Zach Galifianakis is one of the most unusual comedic actors to come out in many years. He was funny in the 3 movie Hangover series because he was so strange and unusual, almost Autistic. He played virtually the same part in the movie Due Date in 2010 with Robert Downy Jr. However, when he is in any movie where he is even remotely playing a normal person he is just not that funny. Unfortunately, “Keep Up with the Joneses” is another one of those movies where Galifianakis is not that funny and the movie he is in is not that funny. This is also true of the recent movie “MasterMinds”, also reviewed on this blog and was at best below average.

Keeping Up with the Joneses is another caper movie and there have been so many caper movies over the years where an ordinary person gets involved with mob-like gangs or criminal situations and because of this, any new caper movie has to put a new kind of a spin on this very overworked story and this one did nothing like that. When I was watching this movie, I was reminded so many times that I have seen the same ideas so many times before, with different actors. The actress Isla Fischer plays Galifianakis wife and she was overall good in her role, but the movie was not that good so it didn’t matter that much. John Hamm and Gal Gadot play spies who get involved with Galifianakis and his wife because he works for a defense contractor and another employee is using his computer to sell computer chips illegally. What follows is a typical chase scene, explosions and gun play and an exploding house. Nothing we have not seen before and an ending that mostly played out like I expected it would.

Keeping Up with the Joneses is not a bad movie, but it’s not a good movie either and way too run of the mill. Unless you are a huge fan of Zach Galifianakis, this movie should be missed.

Of all the actors in the history of Hollywood, Tom Cruise could very well be the only one who has been the star of two ongoing movie franchises. His first franchise is the Mission Impossible movies that started 20 years ago and now consists of 5 movies, the 6th will be coming out sometime next year or in 2018. His next series is Jack Reacher and is about several books written by Lee Child about a retired and highly decorated military officer who is now a drifter. What is rather far fetched is how a drifter can get involved with so many highly dangerous criminals and situations, but then again these books are a work of fiction.

This new movie “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” is mostly a chase movie. There is nothing wrong with a chase movie, as long as it is done right and makes sense. The people being chased around are mostly Jack Reacher and his military friend played by Cobie Smulders and then they are united with a 15-year-old girl, played by Danika Yarosh. Of course, there are fight scenes, several of them, but nothing too different than what we have already seen in the first Jack Reacher movie that came out in 2012.

This movie is on a par with the last Jack Reacher movie and I would think that the continuing franchise of Reacher movies was not hurt by this latest film. This movie has far more chase scenes than the first one, and overall probably less fight scenes. The good parts of this film are the acting and special effects, the bad parts have to do with some of the convoluted logic in the story line and in some of the scenes; including once scene where Reacher and his friend leave a 15-year-old girl alone in a hotel room, downright stupid logic in favor of a dramatic payoff later in the story. From the reviews of this movie, before I saw it today, I was expecting a better film and I found the story telling of adding pieces to different scenes using too many flashbacks as the plot progressed, rather annoying over the course of a two-hour movie. For that main reason, I only give a mild recommendation to Jack Reacher, Never Go Back.

Prior to the year 1988 when the film Die Hard came out, it was almost unheard of that any TV star was ever able to break out of being famous for a TV show – Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, and then transition to being a movie star. Bruce Willis was probably the first actor to ever break out of being a TV star and he definitely did this faster than any actor in history. Around this same time, Tom Hanks did the same thing but in a different way and his transition took much longer than Bruce Willis having started in the TV series Bosom Buddies in 1982.

What was so great about the movie Die Hard is that it was the first “believable action” movie where the main character is a regular person engaging in an impossible situation but the situations that he was in and then survived were not so over the top that they were not believable. The Terrorist attack in the Nakatomi Tower building where John McClane, played by Willis meets his wife was very believable. The action and the acting that followed was also very believable. The fights were awkward and what you would expect a fight to be in real life. McClane gave as well as he got and was hurt himself in many cases, unlike over the top of action films where the lead actor has such an easy time beating up everyone in sight. I cannot remember any movie before or since that had this level of believability within a story that had this many fight scenes and gunplay. For me, the best part of this entire film was the friendship that happened over the phone between McClane and Sgt. Al Powell, played by Reginald VelJohnson and their meeting at the end of the film, which was one the best and emotional of any action movie I have ever seen. The late actor Alan Rickman was also outstanding in his role as the lead terrorists and he played this particular level of evil in this movie better than any actor I have ever seen. Alan Rickman is one actor who will be very sorely missed by everyone.

When Die Hard 2 came out in 2 years later, I thought at the time that in some ways this movie was even better than the first one. What it lacked was believability because the action scenes were not on the level of the first movie where McClane was barely surviving but believable. In this movie, John McClane seemed more like a super-hero than the everyman he was in the first film. Some of the action scenes in this movie were both over the top but very entertaining, including where McClane ejects from a plane to escape being blown up and the scene where he fights several terrorists all who have machine guns and kills them with just a pistol. This scene is another example where the believability factor in the first movie was removed from this scene in favor of extremely entertaining action. Regardless, Die Hard 2 was a very good movie and one of the rare times when a sequel was as good if not better than the first movie.

Unfortunately as always happens with a movie franchise that makes a lot of money, producers only care about making more money and do not care if they have a great script. The 3rd Die Hard came out in 1995 and it was called Die Hard with a Vengence, and it starred Samuel L. Jackson’s as an ordinary citizen named Zeus Carter, who gets involved with McClane in what turned out to be a ridiculous plot of riddles and McClane and Zeus running around New York City. Very surprisingly the 4th movie in the series, Live Free or Die Hard was relatively good, starring Justin Long who gets paired up with Willis in another terrorist plot. This movie was far-fetched but some of the action scenes were the best of the entire series.

Unfortunately, the fifth and hopefully final Die Hard movie “A Good Day to Die Hard” was a very bad movie which probably ruined the franchise for good. This movie came out in 2013 and since that time it seems that Bruce Willis has been making mostly very bad B movies, which shows how harsh the movie industry really is and once you have a huge bomb, you may just never get another chance to revive your career. Why or how a movie this bad, which had such a bad screenplay was ever made is part of the problem of embedded profits because of name recognition over quality. This is a mistake I have seen made many times over the years.

If you have not seen Die Hard or Die Hard 2 you owe it to yourself to see 2 of the best action movies ever made.