to win Oscars but merely to tell an educational story to a generation for whom its significance may have lessened over the years.

Guest Review: Evil Dead (2013) is a solid horror remake...

Evil Dead

2013

92 minutes

Rated R

Evil Dead is a surprisingly faithful yet reimagined retread of the legendary Sam Raimi film that pushes the limits of commercial theatrical wide release horror films.  This is a horror film that isn't afraid or ashamed to be one.  With a intense, blood-drenched finale that should leave a packed theater cheering, Evil Dead falls on the side of good remakes.

The story of this iteration of Evil Dead surrounds a girl, Mia (Jane Levy), who is being taken out to an old abandoned secluded cabin, once owned by her family, to hopefully detox her current drug problem.  Along the way to assist, are 2 of her friends and her brother with his girlfriend.  Upon exploring a smell in the basement, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) and David (Shiloh Fernandez) find a ritualistic set of dead cats and the Book of the Dead.  After reading some passages, wild things begin to happen to Mia.  Should her friends believe the things she says or is it her trying to escape cold turkey detox?

Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) fixes what wasn't broken and breaks it possibly beyond repair.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation
2013
100 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

It's no secret that I'm a fan of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (review).  It's big, colorful, and filled with over-the-top action performed by larger-than-life heroes and villains.  The first 90 minutes (I have issues with the finale) is basically, as I said back in 2009, what might happen if someone gave the 7-year old me to go play with my G.I. Joe action figures and gave me $175 million to spend on the resulting play-drama.  But for whatever reason fan-boys and critics carped about the last picture, calling it too ridiculous and too silly for a, um, G.I. Joe movie.  So now four years later, we have a somewhat stripped down and more 'realistic' sequel to Stephen Sommers's outlandish original. Jon Chu was under orders to make it cheaper and basically more 'grounded' than the last picture, and I suppose he has succeeded. G.I. Joe: Retaliation can best be described as G.I. Joe meets Act of Valor.  I don't mean that as a compliment.

Review: Olympus Has Fallen (2013) is violent and stupid, a 'direct-to-VHS Die Hard rip-off' on steroids.

Olympus Has Fallen
2013
120 minutes
Rated R

by Scott Mendelson

If taken at face-value, Antoine Fuqua's Olympus Has Fallen is pretty much morally indefensible. Written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, the film offers a level of jingoistic fear-mongering  the likes of which are more commonly associated with a 1980s Chuck Norris vehicle and/or the likes of Cobra.  It is astonishingly violent yet acts as if the safety of a single person is all that necessitates a happy ending.  While the slightly similar 'president in peril' epic Air Force One at least implicitly asked what cost in lives should be spent to preserve the life on a man who happens to hold a certain elected office, Olympus Has Fallen has no such weighty ideas on its mind.  It is not so much a Die Hard rip-off but a high-budget ($80 million) ode to the flurry of cheapie straight-to-VHS knock-offs that flourished in the late 1990s, complete with simplistic plotting and implausible levels of violence.  It isn't terribly smart and it peaks in the first act, but damned if I didn't enjoy the picture nonetheless.

Review: The Call (2013) is much better than you were expecting, at least for the first hour.

The Call

2013
95 minutes
Rated R

by Scott Mendelson

For the first hour or so of The Call, you'll think you're watching a new B-movie classic.  The picture is staged as a typical 'special location' thriller.  We get a solid prologue, a decent chunk of the movie set during the actual situation we paid to see, and then, as must always be a the case, a finale set away from the prime location.  Speed had to eventually leave the bus, Shoot to Kill had to eventually get out of the mountains, and Red Eye couldn't just end on that plane.  It's how a film like this handles the eventual disembarking that determines its overall success.  Sadly, The Call blows the dismount by a considerable margin, trading plausible real-world tension for generic genre cliches.  But up until that time, it is a superior thriller, and a successful return to the somewhat lost art of what Roger Ebert liked to call the bruised-forearm movie.  For the first 2/3, The Call is a nearly perfect example of what it's trying to be.  

Review: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013) will make your laughter and interest disappear.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
2013
100 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Among its many other faults, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone makes a solid case for the old 'television is better than the movies' argument.  The film is written by four different screenwriters all swimming in television writing experience and directed by a man who has directed almost nothing but television since 1990 and all of their various television projects are likely, by default, better than this film.  It features two actresses (Olivia Wilde and Gillian Jacobs) who did shine or are currently shining in well-developed three-dimensional roles on episodic television and uses them here merely as props for the boys to screw or ogle.   It contains a script seemingly written by committee that features less wit and smarts than any one of the 38 episodes of 30 Rock  by director Don Scardino.  But putting aside the film vs. TV debate, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is an inexplicable missed opportunity, showcasing subject matter that isn't the least bit timely and highlighting the unmerited 'redemption' of a pointlessly horrible human being whose downfall is completely his own fault.  More importantly, save for Jim Carrey's supporting turn and a few grace notes along the way, it isn't very funny.

Review: Dead Man Down (2013) shoots itself in the foot with a moronic and wrongheaded finale.

Dead Man Down
2013
110 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Up until the very end of the picture, Dead Man Down is a mostly serviceable crime drama.  It has fine work from Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace along with worthwhile supporting turns by Terrance Howard and the always appreciated Domonic Cooper.  It doesn't set out to turn heads or reinvent the wheel, but it tells its grim story of revenge and tortured romance with just enough aplomb to merit a casual viewing.  But oh that ending... I have no idea what screenwriter J.H. Wyman or director Niels Arden Opley were thinking and I can theoretically give them the benefit of the doubt that they just couldn't decide on a thoughtful finale.  I'd like to think they just gave up and went on 'bad screenwriting autopilot'.  It's frightening to think that these two professionals thought that the last reel constituted a worthwhile conclusion to their otherwise worthwhile yarn.  It's tough to review a movie where your biggest gripe involves the very end without actually revealing what happens at the end, so maybe we'll get to that later.

Review: Stoker (2013) delivers the gothic goods.

Stoker

2013
100 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

Park Chan-Wook's Stoker is a delicious hybrid of its influences, which mix into an engaging fable of its own.  Written by Wenworth Miller (yeah, the Prison Break guy), the picture doesn't reinvent any wheels but offers strong genre pleasures for those who like 'this kind of thing'.  To say it's well-acted is almost redundant when your film is toplined by Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman.  Stoker is stylish, thoughtful and wears its influences on its sleeve while stilling spinning its own web.  It is part Shadow of a Doubt, part Hamlet while finding new territory to explore in the somewhat well-worn road of 'a young girl's coming of age/sexual awakening'.  It is a slow but ultimately hypnotic tale that is told with a certain tastefulness that makes its moments of misbehavior all the more jolting.

Review: Snitch (2013) is a potent political diatribe disguised as a solid B-movie action drama.

Snitch

2013
115 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Writer/director Ric Roman Waugh and writer Justin Haythe's Snitch (trailer) operates on two levels.  On one hand, it's a pulpy and satisfying B-movie, a distinctly old-fashioned studio programmer about a normal man thrust into an abnormal situation.  The film is compelling and engaging, keeping its head to the ground in terms of plausibility and authenticity.  Even when the film chooses action, the action beats are small-scale and life-sized, which in turn makes them more suspenseful.  But the film also operates on a second level, that of a somewhat angry political polemic.  While the film doesn't go all-in in condemning the entire 'war on drugs', it sticks to a specific portion of that misguided policy and makes an unimpeachable case for its stupidity.  The film thus earns bonus points for being able to successfully mix social moralizing with its action drama while sacrificing little in the way of story or character.

Review: A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) dies badly.

A Good Day to Die Hard

2013
97 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson 

For a retrospective of the entire series, go HERE.

As my father likes to say, if you don't quit while you're ahead, you'll never be ahead.  By all rights, Live Free or Die Hard (trailer 01) should have been terrible.  It came twelve years after the previous installment, was helmed by the likes of Len Wiseman (a man who managed to make a movie about vampires fighting werewolves boring), ended up with a PG-13, and held back from the press for as long as humanly possible.  Yet, thanks to strong action sequences and a story very much concerned with John McClane coming to terms with his metaphorical death (IE - irrelevance), the fourth entry was just good enough to justify its existence.  But the McClane luck has officially run out.  A Good Day to Die Hard is a terrible film, one of the very worst theatrical movies I have ever seen.  It's willfully stupid, lacking in basic character chemistry and narrative discipline, officially turning John McClane into a borderline insane anti-social lunatic.  It has nothing worth recommending.  A Good Day to Die Hard is basically the movie we all thought we were getting six years ago.

Brandon Peters retrospective reviews: Die Hard 5 (2013)

I was supposed to attend Tuesday's A Good Day to Die Hard screening, with the intent of having a review up Wednesday afternoon.  Alas, my wife got sick (nothing uber-serious), so I still haven't seen the film.  But thankfully Brandon Peters was kind enough to whip up a review in my absence.  I'm intending on seeing the film this weekend and will try to have a review of sorts up then, but in the meantime, let's let Brandon Peters give us his thoughts on the fifth and (for now) final Die Hard adventure...

A Good Day to Die Hard

2013

Director:  John Moore

Starring:  Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Yuliya Snigir, Radivoje Bukvic, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Cole Hauser

Rated R

97 minutes

We’re not a hugging family.

                        ~John “Jack” McClane Jr

Let’s start out like this. 

 From the director of Max Payne, The Flight of the Phoenix remake and The Omen remake.

From the writer of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Hitman and Swordfish.

I know.  How can you contain your excitement?

With that on the table, it should come as no surprise that A Good Day To Die Hard clocks in as an absolute disaster and outright failure.  That this is a film in the beloved Die Hard franchise makes it hard to stomach.  Bruce Willis shows up for a paycheck in film that seemingly goes out of its way to make the viewer dislike it.

Review: Beautiful Creatures (2013) is *almost* fantastic.

Beautiful Creatures

2013
129 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

So much of Beautiful Creatures (trailer/banner) is so unexpectedly terrific that it's almost a tragedy when the picture eventually falls victim to its own plot.  For the 80-minutes or so, the film is warmly engaging, alternating between scenery-chewing camp from the adults and genuinely emotional pathos from the kids, anchored by fine acting and surprisingly clever and authentic dialogue throughout.  The romantic leads (Alice Englert and Alden Ehrenreich) have undeniable charm and chemistry while the likes of Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson relish the inherently goofy nature of this material while still pulling back when required.  The film paints an evocative picture of life in a dead-end fundamentalist American small town and is unapologetic about depicting some unpleasant sides of religious fundamentalism.  But while the film outright soars when  it focuses on character and human interaction, it cannot withstand the weight of its own overly contrived mythology.  The deeper the film gets into its central conflict the more of a mechanical plot exercise it becomes.  So superb is the first 2/3 of Beautiful Creatures that I felt genuine disappointment when the film flubbed the landing, ending itself in the territory of merely 'very good'.

Review: Warm Bodies (2013) is a poignant and allegorical genre hybrid that adds rich layers to the zombie template.

Warm Bodies

2013
97 minutes
Rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

There is very little that happens plot-wise in Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies (trailer) that you haven't seen somewhere else. But beneath the somewhat generic narrative is both a rather sad subtext and a worthwhile parable that elevates the film beyond its somewhat simplistic humor. Most importantly, the film genuinely adds a new idea to the zombie cannon, something that seems so simple that I'm surprised that someone didn't do it much earlier.  In short, the film is told from the point of view of a zombie.  Set in a world where something somewhere caused the vast majority of the world to turn into zombies, the film tells a seemingly simple story of how one such brain-eating creature falls in love with a random human he happens to encounter.  The romance is arguably the film's weakest element, as it's basically a variation on Beauty and the Beast's Stockholm syndrome, but the story goes in some thoughtful directions nonetheless.  Based on a novel by Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies takes bits and pieces from Beauty and the Beast, Wall-E, and How to Train Your Dragon to shape a film that becomes a parable for our current 'war on terror' foreign policy.  But its most important idea is detailing the sheer hell of actually being a zombie.

Review: Bullet to the Head (2013) is awful, but amusingly so.

Bullet to the Head

2013
90 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

I cannot in good conscience recommend Walter Hill's Bullet to the Head (trailer).  It is an amateurish production that looks and feels like a direct-to-DVD film in all of the worst ways.  It is badly acted, terribly written, and lazily plotted.  It is easily one of the worst films Sylvester Stallone has ever made, and it's a huge step down after Rocky Balboa, Rambo, and the silly-but-large scale Expendables films.  Moreover, it lacks any of the subtext or resonance that has occasionally highlighted Stallone's best work and brightened some of his lesser films over the decades (essay HERE).  Yet it is also the kind of movie that can be a genuine good time in the right frame of mind and with the right audience.  If you have a friend or two who is in the right mood and you waltz into a cheap weekend matinee, you'll probably amuse yourself accordingly.  But for anyone actually expecting quality cinema or even something on par with a mid-range Jason Statham vehicle, just know that this makes The Mechanic look like Safe.

Review: The Last Stand (2013) delivers crowd-pleasing B-movie goods in a genuinely entertaining action adventure.

The Last Stand
2013
109 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

The Last Stand (trailer) is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination.  But even in mid-January, it lays down the gauntlet for providing one of the more overtly crowd-pleasing (and thus successful) genre films to come down the pike in awhile.  The key to this film's success is simple: Director Kim Jee-Woon and writers Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, and George Nolfi remember the basics to constructing this kind of meat-and-potatoes entertainment.  It's not rocket science, but you'd be shocked how often simple entertainment value gets left in the dust in the quest to construct the biggest and/or baddest genre entry out there.  The Last Stand isn't the biggest of anything.  It's a mid-budget B-movie action picture set in a small town between California and the Mexican border.  But it is filled to the gills with inventive actions sequences, colorful heroes and appropriately nasty villains.  Everyone knows exactly how seriously to take this material, never getting too reverent but also never descending into pure camp.  It also plays to Arnold Schwarzenegger's relative strengths while doing its best to work around his weaknesses (a look at his very best films).  It may not be art, but its surprisingly splendid entertainment if you're in the mood.

Review: Mama (2013) is a horrifying psychological drama trapped inside a mostly routine ghost story.

Mama

2013
100 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

There is potential for an absolutely fascinating character study hidden within Andrés Muschietti's Mama, but unfortunately the film feels content to follow the road oft-traveled in its genre.  The film's first ten minutes or so are absolutely superb, and the opening credits are among the best in rest years, if only for how succinctly they offer copious exposition in a way that is downright chilling in its simplicity.  In a sea of remakes and franchise reboots, it is indeed admirable that Mama attempts to tell an original horror story, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that it's often quite creepy.  But the real-world horror that we are presented with is actually scarier and far more disturbing than the supernatural elements at play, which puts the viewer in an odd position of wanting less horror and more drama.  The picture is well-acted and contains a few genuine surprises during its relatively brief 100 minute running time.  But the film somewhat hampers its intentions by coming out of the gate so strong that what it offers for much of its running time is merely the wrong kind of horror.

Review: The House I Live In (2012) is an all-encompassing look at the national disgrace that is our 'War on Drugs'.

The House I Live In

2012
110 minutes
Not Rated
Available on various Video On Demand platforms January 15th, 2013

by Scott Mendelson

This won't take long.  Eugene Jarecki's newest documentary is a superb and comprehensive look at the last forty years of drug policy in America.  Oh it goes even further in time then that, but the focus is generally on the 1970s to the present, when the anti-narcotics crusade became the largest source of our current prison industrial complex.  There is little here that will be shocking or new to anyone who has been paying attention over the last few decades.  The value is this fine documentary is that it serves as a all-inclusive document of everything wrong that was and still is when it comes to our drug policies.  It can be argued whether or not a documentary of this nature, unlikely to be seen outside of the converted and perhaps a few not-yet converted during various special screenings, should be judged by its effectiveness in changing policy.  Whether or not it 'makes a difference', it is an important piece of non-fiction filmmaking, a shining light to one of the great shames of our country.

Review: The Gangster Squad (2013) is LA Confidential for kids.

The Gangster Squad

2013
110 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

I've long spoken of the irony of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy being one of the most mature and adult comic book films ever released (essay).  Despite its PG rating and primarily colors-centric art direction, it's rather violent and genuinely sad, focused on adult characters who deal with very adult problems.  It is perhaps doubly ironic that Ruben Fleischer's The Gangster Squad (trailer), which feels at times like a loose remake of the 1990 Disney release, is so juvenile despite its grown-up cast and its very R-rated violence.  It is cheerfully pulpy but childishly so.  It turns the tale of a group of off-the-books LA cops waging war on gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, going 'full gangster') into a simplistic adventure seemingly aimed at eight-year old boys.  For much of its running time, it can't decide whether it wants to be a serious gangster drama or a kid-friendly action adventure (graphic violence be damned), before just giving up and becoming a glorified video game instead.  Despite all of that, it is not a boring picture, filled with enjoyably bad acting, laughably cliched and/or corny plot turns, and pretty much non-stop violence.  The Gangster Squad achieves a rarity in this hyper-aware age: It's genuinely so bad that it's (almost) good.

Review: The Impossible (2012) is a disturbingly whitewashed, yet unquestionably effective disaster drama.

The Impossible

2012
105 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

As a technical exercise and an acting treat, The Impossible is pretty terrific. You want an authentic look at both the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and what it was probably like to actually survive such a thing?  Juan Antonio Bayona gives you exactly that.  The film is a peerless technical representation of mass disaster and a wonderfully acted melodrama.  The big question, and this may well be a deal-breaker for many, is whether one can justify the relative white-washing at play.  In short, while the lead family has been altered from Spanish to British (ie - somewhat Caucasian to lily-white Caucasian) the bigger and more disconcerting issue is how the indigenous locals have been turned into cameo players in their own story.  I don't know the details of what actually occurred at that exact location in Thailand back in 2004, nor do I know the exact demographic make-up of the affected population at this specific area (that specific area being a new tourist-friendly hotel frequented by traveling Europeans).  But it's hard to ignore not only the overt whiteness of the lead family but the film's continual cutting to white victims and white mourners over and over again, while the actual Thailand population is reduced to faceless corpses and proverbial caretakers.  That I can possibly look past this in good conscience is due to the sheer quality of the film itself, and my own ignorance of what is fiction versus non-fiction in this allegedly true story.