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Amazon Movie Review: A Million Miles Away

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The new Amazon movie, “A Million Miles Away” is one of the best true-life stories about perseverance I have ever seen. This story follows the extremely unlikely story of a Mexican farmworker Jose Hernandez, played very well by actor Michael Peña from extreme poverty throughout his entire childhood to a dream to one day become a NASA astronaut and traveling to space. An ambition to become an astronaut is extremely unlikely for everyone who applies, but for Jose, given his meager beginning, his dream was always a million miles away.

This film follows Jose’s childhood from being exceptionally bright in school and guided by his school teacher who believed in him and changed his life. For 30 years Jose tried and was rejected by NASA, applying to their astronaut program no less than 11 times, and he was finally accepted in his 12th attempt. Once accepted into the program, Jose had his share of problems along the way, including almost drowning in a NASA practive swimming pool that simulates weightlessness.

Actress Rosa Salazar, plays Jose’s wife Adela and she is very good in her role. Adela had her own dreams of opening her own restaurant, and through it all, supported Jose with his dream as he supported hers. Their relationsjhip is one of the best parts of this very good family film. Adela and Hose had 5 children together.

A Million Miles Away plays like a very well-made Disney film and considering how unlikely Jose’s ambitions to travel into space, this movie is at times hard to belive is true.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a very high and accurate 89% and I agree with this rating and highly recommend this movie.

Movie Review: Expend4bles

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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

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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.