More prep work for an appearance on the Auteur Cast show meant revisiting one of the most ridiculous of all the Bond films. Roger Moore teams up with Lois Chiles’ CIA/NASA operative Holly Goodhead to foil an evil plot by Hugo Drax (a rather wonderful Michael Lonsdale) to poison the Earth from space and re-populate […] Read more »
After a highly successful run, as a producer of hit TV Science Fiction shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Irwin Allen returned to the big screen in 1972, producing The Poseidon Adventure, a star-studded, technically innovative, action-disaster film. He followed this up […] Read more »
I sincerely believe that one day Michael Bay will make a masterpiece. To-date I still believe that The Rock is his best film. I know that Bad Boys 2 has lots of fans, but for me it grows too long and unwieldy for its own good. The Rock works because it has smart script, talented […] Read more »
You never need an excuse to rewatch a James Bond film, even a middling entry like Guy Hamilton’s Live And Let Die, but this time I was attentively revisiting the film in preparation for my appearance on podcast The Auteur Cast. I was a guest on the show a year or so ago when they […] Read more »
Roland Emmerich’s take on the “Die Hard in the White House” action set-up that was visited earlier this year in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, is a far bigger, louder and more ludicrous affair. Channing Tatum plays the wannabe Secret Service agent who finds himself – along with his tech-savvy teenage daughter – trapped in […] Read more »
Huge disappointment after the surprisingly witty original. Here, the film seems completely disinterested in its characters, so ripe with nuance and subversion, and is instead content simply to gross out its audience with a parade of low brow humour, casual mysogyny and unimaginative action. Not even the addition of an enthusiastic Jim Carrey – in […] Read more »
Some grumbled about Antoine Fuqua’s straight-faced approach to this “Die Hard in The White House” wannabe, but I mostly enjoyed the way it got back to basics, without the need for knowing self-parody that so many action films feel oblige to include these days. Gerard Butler plays it dead straight as a former Secret Service […] Read more »
Overlong but consistently funny, Paul Feig follows up the hugely successful Bridesmaids with another female-centric comedy, this time turning Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy into action heroes. The plot is cliched, rambling and largely inconsequential, but the film gets by on strong chemistry between the two leads and the fact that Sandra Bullock, who is […] Read more »
When we hear the word pirate, the image most of us bring to mind is someone in a billowing white shirt, maybe with a peg leg, or patch over one eye, and almost certainly a sword or cutlass. Maybe we imagine Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood or Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. Pirates in popular culture […] Read more »
On second viewing it must be conceded that Guillermo del Toro’s film is far more of a disappointment than many wee willing to admit – but still manages to be lots of fun. The characterisation is non-existent, the acting almost uniformly terrible and the relationships perfunctory at best, but where it counts – when big […] Read more »
Hugh Jackman reprises his signature role yet again, this time employing James Mangold to take Logan to Japan and embrace one of the character’s best-loved comic book story arcs. While proceedings do ultimately descend into indestructible objects punching each other, this is far more of a crime drama built around strong characters and meaningful relationships […] Read more »
James McAvoy’s transformation into an action hero continues as we see him in yet another big, shiny, stylised London crime thriller. Though unlike Danny Boyle’s Trance, Eran Creevy’s Welcome To The Punch is an altogether more direct and less entertaining experience. McAvoy plays Max Lewinsky, a police detective obsessed with catching Jacob Sternwood, played by […] Read more »
Guillermo del Toro pits huge metal mech suits against giant creatures from a parallel dimension in his epic science-fiction beat 'em up. But is sheer spectacle enough, when the characters involved in the struggle are so lacking? Read more »
After months of anticipation, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim arrived in Hong Kong on a wave of muted praise and widespread disappointment. The feverish anticipation for the film had waned slightly following a poor performance at the US box office, proving that the general public at large were unenthused by a summer blockbuster lacking recognisable […] Read more »
The rumours are true. Sharknado is far more entertaining than it has any right to be. The story is completely ridiculous, the effects are passable but a long way from being cutting edge and the performances vary wildly from a pretty decent Ian Ziering as the heroic lead, to a washed up John Heard playing […] Read more »
Incredibly silly comedy from director Fukuda Yuichi about a high school boy (Suzuki Ryohei) who inherits the twisted perversions of his parents (a masochistic cop and sadistic dominatrix respectively). When he puts a pair of girls panties over his face he gains super-human powers, which come in handy when the school is invaded by gang […] Read more »
A riveting late 90s, post-cold war action film, John Frankenheimer’s Ronin (1998) came at a time when the genre was changing and speeding up. Gritty fast moving scenes combined with a Hitchcockian plot device and perhaps the best car chase scene ever filmed, Ronin is loaded with good performances (Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha […] Read more »
Gearing up to go and see the sequel to this amusing if somewhat forgettable animated action comedy, I suddenly discovered that my girlfriend hadn’t seen it. So we sat down the evening before, rented it off iTunes, and discovered it to be much funnier than I had remembered. Steve Carell rather clumsily voices Gru, a […] Read more »
Jet Li back doing action? Sounds great, but Badges of Fury proves to be more a goofy comedy for his co-star Wen Zhang than a kung-fu packed homage to old school Hong Kong action. Despite its setting, this is aimed squarely at mainland audiences, shot in Mandarin with a mostly mainland cast. The results are […] Read more »
Plagued with problems every step of the way, running vastly overbudget, scraping and totally reshooting the entire third act, losing its core fanbase by largely disgarding Max Brooks’ source novel – it seemed World War Z was destined for failure. But then it came out, and actually it is pretty decent. Brad Pitt cuts a […] Read more »