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.
A first viewing of this odd, quite daft, and extremely watchable slice of hokum. It’s the kind of script a wee kid would write, and it’s somehow a movie. The camera work was so ridiculous, outrageous in the angles.
Galling one-liners and self-referential in-jokes and dull characters constantly referencing they’re in a multiverse. What else? Superhero cameos galore, and fight scenes set to pop hits (how clever). And Ryan Reynolds and his inability to shut the fuck up for even 20 seconds. I suppose that’s the point, but his voice is too annoying to endure for a full movie.
I waited outside for the last half hour, so I don’t know how it ended.
Aesthetically perfect movie with a protagonist’s tunnel vision style that works, an actual reasoning behind it – it’s the antithesis of the self-indulgent. Much more than a ‘noble’, culturally significant picture, it’s as honest with its brutality as you can get, and vice versa. It did recall for me One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and uses all the tools of cinematic technique to tell a story so gripping, relentless, and powerful in its immediacy.
A searing portrait of Hell on Earth, this is not a film you’ll forget.
Elizabeth (1998), oh yes. I’d say masterpiece, a political thriller dressed up for marketing intentions as a costume drama, which it is.
This sequel? Oh, it was so BAD. It felt painful, my ears screeching and eyes gouged. This review cracked me up, though:
Michael Gove, MP and Minister/Secretary of Whatever: ‘It tells the story of England’s past in a way which someone who’s familiar with the Whig tradition of history would find, as I did, completely sympathetic. It’s amazing to see a film made now that is so patriotic … One of the striking things about this film is that it’s almost a historical anomaly. I can’t think of a historical period film in which England and the English have been depicted heroically for the last forty or fifty years. You almost have to go back to Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare’s Henry V in which you actually have an English king and English armies portrayed heroically.’
That’s the worst review I’ve ever read. But the unintentional comedic elements of the writing trumps the movie.
It’s a horrible film. Writing this even depressed me.
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.