The trailer for Netflix’s Take the 10 does no favours for this surprising flick. It plays up slapstick yucks and crude dialogue, and, worst of all, it believes its the first movie to incorporate violent thugs in broad comedy – it’s detrimental advertising. Luckily, writer/director/star Chester Tam has a trick up his sleeve.
Jason Statham has proven himself as an action star, but I still believe his performances are only as good as the filmmaker he’s been paired with. In the case of Mechanic: Resurrection, Statham is jumping through the same hoops, but he’s doing so in a way that mirrors the entertaining ridiculousness director Dennis Gansel sets up.
I impulsively summarized True Memoirs of an International Assassin on Twitter by typing, “really wish True Memoirs of an International Assassin used its strengths to subvert the action genre. Still not bad, just indistinguishable”.
After a long, ten-year stint in filmmaker jail, Mel Gibson has returned with Hacksaw Ridge: a gruesomely violent WWII biopic about Desmond Doss, a medic and devout Seventh Day Adventist, who saved the lives of over 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa without killing a single enemy combatant. Hacksaw Ridge features Gibson’s typical heavy-handed religious symbolism to great effect here, and serves as an unnerving contrast to the graphic violence in the film’s third…
As someone who has known Uwe Boll for his frantic filmography of sloppy video game adaptations, his mediocre and too dramatic action/thriller Rampage: President Down is actually a breath of fresh air.
Blood Father (DIR. Jean-François Richet) Mel Gibson was once one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Now, he is staging a comeback which includes a few directorial efforts. Preceding those is his starring role in Jean-Francois Richet’s Blood Father, a film which could be cynically viewed as an attempt to get Gibson back on the public’s radar and nothing more, if only it was not so entertaining and memorable.
Earlier this year, audiences witnessed Bruce Willis being a lazy actor in Precious Cargo – he talked on a cell phone and barely moved out of his seat. In Marauders, the action star is at least doing more with his role (hey, walking counts), but the film itself receives the same faint praise I halfheartedly awarded Precious Cargo in April.
In Order of Disappearance is a mainstream action/comedy for the arthouse crowd. It’s brave enough to treat its subject matter seriously and in jest, and the performances are of higher versatility than a cast of attractive household names who signed up for a glamour project.
The premise of Criminal involves an ex-con being used as a vessel to contribute to an ongoing investigation by the CIA. Information and memories are transferred via a scientific procedure from a recently murdered agent to the agency’s newly hired hand. This set-up is bonkers, but the cast sells it as best as they can.
Sometime after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and before Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen was at a crossroads with his comedy: does he expose more social experiments with wry satire or does he stick with outrageous nastiness?