20 Years Ago I saw The Fugitive with a bunch of friends for my twelfth birthday in September of 1993. This is a pivotal time in one’s movie-going life. By age twelve you’re tired of kiddie movies. You’re ready for the big time. No more cartoons and after-school special nonsense;… Continue reading
Gangster Squad is an absolutely bananas shoot ’em up that seems plenty content being just that. The story, wearing the “based on true events” tag with a permanent wink, couldn’t be simpler and it’s all basically a coat hook for bloody shootouts, of which there are many. Those expecting a… Continue reading
Skyfall is certainly one of the better Bond films of the past twenty years, though it’s not as if competition has been stiff. Appearing in his third film of the series, Daniel Craig has pretty much turned into an embodiment of the action icon, even if the series continues to… Continue reading
Consider the tagline “Don’t ever cross Alex Cross” a fair warning: creativity is at a premium here. A warmed-over relic from the 90’s incompetently directed by Rob Cohen, Alex Cross is a mess from top to bottom. It’s bad enough that the villain and story are preposterous, but we get… Continue reading
Billed as a high-concept actioner, Looper is really more a high-concept drama. It works on both levels, but still runs into many of the same plot-hole traps that other time-traveling films encounter. At the same time, there’s something to be said for a pretty original story (remember those?) that poses… Continue reading
Safe House is the kind of well-made, exciting action film that delivers the goods fans are looking for. It never aspires to be anything more, as evidenced by the run-of-the-mill corrupt government story at its core. You’ve seen it all before, but it doesn’t matter. This flick is more about… Continue reading
Man on a Ledge falls firmly into the category of the “time filler” film. It’s a competently made, never dull suspense yarn that seems perfectly content being average and unassuming. The problem is that it’s a little too unassuming. A setup like this should wring suspense out of the audience… Continue reading
Red Tails has supposedly been in the Hollywood pipeline for over twenty years, never finding financing because of the African-American-driven cast. George Lucas has been behind the project from the beginning, and finally became so fed up with the studio system that he decided to finance the film himself. The… Continue reading
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in the Earth-destroying series, delivers the goods, plain and simple. Correcting many of the mistakes from its immediate predecessor, Transformers 3 is an epic, exciting popcorn film whose last hour is so relentless and visually breathtaking that all-out sensory overload is a foregone… Continue reading
Green Lantern is a loud, obnoxious, joyless video game that pretty much makes you want to write off superhero origin movies all together. The genre has become such a cash cow that studios now just assume that throwing a character onto the heap automatically guarantees a franchise. Warner Brothers may… Continue reading