Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
From 1978 to 1995, Ted Kaczynski sent 16 package bombs which killed three and injured 23 and prompted the largest FBI manhunt in history. How he was apprehended and supposition of how he may've been sent down this path of anarchic destruction and terrorism is the subject of the latest Netflix Original movie which goes by his nickname, Unabomber.
Opening in 1995 after the Washington Post published the Unabomber Manifesto, a 35,000-word screed against technology and industrialized society, FBI Agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley, Motor City) is frustrated that her linguistics approach to forming a suspect profile isn't being taken seriously enough by the Old Boys Club at the Bureau.
We then flash back to 1958 where a 16-year-old math prodigy Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay, Room, Wonder, grown up now) is a Harvard freshman who applies to be what he thinks is a philosophical debate club run by professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe, Virtuosity) and his assistant Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis, Mutiny) who had created the Thematic Apperception Test which is similar to the Rorschach Test in diagnosing mental issues. The club turns out to be series of harsh one-on-one sessions where the young Kaczynski is verbally abused by "Mr. C" (Gus Halper, The Shards), who violates the rules while Kaczynski's responses are filmed and monitored electronically.
Back in the future, Miller is contacted by Kaczynski's estranged brother, David (Matthew Kevin Anderson, Eternity), whose wife believes the Manifesto sounds like stuff Ted has written and he decided to bring her suspicions to the FBI in order to clear Ted. They have been estranged over two decades, but he still worries about his big brother. Miller's superior doesn't think this has merit and forbids her to investigate, so of course she takes a couple days off and travels to Montana to see what she can find.
Meanwhile in the past, young Ted is become more frustrated by the sessions until Morgan finally lets him see behind the curtain as to what the whole process has been about. Ted is outraged at the duplicity and begins to construct a package for Murray that's similar to the bomb package we've been shown.
Unabomber is clearly trying to construct an impression that Murray's experiment and emotional abuse of Ted set him on the path to blowing up a lot of people 20 years later, but doesn't convincingly connect the dots. When doing my usual post-biopic fact check to see how much was true and how much invention, this impression remained unchallenged. Most distractingly is the fact that Miller is an imaginary composite character clearly fashioned to get a women in the cast (during the end credits, real photos of Kaczynski and the FBI agents at his cabin where he was arrested and no women are present) and that David Kaczynski approached the FBI because he did believe Ted was the Unabomber, not trying to clear him. Why change that?
While the performances are all respectable and the insights somewhat provocative, Unabomber is just too flat and too fictitious to be compelling or informational. It lacks necessary boom.
Netflix reportedly wants the screenplays for their original movies to be dumbed-down for their presumed audience of doomscrollers, who are more focused on their devices than the movie they're supposedly watching, by having characters constantly restating what's going on for the attention deficient. Well, if there was ever an example of NOT doing such a anti-cinematic thing it would be Motor City, a revenge-action flick which is almost entirely devoid of dialog yet doesn't miss it much.
Alan Ritchson (Reacher) stars as John Miller, a parolee who works in a Detroit factory and lives with his waitress girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley, The Secret Life of the American Teenager). His parole officer gives him his discharge and to celebrate he proposes to her. Unfortunately, the drug lord who used to be her boyfriend uses that moment to have crooked cops bash down their door and arrest him for drugs planted in his car which had been stolen then dumped after being loaded with incrimination. Sentenced to prison, she ends up back with the crook, Reynolds (Ben Foster, Pandorum), and Miller plots his revenge.
There are only a handful of understandable dialog lines in the entire movie and none of them are important to the plot, yet director Potsy Ponciroli effectively makes what's happening clear even with flashbacks and intercuts between scenes. A few years back John Woo attempted a very similar trick with Silent Night but in that case the contrivance was annoying and unsuccessful, but here the style, performances, and needle drops make it work. While better, it's still not a great thing but I've added a point for the positively gonzo last act with spectacular fireworks and the grisliest kills.
As long as I've been a movie reviewer I've taken special umbrage at how inaccurately Detroit is portrayed my movies in a manner they would never allow to happen for NYC or LA. (Four Brothers finale with a confrontation on a lake at Thanksgiving supposedly frozen solid enough to support huge SUVs is a particularly bad example.) For a movie set in 1976-77 where they went through all the trouble to source a lot of period-appropriate cars and do the production design, costumes and hairstyles Seventies-like, the establishing shots of the city show buildings and features that weren't present until much later.
The Ally Detroit Center (formally One Detroit Center) is shown in aerial shots as well in the background of a funeral scene. Ignoring the whole "there are no cemeteries in that area" detail, the filmmakers composited a skyline including the Detroit Center which was not completed until 1993! It's not like they forgot to erase a modern building from location footage; they added something that wasn't there.
Bonus stupidity is showing people leaving the landmark Fox Theater with the modern marque that was added during restoration in 1998 and then updated in 2015 showing the Ramones headlining. The Ramones never played the Fox in 1976 or 1977 and both their Detroit-area performances were opening slots. Especially howl-worthy is the Fox being portrayed as on a narrow one-way side street when it sits on Woodward Avenue, the main artery running from the Detroit River to Pontiac, 27 miles north. Very wide. Not like they show it on a street narrower than 4th Street in Royal Oak where the Royal Oak Music Theater (where the Ramones DID play in 1976) looks.
These goofs are especially weird because Jack White is an executive producer and cameos as a piano player in one scene.
Grousing about local inaccuracies aside, Motor City is a solid watch as long as you commit to watching it on your first screen.
Due to a mistake which made Jason Statham Movie 2026, Mutiny, online through Amazon Prime Video days before it debuted in theaters, it became available for review a couple months earlier than usual. Yay.
Statham stars as Cole Reed, a former cop and elite commando - just once wouldn't it be funny if he was just an average Jason, perhaps a cabbie or dog walker? - who works as the head of security for a Thai billionaire shipping magnate, Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram, brother of British singer-songwriter Tanita Tikaram), who treats Cole like another son due to a previous life-saving incident. However, that track record of protection ends when they are ambushed on the road during an evening drive and Tibu is killed.
Cole learns the assassins were set to ship out on one of the company's cargo vessels, so he assumes the identity of a bald killer he'd killed (because they all look the same) and stows away aboard the Artemis. Also on the ship is Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis, Mercy), a single mother who was planning on flying home to America from Bangkok after finishing a voyage for the company but is ordered to serve on the Artemis because someone killed the crew member she'll need to fill in for.
While prowling the ship, Cole discovers a container in the hold filled with people because why not add some human trafficking to the mix. When Angie discovers Cole, he shows her the container people, but when she alerts Captain Marko Madsen (Roland Møller, Skyscraper) to their presence, she immediately learns the crew is in on the racket and now she's being hunted at sea. She attempts to send mayday which is picked up by an American warship in the area. Will Cole and Angie be able to survive until help arrives and will Cole unravel the conspiracy that led to Tibu's death?
Come on.
If you've seen any Statham movies in the past decade or so you know he's plowing the next rut over from Liam Neeson, churning out increasingly samey movies that all blur together after a while. Not as distinctive as 2024's The Beekeeper and marginally better than 2025's A Working Man, Mutiny is exactly as I billboarded: Jason Statham Movie 2026. Proceed according to your tastes.
It's been a loooooong time since Steven Spielberg has made a decent movie and the Jurassic Park/World series has become tedious and stupid when all we want is dinosaur fun. So, it's kind of weird that the best Spielberg and/or dinosaur flick we've had in ages turns out to be the not-great-titled The End of Oak Street from writer-director David Robert Mitchell whose sex horror flick It Follows was a cult fave.
Set in July 1982, we meet the Platt family during a neighborhood block party. Parents Greg (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting) and Denise (Anne Hathaway, Ella Enchanted) are experiencing marital tension due to his work or lack thereof and she is secretly writing an semi-autobiographical novel in the basement. Son Brian (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth) is getting in trouble, smoking and broke a boy's arm and daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella, My Old Ass) is a Carl Sagan fangirl reading books about astronomy. (The least believable detail in a movie about dinosaurs.) Things are simmering under the surface of suburbia.
Weird things begin to happen - a strange plant (Audrey III?) appears in a neighbor's yard; Brian sees bright lights flashing; a huge pile of poop appears in the next door neighbor's yard who thinks it's a prank by Brian - until one night the power and water goes out. The next morning they realize something has gone really amiss when they realize freaking DINOSAURS are roaming their neighborhood. As they try to flee they discover the road just ends with them at the top of a cliff and the surrounding looking like the Jurassic Era. As the neighbors begin getting eaten by the dino predators, the family has to pull together to try and figure out what happened and what can be done to escape. Dino hijinks ensue.
What Mitchell does well is keep the pacing taut, but not hectic. Clocking in at under 100 minutes in an era where 150-180 minutes seems standard, the movie doesn't expend superfluous time setting things up and getting things moving. The hide-and-seek presentation of the dinos is also smart as well as probably cost effective, keeping the VFX heavy film to a relatively bargain $85M before promo, etc. He also deploys some split-diopter shots that make All the President's Men look Little League.
The characters feel sufficiently fleshed out though McGregor's Greg could've used a little more explanation as he veers close to being just another failed weak man whose suffering girlboss wife has to compensate for. But as events transpire, their relationship solidifies as they appreciate what they do when necessary. The running bit about Brian's dog, Starbuck (named after the original Battlestar Galactica series and not the coffee chain), disappearing then reappearing as a doggo ex machina is a tad weak and causes Brian and Audrey to get suicidally stupid at times to facilitate things. (Maybe I just don't get it being a cat person. BTW, cats don't fare too well here. Boo.) There's also a quibble or five to be had about the resolution which seems to believe you can order and get a pizza delivered in under 20 minutes which even Domino's didn't offer.
Earlier this year Speilberg flopped with the alien movie Disclosure Day which I've heard enough about to be especially unenthused about watching it and there really hasn't been a goodJurassic World movie in 2015 and that wasn't that great but the three subsequent sequels have been varying degrees of mediocre to bad. It's into this environment that The End of Oak Street steps and manages to succeed where Spielberg and his dinosaur creations have fallen short. Not a life-changing experience, but a nice throwback to classic escapist movie fare. And any movie with Yummy Girl (Anne Hathaway) as a suburban MILF shooting dinosaurs can't be bad!
Wardriver is the new Paramount+ original streaming movie. It is quite terrible and bad and boring and stupid and you shouldn't watch it. Why? Well, I guess I should say something to justify this, not that it matters.
A rough-looking Dane DeHaan (Chronicle) plays Cole, a wardriver, which is someone who goes around looking for open internet access points, in this case so he can steal company payroll using a magic computer program which just hacks things instantly. He is laundering his proceeds through the Dark Web, dealing with an anonymous user named "RTOMMASI" (half-point for the L.A. Confidential reference) who sends Cole's cut back in the form of cash cards. To show that Cole isn't a really bad guy, he tosses a card in the mailbox of the single mother across the street. Awwwww.
One day he gets beat up by Oscar (Mamoudou Athie, Archive 81), the doorman for a restaurant Cole ripped off who shows up at his door and forces himself inside. He says that a young woman who comes to the place with her father mentioned she had over $800,000 in her checking account and he wants Cole to steal it all or else he'll rat him out for the restaurant payroll theft.
Cole does as he's told because he's a little bitch, but then starts looking into his target and finds that Sarah (Sasha Kelly, Supergirl from The Flash) wasn't coming with her father, but that she was a side piece and that the money belonged to her sugar daddy boyfriend, Bilson (Jeffrey Donovan, Burn Notice), and that he'll hurt her if she doesn't return it. Trying to make good, he proceeds to skim off a bunch of ATM terminals - because ripping off a bunch of random strangers to save some chick you robbed is quite chivalrous - and try to put it back and make right.
He doesn't get it all, but goes to leave a note with instructions how to access the hundreds of thousands he did nab and she catches him so of course they start cozying up to one another. She then proposes they collaborate with Oscar to engineer a heist at Bilson's house where he has $3M in cash. Meanwhile, his Dark Web pals are starting the threaten to expose him. Commence with a whole bunch of double crossing and scams that you'll see coming from a mile away and then almost everybody ends up dead, so happy ending, I guess.
I should have known it would be terrible because it was written by Daniel Casey, the guy who typed F9: The Fast Saga (aka the second worst Furry Fastness movie, the one with the Fiero in space). He is so much of a hack he can't even bother giving any of the characters any reasonable details to root for. We know nothing about Cole other than he's a hacker, lives alone, vapes constantly, and chews on lollipop sticks. Does he have a family? He doesn't want to talk about it, meaning Casey didn't want to think something up. Why does Cole's Dark Web pals threaten him? What happened to honor among thieves?
The howling stupidity of this flick is captured by a scene where Cole is trying to retrieve a skimmer from an ATM in a gas station convenience store. While he's trying to dislodge it a pair of cops come in for donuts or whatever and he's behaving so hinky that one of the cops begins to pay attention. He gets the skimmer off before the cop walks over and he is able to escape without being stopped which really speaks highly of Utah law enforcement.
We're supposed to believe this high-tech Robin Hood is an elite hacker (he has a password cracker called Brute Force which decodes passwords within seconds!) who mitigates his crimes by tossing cash cards to the single mom, but does nothing but stupid things which constantly have him under someone else's thumb, but when confronted with the risk of capture can't muster the neurons to, oh I dunno, WALK AWAY FROM THE ATM AND COME BACK LATER WHEN THE COPS ARE GONE!!!!
Unlike the Temu Heat knockoff that was Crime 101 (5/10, review tk), Wardriver's sole purpose is to send up another red flag about hiring Daniel Casey to type your movie, yet it seems he must have kompromat on half of Hollyweird because he's got a LOT of work lined up with people who should know better. Doubly horrifying, he graduated from my high school. Ugh.
Fuze is a movie so inconsequential it's a mystery why it was made. The setup as broached by the trailer is that an unexploded bomb, presumably from WWII, is found at a London construction site. A military ordinance disposal team lead by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) orders a wide area surrounding the bomb to be evacuated and cordoned off.
Due to a main electrical line running under the site, power to the area is also cut which is very helpful to the crew of bank robbers including Sam Worthington (Avatar) and Theo James (Divergent series) who remain in an apartment, emerging after the evacuation to bring out prepositioned equipment to break through the basement wall into the adjoining bank.
Overwatching the bomb effort is Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki), a police superintendent looking at screens for traces of untoward activity in the cordoned zone, sending in officers when something pops up. Eventually the robbers escape and the manhunt is on and if you've seen one caper film you should be able to predict most of the supposed twists that occur. Even the setup raises red flags as we're expected to believe a bomb has been laying there undiscovered just under the surface for 80 years.
While the missus thought it was fine enough and kept her awake, I found it all flat and predictable with a superfluous coda that sets up the cabal involved. The only real surprise what one death, not that it mattered other than the lack of plot armor it reveals.
I'm getting tired of bemoaning the inability of Samara Weaving to get the breakthrough role she deserves. I'm behind on my write-ups for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (7/10) and Over Your Dead Body (5/10), but it's coincidental that my last posted review for one of her movies before those was just 11 months ago for the disappointing Eenie Meanie (5/10, stream/cable) because Carolina Caroline is almost the same movie and also fails.
Weaving plays Caroline, a young woman in a nowhere Texas town who is taken with a grifter, Oliver (Kyle Gallner), who scams her boss at the gas station by pulling a grift involving making change. She chases him to his car and gets the money back, but it's obvious these two are going to be hooking up pretty quickly. In short order she's pulling the scams herself and so it's time to take the crime show on the road, stepping up to pickpocketing, bank fraud, and when that's not exciting enough, actual bank robberies across small southern towns while they road trip eastward towards South Carolina. Naturally, the fun and games come to a screeching halt when a robbery goes sideways with the law hot on their tails and the stakes soaring.
The script never states when the movie is set with our only clues being gas costing $1.47 the cars dating from the 1970s and 1980s and the total lack of cell phones. Even the music played in bars is generic country. At one point a birthdate on a forged ID is mentioned which may place the time in the early-1990s, but there are no cues like Nirvana t-shirts, etc. While there's something to be said for timelessness, this just distracted me.
It also takes its sweet time getting going which gave plenty of time to wonder why we're supposed to believe a hot little number like Caroline would be instantly smitten with Oliver. He's not particularly handsome and she gets on the grift tip rather quickly considering her father, Hank (Jon Gries, Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite), seems like a decent, kind man who raised his daughter alone for reasons we discover in a hair-raising scene with Kyra Sedgewick.
I'm surprised critics swooned over this "Southern Gothic crime tale" comparing it to Badlands or True Romance when it's a faint copy of those movies. Weaving is touching and beautiful, but as too often is the case, it's wasted here. Again.
Depending on whether you want to love or hate Paul Feig, he's either the creator of the cult fave TV series Freaks & Geeks (which launched the careers of Linda Cardellini, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Busy Phillips and more) or the director of the divisive, fanbaiting disaster Ghostbusters: Answer The Call (more accurately Lady Ghostbusters). But for the most part he has specialized in female-fronted comedies like Bridesmaids, The Heat and a trash favorite of ours, A Simple Favor (and it's less great sequel, Another Simple Favor).
So, the news that he was making a movie of one of those trashy novels popular with wine moms starring current vavoom It Girl Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, Anyone But You) and former curvy light comedy performer (Mean Girls, Mamma Mia) turned ingenue (In Time, Chloe) now Oscar-nominated (Mank) and Golden Globe-winning (The Dropout) Amanda Seyfried, hopes were high for another kicky, kinky, trash-camp funfest like A Simple Favor. While it doesn't hit those heights, it's because it's another beast entirely.
Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway, a young woman on parole for a crime not immediately explained, but it'd been ten years off the job market for her. She's living in her car and desperate for employment to satisfy her parole officer when she interviews with Nina Winchester (Seyfried), a wealthy Long Island woman with a husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, Drop), and daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle). It's a gorgeous showplace mansion home complete with creepy Italian groundskeeper, Enzo (Michele Morrone, Another Simple Favor) and a concerning attic bedroom for Millie as it's a live-in position, checking off the box for her parole.
She gets the job, but when she returns the next day to begin work, the previously spotless, Architectural Digest-worthy home is trashed, with dishes in the sink, clothes all over, etc. Nina is working on a PTA speech and the next day accuses Millie of having stolen it. Millie overhears other PTA mothers whispering about her and another nanny at Cece's ballet class has more tidbits on the backstory of the Winchester family.
The erratic behavior culminates in Nina asking Millie to get theater tickets and a hotel suite for her and Andrew the following weekend, but when they arrive, freaks out and demands Millie explain why she'd spend all that money when she knew they were taking the kid to arts camp that weekend and the spending would come out of her pay, which Millie can't afford. Andrew reassures her that she won't have to pay, but the situation is growing untenable.
When Nina decides to take Cece herself, Millie suggests Andrew should go to the show and he counters with why don't you come with me and wear the nice clothes Nina gifted you? To the shock of no one the trip to the city for dinner and a show and separate rooms at the hotel results in a longer trip to Poundtown. And to even less surprise, Nina knows about it, accuses Millie of stealing the clothes and her car and threatens to have her sent back to prison.
It's at this point the plot pulls a Gone Girl switcheroo and changes POV to recast everything we've seen and what it meant. While the weirdness of certain behaviors like Andrew's obsession with Nina's roots (as in hair, not her being descended from slaves) were waving red flags, what transpires after the switch is sometimes hard to believe like why would you want to disfigure someone you planned on keeping around?
Fortunately, Feig keeps the tonal train on the track though the overall running time could've been trimmed 10-20 minutes. Sweeney is good (exceptional of we're grading on cleavage), but the true star of the show is Seyfried as her performance has to capture a lot of different personas, though the way the script presents things has some large plot holes she has to leap over. And the way they set up an obvious sequel - which has already been greenlit as the film grossed over $350M globally on a $35M budget - raises questions of what the plot will be.
While The Housemaid isn't quite the top shelf trash it aspires to be, it's still respectable enough trash to merit a watch, preferably while heckling at home with a wingman.
This will be quick: Saw Colombiana in August 2011 and didn't like it and somehow haven't watched it since. It hasn't improved. And after rewatching the mediocre Point of No Return again less than a week ago, the formulaic cookie cutter repetition of Luc Besson's 2nd-tier works really becomes obvious.
All the issues I had in my original review stand, but it was interesting how much I'd forgotten beginning with how almost the first half-hour is dedicated to Amandala Stenberg's young Cataleya and how she was a blank-faced wooden actress long before she stunk up The Acolyte. The Point of No Return rehash comes when Sensitive Artist Booty Call Boyfriend turns down Happy Fun Time to pester her with details about her life, just like how Sensitive Photographer Boyfriend gets snippy about how American Nikita keeps secrets after they've been shacked up already.
But to really show how slapdash the script is, it opens in 1992 and her father gives the crime lord a pack of floppy diskettes with cartel info on them. Later, figuring the cartel is about to kill him, he gives Cataleya a SmartMedia card to swallow to keep the info from the cartel. Later on she's seen looking at a Xena: Warrior Princess comic book. Being a nerd, the sudden appearance of the memory card sent me looking for info and I found that both the short-lived flash memory format and Xena weere introduced in 1995, three years later.
This is compounded by the title card "15 YEARS LATER" which would be 2007. The movie came out in 2011, so why in blue blazes did they not simply set the prologue in 1996 when both SmartMedia and Xena existed? Yes, this is petty stuff, but considering all the work that's done to source props, etc. did no one point this out? So lazy like everything else about this.
As for the Blu-ray, the picture and sound as fine. Not going to go into detail because we're not doing the "Green Lantern is a great demo disc" nonsense in this dojo where we buy bad movies to show off the home theater when there are good movies which are demo-worthy. There's also about an hour's worth of extras and - speaking of Green Lantern - there's always some ironic pleasure in watching people talking about all the hard work they did in bringing the characters to life and their nuanced takes on them when the final product turned out just plain bad. (The extras on Wonder Woman 1984 made me feel sorry for everyone to be so disconnected from the reality they live in.)
Unless all you want is to see a sweaty Zoe Saldana in skimpy figure-hugging clothes, give Colombiana a miss.
As we're beginning to run out of Nineties action flicks to watch, the missus decided it's time to switch to kickass chick action flicks starting with Bridget Fonda's take on the Nikita story, Point of No Return.
I've already reviewed this disc in 2021 and 2012 with slightly different coverage, but the same bottom line: So-so movie and disc. Please read those because there's some funny cracks in them.
The Nineties Action Fest plows on with Michael Bay's second film, 1996's The Rock. The final collaboration between uber-producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson (who passed away during production), it's the movie that made Nicolas Cage a capital-M, capital-S Movie Star which he'd follow the next year with the tag team of Con Air and Face/Off and was one of Sean Connery's last top tier roles.
The opening credits play over a montage of Marine Brigadier General Francis "Frank" X. Hummel (Ed Harris) putting on his dress uniform and visiting his wife's grave to apologize for what he's about to do. What would that be? To lead a heist of 15 rockets armed with VX nerve gas from a munitions depot, take them to Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay and take over 80 tourists visiting the prison hostage. His demands? $100 million from a secret CIA slush fund to be disbursed to the families of soldiers killed during black ops whose deaths were covered up, no medals conferred, not benefits to the families. The rest is to pay his crew of mercenaries and turncoats. If not paid within 40 hours, he'll kill hostages and start firing rockets which could exterminate all life in the Bay Area.
Backed against the wall, FBI Director James Womack (John Spencer) reluctantly agrees to bring imprisoned former SAS agent John Mason (Connery) out of the hole they'd put him in without trial after they'd caught him with a trove of state secrets because he is the only man to have escaped from The Rock. Womack offers Mason a pardon if he'll help lead a SEAL team onto the island, through the maze of subterranean tunnels, to recapture the rockets and poison gas.
Along for the ride is Cage's Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, a FBI chemical weapons expert who's just learned his girlfriend, Carla (Vanessa Marcil), is embabied. He'd told her to come out and meet him in San Francisco, but when he found out what he was there for he tried to dissuade her from coming without letting slip why. Naturally, she comes anyway and he's got that on his mind as well.
Things get off to a good start until the SEAL team trips an alarm alerting Hummel and his men and the entire team, lead by Michael Biehn without plot armor, is wiped out in a turkey shoot, leaving only the elderly Mason and the not-a-fighter Goodspeed left to take on an island of trained soldiers to save the world.
The Rock is where Bay's penchant for the bombastic "Bayhem" style really flowered with big set pieces like the car chase through the streets of San Francisco when Mason escapes to meet his daughter whom he'd fathered when he'd knocked up her mother after meeting at a Led Zeppelin concert during a previous prison break.
But for all the noise, he allows for some character moments to prevent the characters from just being cartoons. Mason and Goodspeed's antagonism eventually becomes a grudging mutual respect and Hummel isn't a simple villain seeking money for his own enrichment, but a rightfully wronged man who chooses the really wrong way of pursuing redress for his grievances. Bay manages to balance the tricky tones at times and speaks on the commentary track about how that took time to sort out through test screenings.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of goofy action details like the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mine cart chase and a sequence where Mason has to carefully time his rolling through a ludicrous tunnel of gears and flame bursts like a Mario game in order to open the door for the SEALs. As I recently saw a reel on FaceSpace from the Confused Breakfast podcast, why would Mason have needed to go through the fire tunnel when escaping when the door has the handle on the inside? These are the things you don't think about.
This wasn't Cage's Big Cash-In After Winning An Oscar play either for Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar, came out while shooting The Rock. He hadn't become as exaggerated as he would in his next two blockbusters, so it's a restrained goofiness. Connery was in his own post-Oscar emeritus years headlining various so-so movies that no one remembers like Rising Sun, Just Cause, and Medicine Man, but he steps up with a grizzled authority and charm as Mason.
Moving on to the A/V presentation, while there were a few DVD releases of The Rock including a Criterion Collection(!) edition, albeit with a non-anamorphic transfer(!!), same as with the Criterion release of Armageddon(!!!!!!) - Fun Fact: I have both of those - this has been the only Blu-ray release and you can tell it was early in the format's run (released in 2008) because it includes an uncompressed LPCM 5.1 audio track, but defaults to Dolby Digital 5.1 (there are also French and Spanish DD tracks), because not all receivers could handle PCM for some reason. Nowadays, it's a piece of cake and the best option offering a clear, punchy audio track with good booms. On the video side, it's a very good transfer which maintains the filmic look of the source and Bay's preference for steely blues and blacks at night, but bright primary colors like the yellow Ferrari in daylight. Since this is owned by Disney, it's unlikely to get a 4K release, but this is fine.
The big selling point for collectors was that all the extras from the Criterion release were ported over allowing us to get a Criterion experience without the price tag. Leading off is an excellent commentary track with Bay, Bruckheimer, Cage, Harris and technical advisor Harry Humphries. The speakers were recorded separately and then edited together and it works much better than you'd think, especially when jumping between people discussing the same details. Cage goes at length about how he worked to insert his ideas into the dialog and Harris talks about the challenge of making Hummel more than a monster. Make sure to listen all the way through the credits for a wild story Bay tells about Simpson showing up in the edit room for Bad Boys with an Armani suit that encounters ice cream.
The features are in 480i, but watchable. Navy SEALs on the Range has a couple of the actual SEALS who appeared in the film on a training range operated by Humphries. Hollywood: Humphries and Teague has them explaining why common gun handling tropes in movies like the "gangster grip" (holding the pistol sideways) or the "Wyatt Earp" are terrible for accuracy, then showing the proper techniques. Special Effects for Dive shows the elaborate miniature puppets and rigs they created for a few shots of the SEALs insertion on the island and Action Effects: Movie Magic shows the climatic jet attack and how the airplanes were CGI but the explosion was done with an actual fireball filled from 170 feet up against a bluescreen background.
Secrets of Alcratraz discusses the history of the island as a trading post, then an Army fort, then a prison. An actual inmate shows how he and his compatriots futilely tried to escape and the actual escape that was portrayed in the 1979 Clint Eastwood flick Escape From Alcatraz which happened due to budget cuts that left gaps in security is detailed.
There is an interesting interview with Bruckheimer where he recaps his early life in Detroit - Fun Fact: he graduated from Detroit's Mumford High School as memorialized by Axel Foley's sweatshirt in Beverly Hills Cop - and how he transitioned from working in advertising to film producing, teaming up with Simpson to make films like Flashdance and Top Gun.
The Rock World Premiere, Outtakes (mostly Ed Harris blowing lines and swearing; didn't watch it all), and an assortment of trailers and TV spots wrap up the extras.
The Rock is one of the premium A-tier Nineties action flicks and this Blu-ray is currently the best way to collect it if you're a fan with a good video and audio presentation and a respectable batch of extras.
In the post-Hot Fad Plague world that Hollyweird helped create in 2020, huge crowd-pleasing blockbusters have become harder to come by. One exception was 2022's Top Gun: Maverick which grossed $1.5 billion and showed that audiences would come back to theaters for simple crowd-pleasing movies. With that success, the creators - producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Joseph Kosinski, and writer Ehren Kruger - have reteamed with another aging yet seemingly ageless star, Brad Pitt, to make another popcorn munching crowd pleaser about men in fast vehicles, this time Formula One race cars for F1: The Movie. Currently #7 in the 2025 global box office rankings with $631 million grossed, it was the only non-IP, non-sequel movie in the top 10. While it *only* grossed 41% of Top Gun: Maverick's haul, it's still a decent take though how much profit it made depends on whether the budget was on the lower end of the reported $200M-$300M scale.
Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a once-promising F1 racer whose career was cut short after a nearly fatal crash during a race 30 years previously. Since then, he's been a driver-for-hire picking up work wherever he can like when we're introduced to him living in his van awaiting his shift in the 24 Hours of Daytona race. Even though he gets the team into position to win, he doesn't seem interested in the trappings of the victory as he heads off looking for his next race in the Baja 1000.
Naturally, Joshua doesn't care for the old guy stepping to him with his old-fashioned ways. While he runs on a treadmill with a breathing apparatus to gather biometrics and uses computerized reaction timing devices to train, Sonny merely jogs around the tracks and bounces tennis balls to keep his eye-hand coordination up. Joshua is all about posing for cameras, being on social media, getting sponsors, so how dare this old man tell him how to drive and win?
Needless to say, things get off to a bumpy start - literally - as they crash into each other, taking the team out of the first race. While Sonny manipulates things to give his teammate an advantage, everyone seems puzzled as to what he's doing. He suggests a combat-oriented strategy where they tweak the cars' aerodynamics to allow for more speed in crowded curves and aggressively hold position to make it harder for others to pass, within the limits of safety and F1 rules. But Joshua continues to buck the advice which leads to a horrific accident. Will be be able to come back and will the team be able to save itself from being sold off? Are you really wondering like it's in doubt?
To say that F1 is predictable almost understates how by-the-numbers it is. At times I was saying dialog ahead of the characters. A scene involving a poker game between Sonny and Joshua to determine who is the #1 driver of the team has a twist so obvious they should've had Joshua catch on to what was happening. Care to guess whether Sonny and Kerry Condon's team technical director hook up? It's that kind of easy crowd-pleasing movie.
Brad Pitt was just shy of 60 when filming began and he's definitely straddling the boyish charm/older Robert Redford line that comes from good genetics and a (likely) deal with Satan. He's charming and laid back which is a weird vibe for a guy who wants to win. If there's a fault, it's that he's basically replaying his Oscar-winning Cliff Booth character from Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. I guess if it worked once, why not work it some more. I've been seeing a bunch of clips from Moneyball and The Big Short lately so perhaps I wish he did more, not that the by-the-numbers script demands it.
I haven't seen Idris in anything before, but he's good in his equally narrow role. It's easy to dislike his cocky demeanor when he - in the words of Morrissey - hasn't earned it yet, baby. And it's downright weird in today's times when Hollyweird seems to want to cram THE MESSAGE into everything that the friction between the drivers has absolutely no hint of racial component, just young vs. old. Helps that Joshua is British and even more so that the producers wanted to invite all audiences in rather than drive them away preening their wokeness to their fellow wokesters.
The race sequences are good, but I felt the scenes in Ford vs. Ferrari were more exciting. A friend saw F1 at IMAX and was raving about it due to the huge screen and deafening sound. Granted, my THX-compliant viewing distance home theater can't boom like IMAX, the action in Top Gun: Maverick came across fine. They used tiny cameras on remote heads to get driver's eye view shots and be able to show the stars driving the cars, but it still feels a tad static.
At 2h 35m (with credits) long, I went into F1: The Movie with a bit of dread because movies these days are just too padded out, but to risk punning, the time raced by due to the streamlined formulaic script which was probably timed out with a Save The Cat beat sheet. The missus really liked it, not just because Brad Pitt gets her tingly in the nethers, but because it was just a fun, entertaining movie that delivered what was advertised on the tin. I wanted a bit more, but this probably isn't the movie for more.
The 4K Dolby Vision presentation was sharp and colorful. They filmed with a mix of Sony Venice and DJI Ronin 4D cameras and they intercut seamlessly. The audio mix was enveloping and while I'm sure IMAX really sold the experience, my 5.2.4 Atmos setup did OK.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Coming exclusively to Apple TV in mid-December.)
Not to be confused with Ruin Johnson's 2005 debut, Netflix's Brick is a small high-concept sci-fi flick imported from Germany and dubbed fairly well. The premise is the plot: A couple - Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, Army of Thieves) and Olivia (Ruby O. Fee, Army of the Dead) - whose relationship has collapsed to the point she's leaving him, discovers their apartment's doors & windows are blocked by mysterious black brick walls which seem impenetrable & can become dangerous at times.
Where did this come from and how do they get out? Those are the questions as they proceed to meet their neighbors by drilling and sledgehammering through the walls and floors, attempting to get to a basement bomb shelter which may connect to tunnels. Some want to help, others are more of an impediment, and one is a threat as they don't believe it's safe outside due to anything from a chemical spill or alien invasion.
Brick is an OK chamber thriller where there are a few too many convenient turns like the couple having a big industrial drill in the drawer, someone having a sledgehammer, another having a ladder which makes getting between floors easy, and the owner of the building putting spy cameras in the apartments during renovations which allows for a lot of convenient information discovery. It's also convenient that while cellular, landline, Internet and even the water is cut off, the electricity remains on. The final reveal is visually interesting, but still begs some questions.
The 4K Dolby Vision presentation is fine, but nothing those not paying for the 4K tier will miss out on.
Firmly landing in the "may as well watch it because you're paying for Netflix" zone, Brick is a passable time-killer.
With so many movies these days being massive VFX-heavy epics about invincible superheroes, it's a little disorienting to watch a small revenge thriller of the kind that was common in the 1990s. So it is with The Amateur, a modest global caper flick with some twists.
Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) stars as Charlie Heller, a CIA cryptographer who's married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, Superman), a businesswoman who was attending a conference in London when she was taken hostage and killed by terrorists who were fleeing a botched arms deal in the hotel she was at. It was a random event and she was just an unfortunate bystander.
Using the CIA's Yeah, Right technology (i.e. tech in movies/shows which does the impossible like enhance a full-color hi-rez image of someone off a few pixels in a reflection and makes me say, "Yeah, right!") he determines who the terrorists were and approaches his boss, CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, Mindhunter), with the expectation they'd be brought to justice, but his request is denied because the leader, Horst Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg, Men in Black 3), who pulled the trigger was a terrorism kingpin and they want to roll up his entire network and to capture this handful would interfere.
Outraged, Charlie uses information from a secret source that Moore and others were hiding malfeasance, blaming accidental US military killings on terrorist IEDs, to threaten Moore with exposure unless he's sent to The Farm, a CIA facility, for training so he can personally hunt and terminate the bad guys. He claims he has a dead man's switch which will send the evidence to the media if they try to disappear him, so they reluctantly agree while frantically tearing his home apart to verify whether he actually has the goods.
At The Farm he's handed over to Robert "Hendo" Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, Pee-Wee's Playhouse) who rapidly determines Charlie simply doesn't have it in him to kill someone. He's a terrible shot, barely able to hit a target unless he's within nearly punching distance, but he does show an aptitude for improvised explosives. After a time, Moore decides Charlie was bluffing and orders Hendo to whack him. Fortunately for Charlie, he'd already bugged out with the fake passports the CIA had cooked up for him and headed to Europe to hunt his wife's killers with Hendo in pursuit.
In contrast to the usual superspies like James Bond and Jason Bourne, Charlie not only lacks their JB initials, but is actually pretty bad at vigilantism. He comes up with a clever way to deal with his first target, but the way they die is a total fluke. He manages to get better at it - the trailer gives away the most spectacular case - but his final takedown is a bit convenient.
While adapted from a novel which was also made into a 1981Canuckian feature starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer, the screenplay by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down, but also Transformers: The Last Knight, a movie I bought in 2017 and still haven't watched because everyone says it's so bad) and Gary Spinelli (American Made) feels generic and formulaic. It suffers from the thing where the world's population is limited to just the characters in the movie so Charlie seems to have no friends or family or in-laws also mourning Sarah's killing. Jon Bernthal appears twice as a CIA field operative, but contributes nothing so why is the character even there?
Malek is OK in his usual twitchy bug-eyed Eliot Alderson way and Fishburne basically plays a cross between Morpheus (The Matrix) and the Bowery King (John Wick 2-4). Brosnahan is appealing in her flashbacks, but everyone is playing the script which isn't stretching many boundaries.
The Dolby Vision presentation has some brief moments of bright highlights, but the generally gray spy movie color palette limits eye candy opportunities.
I love the John Wick franchise. Love it. Even the lesser installments blow the doors off of pretty much everything else in the action genre. Sure, the mythology has grown a bit ridiculous at times, but the action continually breaks ground and I ding movies who still traffic in the pre-John Wick era shaky-cam and edit-fu shenanigans when the paradigm has shifted to long take clear coverage. I've been sloppy about getting them all reviewed despite all the times I've watched them, but here is the one other review I posted for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. Even the scores tend to have gone up on subsequent viewings with the series averaging 8/10. The fact I've bought all four movies on 4K UHD Blu-ray after getting two on digital 4K says a lot.
So it was with great anticipation I've waited for Ballerina - or as the posters have it, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina - because Ballerina on its own isn't a super memorable title. And waited. And waited some more. From when it was announced in April 2022, there's been enough time that a Netflix Original, a South Korean import also entitled Ballerina arrived in October 2023 to presumably steal some attention from people thinking it was the John Wick spinoff. (I never wrote the review, but it scored a 4/10, Skip it.) Then it was announced its 2024 release date was being pushed back a full year so that John Wick director Chad Stahelski could shoot some additional action scenes to kick it up a notch. (So long ago this began filming, Lance Reddick makes his final screen appearance as Charon, the concierge at the Continental, when he passed away in March 2023, just a week before John Wick 4 came out, making his on-screen death even more poignant.)
Some claim that most of the film was reshot over 2-3 months, which is denied by Stahelski and credited director Len Wiseman - making his first feature since 2012's Total Recall remake which looked terrific, but lacked Mars for some reason - who insist it was just a couple of weeks of additional work. Whatever the facts, it's here and has been blessed with the honor of getting the missus and I to actually go to a theater to see it; our first theatrical visit since Deadpool & Wolverine in August 2024. (Coincidentally, the previous time we went to a show was in April 2023 for John Wick: Chapter 4, one of only seven times I've gone to the movies since the world ended in March 2020.)
If you wondered what the deal was with the tattooed ballerinas glimpsed in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum when John went to the Director (Angelica Huston) of the Ruska Roma to get passage out of New York City after becoming excommunicado, you're in luck because Ballerina overlaps with the events of that movie.
After an opening scene where a young Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) witnesses her father (David Castañeda, The Umbrella Academy) murdered by men led by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, The Usual Suspects), the orphaned girl is taken by Winston Scott (Ian McShane), manager of the NYC Continental hotel for assassins, to meet the Director to see if she has a place to grow and train.
Of course she does and 12 years later she's Ana de Armas, doing an extended training montage of getting better at dancing and fighting like a girl to compensate for the natural size and strength advantages men have over 5'6" women. She graduates into becoming a Kikimora assassin/bodyguard after completing a protection assignment, barely. She then goes into the murder-for-hire business and after completing a gig, she is attacked by a member of the Cult which the Chancellor leads, indicated by an X brand on their wrist.
Eve demands the Director tell her where the Cult is hiding, but the Director refuses to permit her vendetta. So Eve goes rogue, traveling to Austria on the hunt for the Cult's location in the Austrian Alps town of Hallstatt. Along the way, she makes a pit stop at the Vienna Continental where she stumbles into a situation involving a Cult member, Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus, The Walking Dead), who is attempting to escape with his daughter, which echos Eve's situation with her own father.
As she closes in, the Chancellor contacts the Director to demand she leash her attack kitten or else it will be war between the Cult and Ruska Roma. Who do you send after a woman on a mission? Why the Baba Yaga himself, John Wick (Keanu Reeves, the Bill & Ted series)! Does he stop her? Does she stop him? Does the action ever stop? The answers to all three are various meanings of "Duh!"
While the production may or may not have been troubled, if you didn't know the inside baseball of it there's little to indicate problems. I have routinely praised Stahelski for doing with the John Wick series what his co-director on the first film, David Leitch, has struggled to manage, namely balancing the tone of his films, especially action comedies like Bullet Train (3.5/10, Skip it) and The Fall Guy (5/10, Catch on cable/streaming) and in the latter's review I run down his career, literally. But the credited director Wiseman is no slouch having helmed the first two hot kickass vampire chick flicks of the Underworld series, Live Free or Die Hard (the 4th one where John McClane becomes a superhero at times), and even the flawed Total Recall had clear and kinetic action sequences. Perhaps I could pick out which scenes each shot, but that's just flyspecking.
The bigger problem is the thinness of the script. I'm not demanding Shakespeare from my Unstoppable Killing Machine Revenge Flick or even a fraction of mythos of the Wick world - the first one's logline could've been, "Guy kills a retired assassin's puppy and the assassin murders everyone in return" - but whereas the Wick films deftly sketch the world in brilliant show-don't-tell detail (e.g. what is the deal with the call center with the tattooed Fifties-style women and primitive tech handling the contracts?!?), Ballerina relies on familiarity with the series to understand most of the references & callbacks to the world like the Chapter 3 moments or Chapter 2's "sommelier" weapons dealer scene.
"Young woman becomes assassin to avenge her father's murder" is succinct, but the script by Shay Hatten - who I see wrote it as a spec which Lionsgate bought in 2017 and led to his becoming a co-writer on Chapters 3 & 4 - doesn't really flesh it out with much of a character arc for Eve. (He also co-wrote Zak Snyder's recent tear of bad Netflix movies including Army of the Dead and the catastrophically terribad Rebel Moon movies, soooooooooo make of that what you will.)
Sadly lacking as well is de Armas. I've liked her since she first appeared on my radar in Knock Knock (5/10. Cable/streaming; co-starring Keanu Reeves!) and subsequent appearances in Blade Runner 2049 and others and I was hoping she'd join the elite ranks of beautiful, talented actresses who are also plausible action heroines like Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron and, to a lesser extent, Halle Berry or Milla Jovovich - I omit Scarlet Johansson because her stunt doubles do so much of her action - but while she fights well, her performance lacks the simmering fury that would fuel her revenge quest. I heard someone say that if this was made 10 years ago it would've starred Theron and she would've killed it and that's about right. Amazingly, at age 35 when filmed, she looks about 22 and plays it about the same. It's not bad, but it doesn't quite work.
Reeve's Wick is more of an extended cameo, but it's good though it does raise questions as to why he'd be called in by the tribe who wanted nothing to do with him earlier in the movie?
So the script is thin and the star is disappointing. How's the action then? A: BONKERS! It is a John Wick movie after all and the fight choreographer and stunt performers pull off a variety of unique combat scenarios culminating in a flamethrower fight that had me laughing out loud at how ridonkulous it was in a good way. However, there are a few kills with hand grenades that should've blowed her up real good as well or had her much more banged up. Even when stabbed and beaten, the worst injury she shows is a dainty facial cut with a little blood. Compared to Atomic Blonde (which we watched when we got home) where Theron gets whupped down hard and has black eyes and bruises all over to show for it, this is Disney.
While Ballerina is clearly a step down from the top shelf John Wick films, it does an OK job at not damaging the franchise's reputation, unlike the so-so The Continental TV series which never really caught fire. If you're a fan, it's worth catching a matinee at the theater for the heavy sound - we saw it in Laser Ultra (a Dolby Cinema knockoff) with Atmos sound - but for more causal fans, it can wait for streaming.
Score: 6.5/10. Catch a matinee if you're a big John Wick fan, otherwise catch it on cable/streaming.
Just a year after the sleeper hit of The Beekeeper, director David Ayer and star Jason Statham are back with A Working Man, based on Levon's Trade, one of a series of novels by comic book writer Chuck Dixon. While The Beekeeper was a bonkers mess while being entertaining, this time we're given a bog-standard revenge flick which while it knocked off Disney's disastrous Sand Brown Snow White in the box office in its second week, it won't be remembered in Statham's Pantheon of action classics.
Statham plays Levon Cade, a grumpy ex-Royal Marines commando working as a construction foreman for Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) in Chicago. He has a young daughter, Merry (Isla Gie), who lives with her grandfather, Dr. Jordan Roth (Richard Heap), who blames Levon for his daughter unaliving herself after a lifelong battle with depression. He is seeking to further restrict Levon's limited visitation time because he has PTSD & is a violent killer, though that's what soldiers do in war.
During an evening of clubbing with friends, Joe's daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped. Joe begs Levon to help, offering $70,000, but Levon demurs saying he's not that person anymore. But after about five minutes and a visit to a blind war buddy, Gunny (David Harbour), he changes his mind and embarks on the quest to find Jenny, working his way through Russian mobsters and various underworld lowlifes.
If you've seen any Unstoppable Killing Machine On A Revenge Mission movies, you can pretty much guess how A Working Man goes on its discount Taken plotline. The problem is that the script by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone (whose producer credit indicates he was developing this for himself) is in need of heavy editing and streamlining to pick up the pace. We are separated from Jenny for so long at times we almost forget what Levon is after.
The way he tries to pick up the trail by dealing with biker meth dealers slows the pace. He calls another war buddy who works at the DEA for some info and we never hear from him again. An opening scene where armed thugs rough up a worker at the construction site and Levon steps in to deal the hurt has zero ramifications. And the ending seems like it wants to set up a sequel of some sorts when there's little left to this story. Even the introduction of the grandfather dressed like a Jamiroquai cosplayer isn't explained and how that allows him to look down on Levon.
Statham is Statham in pretty much every Statham movie - grumpy bald Brit with hints of a soft center under his iron fists. At 57, he's beginning to slow down - he was 34 when he shot The Transporter and his peak heyday was in the Aughts. It doesn't help that Ayer covers the action with too close framing and reliance on shakycam. After John Wick revolutionized action coverage, there's no excuse for poor fight work.
To be punny, A Working Man is a workmanlike movie. Not bad, but not as good as it could've been with substantial tightening and a sharper focus. With a dozen novels so far in the Levon Cade series, they'd clearly like to make a franchise of this, but they'll have to get better quickly to succeed.
If you watch the trailer for Black Bag below, it implies that it is a taut spy thriller about married spooks Mr. & Mrs. Smith George (Michael Fassbender, Prometheus) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett, Tar) from the director of Traffic, Steven Soderbergh, and the writer of Jurassic Park, David Koepp. There's a traitor and it may be George's wife. Dun-dun-DUHN!! Sadly, it's a sluggish, talky, drawn-out slog where you the struggle to stay awake for the sparse moments of interests within.
Opening with British SIS (formerly MI-6) agent George meeting a contact at a London club. He's given a list of five names, including his wife's, and the warning that if something called Severus is used, thousands of people could die. He has a week to find out who the bad guy is.
To this end he invites the other names on the list, all co-workers, to his and Kathryn's swanky townhouse for dinner and I'm just going to copypasta the synopsis from Wikipedia here to save time:
But a lot of convenient clues are pointing at Kathryn from ticket stubs in the trash to a movie she claims to have not seen to a cover identity she'd used tied to millions of dollars deposited in a Swiss bank account. While attempting to see why she was in Zurich, George has Clarissa redirect a spy satellite off the books for a few minutes at which point a suspected Russian agent in possession of Severus is able to escape.
Enraged, their boss Stieglitz (Pierce Brosnan, Mrs. Doubtfire) orders George, Freddie and James to find the traitor. George is sweating because he's been acting in a way which looks like he's letting his marriage interfere with national, if not global, security. Of course, there's a lot of red herrings and twists and turns are reveals because spy movie.
But it's handled so quietly that it's easy to doze off like the missus did. In discussing why everyone seems to fraternize at work, one talks about how operational secrecy precludes discussing one's work with civilians, but it's hard to trust your romantic partners because even with everyone being a spy, you still can't talk about what your specific missions are and the catch-all term "black bag" (roll credits!) can be used to protect state secrets or your nooners at hotel with someone else from the office you're shagging.
As for George and Kathryn, they seem to be the perfect couple, but he clearly states that he can't stand liars, but something is clearly up with her. Can she be trusted or is she using his love and trust to do dastardly deeds?
The performances are fine and when Koepp actually writes something interesting Soderbergh stages the scenes well enough (he also does his own cinematography and editing under pseudonyms), but even at 94 minutes it feels padded and slow. He and Koepp have done several movies together lately, all in the 90-minute range in defiance of the length-over-depth ethos weighing Hollyweird down with 3-1/2 hour marathons like The Brutalist and Killers of the Flower Moon, but their Max original Kimi was much better (score: 7.5/10, no written review) even with a much less pedigreed cast.
Black Bag narrowly avoids falling into the 4/10 Skip It range by virtue of Fassbender's performance and the occasional sparks of interest, but this isn't the heartiest recommendation.
There is an immediate feeling after watching a nearly 3-1/2 hour-long movie packed with top-tier performances and strong imagery to feel like you've seen something of heft and substance. That's how I felt after watching The Brutalist - nominated for 10 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, and Original Score - but after some time to reflect on the experience, it turns out to be much sound and fury signifying little, but elevated on the back of Adrien Brody's performance.
Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who arrives in America in 1947. After a graphic visit to a prostitute to have his knob polished, he migrates to a small town in Pennsylvania where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has started a custom furniture business with his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). Attila has anglicized his name and converted to Catholicism, assimilating to American life. He gives László a bed in a store room and a job.
One day the son of a wealthy area tycoon, Harry (Joe Alwyn, best known as Taylor Swift's last ex-boyfriend) hires the store to revamp his father's study, building bookshelves, etc. as a surprise birthday gift from him and his twin sister X (Stacy Martin). László creates a stark modern space with shelves hidden behind swinging doors and having a sole lounge chair made of bent chrome tubing with straps for support - an arty lawn chair - as the centerpiece.
Daddy Harrison (Guy Pearce) comes home to find the workers in his home and blows a gasket, tossing them out and refusing to pay for the work or materials. Annoyed by Lászlo, Audrey suggests he find somewhere else to live and Attila accuses him of making a pass at his wife, which hadn't happened, so off László goes.
A few years later, he's working as a coal loader at a shipyard when Harrison appears to take him to lunch. The library he exploded over has become the subject of magazine profiles making him look like a bold patron of design. He looked into Lászlo's background and found he was a heralded architect back in his native Hungary and hires him to design a community center in honor of his mother with a budget of $850,000 ($11.2 million in today's debased currency).
The mercurial nature of Harrison's behavior is a constant source of tension which explodes in an out-of-nowhere moment which knocks the film off-kilter and raises questions of what overall points director/co-writer Brady Corbet is trying to make with his epic film? Is it that evil American rich people exploit immigrants while loathing them? Then why does Harrison seek out Lászlo to build this monument? Is it that America is rotten with anti-Semitism and Jews need to go to Israel. Considering the current politics & deep anti-Zionist (read: anti-Semitic) views of much of Hollyweird, that's some bad timing? Other than the vague sense of being an industrialist, we never really know where Harrison gets his wealth from.
The epilogue set in 1980 at a retrospective of Lászlo's career also explains the design of the center and what it represented to him and it smacks of telling, not showing, after 3-1/2 hours when there would've been plenty of opportunities to reveal these details.
But these are the questions that surface after watching The Brutalist. During the ride, it's stunning to realize that Corbet and company have made this 3h 35m period movie set between 1947-1958, filmed in VistaVision, a format which provides a big negative area and was last used for an American production in 1961(!), for a budget of under $10 million by filming in Hungary to represent Pennsylvania. It really shows that half of Hollyweird's financial woes are due to blowing massive sums of money on their projects rather than working lean.
The performances are solid & worthy of nomination across the board. As the missus says, Brody does suffering well. With his big eyes and awkward features, he is almost certain to win the same way he did nearly a quarter-century ago with The Pianist. Somehow Pearce has never been nominated before despite three decades in this business, and he would've had a good shot to win if not for Kieran Culkin's lead performance in A Real Pain being jammed into Supporting Actor. Jones is fine, though she's stuck with the Stoic Suffering Wife of the Tormented Genius role.
While I found my copy of the film on the high seas, the 4K 1.66:1 aspect image still retains the filmic grain look of the VistaVision source. Lol Crawley's nominated cinematography has a good shot in a tough field, especially with Conclave shamefully excluded in order to nominate Emilia Perez for everything. I'm sure the inevitable Criterion Collection release will look great, perhaps broken over two discs to match the two acts with intermission structure.
Corbet's previous film was the Natalie Portman-starring Vox Lux which I didn't write a review for, but logged it as a 3/10 Skip It score so while I can't remember what was bad about it, it was bad. He's definitely come up in the world, though according to this takedown - Why The Brutalist Is Brutal To Watch - which rakes it for getting pretty much everything wrong about the architecture and motivations of designers. While it's an easy path to call the runtime brutal, the cause of The Brutalist's woes started with the blueprints.
If it seems like the world has gone crazier than usual in recent years, let's add to the fun with a phrase even less plausible than "Super Bowl Champion Detroit Lions": Pamela Anderson gives an Oscar-worthy performance in The Last Showgirl.
No, I'm not kidding.
Anderson stars as Shelly Gardner, a....let's go with "mature" veteran of Le Razzle Dazzle, the last old-school Vegas revue show on the Strip. She's been with the show over 30 years and serves as a den mother to younger members Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song, Dollface). Shelly truly believes in the show and what it represents while the girls just view it as a job, earning constant chiding from Shelly who doesn't care for the hyper-sexualized shows (a la Showgirls) or more spectacle-oriented presentations from Cirque de Soleil which have taken over Sin City.
However, all good things come to an end as stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista sporting long hair for the first time I can recall) announces that due to dwindling attendance, the casino management has decided to shutter Le Razzle Dazzle in favor of the "Dirty Circus" show which has already taken the prime nights in the showroom. The last performance will be in two weeks and the youngsters start going out for auditions.
Amidst this upheaval arrives Hannah (Billie Lourd, Scream Queens), Shelly's estranged daughter who doesn't respect her mother's life choices, complaining about how Shelly would leave her in the car with a GameBoy while she did two shows a night. She lived with family friends most of the time and is now a college student nearing graduation which is news to Shelly who gets her age wrong and asks if she's chosen a major.
On the other side of showgirling is Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, leaning waaaay too hard into her current "I'm over 60 and going to be fat" shtick; have your True Lies and Trading Places scenes cued up as eye bleach), who left the show several years previously and is now a cocktail waitress struggling for shifts against younger women. Shelly's attempt at auditioning reveals that beyond her age (57), her chops aren't that great and she had coasted on youth and looks.
The terrific and sadly departed singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl had a song called "What Do Pretty Girls Do?" with lyrics that include:
She was a party girl, stayed up 'til the small hours Now she's embarrassing and everybody laughs At the girl with the face that could drive her baby wild Now wasn't she the child with everything?
You should have seen her with her head held high Now what do pretty girls do? She used to be the same as me or you Now what do pretty girls do?
Well they get older just like everybody else She never thought she'd have to take care of herself
The theme of what happens to attractive women as they age is a hot topic in the culture now especially with the wildly overrated The Substance likely to earn Demi Moore a Best Actress Oscar at age 62 for her gutsy full monty performance which has elevated her profile into Serious Actress territory after over 40 years in the business.
Anderson, to be kind, was starting in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement of regard for her thespian abilities. Whether it's her Playboy centerfold origins to being a Baywatch beauty to her tabloid infamy as half of the couple that put the term "sex tape" into common vernacular with then-husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, to her quickie marriage/divorce to Kid Rock, or the fact that her big attempt at crossing over the big screen from the boob tube (pun definitely intended) was 1996's Barb Wire, a movie only remembered (if that) for its credits where she dances around while being hosed down to a rocked-up cover of "Word Up" (very NSFW video), when she started going out in public without makeup, it was easy to see it as a cheap ploy to be taken seriously when "looking old" is a common gambit along with "imitating real people" or "get fat/ugly" to win gold.
Except here it serves a legitimately good performance, all the more shocking because there was NOTHING in the previous 35 years of ubiquitous fame hinting at the possibility of such a turn from her. She imbues Shelly with notes of pathos and naivete as someone who so devoted herself to the show that she cocooned herself from reality nor thought it could ever end. If suggesting to factory workers whose jobs were exported to the other side of the world that they "learn to code" seems glib and unrealistic if they were approaching retirement age, what's the career path for a AARP-eligible Vegas showgirl?
But Shelly isn't a passive victim here, she's responsible for her choices whether in not raising her daughter or preparing for the inevitable. And her lack of empathy at times is illustrated when one of the girls shows up at her place, upset that she may never be able to return home and Shelly blows her off because she doesn't want to make time for her. Anderson doesn't try to make Shelly into a porcelain doll and it's a brave choice which, while the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild nominated her and Curtis for, the Oscars snubbed her in favor of a man and virtue signalling. Of all the actresses who got shafted this year - Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Lily-Rose Depp - Anderson has the greatest right to feel ignored
The rest of the cast turns in good work ranging from Shipka's naive 19-year-old to Curtis's sun-baked senior citizen. (She looks like Lin Shaye's character in There's Something About Mary.) The only poor fit is Lourd who is a decade older than her role and looks it.
Director Gia Coppola (yes, of the Nepo Baby factory Coppola family; the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola) directs Kate Gersten's screenplay with a gritty style that mashes up semi-documentary realism with dreamy interludes of Shelly gazing at the Vegas skyline, the part that doesn't get seen in the movies. There is also a weird montage featuring a drunk Annette dancing on a platform that's a little too surreal.
The look of Autumn Cheyenne Durald Arkapaw's (Black Panther: Wakada Forever) cinematography, achieved by shooting on Super 16mm film with wild anamorphic lenses takes some getting used to as everything towards the sides of the frame is out-of-focus and distorted. (If I wasn't watching on a S-tier OLED TV, I'd complain to the projectionist.)
It's hard to tell whether The Last Showgirl will propel Anderson into a late-life career as an actual actress exhibiting range or this is just a one-off moment where the multiverse glitched and we glimpsed something previously unimaginable, but if you're into small indie character dramas with decent writing and good performances you should catch this show before it closes.
Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actress (LOL), Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, International (non-English), Sound, and two Song noms which caused the broadcast to not perform the nominated songs, it's the next stop on the Oscars Death March.
We open meeting Rita Castro (Zoe Saldaña, Lioness), a lawyer in Mexico City who is concocting a defense for her client who is accused of murdering his wife. When a witness refuses to testify, she decides to blame the media for driving the woman to suicide. After the guilty man is acquitted, she receives a call from a man wanting to meet her and tells her to be at a newsstand in 10 minutes.
She does so and is promptly abducted, ending up in the back of a mobile crime lord truck face to face with Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla SofÃa Gascón, nothing you've heard of under his birth name of Carlos), a bearded cartel kingpin who wants Rita to do him a favor in exchange for many dinero: He wants her to find a surgeon to mutilate him into a simulacrum of a woman and relocate his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, Wizards of Waverly Place), and two children to Switzerland, telling them it was for their safety from his enemies. He's been taking hormones for two years and has developed breasts that no one in his gang or the wife has noticed somehow.
Four years pass and Rita has relocated to London. (Money buys a better peer group.) At a dinner party, a burly woman chats with her and Rita rapidly realizes who it is. What he wants is to see his children again and he has Rita uproot Jessi and the kids and return them to Mexico City where they will live with Manitas' wealthy sister Emilia in a Mexican Mrs. Doubtfire scenario. While Jessi doesn't notice that Auntie Emilia has the exact same build (plus breasts) as her dead husband, his son recognizes his smell and sings a song about it.
One day, Emilia and Rita are having lunch when a mother leaves a flyer for her missing son on their table. Emilia decides that his new life purpose is to use his wealth gained from being a cartel boss (and making many mothers sons disappear himself) to start a NGO to have imprisoned sicarios tell where they disposed of their victims so that families can find closure. One woman, EpifanÃa (Adriana Paz), whose abusive husband had been missing for five years, attracts Emilia and they immediately hook up. Meanwhile, Jessi is contacting her old lover, Gustavo (Édgar RamÃrez).
Normally, I wouldn't go too in-depth of the rest of the plot, but since this is a Skip It movie that is unworthy of almost all of the hype, I'm going to lay out the rest of the story so you can see just how badly it ends.
Jessi announces that she is marrying Gustavo, so thanks for the place to stay, Emilia, but we're leaving. He flips out and attacks her, slipping and saying she can't take "my children" away. Spooked, Jessi disappears in the night with the kids. Emilia cuts off Jessi's credit cards and has his goons beat up Gustavo, giving him $100K to leave down or else. So the lovebirds retaliate by kidnapping Emilia and sending a couple of his fingers to Rita as the opening gambit of a ransom exchange.
When the exchange goes sideways, Gustavo throws Emilia in the trunk of a car, and he and Jessi drive off. Having just discovered who Emilia really is, Jessi pulls a gun on Gustavo and in their struggles, the car drives off a cliff, crashing then exploding, killing everyone. A funeral procession with an effigy of Emilia is parading through the streets while a massive crowd sings her praises as a modern saintly icon and the kids end up with Rita to be raised. The end.
No, I am not making this sh*t up.
Before addressing the controversies, let's discuss the merits of the film itself...........ummmm, well, one of the musical numbers isn't total trash and Saldaña is excellent........that's about it.
Then there's the whole "leave my life of crime behind and do good" premise. OK, sure, fine, whatever, but at no point does Manitas/Emilia atone for HIS sins. He doesn't unearth his victims or suffer any consequences for his actions. Starting the NGO and having all the other thugs who ARE serving time for their criems fess up is his good deed and he gets a girl, a parade, and an icon in his honor. What a mensch. And as shown by his explosion of rage at Jessi's planned nuptuals, you can cut the balls of the cartel boss, but you can't take the toxic masculinity out of the woman he's pretending to be. Oy vey.
The only character who really has some development is Rita, ferociously played by Saldaña, and who is really the lead with ten percent more screen time than Gascón, but ending up nominated for Supporting Actress. Saldaña has been underestimated as a talent for over 15 years because genre entertainment almost never gets recognized and three Star Trek movies as Lt. Uhura, three Guardians of the Galaxy movies where she's painted green, and a pair of Avatar movies where her performance capture was transformed into a giant blue Thundersmurf don't exactly scream, "Give that gal a trophy!" but here she makes a career-changing impression.
In her portrayal, Rita is a complex, guilt-ridden woman who sells her soul for riches then tries to earn it back with good deeds as best she can when her benefactor is a killer with issues. Saldaña's pre-acting training as a dancer is showcased in the one non-terrible song and number, "El Mal" ("The Evil"), where Rita points out all the corrupt politicians attending a fundraiser for Emilia's organization. (Thankfully, Netflix posted the number on YouTube so you can watch the best part of this thing for free. You're welcome.)
Gascón being nominated in the Actress category is inexcusable. Not because he gives a bad performance - ironically it isn't that bad as his portrayal of a man who longs for his children and then can't control his possessive nature with disastrous results has nuance - but for the simple fact he isn't a woman. Period. (Which he can't have.) If he had been nominated as Best Actor, there'd be no complaints, but then what sort of political benefit would acknowledging basic biology provide the Academy who desire to signal virtue more than reward genuine excellence?
Who knows which biological woman's performance got shoved off the podium by this stunt - Angelina Jolie in Maria; Nicole Kidman in Babygirl; Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu; Saldaña herself here? - but it flies in the face of previous handling of gender-bending performances. Linda Hunt won Best Supporting Actress playing a male role in The Year of Living Dangerously; Hillary Swank won Best Actress playing a transish role in Boys Don't Cry; Felicity Huffman was nominated as Best Actress for Transamerica, playing a pre-operative male-to-female character; and Jaye Davidson was up for Best Supporting Actor for The Crying Game way back in 1993. (I hadn't seen the last one before the Oscar nominations were announced, but knew the basic plot about the soldier's "girl" and was puzzled why the actress was nominated in the male category. Spoiler alert!) It's not a hate crime to properly categorize actors.
The cruel irony of making Gascón their hero(ine) is that the discovery of old tweets where he expressed incorrect thoughts about the Religion of Peace, George Floyd, and the Academy itself made him a pariah amongst his former advocates and writer-director Jacques Audiard and Saldaña disavowed him in order to save themselves. (LOL.) Not even being the apex predator of the intersectional hierarchy allows for impolite thoughts about the folks who attacked the offices of French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo 10 years ago, killing 12 and prompting declarations of "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie") from the same celebs now distancing themselves from him. Hypocrites.
And as mentioned, all of the hype, praise, awards (it won the Golden Globe and the Jury Prize at Cannes), or nominations have enticed the Normies to watch it. It's been on Netflix since mid-November 2024 (three months at this writing), no trip to the art house movie theater (if your town even has one) to see it required, and I don't recall ever seeing it on the Top 10 Movies list. Not when the critics gushed over it then, not when it won the Golden Globe, not when it got 13 Oscar nominations. Try as they might, they can't make fetch happen. Womp womp!
And it's not just red state bigots who had a problem with it. Mexicans were offended that a French filmmaker shot his Mexican story in France with a cast of non-native speakers. While Saldaña had some experience owing to her Dominican background and brushed up, apparently Texas-born Gomez had to crash course and learn phonetically. While my gringo ears couldn't tell, the real people could. LGB groups also weren't appreciative of the tokenized and trite portrayal of their condition with GLAAD calling it "a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman" and "a step backward for trans representation" Ingrates!
From a technical standpoint, there's nothing in the nominated image or nominated sound that justifies their nominations. If you're not paying for the most expensive tier of Netflix, you're missing nothing. It's functional and nothing more.
