Category Archives: Action Movie

Movie Review: Him

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After sitting through two hours of the new and horrible movie “Him,” I started to feel sorry for anyone who goes to this film thinking it’s a Sports movie, a Horror movie, or even a movie. After leaving this waste of two hours, it is impossible for anyone to fully define what this movie is about or why it was even made. Him is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

The story is about a former quarterback, Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans, training a recently injured rookie quarterback Cameron Cade played by Tyriq Withers, in a private and insane facility that includes zombie-like people who roam around a huge training facility. There are violent action scenes that include a football player who lets himself repeatedly get hit in the face, at close range, by a football-throwing machine. Why this scene exists in this movie-mess is another example of a bad story that makes no sense. This entire movie is so bad that it is almost impossible to review, with the best part being that this nightmare of bad movie-making eventually does end.

The Rotten Tomatoes consensus for this horrendous film is a way too high 30%, with my rating a solid zero and a recommendation to miss this waste of 2 hours at all costs.

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.