An impressive cast, an experienced screenwriter, a respectable director, and an amazing fight choreographer have collaborated to make the staggeringly dull revenge thriller The Protégé, a film that is reminiscent of so many indulgent knockoffs of Quentin Tarantino’s work.
Liam Neeson has been playing a variation of the same soft-yet-secretly-badass character since 2008’s Taken, and Mark Williams’ action-thriller Honest Thief is no exception. Neeson treads well-worn ground as Tom, a former marine-turned-bank robber who wants to turn himself in and start a new life with his girlfriend, Annie (Kate Walsh). His attempts to make amends don’t exactly go as planned when the FBI agents sent to take him in decide to keep the money…
P.I Carson Philips (John Travolta) accepts a missing persons case that returns him to his hometown. Reminding movie goers of Walking Tall, Philips observes that his old stomping ground is unlike how he remembers it, which leads into an overlapping conspiracy involving the recent murder of a star high school quarterback.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen someone tell a story as passionately as Max Martini does in SGT. Will Gardner. His activism against the mistreatment of war veterans rings sincerely through the writing and direction of his first solo effort as a filmmaker, and he wears his heart on his sleeve as the title character. The film itself is imperfect, but my admiration towards Martini helped me be forgiving.
By: Addison Wylie Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments, Pontypool) is a very busy filmmaker. In 2010 alone, the award-winning director released three films. If I don’t like one of McDonald’s films, I can at least find something I can appreciate about his filmmaking, but his latest horror Hellions suggests to me that the next best thing for his career may be some downtime. The main problem with Hellions, a film about a…