Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to do a high five! Have a look as I race against the clock to pickup what “Drop” is putting down, and tell you about the dramas “Warfare” and “The Amateur.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Amateur,” a new thriller now playing in theatres, Rami Malek plays a CIA cryptographer whose life is touched by tragedy when his wife is killed in a terror attack. When the agency refuses to investigate he takes matters into his own hands. Despite being “just a nerdy guy who works on computers,” he vows to use his unique set of skills to get vengeance. “I want to face my wife’s killers,” he says, “look them in the eyes, and balance the scales.”
CAST: Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Adrian Martinez, Danny Sapani and Laurence Fishburne. Directed by James Hawes.
REVIEW: “The Amateur,” based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Robert Littell, is a workmanlike thriller, with loads of style but few actual thrills.
The story of vengeance, set into motion after CIA cryptographer Charles Heller’s (Rami Malek) wife is murdered in a terror attack, aspires to be a layered look at grief, anger, the integrity of institutional organizations and the ethics of revenge, is instead a slackly paced movie that is all surface and no depth.
It begins with promise. There’s a cast headlined by Oscar, Tony and Emmy winners, a premise that reflects government conspiracy theories and worldwide unrest, and who doesn’t love a revenge drama? But as the story unfolds it becomes a jumble of ideas that are never pulled together in a tight enough package to become truly engaging.
Malek is in virtually every scene and acquits himself well as the smartest-guy-in-the-room-with-a-grudge, but there’s never any real heat around the character. We are told over and over how brilliant he is, so while he plays a life-and-death game of “Survivor” with the baddies, it’s almost a certainty that he will Outwit, Outplay and Outlast everyone. The predictable nature of his near misses and close scrapes becomes less interesting with every minute of the film’s runtime.
And don’t get me started on the underuse of Rachel Brosnahan, who is barely given any screen time, and when she is, is relegated to playing an idealized version of Charles’ wife. Laurence Fishburne fares better but is still a stock character. He plays a no-nonsense tough guy, ripe with gravitas. It feels like the original script called for a “Laurence Fishburn type” and then they were lucky enough to get Laurence Fishburn. It’s a shame they don’t give him more to do.
As a thriller “The Amateur” rarely raises the pulse rate, but it is as a vehicle for its supporting actors that it really disappoints.
Steeped in tragedy and trauma, “The Iron Claw,” a movie about the Von Erich wrestling family starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, and now playing in theatres, isn’t a sports movie. Set against the backdrop of professional wrestling, the movie is study of toxic masculinity and how the sins of the father can be visited on their sons.
The film begins with Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) patriarch of the championship Von Erich wrestling dynasty. Early in his career, in an attempt to create a villainous heel persona, he changed his name from Jack Adkisson to the German sounding Fritz Von Erich. The switch purposely stoked post-war animosity and made him a wrestler audiences loved to hate.
In the ring he was a relentless competitor, the purveyor of the deadly Iron Claw, his much-feared finishing move that squeezed his opponent’s face into mush. Outside the ring his drive to win saw him push his sons Kevin (Efron), Kerry (White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons), into the family business.
“Now, we all know Kerry’s my favourite, then Kev, then David, then Mike,” said Fritz. “But the rankings can always change.”
Under Fritz’s hardnosed guidance, the Von Erich’s became one of the first wrestling families to become popular, winning championship belts and fans for their high-flying, acrobatic style but their accomplishments are tempered by tragedy, which son Kevin blames on a curse brought on by the family’s adopted name.
“Ever since I was a child, people said my family was cursed,” Kevin said. “Mom tried to protect us with God. Dad tried to protect us with wrestling. He said if we were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us. I believed him. We all did.”
“The Iron Claw” is about sports, and clearly stars Efron and White spent time in the gym to prepare for their shirtless bouts in the ring, but like all good sports movies it isn’t about the sport. It’s about the universal subjects of tragedy, brotherhood, brawn and bullies. The backdrop may be unusual, but anyone who has ever been browbeaten by a bully will find notes that resonate in the Von Erich story.
At the heart of the film are Efron and White as sons Kevin and Kerry. Both hand in performances etched by their physicality but deepened by the emotional turmoil that envelopes each character.
Efron digs deep in a career best performance. As Kevin watches his family fall apart, he slips into a depression, afraid that the curse is real and may affect his own wife (Lily James) and kids. For such a physical film, it’s internal work that reveals a well of emotion and sublimated anger underneath the character’s bulky frame.
White has a showier role, but as Kerry, the son who pays a huge personal price for wanting to please his overbearing father at any cost, he is more outward in his reactions to the story’s twists, but the sadness he carries with him is palpable.
Maura Tierney does a lot with little as mother Doris Von Erich. A stoic figure, when her buried feelings threaten to overflow, the look on her face has such quiet intensity it speaks louder than words.
McCallany has a much larger role. He is the catalyst, the bully who pushed his sons toward the ring by any means necessary. He’s the movie’s obvious boogeyman. Trouble is, the family can’t see it until it is too late.
“The Iron Claw” is a slow moving, somber movie that looks beyond the ring to focus on the price this family paid for success.
In recent years we’ve seen Liam Neeson morph from dramatic actor to action star. He’s battled everything from human traffickers and Mexican cartels to hijackers and murderous drug dealers. His latest, “The Ice Road” sees him up against his most daunting adversary yet—a long stretch of frozen ocean.
Neeson is Mike, a grizzled big rig driver who cares for his Iraq war veteran brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas). Gurty is a master mechanic but his PTSD has made it difficult for the brothers to stay employment. When a diamond mine in Northern Canada collapses, they accept a job offer from Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) to be part of a convoy delivering lifesaving equipment to the remote mine location.
The brothers team with Goldenrod and Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), a fearless young woman whose brother is trapped in the mine, to navigate three 65,000 pound vehicles over “ice roads,” frozen lakes, rivers and oceans to deliver life-saving equipment.
There’s more but I can’t describe the plot’s main thrust without a major spoiler. Suffice to say, there is a villain so dastardly all that’s missing is a giant moustache to twirl.
The drama in “The Ice Road” quickly melts away like ice before a fire, leaving behind a residue of clichés, long, drawn out action and fight scenes and dialogue borrowed from a hundred other, better action movies.
Director Jonathan Hensleigh, writer of the screenplays for “Jumanji,” “Armageddon” and “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” struggles to bring the popcorn thrills of his best-known work to this movie.
Even the death of one of the major players (NO SPOILERS HERE) is so abrupt and undramatic, it’s as if the actor had a doctor’s appointment and had to leave the set suddenly.
It’s too bad because there’s lots to work with. Start with Man-against-nature. Move along to a pantomime villain and throw in some of Neeson’s trademarked grimaces and growls and you could have an enjoyable b-movie but the hackneyed relationships and threadbare special effects sink the whole thing.
“The Ice Road” is a long (why did this have to be 103 minutes long?) winding road to nowhere; all build up and no pay off.
Richard joins Ryan Doyle and Jay Michaels of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show to talk the murky origins of the Mai Tai, a drink that became so popular in the 1960s it caused a worldwide rum shortage! We also talk about what to watch on the weekend!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
A remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur,” “Wrath of Man,” now playing in theatres and coming soon to VOD, is a revenge/heist flick that sees director Guy Ritchie reunited with his trademarked tricky storytelling style, Jason Statham and the ruthless violence that made his early movies such eye poppers.
Statham plays “’H’, like in bomb,” a man of few words with a mysterious past. Big surprise there. They should call him Gazpacho because he is the coolest of cool cucumbers. No matter what, this guy’s pulse rate never rises above 50 beats per minute.
When we first meet him, he takes a job as a security guard for Fortico, a Los Angeles armored car company. A recent robbery left three people dead and made the surviving guards edgy and uneasy. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this job can be?” a coworker named Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett) asks him. “We ain’t the predator, we’re the prey.”
When some very bad people attempt to rob one of the company’s cash trucks “H” reveals a special set of skills to the shock and awe of his co-workers. “It doesn’t feel right,” says security guard Bullet (Holt McCallany). “It’s like he wants the trucks to get hit.”
As the bodies pile up “H’s” lethal past is exposed and it becomes clear that he didn’t take the gig at the armored car company simply because he needed a week to week pay cheque. “I can do in two weeks,” “H” says to the shadowy Agent King (Andy Garcia), “what you wish you could do in twenty years.”
Told on a broken timeline and sectioned-off into chapters with names like “Bad, Animals, Bad” and “Scorched Earth,” the movie’s plot can be boiled down to one line. “I do bear a grudge,” “H” says, summing up the film’s raison d’etre as bullets fly and bodies pile up. A nihilistic story about revenge decorated with a tense heist subplot, it’s a riff on Statham’s earlier work in which he usually played either Character #1, a “loner with a past who must protect a loved one,” or Character #2, the “loner with a past who must protect a youthful innocent.”
Here he shakes things up by showing a disregard for the lives of some while avenging the loss of a loved one. Gone is the jokey Statham of “Spy” and his over-the-top “Fast and Furious” work. This is a back-to-basics performance that sees him settle on one facial expression, as though his chiseled face is encased in amber, to convey the character’s one deadly motive. The taciturn thing has worked for him before and it works well here. “H” is no laughing matter. Danger follows him around, and Statham’s coiled spring performance, no matter how basic, suggests that ultra-violence could erupt at any moment. It gives the movie much of its edge as Ritchie navigates the grim but stylish goings-on.
Are there plot holes? Yes. I can’t go into them without giving the story away but let’s just say “H’s” resilience is impressive.
Somewhere buried deep in the gunplay there is an elegance to “Wrath of Man.” Ritchie’s tough-talking film is tautly crafted, and, for those expecting “Snatch” style editing tricks, quite restrained.
The editing, not the violence.
Shot through a hail of bullets, the movie builds to a tense “Heat” style climax that doesn’t waste time or ammo. The jittery atmosphere is amped up by an angrily effective score from composer Chris Benstead.
On the downside, Ritchie’s taste for macho posturing doesn’t add much to the film’s early scenes. There are barely any female characters, save for Niamh Algar’s security guard Dana and assorted wife characters, and the hard-boiled dialogue between the often men borders on parody.
“Wrath of Man” is bleak and the characters are all, at best, anti-heroes, but for those with a taste for adrenaline pumping action set pieces, “Wrath of Man” delivers.
TODAY! TODAY! TODAY! The worst movie on four wheels! No adrenaline pumping action! “Monster Trucks!” We’ll sell you the whole seat… to make it easy to take a nap!
“Monster Trucks” begins when avaricious oil baron Reece Tenneson (Rob Lowe) insists on drilling through an underground water main to get to “the ocean of oil” that lies underneath despite the possibility of disturbing the life forms that may live down there. “If we keep this quiet will all do very well,” cackles Tenneson. His greed unleashes several strange creatures, sort of land squids with big googly eyes, whom he immediately orders destroyed.
On the other side of town Tripp (Lucas Till) is a curiously old high school student and scrap yard worker. He’s a blonde James Dean type, an outsider more comfortable around cars than people. When one of these creatures shows up at his junkyard he doesn’t set it free, nor does he call the authorities. After discovering oil is this tentacled creature’s mother’s milk, as any true grease monkey would do, he straps it to the underside of an old truck he’s been working on, using it as a super-charged engine, literally turning his old junker into a “monster truck.”
With the help of biology student Meredith (Jane Levy) and the creature—who Tripp inventively nicknames Creatch—our hero tries find out exactly where his oil-guzzling new friend came from.
Fittingly “Monster Trucks,” a movie about automobiles, is my first seatbelt movie of the year. It is a film so bad I needed to a seatbelt to keep me in my chair for the entire movie.
Forget that Tripp looks old enough to be his high school classmates’ hip guidance counsellor or that the sum total of the great Amy Smart’s role is advising her son what to eat for lunch or that a sea monster appears in the landlocked state of North Dakota. That stuff is bad enough, but the thing that really puts “Monster Trucks” on a collision course with the ditch is a complete lack of playfulness.
What might have been a fun action-adventure with a kid friendly sci fi twist is, instead, a collection of lame brained ideas that feel strung and in search of a heartwarming or interesting moment. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” another alien movie, works not because we believe the little rubber alien is real but because we care about the way that Elliot, Gertie and Michael interact with him. Despite the presence of a rubber alien it feels authentic and not cobbled together by a marketing department.
When Tripp’s dad (Frank Whaley) says, “It’s like the earth got mad and let something bad out,” he may well have been speaking about this movie and not Creatch.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Cobie Smulders has been in action movies a plenty, but she’s rarely part of the action. That changes in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
Opposite Tom Cruise, Smulders plays Major Susan Turner, a decorated solider accused of espionage. To prove her innocence she teams with Jack Reacher in a battle for the truth.
“I was really excited about doing some action scenes,” says the Canadian born actress who played former director of the planetary intelligence service S.H.I.E.L.D. Maria Hill in various Avengers movies as well on television.
“I’d done some quote, unquote action movies before, through The Avengers and the Marvel Universe. I’d be part of some of their stuff but I missed out on most of the fun fight sequences. Jumping on this, I knew I would get to do more fighting, hands on, rather than standing next to the superheroes while they do all the fighting.”
She has more than her share of up-close-and-personal battle sequences, bare knuckling her way through the story at a breakneck pace, but were the scenes as fun to shoot as she thought they would?
“That’s a great question because sometimes they are not,” she laughs. “They are quite technical and they can drag on. When it is fast and intense, they’re really fun because it’s like an adrenaline rush. It’s like doing a choreographed dance with somebody. But when they drag on and it becomes about the minutia of like, ‘We have to do the insert of the picking up of the meat tenderizer and we have to do it from this angle and that angle,’ it takes the magic out of it.”
A magical experience or not, Smulders, who will next be seen in the action comedy Why We’re Killing Gunther opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, says the scenes helped her performance.
“For me all the training and all the fighting helped me get into the character,” she says. “There were days when I would push past breaking points and think, I can’t take this anymore, and then I would go further. It got easier and easier. It was really painful at first but I always kept that in the back of my mind, what this woman would have had to go through, and what women and men in the military have to go through.
“I think anybody who decides to enlist in the military and do all the work it takes to become a major is somebody who is much stronger than I will ever be.
“She’s a woman we say has graduated Ranger School. When we started shooting the movie that hadn’t happened yet; no women had graduated from Ranger School. Then during the shoot the first two women graduated. If I am playing a woman who can endure that type of training, then this should be like a piece of cake, what I’m doing on set.”
Cruise and Smulders play a sort of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a deadly duo who never allow romance to get in the way of their appetite for bodily destruction. Their relationship is a mix of Roadhouse style fighting and humorous rom com dialogue.
“To not have these characters get together romantically,” Smulders says, “was more interesting to watch than having a love scene in the middle of the movie.”
Who exactly is Jack Reacher? If you are a reader, he’s the protagonist of twenty books by British author Lee Child. If you’re a moviegoer, he’s a bone crunching former Major in the United States Army Military Police Corps who looks a lot like Tom Cruise. According to the new movie “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back,” he’s “the guy you didn’t count on.”
When we first see Reacher it’s four years after his exploits in his eponymous debut film. With the help of Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) he has just broken up—and beaten up—a ring of smugglers. When he arrives in Washington to thank her, and possibly wine and dine her, he is shocked to discover she’s been court-martialled, accused of espionage. His efforts to get to the bottom of the case suggest she was arrested because she had a hard drive with sensitive info. “What did you expect,” he’s asked, “a picture of her in a Burka and having drinks with the Taliban?” After a daring prison break, he and Turner hit the road, trading quips and punching faces with a deadly ex-military hit man (Patrick Heusinger) hot on their trail. Their efforts to clear her name and uncover a far-reaching conspiracy are complicated by the presence of Samantha (Danika Yarosh), a fifteen year old who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter.
The addition of a kid changes the dynamic of the film. The first Reacher movie was a fun but violent ride, designed to keep fans of Cruise’s actionman persona happy until the next “Mission Impossible” instalment came along. It was an old fashioned movie, the kind of flick that Steven Seagal might have starred in circa 1992. It was a bare-bones action movie and predictable but Van Dammit, taken for what it was, it was also a bit of fun.
The new one delivers much of what we expect—the Statham-esque levels of hand-to-hand kick assery and the Tom Cruise Run©, hands extended, arms akimbo, are present—but this is a kinder, gentler Reacher. He’s still a violent animal who can kill you in three hundred different ways, but he’s more human now. At least he’s not a total monster, even while he’s snapping someone’s spine.
The movie rips along at a fast pace, bareknuckling its way through the story at a breakneck pace. Cruise and Smulders are sort of a Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a deadly duo who never allow romance to get in the way of their appetite for bodily destruction. Their relationship is a mix of “Roadhouse” style fighting and cutesy rom com dialogue.
It all adds up to an action movie for those who like a dose of sentimentality with their spinal injuries.
