Ride Along is about as close as you can get to being a cartoon without being animated. It’s a pretty exhaustive vehicle for funny man Kevin Hart, who can be very funny in smaller doses, but here expends all goodwill by the end of the second act by just never… Continue reading
Adam Sandler, reigning king of the Filmed Vacation, is back for another luxurious trip short on belly laughs and long on gooey sentimentality and familiar slapstick. The strange part is that Blended comes close to working, mainly due to Sandler and Drew Barrymore’s chemistry and her likability. The comedy mine… Continue reading
Given that it seems like a blank screen and a couple of loud roars would make any Godzilla movie superior to 1998’s Roland Emmerich debacle, one would think the cards would be stacked in director Gareth Edwards’s favor to bring the iconic monster back to the big screen with success.… Continue reading
Neighbors is that kind of comedy that, more often than not, we’re complaining about rather than praising: the kitchen sink comedy. You know the kind; it throws everything at the wall and sees what sticks. When they don’t work, they’re annoying. When they do work, as is the case of… Continue reading
Draft Day takes on the challenging task of balancing the sports-nerd event that is the NFL draft with a story that the average, non-football fan can take in. The results are mixed, with the verbal battles between the general managers making for far better entertainment than the sappy and under-cooked… Continue reading
You know fun? Think the exact opposite of that and you’ll be in the right mindset for Sabotage, an exceedingly dreary and uninteresting revenge/whodunit that easily ranks as one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s worst films. Stripped of his larger-than-life persona and forced to play a grieving widower and leader of a… Continue reading
300: Rise of an Empire is pretty much the same lame video game as the first 300 film, but what this one has going for it is an occasional sense of a humor and a biting, entertainingly evil performance from Eva Green. She’s hands-down the best part of this monotonous,… Continue reading
Non-Stop features such a brilliant set-up that you spend most of the film wondering if it can pay it off. The answer is no. But for three-quarters of the run-time it is a taut, tense thriller that demands and keeps your attention. Once the Big Reveal is made, things go… Continue reading
Pompeii may have razor-thin characters and the least-convincing romance of the past few years, but one thing it is not is boring. As sort of a cross between Dante’s Peak, Gladiator, and Titanic, it blows up people and ancient architecture as efficiently as any disaster movie could. There are plenty of… Continue reading
The new RoboCop is a lot like the old RoboCop in that a lot of people are shot and killed. Whereas the 1987 film conducted its business with a sly, dark sense of humor and an ear for social commentary, this 2014 remake (or is it reboot?) plays everything with… Continue reading