Category Archives: Action Movie

Movie Review: Sinners

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The new movie “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan, who plays two roles, Stack and Smoke, in a rare example of one actor playing twin brothers.

This film is set in the Deep South, 1932, Clarksdale, Mississippi, where twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, return home to open a juke joint. There is massive evidence of bigotry, and members of the Klan as Smoke and Stack, throw money around town, attempting to convince people to perform or work at the new juke joint. Much of this is rather slow and boring for most of the movie until the entire story takes a gigantic turn into murdering vampires and zombies and violent battle scenes, until the insane conclusion, making this the strangest turn on a dime story change I have ever seen in any movie.

This movie is both written and directed by Ryan Coogler, marking his fifth collaboration with Michael B. Jordan that includes both “Black Panther” movies (2018, 2022), “Creed” (2015), and “Fruitvale Station” (2013), Jordan’s first movie.

I was surprised that a promising story degraded into something that seemed more like a B movie, and another run-of-the-mill Vampire film. I was also surprised at the appearance of actress Hailee Steinfeld, who seemed miscast in this movie, playing Stack’s love interest.

The special effects, while well done, have been seen many times before, with battle scenes involving the living and the dead, and the various methods of how to kill a Vampire. At this point, enough of the killing of the already dead.

The biggest surprise is the extremely high and wrong 98% rating for this movie on Rotten Tomatoes, with my rating 75% and only a very small recommendation, because there is nothing new in this story, other than the sudden and drastic change in direction.

Movie Review: A Working Man

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The new movie “A Working Man” has many similarities to the great Liam Neeson movie “Taken” from 2008. The entire screenplay plays like Taken with one man taking on significant gangs of criminals, in this case, three different gangs, corrupt police, a young woman kidnapped into a human trafficking ring, and a dramatic ending with Levon Cade, played by Jason Statham finding the young woman named Carla, played by Noemi Gonzalez also very similar to the ending of Taken.

The attempts to make this movie different than Taken, with Levon Cade an employee of a family of a construction company to find their kidnapped daughter are not enough to erase constant reminders of Taken throughout this two-hour movie. A Working Man was written by Sylvester Stallone, David Ayer, and Chuck Dixon making it more unusual that with three writers nobody could think of enough new ideas to turn what could have been a much better new story idea, into an obvious clone of Taken.

The acting in this film is good, with David Harbour and Michael Peña and the action scenes are what anyone would expect with a Jason Statham movie. The ending has a major flaw with about 20 bikers running into a bar trying to kill Cade, and later they are nowhere to be found, with Cade fighting the lead biker at the end. As with all movies like this one, when there are multiple people shooting guns and machine guns against one other person, there is no way one person would survive with that many bullets. But this is a movie, not real life.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 53% are accurate and I do not recommend this movie, that did not try to be more original.


Movie Review: The Monkey

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As far as coming up with a new idea for a horror-blood-and-gore movie, the new film “The Monkey” has many scenes never seen before. For starters, the evil creature creating all of the death, is a toy monkey that when wound up, plays a drum. The monkey has very evil eyes, and an evil smile, that when turned on shows a row of dangerous looking teeth. All definately new ideas.

What is not new are the horrific deaths of many people in this story invoving blown up, dismembered bodies, heads blown off, a woman falling into an electified pool and blown into hundreds of pieces. Many of these extreme deaths reminded me of the “Final Destination” movie franchise where several people at first cheat death and are later slaughtered in horrendous ways as death seeks its revenge. All of this of course is ridiculous, with some measure of humor and over the years this kind of death movie has found an audience. A documentary about why movies like this are popular might be better than the movies themselves.

The Monkey stars Theo James as Hal, who has a twin brother. At the beginning of this movie, Hal’s relationship with his abusive brother is difficult to watch, due to the non stop verbal attacks that at times seemed too much and unnecessary. There is a cameo appearance later in the movie from
Elijah Wood – there are no other well known actors in this production. I found some of this story, especially towards the end disjoined and sketchy, almost as if the screenwriter could not come up with an effective ending. This movie was directed by Oz Perkins, who also directed the recent “Long Legs” horror movie. Perkins also co-wrote the screenplay of this insane movie with writer Stephen King.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a too high 76% with my rating 65% without a recommendation to see this movie.