Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) is a severely underappreciated movie.
It is dark, gritty, and violent; I’m shocked it was released as a PG-13. I find it highly amusing that they are tutored by this fuck-off rat with a Japanese accent. It’s a demonstration of respecting your elders.
The movie perfectly captures how bad New York was during that H. W. Bush era, a post-Reagan hangover from hell with crack epidemics, failed economics, and generally being surrounded by cunts. The picture, incredibly, almost approaches Scorsese in this regard.
John Woo in his Hong Kong heyday made the most insane actioners of his time, movies that defied categorisation to the extent that he created a new genre. His pictures were somehow operatic and you could absorb real feeling from them. That and the mayhem, the bullets, the exploding heads, the carnage which seemed to have been concocted by Hannibal (psychiatrist, not conqueror of the Alps).
He ventured into the States and helmed the barking Face/Off (1997) and sadly never topped that, but how could he?
Now we’ve got a remake, for whatever reason, of one of his indelible HK masterworks.
It was depressing in its pointlessness, visually as dull as these things come. The scenes are shot and edited just like I would expect from your standard hacks for hire. Not a shred of artistic imprint was on this vacuous yarn. I didn’t think it could get any worse but then Eric Cantona turns up, looking away with the fairies and perplexed, which I found most perplexing. Fabulously talented football player. But he has the acting talent of a Wookie interviewing for the Third Reich.
This is the best-looking movie about gruesome happenings of the soul and imagination.
You’re seduced, almost, into its albeit engrossing web of cruelty through the outrageous grandiosity of its style; it’s obsessively framed and lit. Yet it somehow never descends into the pretentious, a rare movie that pulls off its conceit.
And Michael Shannon is in it and he can do no wrong.
This is a good movie in a landscape of capes and all that.
This is based on a lauded video game. I haven’t heard of it or played it, so I won’t bother alluding to the geneses of 2007’s Hitman. Timothy Olyphant has been around forever and he’s a fine actor but has never quite hit the A-list. I mind him first rocking up as the zany Mickey (“the freaky Tarantino film student!”) in Scream 2 (1997) and the slimy drug dealer in Go (1999). He’s had decent work ever since, though he was a monotonous ‘presence’ in Die Hard 4.0 (2007), but that’s down to having zilch to work with.
This movie kicks off with one of the most turgidcredits sequences I’ve seen, with ‘Ava Maria’ joining in the snores. The lack of originality wasn’t a shock; the entire film being an imitation number wasn’t, either.
It has a bit of visual verve to it, and we have a sympathetic protagonist (Olyphant is good) with more layers than I expected for this variety of trash. The dialogue, though, is so lumpen and stilted it’s like R2-D2 beeped the words and had them translated by a writer on the expired soap opera of mank that was Brookside. “Eat your sandwich, I need to get some sleep,” orders our eponymous hitman to Olga Kurylenko. Profound words. It’s a full 90 mins of this kind of exchange.
To add to the melting pot of the derivative, Dougray Scott (“I coulda been Wolverine”) is also in it with his Received Pronunciation Scottish accent, Sean Ambrose from Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) but as an Interpol agent. The plot is confusing and confused; even the actors seem confused as to what is actually happening and why. The totality of this flick is that it’s Bourne-lite and Luc Besson-lite at the same time.
Shite, but just shite. It has no pretensions to be anything else, so it receives a 1/5 from me.
An entirely unnecessary sequel with no character development or anything approaching the battle of smarts that was Indiana Solo vs. Tommy Lee Jones, but it has a few thrills, and Robert Downey Jr. thankfully keeps his rote muttering shtick to a minimum.
And Tommy Lee Jones dresses up as a chicken for the purposes of law enforcement.
Another John Badham movie?! This bloke directed everything, your journeyman hack for hire. Talented, though.
Here we have Wesley Snipes and the frankly barking Gary Busey in the same movie. It’s hokum but good for what it is. The action is splendid, and it just about makes up for a highly annoying performance from ‘90s resident oddball Michael Jeter.
It’s also a shame what happened to Snipes as he’s a decent actor.
It’s alright. Just don’t be expecting anything deep.
Yet another doozy from the ’80s starring Kathleen Turner. She is synonymous with the decade and doesn’t exist outside of it in a cinematic sense, a fate shared by a rarefied club of period-tied stars like Burt Reynolds (1970s), a heyday of hits followed by relative obscurity and the occasional flourish. This movie is a swansong of sorts from the great John Huston; it’s a testament to his talents that he somehow made it from the The Maltese Falcon (1941) all the way to this, a career spanning, indeed making, the history of the superlative decades of cinema as we know them.
It’s a fine wee movie, even if the cast have way too much gravitas about them for starring in what is a bit of black comedy fluff. The score by the renowned Alex North is okay, the soundtrack less so. It’s a recycling of tunes popularised in other movies. Why do filmmakers do this? If a musical piece is in a seminal flick, just don’t bother appropriating it again.
This was shockingly not crap. Which was a bit funny. A decent wee movie.
You’d call it The Football Factory (2004) of its age, that and a who’s who of almost-made-it British acting talent. Spot Jay’s dad from The Inbetweeners in that snap.
The tale is what it is, to adopt the cliché. Ah, the ‘90s – when swaggering gremlins (sans Gizmo) on the sauce kicking the fuck out of each other in boozers and the terraces for no reason were bonding through a bit of the ol’ fisticuffs. How we’ve grown up since ….
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 