Black Hawk Down

As cities across the globe are besieged by extraterrestrials bent on eradicating us, we follow a Camp Pendleton-based squad of Marines, led by a green Lieutenant (Ramon Rodriguez) and Eckhart’s veteran Staff Sergeant, as they battle the indistinct-looking beings while evacuating civilians (including Bridget Moynahan and Michael Peña) from Santa Monica before the city is bombed to dust.

The film is comprised mostly of ground battles amidst rubble-strewn streets and freeways that look and sound fairly realistic, even if the soldiers are fighting aliens or trying to take out alien ships. Director Jonathan Liebesman effectively uses the popular shaky-cam technique to convey the life-threatening anxiety of it all, and the soldiers behave with enjoyably exaggerated military-movie bravado, risking their lives or selflessly sacrificing themselves on a moment’s notice.

Liebesman, whose resume includes horror films like Darkness Falls and the Texas Chainsaw prequel, proves very adept with the action stuff, blowing up vehicles and buildings and showing us spectacular shots of a devastated L.A. But he also makes the various firefights appropriately intense, and certain moments of destruction, like a helicopter exploding, sudden and shocking.

And he does this from beginning to end, from when the alien ships begin to rain down like meteorites and take out Navy destroyers, to the fantastic finale in which the surviving soldiers work feverishly to destroy a massive alien command ship. The effects are top-notch, too, and were created by a company run by the Brothers Strause, who coincidentally made their own alien-invasion movie in Skyline.

What helps make this film superior to that one is that we’re given characters to root for instead of irritants we’d rather see die. This doesn’t mean they’re particularly well-developed. There’s the scared newbie, the newly minted, yet unsure, squad leader, and the solider who resents the veteran (a story element that annoyed me). All one-dimensional, but certainly tolerable.

Michelle Rodriguez has made a career out of playing badass cops and soldiers and such, so her presence here as a tech officer is not surprising, but it is definitely welcome, as she’s one of the few actresses nowadays who looks both comfortable and convincing kicking butt or shooting a gun. One of her first lines has her joking, “I didn’t get this far on my good looks.”

The real surprise here is Eckhart. He takes his stock veteran-who-wants-to-retire role and gives it some decent depth. Sure, the writers give his character a little color by having him drive a classic Mustang. But it’s Eckhart who convinces us the guy is both a tough and intelligent soldier and a compassionate man who doesn’t mind telling a boy it’s okay to cry. His performance is the closest thing we get to nuance in this super-sized serving of somewhat silly sci-fi. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Sci-Fi

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 6/14/11

Michael Bay

Based on the first book in a potential six-book series, it centers on an alien teen (Alex Pettyfer) who, along with eight others, was sent to Earth as a child to escape a hostile invading race. When said race discovers where the kids are and starts eliminating them, the boy and his warrior-guardian (Timothy Olyphant) move from town to town in an effort to evade them. As if that’s not bad enough, Pettyfer starts developing inherited alien abilities, including telekinesis and super strength.

Caruso, who’s fast become one of my favorite directors of thrillers, once again displays a refreshing knack for shooting and editing action clearly. This makes for genuinely thrilling set pieces, from the various third-act battles between good and bad aliens inside a high school, to the fantastic football-field finale, a special-effects spectacle full of alien gunfire, giant alien creatures and a rather spectacular explosion. Especially cool is the way Pettyfer runs while deflecting volleys of said gunfire.

As well the script, written by Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, does a decent job playing with our expectations as to who, or what, is good or bad. The Pettyfer-hunting aliens (led by Lost alum Kevin Durand) are obviously bad, what with their freakish heights and nasty sharp teeth. But we’re not so sure about the blonde hottie (Teresa Palmer) on the motorcycle, nor the shape-shifting creature who latches on to Pettyfer in the form of a Beagle.

And yet the film is more than just a load of eye candy. It has some actual emotional heft. The characters and relationships all feel believable, at least for a movie about teen aliens. Pettyfer’s romance with a cute-girl photographer (Glee’s Dianna Agron) is especially well-handled, and also allows us to see, via a scene with the girl’s family at dinner, his character’s longing for a normal life.

Pettyfer is mainly called upon to be photogenic, be it while brooding, smiling, fighting, crying or waterskiing. Better is Olyphant, who brings a nice mix of sternness and compassion to his protector part. Best, I think, is Callan McAuliffe (Flipped) as a bullied teen Pettyfer befriends. He does a beautiful job conveying his character’s loneliness and frustration. In perhaps the film’s best scene, he pleads with Pettyfer to confirm his suspicions about Pettyfer’s true nature.

My only quibble is the emo tunes on the soundtrack, an inevitable thing considering the demographic to whom the film is meant to appeal (though I did appreciate hearing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” over the scene of Palmer strutting away from an exploding building). On a related note, I very much liked the score by Trevor Rabin. It enhances the action, brings the tears and, much like Caruso’s straightforward direction, never gets in the way. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date 5/24/11

Its long-awaited sequel, Tron: Legacy, also focuses on its looks to the detriment of just about everything else. The writing is weak, the direction, by one Joseph Kosinski, lacks style and the acting, save for Michael Sheen and the returning Bridges, is adequate at best. But, thanks to the huge advancement in visual effects since the original, it’s a far more impressive-looking creature, a grand visual creation utilizing some truly dazzling CGI, and so I was more willing to overlook such flaws.

The plot is thus: some two decades after Kevin Flynn, the genius software engineer played by Bridges, went missing, his rebellious, twenty-something son Sam (Garrett Hedlund, who at various times resembles either Hayden Christensen or Christian Bale) inadvertently finds his way into the dystopian-tinged computer world created by his dad, where he discovers not only the old man, but Clu, Bridges’ digital doppelganger who has plans to conquer the real world.

Kosinski wisely retains many elements from the original film, but understandably updates them. The suits still light up according to their wearers’ allegiance (blue for good, orange for bad, yellow for Clu), but are now sleek, black leather duds, the Light Cycles have the same shape, but are bigger and shinier and can curve around the track, and the identity discs (the glowing Frisbees) are razor-sharp weapons that can slice right through a digital denizen. I also appreciated the brief appearance of Bruce Boxleitner, who played both the title character and Bridges’ friend in the original.

As well the numerous action sequences possess a nice muscular energy, less the result of Kosinski’s directorial choices, I think, than of the superlative CGI work and superb sound design. It was especially cool to watch the way various vehicles materialized around characters, though I also liked how the Light Cycles exploded into big, brilliant gouts of blue or orange pixels when getting hit. And I do have to give Kosinski credit for creating the Outlands, the dark and ominous realm beyond the borders of the digital metropolis where digital thunder rumbles through digital clouds.

Bridges plays Flynn with a certain Zen-like weariness, wearing white robes and sounding a lot like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, only smarter. It works, though. He gives the film dramatic weight, and manages to make his solar-sailing bonding time with Sam a poignant pow-wow. But the big thing here with Bridges is that we also get to see a younger version of him as he plays Clu, a nifty, cutting edge digital trick that’s fairly convincing, save for the moments where his mouth doesn’t move quite right when he talks.

In his turn as a neon-cane-using club owner, Sheen (The Queen) briefly injects some outrageous, over-the-top energy into the film, prancing about like Liberace on steroids. Which leads me to mention Daft Punk, the electronic-music duo that cameos as the club’s digital DJs. They composed the film’s score, a most excellent fusion of electronica and orchestral elements that is perhaps the best thing about the film, turning what would otherwise have been just another slick and expensive sci-fi flick into an otherworldly epic. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi

Rated PG

DVD Release Date: 4/5/11

Like that movie, it’s set in L.A., but instead of focusing on a pack of soldiers, it follows a group of irritating regular people (including Eric Balfour and Donald Faison) in a highrise as they try to survive a sudden and harrowing invasion by some hostile ET’s.

When they’re not staring at or fighting with the aliens while shouting helpful things like “Run!” or “Help!” or “Oh my God!,” the one-dimensional characters are yelling at or fighting with each other or, in the case of Faison’s blonde girlfriend, being nonsensically concerned about whom may have slept with whom.

The effects don’t quite make up for the lack of character development, but they come close, even if they do rip off other sci-fi flicks. The main alien ships alone are grand CGI creations, spitting out smaller ships that resemble something out of The Matrix, while the colossal alien beasts that stomp cars and climb buildings will remind you of the creature in Cloverfield.

And while I would never mistake the brothers as great directors, the military-vs.-aliens action scenes here do have energy. In one of the better ones, a shot-down fighter jet smashes into the highrise’s roof, rolls over Balfour and his girlfriend, and rams an alien beast right off the side. Even better is the spectacular sequence in which one of the big ships is shot down and thunders into the ground.

It would have been nice know why the aliens are attacking us, I suppose, but they do have a somewhat original, if not icky, way of powering themselves. Icky also describes the interior of the big alien ships, where the movie ends with a ludicrous but fairly ingenious little twist that will no doubt be elaborated upon in an equally second-rate sequel. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 3/22/11

The basic outline has it that a NASA deep-space probe carrying samples crashed in Mexico, spreading alien life forms throughout the U.S./Mexico border region and leading Mexican and American militaries to quarantine the top half of Mexico. We follow two Americans, a photographer (Scoot McNairy) and the daughter (Whitney Able) of his employer, as they try to get back into America.

It’s the epitome of low-budgetness. Not only did a young Brit named Gareth Edwards direct it, film it (with two digital EX3 cameras) and create the effects, but the entire production team consisted of maybe seven people, and the extras McNairy and Able interacted with were real people at real locations where the action was shot guerilla-style.

As such McNairy (In Search of a Midnight Kiss) and Able, who are married in real life, improvise much of their dialogue. The tactic is not necessarily a bad one for a low-budget movie, and the two are good enough performers that they don’t embarrass themselves. But there are definitely times when I wished there were an actual script, and that the performances were a little more polished.

Thankfully, Edwards succeeds not only in making the sea creature-like aliens themselves convincing, but in creating an environment where people seem used to having the things around. Employing easily accessible Adobe software, he inserts tanks on city streets, ships stuck in trees and jets patrolling the skies, not to mention ingeniously altering signs and TV news footage.

He also tries for some depth by having McNairy and Abel discuss the ethics of his photographing people killed by the aliens, as well having the leads encounter not one, but two beautifully-rendered aliens during the film’s wondrous finale. Being a monster, it seems, is merely a matter of one’s perception. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

He plays a black ops soldier deposited, along with a bunch of similarly minded people, some soldiers, some not, on an alien planet by the title creatures who want to test their warrior skills by playing “The Most Dangerous Game” with their, to put it mildly, reluctant human participants.

For sure the novelty of these particular aliens has long since worn off, and there are only so many interesting ways one can show them hunting and roaring and removing their masks to show us their ugly faces. As well this one’s setup sounds more than a little like the 1987 original, what with the jungle setting, characters getting picked off one by one, and Brody covered in mud in the finale.

But screenwriters Michael Finch and Alex Litvak inject enough new elements into the mix that the film doesn’t feel like a complete rehash. I especially liked the idea that not all of the characters are soldiers. There’s the Yakuza member, convict, drug lord, etc. There’s also a whiny doctor, played by Topher Grace, whose puzzling presence is explained very late in the game.

The aliens almost seem like equal opportunity employers, too, but they apparently favor Americans as targets, including Laurence Fishburne, who effectively plays the Colonel Kurtz of the piece. His is the only acting here that even kind of pops, followed closely by Grace. Brody, all six-pack and gruff voice, certainly pulls off the physical stuff, but lacks Schwarzenegger’s charisma.

Director Nimród Antal does a better job with action here than he did with the anemic Armored. He makes the first half nicely suspenseful, as the characters react to their new digs, then successfully cranks up the pace for some lively set pieces, like the fiery, if familiar, finale, and, in a nice touch, a somewhat elegant sword fight between the Yakuza member and one of the aliens.

The film makes a half-hearted stab at some actual emotion with a few lines about being a soldier versus being a human being. Nice try, I suppose, but the violence, sad to say, is what I came for, be it the aliens with neon green blood getting their heads chopped off, or the aliens ripping out a character’s spine while he’s still alive. A bloody good time, even without Arnie. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 10/19/10

Having told the world he’s the title character, billionaire CEO Tony Stark (Downey) finds himself plagued by problems. A rival CEO (Sam Rockwell) wants to bury him, the government wants his high-tech suit, the physicist son (Mickey Rourke) of a disgraced Russian scientist wants revenge on him and, oh yeah, the mini-reactor keeping him alive is slowly killing him.

I’m all for making the hero flawed and human and all that, but the when-it-rains-it-pours approach taken here by screenwriter Justin Theroux generates too much material, and too many characters, for one movie. As such it all feels a little unfocused, at least up until the entertaining finale.

Which is kind of frustrating, because a lot of the plot elements are sound, be it Stark’s screwball-comedy relationship with his loyal assistant (Gwyneth Paltrow), his friendship with his military buddy (Don Cheadle) or the intriguing father-son theme, which results in the film’s best moment, a truly touching scene in which Stark watches his dead dad (Mad Men’s John Slattery) on a reel-to-reel film.

Rourke, all greasy locks, tattoos and Russian accent, starts out strong, oozing muscular menace as he unleashes awesome destruction with a sweet pair of homemade laser whips at the Grand Prix in Monaco where he confronts Stark. Rockwell kind of feels like a Stark clone at times, but the amusing used-car-salesman vibe he brings to the part makes the character just different enough.

I never bought Rourke as a scientist, though, no matter how much director Jon Favreau shows him clacking away on a keyboard. And the character basically becomes dead weight after teaming up with Rockwell. He’s one villain too many, just as Scarlett Johansson, as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Black Widow, is one hero too many, despite her close-fitting costume and convincing martial arts skills.

Luckily, and despite the sluggish way he opens the film, Favreau (Zathura) knows how to pace the action stuff. The terrific Monte Carlo chaos aside, we get a fun Iron Man-suit mano a mano between Downey and Cheadle, as well as a super finale featuring hordes of robot drones that’s epic, exciting and, most importantly, not just an overwhelming frenzy of pricey-looking CGI.

Of course, it would all be for naught without Downey’s deftness. He owns the role. He’s funny, charismatic and confident, and absolutely enlivens the film. He also gives the hero, as well as the movie, the necessary emotional weight. But he doesn’t get the film’s funniest line, the last line of the film. That honor goes to Garry Shandling, cast, rather appropriately, as a smarmy senator. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 9/28/10

In 2025 people can purchase artificial organs engineered by a corporation, but they’re really expensive. Fail to keep up with the payments on them and the company sends in specialists like Law to take them back. Circumstances eventually force Law on the lam from his employer. Sounds a lot like Repo! The Genetic Opera, I know, but it’s based on a book by co-screenwriter Eric Garcia.

The film’s not totally awful. I liked Forest Whitaker as Law’s childhood buddy and work partner, Liev Schreiber works well as their bureaucratic boss, and the fight scenes, like the one near the end where Law takes out a capable crew of corporate security men, are cool to watch. There’s also a nice scene early on where Law waits for his favorite musician to finish a song before repossessing his heart.

But as a whole the thing just feels tired. There’s no urgency, no tension, no excitement. For that I blame the listless direction by Miguel Sapochnik. In addition, buckets of blood are spilled for no discernible reason. Particularly grotesque is the part where Law scans in the past due organs of himself and his on-the-run companion (Alice Braga).

The supposed moral of the story is that Law has a change of heart, figuratively as well as literally. Yet he never really seems that bad to begin with, and so I never understood why he would be involved in such mean-spirited work. Law does a decent job nonetheless, and obviously worked out for the role. But the movie itself is in pretty bad shape. – [DVD]

Action/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 7/27/10

The town sheriff (Timothy Olyphant, one my new favorite actors) makes the discovery, after which he, along with his pregnant doctor wife (Radha Mitchell) and deputy (Joe Anderson), decides to hightail it out of the place while fighting off the infected and eluding the military.

While the original was meant to be some sort of indictment against the military, the deepest this one really gets is Olyphant’s brief anguish over having to kill a local man. Like other recent remakes of ‘70s horror flicks, it’s a slicked-up scare machine, complete with satellite views of the town, cars flipping over or blowing up, and some CGI, in particular the spectacular fireball near the end.

But I didn’t mind the better production values, because Eisner (Sahara) actually manages to make the movie scary, from the excellently eerie early goings–I’ve never seen a thresher look so threatening–to the subsequent tense and bloody mayhem. One of the better scenes has Mitchell tied down to a bed as one of the title nut jobs starts stabbing the people around her with a pitchfork.

Even more chilling is the scene in which a woman hides with her son in a closet from her infected, knife-brandishing husband, who then locks them in and sets the house on fire. There’s also a scene that will make you think twice about ever going through a car wash again, and the part where Olyphant desperately scoots away from a runaway bone saw definitely made me squirm.

None of it would have been nearly as enjoyable without Olyphant, whose sturdy presence helps ground the pandemonium somewhat. Brit actor Anderson does a decent job as the increasingly unhinged deputy, while Mitchell (Pitch Black) mostly just annoyed me. All that being said, only a crazy person would watch a blood-spattered movie like this for the emoting. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Mystery/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 6/29/10

After a “hot tub malfunction” caused by a night of partying in a hot tub, Adam and his lifelong friends are brought back to the ’80s were they come to realize that they could possibly better their own futures given this bizarre opportunity. This movie can be funny, but it’s really nothing special. I often found myself more entertained by actors Craig Robinson (The Office) and Rob Corddry rather than Cusack himself. The cameo made in Hot Tub Time Machine is good but obvious, the representation of the 80’s was more than OK, and the jokes were generally original. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Sci-Fi

Rated R