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 turgid credits 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.
Mental movie and in a good way. It has a lot to say about media and brainwashing but in typical Cronenberg style it’s through humans disintegrating or losing their marbles. It’s not as bad as Dr. Ian Malcolm vomiting on a sweet delicacy and metamorphosing into an insect, but it approaches it. One would always confuse the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg. They are thematically so similar, but Lynch veering more into dream territory and Cronenberg the flesh. This could have been a Lynch movie, though.
Videodrome (1983) is some experience, and I had to watch it twice to figure out what I thought was going on. It’s never boring and always … well, nuts.
And Blondie is in it but with brown hair.
Further reading:
https://www.slashfilm.com/1520335/videodrome-david-cronenberg-ending-explained/
I didn’t know what to make of this. Nothing happens but it does. The ‘conflict’ isn’t about anything important; zero character arcs. It got a bit dull. The quotes are memorable. It looks fabulous.
I saw it in the cinema in 2007 with a bucket of Blue WKDs. It was a masterpiece back then.
I’ll give it another whirl in a few weeks. With some Blue WKDs.
A very weak Costner performance, especially when you consider that the real-life Kenny O’Donnell had little bearing on these events. The role stinks of ego and the movie is better when he doesn’t feature. Sadly, he’s never off the screen.
The actors playing the Kennedy brothers are also fucking dire.
Actually, fuck this film. It was pish.
An initially gruesome watch in an almost delightful way but it ran out of steam.
A high-concept slice of manky that precursors the Saw franchise, it knows how to ramp up the claustrophobia, a motley company of strangers stuck in a booby-trapped cube of nasties.
Sadly, the characters end up biting the dust (either physically or as characters) just as they start to demand our interest/respect. They are second fiddle to the tension and contrivances that are unbearable at times and I’m guessing that was the point.
It’s great for 45 mins. Sadly, it proceeds into the rubbish. Why are they in a cube? What was really happening? Why was I losing interest the longer this story went on? I wanted answers; I got none.
A cube does not warrant 90 mins.
Several things about this movie annoyed me prior to watching it: it’s a reboot of a disaster flick that isn’t any good, it features that immensely vexing bloke from Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and I hate films about the weather – aside from Groundhog Day (1993), which is weather as MacGuffin.
Barrels resembling Quint’s annoyed me. It’s an opening wee scene and a protagonist introduces herself via one of these vlogs and there are barrels in the frame. At least be subtle in your references.
Dialogue was from the dustbin and I could predict almost every other line a character was about to say.
Some of it is good – the effects are splendid. There is at least chemistry between the leads.
But one of the characters is the spitting image of Noah Tannenbaum from season three of The Sopranos, so this loses half a star.
1.5/5.
This is the perfect little gem and remarkably not stupid or annoying.
A genuinely witty high school comedy with a dazzling Heath Ledger, it belongs to that magical period in cinema that is 1999, a year of glory. The only shite thing about this film is that it’s just 90 mins long, and let’s ponder the miracle that both this and Cruel Intentions (1999) occupy the same space.
It was 1999, though.
It’s not The Fugitive (1993), but what could be?
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.
I’ve had worse viewing experiences.
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.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 