Max Rockatansky. Imperator Furiosa. Rictus Erectus. Toast The Knowing. The Splendid Angharad. Cheedo The Fragile. The Organic Mechanic. Keeper of the Seeds. Nux. Slit. Those are just a few of the characters I met last night.

If the future indeed belongs to the mad men and women of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, then strap me in for the long ride. This 120 power packed thrill ride is exactly the kind of movie to spring us into the summer wind. After getting superpower wasted with Avengers last weekend, Miller’s full throttle rebooting is just what the audience needs. Engine, grease, bullets, blood, tears and lots of extreme action. The kind of action that makes you forget about all the amateur action you’ve seen lately. The kind of chase scenes that make you want to get into a muscle car, find a sandy road and blow down it without thinking about anything else. Fury Road is an original model, something you’ve never seen before and may never see again, unless you see a chained up Tom Hardy swing into your front seat.

Hardy’s casting and Miller’s return made me get excited about this Mad Max return. Hardy doesn’t take a day off at the office and sinks his teeth into every single project he does. While some movie stars see fit to waste their lives and talent for a boatload of cash, Hardy doesn’t like to mess around and makes the Max role his own. The hero here is cut from the darker cloth and doesn’t speak a ton, so it’s good that Hardy can transcribe a thesis statement of emotions and words with a series of looks. Hardy is like Clive Owen and Russell Crowe at their best, actors who can carve a lot out with a little. People have complained Hardy isn’t fit to fill Mel Gibson’s shoes, and I’ll tell them Gibson signed off on Hardy and it’s easy to see. He’s dirty, grimy, and keeps you on your heels. This is his first bona fide action hero role and Hardy never lets it seem like a gimmick. He’s in every single scene and carries the weight of the film on his back, since his name is kind of in the title. Sure, the first 30 minutes of the film sees him wheezing out of a metal mask on his face, so people will think this is Bane reloaded, but Hardy turns him into something else entirely by the end of the film. A walking wounded loner looking for redemption. Aren’t we all? (more…)

Watching a 54 year old action star with a receding hairline try to keep the good old days alive on screen carries a well mixed brew of nostalgia, sadness and hidden glee. Jean-Claude Van Damme’s latest direct to On Demand/DVD effort, Pound of Flesh, isn’t a complete waste of time or miserable experience but it does make you think about the sharper days of Lionheart, Kickboxer and Double Impact. If this movie was released 20 years ago, it may have worked. Today, in a day and age where fight choreography has been taken to a whole other level, Pound of Flesh seems tired.

Van Damme plays Deacon, a man who checks into a hotel only to wake up the next day not feeling so hot. A woman who crossed his path rolls around in his head while he figures out that a part of him is missing. A kidney. He finds money, meds and an ace of spades waiting for him. That’s the first complaint. How many times are filmmakers going to use an ace of spades as a big turning point in a story or a big bad guy mark. Why not use a Jack of Hearts or a scrabble piece just to change things up. Like I said, the mechanics used here by director Ernie Barbarash and writer Joshua James are overused and stale. (more…)

The D Train has a compelling group of actors but a story that is as old and tired as spoiled milk in an empty apartment. Jack Black and James Marsden are talented actors but their work here never gets on the right freeway for viewers to enjoy the story. This is a movie without a real identity. Let me spin the setup quick.

Black is a school alumni nerd who never had his glory day in high school and spends his mid thirties trying to be so cool that he irons the juicy details right out of the word with every stupid nickname he gives himself. In order to win back some respect, he ventures out to Hollywood to lure back the high school superstar Oliver Lawless(Marsden, who has the most fun in the film) for the alumni reunion. A wildly unexpected event after a hard night of boozing and drugging forces the two men to reconsider everything.

This movie is like Black’s character. It wants to be super cool, very funny and also poignant in the end and it fails on all three fronts. It isn’t funny and the poster and trailer inform the viewer that “Get Him to the Greek” is in the cards. While that film had a brave and game duo in Jonah Hill and Russell Brand, Black and Marsden are pure blandness when together. Their wildness pales in comparison to the Greek’s wildness because the comedy was present and the drama was even surprisingly fresh. (more…)

Halfway through John Wick, our hero confirms a long standing rumor. As he sits in a chair, tied up and beaten, he tells the bad guys that he is indeed back. He’s also coming back to theaters in the future to kick ass, as Lionsgate announced today that John Wick 2 will happen and it will happen soon. (more…)

I have experienced trouble in my film-addict lifetime attaching much emotion to Tim Burton movies. Yeah, Beetlejuice and Batman are classics and will always be signature Burton. Ed Wood was mad fun but didn’t hang with me for too many years. Big Fish was the biggest surprise because it did connect. Lately, though, his efforts haven’t left much of an effect. I see his films and shake my shoulders and think to myself, “Maybe next time he will mix in a little of that Big Fish spectacle with the Ed Wood madness and tell a simple tale.

Well, his latest feature, Big Eyes, is exactly that. A simple straight forward tale that is sweet, odd, a little dark, and doesn’t shy away from the obsessions that ordinary people have with gifted artists. Tim Burton doesn’t apply too much black paint to this heartfelt true story of a brilliant painter hiding in the shadows of her showboating husband for 10 years. He just tells the story and lets the chips fall. He also lets a talented pair of actors in Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz take this movie and run with it. (more…)

Call me crazy, but I am not sure Foxcatcher works as a film. It’s definitely not Oscar worthy or even worth watching in a theater. It is an ambitious attempt from director Bennett Miller(Capote, Moneyball) but the overall effect of this film is overly bleak, boring and involves a heavy miscast. When I left the theater, I thought to myself, “Not a bad film but also not really that good.” It’s a sad story so the bleakness is expected but the execution is just erratic. Maybe that’s unfair to Miller due to the subject matter(not bedtime material) but I feel like I was sucker punched here. Promised a juicy steak and got a chewy piece of beef.

What’s the tale of the tape? A true story about a pair of Olympic wrestling brothers(Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo) connecting with a strange, rich and 100 % creepy John Du Pont(Steve Carell) and their lives suddenly become entrenched in opportunity, sadness and ultimately, tragedy. There’s no need to reveal anymore because there isn’t much more to tell.

Carell plays the tortured isolated and needy older man longing for some friendship and the gimmick of his performance shows up too often. All I can see is the prosthetic nose and an actor trying to stretch instead of seeing a true performance. Like his character, Carell just wants to play with the big boys and looks out of place. He is miscast here. I don’t buy his performance and it’s key so the wheels start to roll off the more screen time he gets. (more…)