Movie Review: Expend4bles


Going into any 4 of the Stallone produced Expendibles movies, you expect them to have no logic, no plot, no plausible story, and just a series of excuses for action to fight, stab, shoot, blowup any number of people. Then the question eventually becomes, when does very stupid become too stupid?

The latest and hopefully last of the Expendibles franchise is easy the dumbest of the 4, with an attempt of “surprise movie ending trickery” that is actually insulting to the audience. Movie trickery, “trying to fool the audience” only works when the logic of the story supports the trick ending. With this very bad and very stupid movie, the end of the story suprise is completely absurd and not supported by the story in any way. With an attempted explanation at the very end that holds no water.

With this 4th installment, only four previous cast members appear in this new version. Jason Statham who plays a character for some reason is named Christmas, Dolph Lundgren, who plays Gunner, and Randy Couture plays Toll Road and of course Sylvester Stallone who plays Barney. Some of the character names are as idiotic as the plots of some of these movies. The new cast includes Megan Fox, who is miscast, Andy Garcia, how much was he paid for this bad role, Tony Jaa, who plays the villain and Jacob Scipio, who is the comic foil in this story, and his role mostly fails throughout this film.

My guess is that so many of the action stars from the previous movies actually read the script and decided – no way. Considering how bad this last movie of the series is, this decision to not make the final movie could be career-saving.

The other problem is that the action scenes are not nearly as good as the previous 3 movies, almost as if they phoned in the simplest action scene ideas. Then decided to save on the budget, with Jason Statham doing almost all the action scenes in the end. With the rest of the cast, stuck in a make-shift prison. What were they thinking with this idea? High paid actors standing around in a prison for most of the last act of this movie?

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Expend4bles an extremely low and correct at 17%, My rating is 10%, and a big-time miss on this end of a movie franchise that was completely killed by the 4th and last installment.

Movie Review: A Haunting in Venice


In the new movie “A Haunting in Venice” actor Kenneth Branagh once again plays his role as detective Hercule Poirot. The last movie in this series was last year’s “Death on the Nile”, which was not reviewed on this blog, mainly because of the low ratings.

These two movies were taken from Agatha Christie novels. As far as this new and hopefully last installment of this mystery/murder series, due to the fact that the two hours were so boring, I for one hope this is the last film.

The story of A Haunting in Venice takes place in Venice Italy, and one flaw is that not nearly enough of the city was shown in this movie, because at least this boring film could probably be converted into a quick travelogue to Italy. Most of this film is shot inside of a massive church-like building. almost always at night, raining and way too dark. The story about a series of murders takes the entire 2 hours to fully resolve, but when it was finally over, I found it too boring to even care about the ending.

A Hunting in Venice stars Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Dornan, Tina Fey, and Kelly Reilly. Once again, due to the blog and relatively high and incorrect high ratings of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes, I sat through this pretty bad movie, with my rating of only 50% and a solid pass, for everyone except those who have a severe sleep disorder.

Movie Review: Bottoms


Based on the very high Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 93% for the new movie “Bottoms” and my continued obligation to this blog, I decided to pay 8 dollars to see this movie.

For me, the highlights were that former outstanding running back for the Seattle Seahawks Marshawn Lynch appears in this film as a gym teacher and the great up-and-coming actor and star of the Hulu Series “The Bear” Ayo Edebiri, who plays the main character Josie, are leads in this film. Ayo along with Rachel Sennott as PJ and Ruby Cruz as Hazel decide to create a high school female “fight club”, mainly because they feel like they are the bottom tier disprepected gays of their high school.

There are too many violent scenes in a gymnasium between the women in this fight club, supervised by the gym teacher Mr. G, played by Marshawn Lynch. Of course, this is a kind of a dark, strange, and too weird comedy film, but the violent fight scenes are way over the top, including when one young woman is kicked in the face while she is lying on a floor by a football player. None of this is funny, a parody, or ever necessary in any movie, much less a comedy. All this makes anyone wonder how or why a movie like this could ever be rated highly under any circumstances. For the majority of this film, there was almost no laughing in the audience I was in; always the all time tell tale sign of a comedy that does not work.

Why the critics who publish on Rotten Tomatoes gave a rating of 93%, makes absolutely no sense with my rating only 30% and an emphatic “miss this mess” recommendation.