Nobody 2.

Review #2411: Nobody 2.

Cast: 

Bob Odenkirk (Hutch Mansell), Connie Nielsen (Becca Mansell), John Ortiz (Wyatt Martin), Colin Hanks (Abel), RZA (Harry Mansell), Christopher Lloyd (David Mansell), Sharon Stone (Lendina), Colin Salmon (The Barber), Gage Munroe (Brady Mansell), Paisley Cadorath (Sammy Mansell), Daniel Bernhardt (Kartoush), and Lucius Hoyos (Max Martin) Directed by Timo Tjahjanto.

Review: 

You might remember that Nobody (2021) was a bit of a delight in what one could call an "addiction drama about a man whose addiction is violence." Derek Kolstad wrote the script for that movie, and it probably is a good omen that he returns to write the script (having sole credit for the story and co-writing the screenplay with Aaron Rabin). Sure, maybe the punchline at the end of the day was that an action hero was being inhabited by Bob Odenkirk, but it was a pretty neat movie in both showing someone who did look the part for an action movie and had fun with it (and, apparently, the training regimen done for that movie probably saved his life when he had a heart issue in 2021). The movie is directed by Timo Tjahjanto, a West German-born Indonesian filmmaker making his American debut after five movies made in his native Indonesia. For the most part, a good deal of the cast from the first film reprise their roles for this film.

The movie might be on vacation a bit, but at least it does have some entertainment value for the most basic of requirements. On the average scale of action movies, it probably would be in the middle between the 2025 slate of Novocaine and Ballerina, and it certainly wouldn't top the first Nobody, but being an average sequel is not a bad thing. Instead of trying to cope with the idea of just being a dull family man, we now have a guy who just kicks ass and thinks he can simply just ride that wave for a while that really can't just have a break. I guess one's nature makes things inevitable for someone who just allows things to get nuts. Do I expect more from certain action movies? Eh....not really. In fact, sometimes an action movie beat could resemble the horror movie in where I play generous because God only knows what would happen if either genre was at the mercy of streaming.* Odenkirk is still pretty game to carry the proceedings with worthwhile believability that can look and sound the part of an asskicker (to an extent) while having the troubles that come with someone who just can't resist scratching the proverbial itch. Nielsen is relatively fine in the same way that one is accepting of a dark cloud gathering because they are clearly ready with an umbrella in hand, I suppose. Stone is actually pretty neat as the routine villain, minus the fact that one could do with most (all?) of the lines stating how scary she is meant to be (ooh, she'll kill your bloodline if you cross her, what's next, she'll clone you to kill you again?), because she just has that basic instinctual touch to seem unnerving enough already. You get a smidge of time with others that are mostly "hey, that's nice" or "sure", so there's that. The action sequences are generally satisfying in the staging that mostly keeps things fresh, as signified with having a duck boat involved to go with a few chuckles in the lingering absurdity that comes with a vacation area becoming the most evident staging area for mayhem. The ending is, well, surely a bit too familiar, mainly because it thrives on conveniences for nearly too much of its 89 minutes (the last movie also started and ended in the same place, naturally) and I'm not entirely sure this is a movie that needs a follow up to feel whole. As a whole, Nobody 2 is a casual trek through the proverbial woods of movie-shuffling, one that achieves most of what it sets out to do in vacation-based action beats. I don't really know if there is a profound desire for a third of these movies, but I can always endorse a decent time with an action movie when it seems necessary to do so, so there's that, I suppose.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

*Arguably, you have stuff happen to people in action movies that would fit right in for horror movies, such as say, a dart to the eye.

Resident Evil.

Review #2158: Resident Evil.

Cast: 

Milla Jovovich (Alice), Michelle Rodriguez (Rain Ocampo), Eric Mabius (Matthew "Matt" Addison), James Purefoy (Spence Parks), Martin Crewes (Chad Kaplan), Colin Salmon (James "One" Shade), Ryan McCluskey (Mr. Grey), Oscar Pearce (Mr. Green), Indra Ové (Ms. Black), and Michaela Dicker (Red Queen) Written and Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. (#1670 - Mortal Kombat and #1688 - Alien vs. Predator)

Review: 

"This film is the explanatory prequel that game players have always wanted to see, using the scary mechanisms and devices that have become part of the Resident Evil cyber culture. I felt the idea was the correct approach for both people who had never heard of the game and for the avid players who will get all the references included just for them."

Surprisingly, I had thought about doing this film in each of the last two fall seasons. I thought to myself, hmm, I hear it has zombies, why not think of it? Well, sometimes things just don't go your way (. The source material for the film is what else but a video game (known as Biohazard in Japan and Southeast Asia but Resident Evil everywhere else), as created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara that was created in 1996. Constantin Film purchased the film rights a year after the release of the first game and had a handful of names considered in the development process. Somehow, they went through the process of enlisting script ideas from a line that went from Alan B. McElroy to George A. Romero to Jamie Blanks and said no each time. So... they instead went with a man who apparently wrote a script that was a "ripoff" of the aforementioned Evil game after playing it. Made on a budget of roughly $33 million, the resulting success with audiences led to a slew of sequels in Apocalypse (2004), Extinction (2007), Afterlife (2010), Retribution (2012), and The Final Chapter (2016), for which Jovovich was featured as the one consistent star to go with Anderson being the writer of each one (while directing most of the sequels). 

They wanted to make a movie that wouldn't imitate the game in every detail but instead try to siphon that shock and horror feeling for a film. This is the kind of movie you could probably watch while doing your taxes. Things that barely register as things happen in the film that actually made me wonder how you can read a George A. Romero script, see it as destined for the "NC-17" rating and decide, nay, we must go with Paul W. S. Anderson. I find more urgency in looking for the remote that may or may not be wedged somewhere in the space between the couch and the wall than what happens in this puddle of a movie. I never played the Resident Evil video games, but I can certainly say that it is pretty hard to get me spooked when playing a video game in general...what the hell is different from film-to-video game adaptation? I can't even call this a fun type of B-movie, because it really manages to make 100 minutes feel like a tremendous waste of time in terms of the idea of trying to "shock" me with nonsense. One whole film goes by and I feel like nothing has happened to make one want to see sequels of this, with the "Umbrella Corporation" and their massive interest in dominating the markets and being used for the military just gives me a blank expression. Jovovich seems unsure as to where to really go in terms of "follow the path as the action lead", and it isn't exactly the best compliment when the only noteworthy sequence to highlight is a "flying kick" applied to a effects creature. The rest of the actors seem clinically stuck in second gear, with that bare idea of interest that really makes me wonder if Uwe Boll saw stuff like this and decided that he could do video game movies just like that. Even the scene of folks trying to escape deadly lasers (ones that slice you in the same way one wishes they could slice beef) just seems bland. It is a "5" because it doesn't give me that particular feeling of being just short of mediocrity but instead being shorter than even the too-average things. You really find a feeling of "phone it in" when it comes to thinking about this film, where it is not particularly good in any one consistent territory nor terrible in all of the aspects to really scare someone out. One either goes with the flow and looks further with those other features or they move on with their day and do something else. 

Overall, I give it 5 out of 10 stars.

Alien vs. Predator.

Review #1688: Alien vs. Predator.

Cast: 

Sanaa Lathan (Alexa "Lex" Woods), Raoul Bova (Professor Sebastian De Rosa), Lance Henriksen (Charles Bishop Weyland), Ewen Bremner (Dr. Graeme Miller), Colin Salmon (Maxwell Stafford), Tommy Flanagan (Mark Verheiden), Carsten Norgaard (Rusten Quinn), Joseph Rye (Joe Connors), Agathe de La Boulaye (Adele Rousseau), Sam Troughton (Thomas Parks), Petr Jákl (Stone), Liz May Brice (The Supervisor), Karima Adebibe (Sacrificial Maiden), with Tom Woodruff Jr (The Alien / "Grid") and Ian Whyte (The Predator / "Scar") Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson (#1670 - Mortal Kombat)

Review: 

Well, we have now moved into the next phase for two separate film franchises, and it's interesting to consider how it affected the quality of each over the prevailing next few years. Alien (1979), if you recall, was a series of four films that had four distinct visions of people being terrorized in space (each starring Sigourney Weaver), whether involving a gradual build in terror like the first film, or a segue into action-horror with the sequel, or whatever the idea was supposed to be for the third and fourth movies. Predator (1987) is a different story (written by Jim and John Thomas). The first one was pure sci-fi action, one carried by Arnold Schwarzenegger and other folks generating bravado for a well-done experience. I honestly can't really remember the second film, which either might mean it is due for a re-consideration, or it just means that it was forgettable enough to have killed further attempts more sequels about the predator and its hunt. Both franchises would also see follow-ups come in the years that followed this (Alien went to the past while Predator had two films released eight years apart that had soldiers banding together to take down modified predators). To be technical, the inspiration for doing a crossover came first within comic books, because a series was done that crossed the two franchises that was released in 1989 by Dark Horse Comics; further stories would be released by the company over the next two decades that also involved video games (of course there was also a tease in the aforementioned Predator 2). Got all that? Good, because you get a crossover between the two franchises with people that are seemingly designed to just get gobbled up for fodder while involving temples hidden in Antarctica. Anderson was responsible for the screenplay while co-writing the story with Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon (writers of the story for Alien). 

Maybe the only ringing endorsement of the film that means anything is from James Cameron, who described it as the third best film of the Alien movies. Of course he initially thought the idea was akin to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (which irked him enough to where he had stopped trying to do a script for a potential fifth film), so take that for what it is worth. Besides, Alien: Resurrection (1997) might actually be more interesting, comprised of goofy narrative decisions to go with hyper-extended acting/acting choices. There are two reasons to probably see the movie: seeing the fight sequences to override a thin plot, and Henriksen show up for nearly an hour. Of course I am talking about the unrated version when it comes to said violence, because why would you watch the original (PG-13 rated) version? The original lasted 101 minutes, while this version has an increased runtime of eight minutes, which adds little moments of story (like an opening in 1904 Antarctica) alongside shots of CGI blood added in to certain shots. In that sense, the action sequences are fairly decent, since one is mostly looking at performers at work and not too much CGI wrangling that makes for useful grimy moments. Lathan does okay here, in that everyone around her is a wax figure waiting to be melted down, which is very okay for the obvious final leftover. Bremner and his instantly-doomed presence (uh huh, take photos before you get started with the mission) is probably the only other presence to note, because face it, you are sort of chuckling when it comes to dinner time for the creatures in the dreary pyramid. Henriksen is cut and dry in what is needed in a spot designed for a familiar presence, one that you know exactly where it is going to go but enjoy because it is a reliable actor involved.

The comparison to the aforementioned Frankenstein crossover is interesting, but perhaps a more apt comparison would be Freddy vs. Jason (2003), which also took a number of years to finally do a monster mash that involved character you couldn't remember if they wore name tags before being vanquished (of course that movie also fudged with basic qualities such as geography, so there's that). Man is this a bleary movie to watch. Making a movie that lives to the title really isn't a high bar to clear, but you have to be kidding with this, right? The aforementioned Predator movie may be a macho extravaganza, but one always has the feeling of excitement when it comes to the actual action that just never hits with this feature; conversely, there are no moments that reach the level of Aliens (1986) when it comes to ripping tension in action with the creatures, probably because there isn't a single moment of shock when it comes to building camaraderie between its characters before the terror hits (i.e. there isn't a Hicks parallel one is curious to see again). I guess it really depends on what one is desiring for a movie about predators that gave humans pyramids to build while doing a hunt every century to take down Xenomorphs with human hosts - and they have the perfect solution if they end up as losers. At least the idea to have a focus on a predator for longer than a few minutes is interesting, but the cynic in me thinks a film that just features predators and Xenomorphs without much dialogue might be a better experience (in that I would endorse it driving other folks nuts). Overall, it is a movie that rides hard on how much one really wants to see monsters fight with the bare minimum involved that obviously found a favoring with the audience it wanted to warrant a sequel with Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem three years later. So yeah, it is incredibly average, but it might be good to doze off too before the creatures wake you up. Oh well...

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Nobody (2021).

Review #1673: Nobody.

Cast: 

Bob Odenkirk (Hutch "Nobody" Mansell), Connie Nielsen (Rebecca Mansell), Aleksei Serebryakov (Yulian Kuznetsov), RZA (Harry Mansell), Christopher Lloyd (David Mansell), Gage Munroe (Brady Mansell), Paisley Cadorath (Sammy Mansell), Michael Ironside (Eddie Williams), Billy MacLellan (Charlie Williams), Colin Salmon (The Barber), Araya Mengesha (Pavel), and Aleksandr Pal (Teddy Kuznetsov) Directed by Ilya Naishuller.

Review: 

To me, this film really did come out of nowhere. True, in a normal-ish year, this might have been somewhere carefully placed on the radar, but one can only have so many interests when priorities shift. But research comes in handy when one wonders if they have seen something like this before. The film was written by Derek Kolstad, who you may remember as the writer behind the scripts for the John Wick series, and the director behind the first film in David Leitch is one of the producers for this film. This is the second film by Naishuller (released six years after Hardcore Henry), a Russian-born director known for his work within music with his rock band Biting Elbows (his influences perhaps fit in ranging wildly, citing the James Bond series alongside Wes Anderson). To put it in perspective, this is the first action role for Odenkirk, who has dabbled in comedy and drama with Mr. Show and Better Call Saul, and the latter show relates that argument since Odenkirk felt that on that show he was basically playing an action character but without fighting. Odenkirk came up with the initial idea, inspired by a home invasion that he had experienced and had to deal with personally (complete with a police officer talking about what he would have done if it was his family), and he underwent two years of learning with the choreography in action. The idea of someone deciding to re-inject some adventure in their life isn't particularly a new one, but it is the way that Naishuller maneuvers the film in its action and warmth that makes for a charmer, particularly one that at its heart is a family tale (of course he describes it as an "addiction drama about a man whose addiction is violence", which is also apt). 

One can approach the film from two perspectives, one of them being the idea of awakening oneself into action after dormancy that can hone for any folks struggling in retirement, where finding a new outlet can be a tough one...and then of course there is the perspective of someone who was powerless in a situation with home, where the "should have done X" question definitely can play tricks on your mind (this works also for sports, if you consider how many people believe they could do a certain sport like the folks they see on TV). Consider the bus sequence in the film, because it serves as a hallmark for what comes before and after: it balances its levels of violence within an injection of levity that helps to deliver a riveting time that doesn't end up jamming the senses (i.e. one can appreciate the action without experience a jarring sensation). All of these sentences can be distilled into one: I really enjoyed this movie. It all starts with Odenkirk, because one needs a good presence within calm family man and tense action timing. He excels in that regard, because there is never a moment that one seems to think of him as out of his range, taking the material with relative patience that is engaging without seeming like a pastiche of other action stars - motivation and composure go a long way towards a fun movie that never borders on parody or cartoon of things one has seen before. Nielsen accompanies the proceedings with calm patience, fitting alongside Odenkirk with calm care that keeps the family angle in relative focus (sure, there are two kids to go alongside that, but one isn't thinking too much about that). Serebryakov makes for a quality adversary, wrapped with some menacing quality without seeming generic, managing to make a curious presence count with terror (whether involving weary greed or a bout of live performances). Ah, but the real surprise is to see RZA and Lloyd come together to share time with Odenkirk, which likely makes for one of the more interesting family action films to come around in time (admittedly the bar can be low if you've seen something like A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), for example). I was curious to see how much they would show up in this film, but their presence proves quite necessary in enjoyment, gunning their way through in a manner that inspires curiosity for further adventure (which is easier to say if one is more familiar with either actor, I suppose). As a whole, it runs efficiently at 92 minutes that makes an interesting action flick that has its share of laughs that has fun within a degree of absurdity that Odenkirk uses for great effect in becoming a capable action lead through and through. It might not be the most original work to come through the action genre, but it surely delivers enough to make it all worthwhile with no sense of gimmickry or monotony detected here. However many movies Odenkirk makes in the action genre, one will not forget his first, a winner for both director and star and a well-suited curiosity for the spring.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: Die Another Day.

Review #174: Die Another Day.

Cast
Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Halle Berry (Giacinta 'Jinx' Johnson), Toby Stephens (Gustav Graves), Rosamund Pike (Miranda Frost), Rick Yune (Zao), Judi Dench (M), Will Yun Lee (Colonel Moon), Kenneth Tsang (General Moon), John Cleese (Q), and Colin Salmon (Charles Robinson) Directed by Lee Tamahori.

Review
Greetings to any viewer who clicked the link from the review of Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Enjoy this review from 2012, to a movie that fails to live up to the other three Pierce Brosnan James Bond films, mostly because it just doesn't have the right spirit that other Bond films have, feeling more like a souped up version of a Roger Moore Bond film - for better or for worse. 

This is the last film to star Pierce Brosnan, and it is the 20th released on the 40th anniversary in 2002. The film has some of the same charm as the other three, but it is missing one thing: Plot. This film is basically action and just that, ignoring plot for over the top action. The one thing I find worse is the invisible car. Look, there's having high tech spy gadgets, but this is just ridiculous. The only thing more ridiculous is if Bond went to space-Oh, well. Ouch. Brosnan does do a good job as always, along with the others, but the film just doesn't have the spirit most films have. After this, the series would be on hold for 4 more years until a new actor was found. This film will be remembered as one of the middle of the road Bond films.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: The World is Not Enough.

Review #172: The World is Not Enough.

Cast
Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Sophie Marceau (Elektra King), Robert Carlyle (Renard), Denise Richards (Christmas Jones), Robbie Coltrane (Valentin Zukovsky), Judi Dench (M), Colin Salmon (Charles Robinson), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), John Cleese (R), and Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny). Directed by Michael Apted.

Review
This film is the penultimate film for Brosnan, and it is decent enough to end the 20th century. Brosnan once again does an excellent job, keeping the film float. Richards on the other hand just isn't convincing as a nuclear scientist because of something I call the "Copy and Paste Principle" That is when someone is trying to speak like the role they play, but sound like they read it off a script rather then act the role. The plot is decent, giving us a twist for once, but not too much of a twist. This film has an action packed style that keeps you interested no matter what.

Overall, I give it 007 out of 10 stars.