The new movie “The Rhythm Section”, invokes many questions from any viewer. Is this movie some kind of a back ended attempt to remake the Bridge Fonda film, “Point of No Return”, from 1993 – which is a much better movie? Did any of the 3 well known actors who agreed to appear in this movie, Blake Lively, Jude Law and Sterling K. Brown also read the script? Why would anyone decide to name this convoluted and pretty bad story, The Rhythm Section? This title makes even less sense than the decision to make this movie in the first place.

The Logline for this story is, a young woman loses her entire family in plane crash, then finds out through an self employed journalist that there was a bomb planted on their plane by a terrorist.  Unfortunately the disjointed story that follows jumps from this down and out woman, who is working as a hooker to running into this journalist, to suddenly – without any explanation, being trained by some secret agent, played by Jude Law.

This entire story was very poorly told, and not only does not make much sense, but was boring in way too many places.  I was surprised to see the great actor Sterling K. Brown from “This Is Us” in this bad movie because this makes about 4 films in a row where he has tried to parlay his television success into film. At this rate, after making four bad movies in a row, he should probably just stay an outstanding television actor.

I agree with the very low ratings of 33% for The Rhythm Section that amounts to another very good example of “January Junk”.  This movie should be skipped.

As with Guy Richie movies I have seen in the past, the story of “The Gentlemen” is told using a jumbled flashback way that always includes summation scenes at the end that try to explain what happened previously. I personally find movies that try and tell stories using methods like this very annoying. Its one thing to be different good, and another thing to be different bad. If a story cannot be told in a uniform, understandable and mostly sequential way, then there is not a story to tell in the first place. The only production I find worse than a Guy Richie movie is a Micheal Bay movie, especially if it is a Transformer film.

The only memorable thing about this bad movie is within the disgusting dialogue that included the constant and abusive use of the “C” word. What was the point of using a word like this so often, given that there was so much to dislike with the story.

The Rotten Tomatoes average review of 72% is way off and my rating is a very low 30%. This one should be missed.

The most impressive thing about the new film “The Last Full Measure” is the unusually large number of named actors that are in this above average war story. Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Plummer, Bradley Whitford, William Hurt, Diane Ladd, Amy Madigan, John Savage, Sebastian Stan and the late Peter Fonda in his last movie role. The acting is also outstanding from all of the named actors, especially William Hurt. The Last Full Measure reminds all of us that very often the worst thing about war is the psychological damage it does to so many millions of people, long after the war is over.

The subject of this war story, is mostly told through flashbacks of one of the most bloody battles of the Vietnam war –  Operation Abilene. Air force medic  William H. Pitsenbarger saved over 60 men during this battle and entirely because of military politics, his congressional medal of honor was taken away after he was killed during this battle. Considering the extraordinary heroism of Pitsenbarger, saving 60 lives during one of the worst battles of the Vietnam War, it is a tragedy that politics prevented him being honored for so many years. I thought it was also interesting to find out that out of the almost 3500 Congressional Medals awarded, only 18 are with the Air Force and only 3 of those were enlisted men. One of those went to Pitsenbarger.

The problem with this movie are the large amounts of time devoted to Pentagon employee Scott Huffman interviewing the many witnesses to Operation Abilene, which makes this movie unnecessarily slow in too many places and does account to the relatively low 60% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. I agree with mostly low ratings and despite the very good acting and well shot war scenes I cannot recommend this film.