Category Archives: Action Movie

Movie Review: Caught Stealing

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In terms of horrible New York City apartments, squalor, and barely surviving, set in a gritty, dark, and depressing story, the new movie “Caught Stealing” is one of the all-time standards.

Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as Hank Thompson and Zoë Kravitz as his girlfriend, Yvonne, who are constantly in trouble, running for their lives, and getting beaten up. One of the early beatings of Hank involves a long period of kicking his midsection while he is lying on the ground. This causes Hank to lose one of his kidneys. At some point during a scene like this, you would think that director Darren Aronofsky would have yelled ‘cut’ long before this scene became obvious overkill.

Unfortunately, this movie is mostly about scenes like this, with one of the few good aspects, the appearance of an extremely attractive house cat, who is present for almost the entire movie, despite the constant gunfire and violence. My guess is the director thought of having this cat appear in this movie to diffuse the over-the-top action scenes.

The story is about a large sum of money that two groups of criminals are trying to find at all costs. Hank has a friend who is leaving for England, and the criminals think that Hank knows where the money is. What follows are chase scenes and non-stop gunfire.

One group of criminals is a Russian gang, the other group of two Hasidic Jewish men, played by two well-known actors, Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, are the most violent, at one point blowing up a nightclub with many people still inside. Regina King plays a police detective in a role and a story twist that we have all seen too many times before.

While the acting is good in this film, the story, over top violence and several parts of the conclusion that do not hold water, I do not recommend this movie, despite the too high 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Movie Review: The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The new movie “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is different and unusual mainly for its proclaimed timeline of “Earth-828,” which is equivalent to the era of the 1960s within a retro-futurian version of New York City. The computer monitors and computers also seem to be from the 1960s, but the technology, especially for space travel, is initially from the current day and later from the future with speed-of-light spaceship technology. This of course, does not make sense. 1960s technology mixed with present-day and future technology?

This film stars Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards • Mister Fantastic (Rubber Man), Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm Human Torch and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, The Thing. The story involves a huge alien from another planet who wants to destroy the Earth and a silver woman who flies around on a surfboard.

The story has two parts where the Fantastic Four fly to the alien planet, trying to reason with the gigantic alien Galactus, played by Ralph Ineson. It turns out that Galactus with spare the Earth in exchange for the unborn child that is being carried by Storm. When they refuse to give Galactus the child, part 2 is the war on planet Earth between the four superheroes and Galactus. Once again, the special effects are either spectacular or very impressive, but the story is nothing special and definitely nothing new.

Overall, the acting is good from the four main stars and all of the other characters, with some cameos played by Natasha Lyonne and Julia Warner. Based on the money involved and the huge number of past and new movies that are within the Marvel Universe, I was hoping for a better movie, considering that the last two Fantastic movies were 10 and 20 years ago.

The Rotten Tomatoes this time around is a way off 89% with my rating a 75% and a small recommendation.

Movie Review: Superman

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Due to the hype and the comments on talk shows about the new movie “Superman”, I was surprised at just how bad this movie is. There is no evidence of a coherent sequential story anywhere in these two hours. The characters fly in and out of scenes, with no explanation as to who they are or what they are doing in this badly written screenplay. This is another screenplay that should have had about 5 more re-writes, but this takes too long, and costs the studio money.

In this story, Lois Lane is currently involved with Superman, so there is no mystery about who Clark Kent really is or the ongoing ridiculous “taking eyeglasses off and on” as a major disguise for a superhero. The Superman outfit is nothing new, with tights and red underwear, which, since the beginning of this superhero icon in 1938, one would think would have mutated into a less humiliating outfilt for the actor to wear after so many years.

For this latest Superman film, there are other superheroes, including: Green Lantern, played by Nathan Fillion, Mister Terrific, played by Edi Gathego, Metamorpho, played by Anthony Carrigan, Harkgirl, in a very small part played by Isabela Merced, and The Engineer, played by Maria Gabriela de Faria. Except Green Lantern and Mister Terrific, it is hard to understand why most of the other characters are in this movie, with parts this small.

This movie stars newcomer David Corenswet as Superman, who is well cast and believable as the new Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, who is also very good in her role. Unfortunately, the love story between the two is not nearly strong enough, with one exception: an argument during an interview between the two at the beginning of this movie that I thought was well acted. Nicholas Hoult plays the evil Lex Luthor, in a role that I thought was about on a par with Gene Hackman, who played this role in the films that starred Christopher Reeve, starting in 1978.

The rest of this story is all about action scenes, fight scenes, and frequent appearances of an AI dog that jumps on people every time he appears in a scene – not funny enough to save this mostly bad movie. One unique aspect about this new Superman version is how badly and how often Superman is beaten up, which, given the many fans of this superhero and children in the audience, is yet another problem with this film.

Rotten Tomatoes has too high ratings of 82% I can only attribute to favors and payoffs, because this movie is at best 60%, only for some of the insane action scenes. I rate this new Superman movie a disappointing pass, bad enough to potentially hurt the possibility of a sequel.