Dell's Good, Bad & Ugly Movie Reviews

[dell71]

Haven't seen them yet. Soon, hopefully.

[Mogriffjr]

Damn I thought I was alone in thinking Theron was GREAT in her role...she had me hook, line and sinker...funny u didn't mention much about hemsworth in the movie lol...iMO he really was a side piece to the film...

[j.hen]

Gwen Stacey was introduced first because he was actually Peter's first love.... She dies and he moves on to Mary Jane (who's already been confirmed for the sequel)

[j.hen]

And the web-shooters show that this Peter Parker kid is a fucking genius on the same level as Bruce Banner and Tony Stark even as a high schooler (something Raimi's movies completely ignored) You can't have a reboot of spiderman and not include the web-shooters.

[dell71]

Gwen Stacey was introduced first because he was actually Peter's first love.... She dies and he moves on to Mary Jane (who's already been confirmed for the sequel)

Like I said, no problem here. I just don't like how the character was handled.

And the web-shooters show that this Peter Parker kid is a fucking genius on the same level as Bruce Banner and Tony Stark even as a high schooler (something Raimi's movies completely ignored) You can't have a reboot of spiderman and not include the web-shooters.

I got that. My main issue is if they're going to use them then actually include them in the story. Once he invents them, they're completely forgotten about when that was never the case in the comics. They were always something Spider-Man was aware of because he had to deal with it when they ran out. Here, they never run out no matter how much webbing he uses and he uses lots and lots of it.

[Palooza]

Nobody groans dell in his own thread and gets away with it.

[j.hen]

Nobody groans dell in his own thread and gets away with it.

Point taken and groan retracted.

[Senser81]

Nobody groans dell in his own thread and gets away with it.

What about Palooza?

[Palooza]

What about Palooza?

Yes, it is always acceptable to groan me.

[dell71]

The Adventures of Tintin
Directed by Steven Spielberg.
2011. Rated PG, 107 minutes.
Cast:
Jamie Bell
Andy Serkis
Daniel Craig
Nick Frost
Simon Pegg
Toby Jones
Daniel Mays
Gad Elmaleh

We kinda sorta meet Tintin (Bell) and his dog. He buys a model ship, and people immediately start trying to buy it from him. When he won’t sell, they try stealing it. Should he get killed in the process, the bad guys won’t think it such a big deal. That’s The Adventures of Tintin in a nutshell. Actually, that’s it, almost entirely. The only other thing you need to know is eventually he teams up with an alcoholic sea-captain whom the bad guys, one of whom looks suspiciously like the movie's director, want to keep around for some reason. Lots of swashbuckling ensues.

My main problem with Tintin is that’s all there is. We get no set up and are thrust into the adventure with no emotional attachment to anything on the screen. Director Steven Spielberg is certainly no stranger to telling his story through action. He did a masterful job of just that in Saving Private Ryan. The difference is through that action, including very real looking death all around the survivors, the weariness of those men and their determination through it all we form a bond with them that submerges us in the film. Here, especially since it’s aimed at children, that action doesn’t have nearly the same weight. It’s a blitzkrieg of dazzling sights and sounds. However, like a fireworks show, when the smoke clears there is nothing there.

This isn’t to say that Tintin is a bad movie. It is not. The animation is top notch and gives us some wonderful visuals throughout. Action is pretty much non-stop so you, most likely, won’t be bored. And if you like pratfalls and slapstick comedy, you’ll laugh a lot, too.

No one, myself included, is really qualified to tell Steven Spielberg how to make a movie. I just feel he went way too fast with this one. I would love to see Tintin, and even the villains, more firmly established before we really get into his adventure. Instead, it’s like a mashup of his own Indiana Jones flicks and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes without the heart of either. We can see many of the director’s normal touches, but it feels like a dumbed down version of his normal work like he’s pandering to an even younger crowd than his popcorn flicks usually shoot for. Ironically, his pal J.J. Abrams made the best Spielberg flick in the last couple years with Super 8. There is no question that Spielberg is a magician when it comes to filmmaking. However, this particular trick falls flat. It wants to wow us by constantly showing us our card. Unfortunately, we never get to actually pick one.

MY SCORE: 6/10

[dell71]

The Expendables 2
Directed by Simon West.
2012. Rated R, 103 minutes.
Cast:
Sylvester Stallone
Jason Statham
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Bruce Willis
Jean-Claude Van Damme
Chuck Norris
Nan Yu
Dolph Lundgren
Jet Li
Terry Crews
Randy Couture
Charisma Carpenter

Everything goes boom. There’s really not much more description or explanation needed. This is a movie simply about everything going boom and the guys we love to watch make stuff go boom making stuff go boom. We have plenty of holdovers from the original. Since he’s the creator of both of these homages to the 1980s, Sylvester Stallone once again plays our fearless leader. Joining him again are current action king Jason Statham, former straight-to-video action king Dolph Lundgren, martial arts legend Jet Li, Terry Crews and Randy Couture. Expanding their cameos from the first flick are The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mr. Die Hard himself, Bruce Willis. Also joining in on the fun are “the muscles from Brussels” Jean-Claude Van Damme and the man who doesn’t do push-ups but instead pushes the Earth down, Chuck Norris.

How the hell didn’t this movie not have a part for Steven Segal? Well, he possibly ate himself out of a role. And again, no Carl Weathers? Did Ivan Drago…ahem…Dolph Lundgren really kill him during that boxing match where James Brown performed “Living in America?” Woo. Good Gawd. Jump back. Kiss myself! Hey! May the Godfather of Soul rest in peace. Sorry. Got off track for a moment.

There is the basic construct of a story here. As you may recall from the original, Sly and the guys whose names I dropped in the first group are kinda, sorta like The A-Team. By the way, since another major draw is our familiarity with and nostalgia for the actual actors and their past work, we won’t be using any character names here. The youngest guy on the squad decides the life of a merc is not for him. . He’ll finish out the month then go home to settle down with his girl and raise a family. If you don’t know how that works out in action flicks, think of him this way: in another movie he’d be a cop with only a few weeks until retirement. In other words, he’ll need to be avenged. He meets his fate during a mission the boys get sent on by Bruce Willis. They don’t want to do it, but Sly owes Bruce a solid. Their job is to grab hold of a thingamajig from the wreckage of a downed plane and bring it back. Of course, that doesn’t go as planned since Van Damme and his evil cronies show up to get their grubby little paws on it. Yes, Van Damme is a villain. He’s a pretty good one, in fact. Anyhoo, that’s about as specific as I’m going to get. From there, our heroes trying to retrieve the thingamajig and avenge their fallen brethren ensues.

The Expendables 2 is a dumb, fun action flick sure to give your surround sound system a workout. It’s even better than its predecessor because there’s not nearly as much downtime so we can get to know the boys. They all pop in, shoot stuff and/or fight while either themselves or someone else makes a reference to one of their old movies, or their persona in general, as a joke. For instance, a large percentage of Arnie’s dialogue is made up of him telling whoever is within earshot “I’ll be back.” You should understand this to mean this flick takes itself even less seriously than its predecessor and is therefore closer to what I thought that movie would be. Without question, this is a “turn your brain off” experience starring a group of guys who made a pretty good living making stuff go boom. In other words, it's so bad it's awesome!

MY SCORE: -10/10

[dell71]

Alex Cross
Directed by Rob Cohen.
2012. Rated PG-13, 101 minutes.
Cast:
Tyler Perry
Edward Burns
Matthew Fox
Jean Reno
Carmen Ejogo
Rachel Nichols
Cicely Tyson
John C. McGinley
Werner Daehn
Bonnie Bentley
Giancarlo Esposito

Alex Cross is the lead character in a series of novels written by James Patterson. He was previously brought to the big screen in 2001’s Along Came a Spider with Morgan Freeman playing the role. Here, the honors belong to Tyler Perry. Our reintroduction to the detective/psychologist starts with him finding out that his wife (Ejogo) is pregnant with their third child. Actually, it starts with a perp chase that’s totally irrelevant to the plot except for being an easy way to introduce us to Alex’s team, but that’s neither here nor there. By the way, the team consists of Alex, his partner and best friend since forever Thomas and fairly new to the crew Monica. After getting the news about his family’s expansion Alex and company gets called in on a case where a very wealthy young lady and all her bodyguards were found murdered at her home. Getting his Sherlock on, our hero intuits that it was only guy responsible, he tortured the rich chick just for fun, was drawing a picture of her as she was dying, despite not actually being able to see any real evidence of this, and that she was not the main target. The drawing leads his team to dub the bad guy Picasso (they do eventually find a drawing). Trying to catch the artist ensues while he kills more women.

By now, you should see my main problem with this movie. No, it’s not the star. More on him, later. I get that Alex is a genius with immense powers of deductive reasoning. However, to figure out a lot of things in this movie he’s more psychic than psychologist. Take the drawing, for example. Granted, I’m certainly not a crime scene investigator. However, from the information before him I’m not seeing how Alex just decides this guy was drawing a picture of his victim. A few moments later, voila, Thomas finds a picture. A short while later, he’s folding the drawing in precisely the right manner to uncover a clue left by Picasso.

This gift for precise premonition isn’t limited to our hero, either. The bad guy seems able to quickly know things he really shouldn’t. In particular, he magically knows where Alex is going to be in one scene and where another cop lives in the next. It feels lazy, as if the writers just relied on the fact that similar things happen in movies all the time so we probably won’t question it.

Things eventually cycle back into Alex’s favor. This is where we get our most egregious misuse of our hero’s ability. The movie’s entire runtime is spent on the cat and mouse between Alex and Picasso, which is fine, but never clearly establishes reason and motive for the events. Instead, after what we think is the finale, Alex just suddenly knows a lot more information and we have a bit more movie to watch.

In the lead role, Tyler Perry was just fine. He won’t make anyone forget anything Morgan Freeman ever did, but he performs admirably. In roles that require him to show his own face he’s usually bland, hardly engaging. Here, those qualities work for him because it gives the analytical Cross the proper distance from most of the atrocities being committed. It is my understanding that Idris Elba was originally signed to play this role. I think Elba is the better actor, but plays even his non-action roles with too much brawn for this character. Perry’s a better fit and did a good job.

The rest of the cast also does well. Matthew Fox as our bad guy is particularly good. He gives us a solid psychopath. Filling out the rest of the roster are a bunch of folks capable of great work, but given very little to do: Jean Reno, Rachel Nichols, Giancarlo Esposito, Carmen Ejogo, and possibly John C. McGinley. Director Rob Cohen has assembled a nice group but made little use of them with a paint-by-numbers screenplay filled with easy answers.

MY SCORE: 4.5/10

[dell71]

Safe
Directed by Boaz Yakin.
2012. Rated R, 95 minutes.
Cast:
Jason Statham
Catherine Chan
Chris Sarandon
Robert John Burke
James Hong
Reggie Lee
Danny Hoch
Anson Mount
Sándor Técsy
Joseph Sikora
Igor Jijikine
James Colby

There’s a tween-aged girl name Mei (Chan) who quite literally has a mind like a computer. Not only is she a math genius on a level beyond comprehension, she has the ability to look at large amounts of data and memorize it in seconds. What’s more, anything she commits to memory is never forgotten. It just so happens that she has an uncle in the gangster business that finds out about her skills and wants to put them to good use. He yanks the girl out of school in Hong Kong, threatens to kill her mother (!) if she doesn’t cooperate and ships her off to New York to help with his organization. Basically, she’s to keep the books in head, eliminating any paper trails. Eventually, she’s made to memorize a rather long number that the rival Russian mafia also wants to get their hands on. The Russians kidnap the girl and she somehow manages to escape. Now both gangs plus every dirty cop in the city is hunting for her.

This where Luke (Statham) comes in. He’s an MMA fighter who accidentally wins a fight he was supposed to have thrown. As punishment, those pesky Russian mobsters kill his wife and plan to make him spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. While contemplating whether or not he should step in front of a speeding subway train, he notices Mei being chased by the same guys who killed his lady and decides to help out, suddenly turning into The Transporter.

Once again, Statham delivers the goods in the action department. He beats up and/or kills multiple bad guys in a string of fun, brutal action sequences. Though over the top, they’re still nowhere near the level of ridiculousness of those Transporter flicks I alluded to or his Crank movies. This gives things a grittier feel, removing the tongue-in-cheek aspect of both of those franchises. Still, our hero gives us just enough of his trademark humor to keep things from getting too serious.

The story surrounding the action also holds together pretty well. The girl’s predicament and the way law enforcement figures into this is all fairly intriguing. It’s not a perfect movie, by any means, but we get enough twists to keep us on our toes. We also wind up in some interesting places. On the downside there are a number of plot holes. Most troublesome of these is we’re sure of the truth concerning Mei’s mother. Regardless, its drawbacks aren’t enough to make it a bad watch. If you’re into action flicks, this is a pretty good one with better plot than many.

MY SCORE: 6.5/10

[dell71]

Safe
Directed by Boaz Yakin.
2012. Rated R, 95 minutes.
Cast:
Jason Statham
Catherine Chan
Chris Sarandon
Robert John Burke
James Hong
Reggie Lee
Danny Hoch
Anson Mount
Sándor Técsy
Joseph Sikora
Igor Jijikine
James Colby

There’s a tween-aged girl name Mei (Chan) who quite literally has a mind like a computer. Not only is she a math genius on a level beyond comprehension, she has the ability to look at large amounts of data and memorize it in seconds. What’s more, anything she commits to memory is never forgotten. It just so happens that she has an uncle in the gangster business that finds out about her skills and wants to put them to good use. He yanks the girl out of school in Hong Kong, threatens to kill her mother (!) if she doesn’t cooperate and ships her off to New York to help with his organization. Basically, she’s to keep the books in head, eliminating any paper trails. Eventually, she’s made to memorize a rather long number that the rival Russian mafia also wants to get their hands on. The Russians kidnap the girl and she somehow manages to escape. Now both gangs plus every dirty cop in the city is hunting for her.

This where Luke (Statham) comes in. He’s an MMA fighter who accidentally wins a fight he was supposed to have thrown. As punishment, those pesky Russian mobsters kill his wife and plan to make him spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. While contemplating whether or not he should step in front of a speeding subway train, he notices Mei being chased by the same guys who killed his lady and decides to help out, suddenly turning into The Transporter.

Once again, Statham delivers the goods in the action department. He beats up and/or kills multiple bad guys in a string of fun, brutal action sequences. Though over the top, they’re still nowhere near the level of ridiculousness of those Transporter flicks I alluded to or his Crank movies. This gives things a grittier feel, removing the tongue-in-cheek aspect of both of those franchises. Still, our hero gives us just enough of his trademark humor to keep things from getting too serious.

The story surrounding the action also holds together pretty well. The girl’s predicament and the way law enforcement figures into this is all fairly intriguing. It’s not a perfect movie, by any means, but we get enough twists to keep us on our toes. We also wind up in some interesting places. On the downside there are a number of plot holes. Most troublesome of these is we’re never sure of the truth concerning Mei’s mother. Regardless, its drawbacks aren’t enough to make it a bad watch. If you’re into action flicks, this is a pretty good one with better plot than many.

MY SCORE: 6.5/10

[Palooza]

of the 93 movies I have seen from 2012, Alex Cross was the worst. Felt like a really bad episode of one of those CBS dramas.