expendables | the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: Escape Plan

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Darren

Escape Plan doesn’t demand too much. It doesn’t demand too much from its lead actors, and it doesn’t demand too much from its audience. A film about watching two of the biggest action stars of the eighties teaming up should be a celebratory occasion – a trip down memory lane, one last go-around for old time’s sake as we watch this dynamic duo escape a mysterious “off the grid” prison which seems quite like the place I imagined all eighties action stars go in the end.

Instead, Escape Plan feels like the middle section of John Woo’s Face/Off extended out to a two-hour feature film, the story of a man who shouldn’t be in prison forced to escape from a futuristic science-fiction gulag through a series of overly-elaborate action set-pieces. There is, quite frankly, not enough here to support the movie’s extended runtime, with the script never daring to swerve sharply away from expectations or clichés. Escape Plan delivers exactly what the premise promises, but nothing more and never with anything approaching enthusiasm.

Old-timer hard-timers…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Amy Ryan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Demand, EscapePlan, expendables, Jim Caviezel, Julian Assange, Rocky Balboa, Schwarzenegger, sony, Sound Shapes, sylvester stallone | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: RED 2

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Darren

Red 2 is a stronger film than Red, although it’s still not quite a wholly satisfying cinematic experience. There’s a certain charm to watching all these veteran stars reuniting on the screen together, with a considerably lighter touch than The Expendables. What’s interesting about Red 2 isn’t a dearth of good ideas or interesting hooks in the set-up of this sequel, it’s just a littler rushed, a little unfocused, a little disjointed. However, Red 2 generally moves so fast that these problems never quite reach critical mass. The result is more-than-occasionally great fun, but also just a little too light for its own good.

Growing old disgracefully…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: anthony hopkins, brian cox, bruce willis, Catherine Zeta-Jones, expendables, film, hannibal lecter, helen mirren, john malkovich, Karl Urban, London, Mary Louise Parker, Moscow, Moses, Movie, non-review review, RED, review | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Last Stand

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Darren

In theory, The Expendables demonstrated that age was no real impairment when it came to the task of kicking ass and taking names, even if you might need to put your reading glasses on first. So, you could argue that the issue of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s age doesn’t really need to come up during The Last Stand. We know that he is 65 years of age, and we also know that he’s probably a great deal fitter than most of us will be at that age. (Being honest, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that a hexagenarian Arnie could trump most people in their prime.) As a result, the fixation of The Last Stand on the age of its leading man feels a little strange.

It feels especially strange because it eats into a lot of the film. The Last Stand is mostly functional, but its pacing suffers greatly. We’re going to see an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, so it’s safe to assume that (a.) we’re okay with his advancing age, and (b.) we want to see him kick some whippersnapper ass. Unfortunately, The Last Stand seems to misjudge the audience’s interest in an Arnie film, and as a result our leading man spends most of the first three-quarters of the film doing very little.

The Last Stand is clearly intended to demonstrate the viability of its leading man in this modern age, but it seems to lack the confidence to just dive into the action that this sort of film is meant to provide. The result is a strange mish-mash of a film that winds up wasting a lot of good will long before it reaches its climax.

He’s back!

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Arnie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California, Christopher Nolan, expendables, Fast & The Furious, film, last stand, Movie, non-review review, politics, Ray Owens, review, Steven Seagal, sylvester stallone, United States | 1 Comment »

Justice League – Starcrossed (Parts I, II & III) (Review)

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Darren

Starcrossed serves as something of a grand finalé to the first two seasons of Justice League. At the time it was written, Timm and his fellow creators weren’t assured of another season. When they did get another season, the show was massively revamped – repracing the team of seven with a much broader cast of characters, scaling down the multi-part episodes to stand-alone adventures, and building on its own themes. As such, Starcrossed can be seen as a conclusion to this era of the show, tying up loose ends and also serving as an impressive showcase for each of the major character featured.

Flights of fancy…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Arnold Schwarzenegger, batman, bruce timm, Brucetimm, Damme, diana, Dolph Lundgren, expendables, geoff johns, Hawkgirl, ivan reis, jim lee, john stewart, justice league, Justiceleague, lex luthor, Paul Levitz, pragmatism, superman, sylvester stallone, Van Damme, Video game | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Expendables 2

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Darren

There’s a very thin line between being a tribute to something and becoming an example of it. The Expendables sold itself as an affectionate homage to the cheesy eighties action movies that you’d find populating the godforsaken post-midnight hours on a local television station. They’re the kind of movies we remember with a sense of casual fondness – we don’t lie to ourselves that they were great, but focus on the cheesy one-liners and the ridiculous stunts and the scenery-chewing bad guys. Unfortunately, those movies generally weren’t as good as we remember them. We omit certain details – the terrible pseudo-political subtext shoehorned in, the cringe-worthy character work, the pacing issues, the performances that aren’t so bad they become good, but are instead so bad that they remain bad. The Expendables felt like a revived eighties late-night action movie, rather than a tribute to our cultural memory of one.

So I was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed The Expendables 2, the sequel to the all-star actioner. It seems to have learned a lot from its predecessor and feels like exactly the sort of light and brainless entertainment we remember, rather than the mind-numbingly bad films we actually watched.

Eighties action movie reunion!

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: bruce willis, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, expendables, expendables 2, film, Jason Statham, Jean-Claude Van Damme, mercenaries, Movie, non-review review, review, Stallone, sylvester stallone, the expendables 2 | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Twilight – Breaking Dawn, Part I

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Darren

Twilight tends to generate a great deal of controversy on the internet, which is something I’ve never really understood. After all, all aspects of fandom – movies, television, comic books, video games – tend to suffer from a mainstream prejudice, so it seems strange that Twilight should attract such a harsh response from fans of other niche culture. In fact, I’d subscribe to the argument that Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part I is just like any other major franchise film, like The Expendables or Transformers III. The only major difference is that it’s aimed at the female demographic rather than a male one. Keep in mind this isn’t a defense (it has many of the same weaknesses as those two films), but rather an observation – it’s something I’ve always found strange.

To have and to hold...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Anna Kendrick, bella, breaking dawn, edward, Edward Cullen, expendables, film, Movie, non-review review, review, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, taylor lautner, Team Edward, team Jacob, The Twilight Saga, the twilight saga: breaking dawn, twilight, Twilight Saga, twilight: breaking dawn | 10 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Expendables

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Darren

Nostalgia is a double-edged sword. When it was mentioned that Sly Stallone would be putting together a dream team of action movie stand-bys – Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren – our minds immediately go to a happy a place. We remember the joys of films like Rambo: First Blood or Die Hard or Total Recall. However, we forget that a great many of the films produced over that iconic era we look back to were also just plain terrible (or, at best, woefully mundane): Red Heat, Cobra, Tango and Cash, among many others. Sadly The Expendables stands more with the latter than the former. Which is a damn shame.