Movie Review: Fight or Flight

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The only obvious difference between the nonstop-seen-this-before action movie “Flight or Fight” is that all violent fights and action occur on a plane, with the additional insanity of a final fight scene that involves a chainsaw, even though there is no way a chainsaw would be allowed on a plane like this.

Fight or Flight stars Josh Hartnett as Lucas Reyes, an FBI agent on the bench, who is mostly sleeping and drunk in Thailand for two years, when he is called up to track down a criminal on a plane. About the time Reyes is about to board the flight, his team at the FBI realizes that just about everybody on the plane is a hired killer, setting the stage for nonstop fight and action scenes for the rest of the movie, without any regard to a coherent story.

The other issue with a movie like this is that with the beatings, stabbings, and shootings that Reyes takes during the many fight scenes, he would have died midway through this film. There is never any real reason to throw logic this far out the window, just to make an action movie.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Fight and Flight are a too high 77%, with my rating around 50% and a solid miss.

Movie Review: The Surfer

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Another one of those, “quality means nothing, story means nothing, let’s be strange, weird, never been done before”.

This time, the movie is called “The Surfer,” starring Nicolas Cage as “The Surfer”, somewhere on the coast of Australia, about to surf with his son and running into a group of lowlife local Australian surfers. Then a series of events that involve theft, bullying, and intense violence, leaving The Surfer battered, dirty, and looking like a homeless man. While watching this too-long, depressing movie, you can’t help but think. Why doesn’t he just drive away? Why does he stay in this parking lot overlooking a beach that is loaded with criminals who might kill him?

What is so strange about this film is that The Surfer spends almost this entire movie hanging out, sleeping in his car in a parking lot, on his cell phone trying to get the funding for a house he wants to buy on the coast, calling his boss, trying to save his job, in a downward spiral into homelessness and depression for this entire two hours. What is the point of all this?

Aside from all these problems, the majority of this movie makes no sense and eventually degrades into constant attempts to trick the audience, wondering what is real, what is fake, and what is just a hallucination. Is this man now really homeless, imagining all that happened before? Is all this happening because he has been in the sun too long, or is he on drugs or just drunk? One hour into this and it is impossible to care about what is going on, we just want it all to end.

I have never seen a greater difference of opinion on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics giving this bad movie an 86% rating, and the audience 50%. What are the critics thinking here? Perhaps they are all on the same drugs that The Surfer is using in this film? This time around, the critics are once again dead wrong, with the audience correct at 50%, and a run for your life, miss this movie at all costs.

Movie Review: Thunderbolts

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There have been more than a few bad Marvel movies released in the last few years, most recently “Captain America: Brave New World” (2025) and “The Marvels” (2023). The release of the new Marvel movie “Thunderbolts” was an opportunity to greatly improve the quality of this franchise. Unfortunately, mainly due to the crazy and mostly boring screenplay, this movie cannot be considered a step in the right direction.

The story starts with the main Marvel characters Yelena Belova, played by Florence Pugh, Bucky Barnes played by Sebastian Stan, John Walker played by Wyatt Russell, Ava Starr played by Hannah John-Kamen and a new superhere they call “Bob”, played by Lewis Pullman all trapped in a warehouse, for the first 10-15% of this film. There is no real way to make scenes where several people are trapped in a large series of rooms – interesting, especially in a film that is supposed to be a superhero action movie.

We later find out that Bob has superpowers that greatly exceed the powers of all the other superheroes, and later Bob turns to the dark side and has evil forces that can send people into some other dimension. All this does create several scenes of extreme special effects, but not enough to cover what I thought was a surprisingly bad screenplay.

There are some good father-daughter scenes between Velena and her father, Alexiei Shostakov, played by David Harbour, but not enough to fix what could have been a far better screenplay.

I was surprised that Julia Louis-Dreyfus took the part of politician Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, after reading this script. She seems completely miscast in this role, regardless of the mostly ridiculous story.

I have no idea why the Rotten Tomatoes ratings are on average 88%, with the most accurate review from critic Jeffrey Harris:

“The film exemplifies how The Multiverse Saga constantly stumbles and fails to find its footing, with the entire narrative amounting to little more than a groan-inducing, bait-and-switch joke.”

Due to the many flaws, and mostly bad screenplay I do not recommend this movie.