Retro Reviews: Predator series Part I: Predator (1987) and Predator 2 (1990)

Having recently seen Shane Black's newest entry into the Predator film series, I had the urge to go back and watch (or rewatch) a few of the earlier movies which I hadn't seen in a number of years. This year's The Predator marks the sixth movie in the series, and I'd seen all but one of the previous five with varying degrees of recency. Without further ado:

This is the actual poster that I had on
my bedroom wall as a kid.

Predator (1987)

Director: John McTiernan

I didn't need to bother going out of my way to rewatch the original movie, as I watch it every couple of years or so. This keeps it rather fresh in my mind, even aside from the fact that my Predator-loving friends and I have been quoting the movie for a couple of decades now.

For those who have somehow never seen it, the brief summary is that a rescue team of special forces soldiers, led by Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), go into the Central American jungle on what is supposed to be a rescue mission. After the mission goes south, Dutch and his team start to be brutally killed, one-by-one, by some mysterious, unseen being. The being turns out to be an extra-terrestrial hunter that pursues the most challenging "game" on this planet. Dutch and his crew try to survive, with all but Dutch and a local freedom fighter, Anna, being slain by "the Predator."

This movie is, quite simply, a masterpiece of action film-making. It was the first major film by action movie directing legend John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October), and this was the movie that got him larger budgets for his later films. With a relatively paltry budget of $15 million, he transported viewers into a Central American jungle to follow Schwarzenegger's small platoon of completely badasses, as they are ruthlessly hunted by a mysterious killer using impossibly advanced technology. The story is relatively simple, but the characters are great, the pacing and dialogue are perfect, and the action and tension are top-notch. I have to assume that it was the quality of this film that urged movie studios to throw far greater sums at McTiernan for his next movie - the following year's iconic Die Hard, another absolute masterpiece of action cinema.

Back to Predator. It's not often that a movie gets made that is so much of its own time yet is timelessly enjoyable. The great noir cinema of the '40s and '50s comes to mind, as do several other films. Predator is one of those. A friend of mine once brilliantly described the movie as "Beowulf told through the lens of Reagan-era America," which I found astoundingly fitting. Like so many things in the 1980s, this movie was about undiluted machismo. You have several famously muscle-bound dudes: Arnie. Carl "Apollo Creed" Weathers. Jesse "The Body" Ventura. And several other obvious tough guys, most of whom were military veterans. This resulted in a very organic, humorous Alpha-male chemistry between everyone in the platoon. Without authentic soldiers playing these roles, it's easy to imagine how this movie could have fallen very flat. A strong argument can also be made that Schwarzenegger - never known as being a particularly great actor - was at his acting best in this movie. No, the role didn't demand much, but it fit Arnie like a glove, and he nailed it to a tee.

Two more of the obvious strengths of the film are the narrative pace and dialogPredator have tried to work in a fraction of this movie's great lines and flawless deliveries, and nearly all have failed.

Dutch and his men. They look like serious badasses probably
because nearly all of them were in real life. Even beyond the
muscles and hard stares, though, each character quickly
displays some charisma, making many of the deaths
meaningful to us viewers.

ue. The movie does spend a little time setting up the "rescue mission" story, but it's barely five minutes before we're with the guys on a chopper, listening to "Long Tall Sally" blasting over the radio and Hawkins fire off one of his crass jokes, and getting to love the entire squad through their busting of each others' balls. The movie is then off and truly running, with the slower, tenser moments bridged to the explosive action sequences through a highly memorable and quotable script, compliments of the punch-up writing of Shane Black, who plays Hawkins in the film. Countless action movies before and since

One last observation about this movie - the ending. I think it's often a somewhat overlooked piece of genius. Whereas so many lesser action/horror movies follow the trope of ending the movie with the surviving hero firing off a one-liner, or the movie leaving us viewers with an obvious teaser for a potential sequel, Predator doesn't do that. The final shots of this movie are of Dutch being carried off in a rescue helicopter, staring into the distance as the reality of his men's deaths sets in. No more pithy one-liners. No hints of further "Predators" arising to seek revenge. Just the haunted stare of an elite soldier who has survived a horrific ordeal - one which has taken the lives of every one of his closest brothers-in-arms. It's rare that such an overtly "action" movie chooses to end on such an effectively somber note, but Predator pulls it off.

There is a very good reason that this single film spawned so many other stories, mainly in movies and comic books. In terms of the films, none of the five succeeding ones has come anywhere close to matching the muscled-up magic of the original.

Predator 2 (1990)

Director: Stephen Hopkins

A sequel that was rather disappointing when it was released, given how very different it was from its predecessor. It is one, however, that holds up fairly well.

Predator 2 completely shifted the setting from a tropical rainforest to a blisteringly hot Los Angeles in which a wildly violent gang war is taking place. This was the first jarring shift away from the memorably primitive setting of the original movie. Another is that, while a sequel, not a single character and only one brief reference is made to the horrors which Dutch and his men suffered in Predator. And the final large difference is simply the complexity of the plot, which includes more than the simple survival tale of the original film. Here you have a Dirty Harry-like cop, Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), who catches the eye of a new "Predator" alien. The Predator, for whatever reason, decides to toy with Harrigan by following him around and gradually killing of members of his squad. Hovering around all of this is a shadowy government group who is interested in trapping the Predator, in order to study it and its amazingly advanced weapons technology.

While it never really comes close to the overall quality of the original, Predator 2 is a decent follow-up and a solid enough action movie. I admire the film-makers' willingness to completely change settings, and it was fun to dig a bit deeper into the culture of the Predator species. While the drug war plotline never gets terribly interesting, it serves well enough as a hotbed of action in which the Predator and Harrigan can play their cat-and-mouse game. The cast it also strong. Although Maria Conchita Alonso can overact and over-inflect quite a bit, Ruben Blades, Gary Busey, and Bill Paxton are all great. There are a few moments when the tone is just a tad off - basically when anyone not named Bill Paxton tries to be funny - but this was a decent entry into the series.

Though never noted as an "action star," per se, Danny Glover
actually plays the part of hard-charging super-cop Mike
Harrigan fairly well. His epic chase-down of the hunter
alien packs a solid amount of intensity to it.

I feel that one thing that weakens this movie is that a fair bit of the violence is purely gratuitous. Namely, some of the gang violence, especially the scene in which Jamaican gang members string up a rival and mercilessly thrust a massive knife into his chest. This scene also includes one of several clumsy attempts to emulate the memorable one-liners from the original film. The knife-wielding Jamaican in this scene, for no clear reason, utters the line, "Shit happens," with his thick accent. This becomes a line that the Predator alien utters later, much the same way that the alien utters "What the hell are you?" in the original movie. These were just two of several moments which seemed to be going for a little more shock value or "cool" factor than the original movie, which achieved its strength and coolness in a nearly effortless and organic manner. When Predator 2 tries, it comes off as cheap B-movie fare.

I wasn't able to find a final budget for this movie, but it made notably less that the original. This is why, I assume, the series was put to sleep for well over a decade.

Terminator Series (Including Genisys)

Terminator Series: An Achronological Overview

I recently watched the latest Terminator movie, Terminator: Genisys. It was the first in the series that I had seen since Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), due to the generally poor reception of the third and fourth films in the franchise. After watching Genisys, however, I felt the urge to take in the whole series, albeit out of the order of their release.

I already know that Terminator is a masterpiece, and the sequel was a wildly entertaining, game-changing sci-fi action movie. I've seen those two movies more times than I can remember, and I know I'll love watching them again. With this in mind, I first went back to the third and fourth movies. Perhaps odd, but arguably appropriate for a series heavily involving time travel.

Let's begin at the end...

Terminator: Genisys (2015)

This was the fifth film in the series. 

Director: Alan Taylor

How does Hollywood keep getting this wrong?

I should state right away that I didn't find Terminator: Genisys to be an outright disaster. It had just enough going for it that I was curious about the resolution. Still, it's difficult to see how several filmmakers, armed with obscenely huge budgets, have now gone into James Cameron's oh-so-fertile science-fiction landscape and failed to create anything remotely as fun, entertaining, or engaging as the original two films.

Genisys actually begins with a decent setup. In the future, with commander John Connor on the cusp of leading humanity to an ultimate victory over Skynet, the machine system sends a Terminator back to 1984 to execute Connors's mother, Sarah. This is, of course, the backstory which leads into the well-known tale of the original Terminator. However, a twist comes when the T-101 (a CGI in-his-prime Arnold Schwarzenegger) is stopped while attempting to steal the clothes off of a trio of punks. Halting the T-101 is a noticeably aged version of himself (the real Arnie). It turns out that this T-101 had been sent back even earlier into the time of Sarah Connors's childhood, in order to protect her against attackers sent by Skynet. The human who was sent back to 1984, Kyle Reece, arrives shortly after the 1984 T-101, and is stunned to find a savvy, already-battle-trained adult Sarah Connor and her Terminator-protector on top of the situation.

This initial twist on the original tale is not a bad one, despite essentially overwriting the classic original story. The Genisys twist sets up an interesting mix of the first two films, whereby Sarah, Kyle, and the protective T-101, whom Sarah calls "Pops," must fend off attacks from the T-1000 and other threats. Unfortunately, things become convoluted at an insane pace. All too quickly, the story packs in multiple Terminators, another time jump to 1997, and even the appearance of the adult John Connor in 1997. Once you start trying to find the logic between all of the time jumps and the causalities behind the time ripples involved, the tale loses its narrative cohesion. Sure, there was a paradox or two in the original movies, but these were easy to overlook in the name of suspending disbelief. In Genisys, however, the writers seemed to be trying to bury us viewers with time-travel jargon and mumbo jumbo, in the hopes that we wouldn't notice the mounting logic problems.

The action itself is standard big-budget Hollywood fare. There are explosions aplenty, car chases, helicopter pursuits, and a mildly interesting underground fight. It borrows/steals from its predecessors much of the time, with a few dashes of originality in terms of visuals and stunts. This would have been more palatable had the characters and dialogue been more engaging, but these elements were flat. Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney are only decent at best, and they simply don't compare to the performances of Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. It didn't help that the script featured too many misplaced attempts at levity and awkward attempts at drama which failed to facilitate any chemistry between the leads.

With some better writing and editing, this movie could have been a nice addition to the Terminator canon. As it is, however, it is a mediocre science-fiction action flick on the level of the second and third Matrix movies.

From here, I decided to take two steps back, into the middle of the series...

Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines (2003)

Director: Jonathan Mostow

A mildly entertaining third entry in the series, with a surprisingly and somehow satisfyingly bleak ending.

Unlike Genisys, Rise of the Machines seeks to maintain the narrative integrity and continuity of the first two films. Moving ahead to 2003, roughly 10 years after the events in Judgment Day, we find John Conner (Nick Stahl) in his early twenties and drifting around the United States. His mother Sarah has died of natural causes, and while the events which took place a decade earlier should mean that humanity is safe from the possible threat of Skynet, John is unable to fully accept it. His nagging dread is realized when a new Terminator, model designation T-X, arrives in 2003, wearing female human skin. This "Terminatrix," as she is called, is actually on a mission to kill both John Connor and his future wife and former high school classmate, Kate Brewster (Claire Danes). Also arriving on the scene is the familiar T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who has once again been tasked with protecting Connor, as well as Brewster.

 Without the natural menacing look, actress Kristanna Loken
often seemed to spend too much time trying to appear fierce 
by looking out from under her eyebrows.

The rest of the plot has a few interesting turns to it, while others don't hold up under close scrutiny. The ever-present bugaboo of paradoxes is a bit more prevalent in this film that in its predecessors. The T-X Terminatrix features upgrades that at first add fascination - she can take over and control machines; her right arm can morph into various weapons; she has the "liquid metal" malleability of the T-1000 - but they soon bring up unanswerable questions about her tactics, or lack of, in pursuing her quarry. She never becomes nearly as frightening as the original T-101 or the T-1000. It also didn't help that the actress playing the T-X, Kristanna Loken, seemed to be trying a little too hard to look menacing. This may have been the fault of the director, but the fear factor was often ruined.

There are plenty of action scenes in the movie, though I found most of them merely typical for a large-scale Hollywood blockbuster. The acting was solid, though they had to do with a lukewarm script that, like Genisys, tried to shoehorn a few jokes into places where they didn't fit the tone of the scene.

The part which I found oddly redeeming was the ending. Spoiler alert (but hey, the movie came out 12 years ago): they don't save the world. Skynet takes over, and we end with Connor and Brewster locked in a secure underground bunker, waiting for the nukes to inevitably start falling. It's a pretty hardcore downer of an ending, but I actually appreciate the film going in this direction. It speaks to the inevitability of certain predestined horrors, which is very much in keeping with the orignal Terminator.

I then went a step forward, to one of the most critically panned Terminator movies...

Terminator: Salvation (2009)

This was the fourth film in the series.

Director: McG (yes, that's the guy's name)

Observation: films can actually be OK when your expectations have been set at rock-bottom.

Since its release six years ago, I had not heard a single positive recommendation from friends or through critiques of Salvation. This was the main reason that I only just got around to watching it. I must say, though, that I did not find it to be the non-stop onslaught of horrible cinema that I was expecting. It's certainly not a great movie, and I would rank it as the fourth-best in the Terminator series, but I found some redeeming qualities in it.

Salvation begins in 2003, in a prison where inmate Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is about to be executed for homicide. A contrite and resigned Wright signs a release which will allow the young company, Cyberdyne, to use his body for scientific purposes. Wright is then put to death.

Fast forward to 2018. It is now roughly 15 years after Judgement Day has occurred, and humanity is being hunted to extinction by Skynet's killing machines. A hardened, adult John Connor (Christian Bale) is a charismatic leader in the human resistance movement against Skynet. During a raid on a Skynet base, Connor discovers a room filled with human bodies in various states. After Connor flees from a Skynet response group, A youthful-looking Marcus Wright emerges from the rubble. Wright initially heads towards where his home was in California, but soon learns what has happened to the world while he was supposedly dead. He also soon becomes enmeshed in the lives of Kyle Reese, John Connor, and the entire resistance movement.

Though the CGI is top-quality, the color palette and mood
never expand beyond the drab greys browns evident here.

The weaknesses of the film are obvious. It is overly dark, both aesthetically and tonally, with far too many grating, gravelly voices, dark or drab sets, and scenes taking place at night. The script only has a few moderately memorable lines. Most of the actors oversell the intensity. All of these things, taken together, make it clear why so many people lambasted this movie on its initial release. As a sequel to the first three films, Salvation is a bleak affair.

All the same, I found there to be merits amidst the drab shadows. The primary one is the character Marcus Wright. The mystery behind his resurrection and motivations are interesting plotlines through most of the film, and I found their resolution fairly satisfying. I also found the general story of Skynet's plot to infiltrate and eliminate the human resistance to have more smarts and integrity than either of the time-travel-mashups that we got in the third or fifth films. Maybe more people would have appreciated these elements a bit more had the movie not been shrouded in such an unattractive veneer.

This is a tough one to recommend to anyone except those like me: viewers who stayed away because of all of the negativity surrounding the movie. I think you may find some redeeming qualities that are worth your viewing time. The best idea is to have few to no expectations going into it.

And now for dessert, I go backwards three steps, to the masterpiece that started it all...


The Terminator (1984)

Director: James Cameron

This is the one that not only started it all but was also James Cameron's monster breakthrough. Say what you will about Cameron's overblown sense of self-importance, his first major work as a director and screenwriter is the stuff of aspiring filmmakers' dreams.

Nearly all science-fiction or movie fans know the story. A killer cyborg is sent back to 1984 from a possible future in which machines have been eradicating mankind from the planet after a ubiquitous defense program became self-aware. The cyborg, or Terminator, is on a mission to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who will give birth to John Connor, the man who will lead humanity to overthrow the army of killer machines in the future. Sent to protect Sarah is Kyle Reese, a soldier in the human resistance whom John Connor sent back to ensure that he would even be born.

The original Terminator holds up quite well. James Cameron, who wrote and directed the movie, had an excellent sense of how to create a film story which went well beyond the few interesting ideas that were its foundation. While it does have roots in science-fiction - robots and time travel - the story creates characters whom we actually care about. The movie very quickly lays out the time travel aspect, and there is intrigue present from the earliest moments. We see the arrival of the Terminator and Reese, but we must wait to get the full story on exactly who they are and why they have traveled back in time to find Sarah Connor. Several elements of horror and suspense are utilized as we see the Terminator coldly execute several people. Terminator may be a "science fiction" movie, but it incorporates and executes more than a few elements of solid film making, regardless of genre.

Schwarzenegger played the iconic title role, but Michael
Biehn's performance as Kyle Reese is one of the best you'll
ever see in any type of action movie. 

In watching the movie this time (my first in many, many years), a few things stood out. One was just how efficient the direction was. With this, his very first feature film, James Cameron showed that he had an amazing sense of exactly what to include and (more importantly) not to include. There is an excellent balance between slow and even humorous moments, which humanize Sarah and Reese to make them very sympathetic, and the tension-filled action sequences. The balance in tone is exceptional. Even more than this, though, I noticed just how skillfully Sarah's development is handled. In the 100-odd minutes of the movie, there is a very organic revelation of her grit and toughness. Thanks to the script and acting of Linda Hamilton, we see a young woman have her soft exterior stripped away to reveal an authentically tough person. This is something that could easily have been botched, but Cameron avoided the many possible pitfalls. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the great performance of Michael Biehn, who went all-in as the desperate and tortured protector Kyle Reese. He sells the urgency of the story with impressive fire.

There are some moments that are a tad slow, and several scenes which solely rely on the then-cutting edge effects to dazzle the audience. As great as they were in 1984, most of these effects pale in comparison to what movie-goers have seen in the past 20 years. That said, the final action sequences do still have some power left in them, even these 30-plus years later.

The Terminator is still a landmark action movie. It has lost some luster in the 30 years since its release, but it still does things that other, lesser action movies could learn much from.

I'm not totally sure what the tagline
"It's Nothing Personal" actually means
on this movie poster.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

Director: James Cameron

Some may label me a blasphemer for this, but this movie has lost a lot of its magic for me. Certainly not all, but a lot.

By now, the story is well-known. Roughly 10 years after the events of the first film, Sarah Connor's son, John (Edward Furlong), is an untethered rebel. His mother is in a mental institution and he spends his time hacking into ATMs and avoiding his foster parents. He is soon discovered by two Terminators - one, a model T-1000 (Robert Patrick), sent back in time to kill him and the other sent back to protect him, with this latter being the same model (Arnold Schwarzenegger) that tried to execute his mother a decade earlier. John and the Terminator help Sarah escape the mental ward and go on the run from the T-1000. A manic Sarah eventually breaks away to try and kill the man who will eventually design the Skynet program which leads to nuclear holocaust.

For pop science fiction, the plot still holds up fairly well. I actually appreciate some of the very dark themes and aspects raised in such a "Hollywood" movie. There is one particularly grim nuclear holocaust vision that is graphic enough to still give you nightmares. James Cameron also shows off his considerable skills as a technical director in this sequel, just as he has in every movie he's made. It was also fun to go back and once again see an Arnold Schwazenegger at his absolute peak. Though an iconic '80s action star, he really only made a handful of truly exceptional movies, with Judgement Day being one of them.

The then-revolutionary morphing technology still holds up,
but it has long since become a ho-hum standard in movies.

That said, Judgement Day has simply gone the way that most of James Cameron's movie have gone: from monstrous commercial success and pop culture phenomenon to a bit of a relic. Many of the elements that made the movie so fun to watch when I was younger simply do not have the same appeal any more. This movie introduced "morphing" effects, which changed the game of movie visuals forever. At the time, seeing the T-1000 shift from one form to another was well worth the price of admission. Now, though, such effects have long since been outdone (by Cameron himself, in fact), and now they cease to amaze.

Another of the movie's teeth that has dulled in my eyes is its reliance on extended action sequences. Especially during the finale, the action grows rather dull. For nearly 30 minutes, we get car chases and warehouse pursuits which hold very little actual suspense or engagement for me any more.

This all may sound harsh for a movie that set the bar for its blockbuster action kin for years after its release. Unfortunately, I could not help but be a tad bored for several, sometimes long, stretches of Terminator 2. It's a shame, as I was really hoping that this one would hold up as well as the original.

Final Takeaways

The Terminator series, for as massive as it has been for over three decades now, is actually rather mediocre as a whole. One could easily argue that it has done nothing but grow weaker since the original, not unlike many film series. The disappointing thing is that there seems to be plenty of untapped potential for cool movies here; yet it goes unexplored in the name of simply trying to outdo earlier film in the series by simply piling on more of the same elements: time travel, explosions, and the ever-aging Schwarzenegger as that last piece of nostalgia to hedge the filmmakers' bets. At least in these days of constant reboots, we can always hope for a successful revitalization.

Retro Trio: Made (2001), Escape Plan (2013), We Own the Night (2007)

Made (2001)

Director: Jon Favreau

In a word: lame.

The look on Favreau's face here is pretty
much how I felt watching this movie.

This was a surprise for me, since I've generally liked Favreau's writing and direction in his various films. From Swingers to Elf to the first two Iron Man movies, I thought he was solid enough, if not exactly spectacular. I don't put him in any kind of pantheon of great directors, but he's solid. Even films of his that I wasn't terribly enthused about, such as Chef, are well-done, for what they are. 

So it was disappointing to watch this earlier stab of his at spoofing the mafia genre. It's not hard to see what Favreau was trying to do - throw a couple of bickering buddies into the lower levels of the mafia that has been glamorized by countless great movies. But it never gets any real steam. First of all, Vince Vaughn's character is supremely annoying. I'm no Vaughn hater (even though he has absolutely zero range, outside of playing himself), and I actually think he's hilarious when cast in the right movies. But imagine his typical motormouth character firing off line after line, without a single thing actually being funny. Well, that's what he is in Made. I actually wanted him to get whacked after about 15 minutes.

Second off is that the story rambles through a sluggish and vague narrative that seems to have been meant as a mafioso Odyssey of sorts. There are a few mildly amusing scenarios here and there, but most of the scenes simply drag. In the end, the big "reveal" of the plot only made me think that the movie should have been about 45 minutes shorter and saved us viewers the trouble.

This movie had potential, with a decent idea and really good cast, including Favreau, Vaughn, Peter Falk, and about half the cast of The Sopranos. Alas, the whole was far, far less than he sum of its parts. So much so that I was surprised that it made a "Top 100" list of gangster movies compiled by a few Philadelphia area film aficionados. Not sure what they were seeing on this one. 

Escape Plan (2013)

Director: Mikael Haefstrom

This movie fell just slightly on the wrong side of "mediocre." It's not terrible, but there's no way one can call it "good." 

The plot is all but given away by the two-word title. Stallone plays Ray Breslin - a security professional who breaks out of prisons in order to expose any weaknesses, so that they can be corrected. When his services are procured by a a mysterious woman working with the C.I.A., things start to go wrong. All of his safeguards are stripped, and he is truly stuck in a high-tech, ultra-secret, maximum security prison which is completely off of the grid. Inside, he meets a sly German inmate (Schwarzenegger) who takes great interest in his demeanor and skill set. From there, the two try to (you guessed it) escape.

Escape movies' biggest strength is always waiting to see just how the escapee will use his cunning to make his way past all sorts of obstacles to gain his freedom. In that respect, Escape Plan gets it right. The set up is fine, and the super max prison presents a few interesting obstacles that Breslin has to surmount. But none of them are so creative that they become memorable. Breslin's methods for studying and using his environment are just compelling enough to have kept me watching, but they weren't exactly mind-blowing.

One must absolutely NOT think too hard about this movie's story. There are a laughably high number of logical inconsistencies. I was able to shrug them off for the most part, as it didn't take too much away from the escape element of the movie, but they are pretty bad. If the very reason for the prison's existence doesn't hold up to some mild questioning, then the scriptwriters have done a pretty poor job. There are more than a few other massive oversights that are nearly as awful, so a viewer will need to be ready not to analyze things too closely. You'll only be disappointed.

The aesthetic is just hilariously bad. Clearly going for style over any kind of pragmatics, the prison design is unnecessarily silly, and the guard uniforms look like bad Halloween costumes. Style over substance can work, as long as there is actual style. Escape Plan's notion of "style" equated to what an 11-year old boy would find "cool-looking."

There is also one missing element that I had mixed feelings about. When you sit down to watch a movie with Stallone and Schwarzenegger, then you would expect more than a few one-liners, right? Well, this movie is woefully lacking in that department. Yes, there are a few attempts at some zingers here and there, and one or two of them are half-decent. But mostly, the banter is absent, and much of what is there is thoroughly forgettable.

Do I feel like I wasted my time watching this? Not quite, but close. And there's absolutely no need for me to watch it again. It's a barely passable popcorn flick that you can turn your brain off for, and we all need one of those every once in a while. 

We Own the Night (2007)

Director: James Gray

A good crime flick, if not quite an outright "classic."

The movie tells the tale of Bobby Green - a self-absorbed, semi-outcast brother of one cop and son of another. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, his is a story of self-actualization and transformation through suffering. It's a unique story for the crime film genre, in the type of character that serves as the focus, and just how that character evolves throughout. While it does seem a tad extreme and rushed to an all-too tidy ending, it is a rather satisfying arc.

The movie's two greatest strengths are the acting and the fact that it doesn't pull too many punches. The large-scale "crime" conflict is between the local cops and an ever-increasing Russian mob presence, and Bobby is caught between the two. The tightrope that Bobby walks through most of the movie is constantly wavering in the winds of his own indecision, and we viewers know that he will eventually fall off. The suspense comes from waiting to see if Bobby will make the choice of which direction he falls towards, or if the decision will be made for him. The emotional ramifications make for great theater, as Joaquin Phoenix wears the struggle exceptionally well. He has to struggle through several dilemmas that threaten either his body or his peace of mind, without a single easy answer or fully acceptable outcome for himself or his loved ones. The grey areas certainly set this film apart from many others of its ilk.

Though much of the movie focuses on emotional turmoil, there are certainly several highly suspenseful action sequences, which are quite well-done and affecting. More than simply adding some visceral excitement to the proceedings, they often serve to jar Bobby out of his sometimes paralyzing indecision.

The clearest weakness to me is simply that the transformation goes a bit too far, by the end. I won't give anything away, but the end of Bobby's journey went to a place that I thought oversold just how far he had transformed by story's end. It hardly ruins the film by any means, but it wasn't completely to my liking.

A very good movie that I would certainly recommend to anyone who is a fan of more sophisticated crime tales that focus more on individual character study and transformation, rather than the more procedural elements of most crime films. 

Last Action Hero (1993)

Director: John McTiernan

Last Action Hero was a good idea that couldn't quite pull off the execution (cue the Jack Slater bad pun here).

The movie tells the story of Danny Madigan, a 12-year-old who's obsessed with movies, especially action flicks featuring his hero, Jack Slater. Slater is a virtual parody of the already-over-the-top action hero that dominated the box offices through the '80s and early '90s, and the character is played by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. On one particularly tough evening, Danny is given a magical ticket that transports him into the latest Jack Slater sequel, where he quite literally becomes a part of the world of the big-budget action film as Jack Slater's sidekick.

The real trouble begins when one of the arch villains in the picture - an icy-cold assassin named Benedict (played brilliantly by Charles Dance, whom you may know as Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones) - finds Danny's magical ticket and transports himself into "our" world, the realistically dour and dingy New York City. Benedict's master plan involved using the ticket to go into various films and bring other villains into this world where, as he puts it, "The bad guys can win." Danny brings the fictional Jack Slater into the real world to try and stop Benedict. The problem is that Slater, no longer in his world, is now vulnerable in ways that he has never been in his own movies.

The icy-cold and wonderfully sarcastic Benedict - probably
the most consistently excellent thing about this movie.

Last Action Hero does have its moments. It was certainly a parody that was due back in 1993, as that particular style of action movie had reached untold heights of commercial success and featured no end of formulaic and often downright silly elements. These elements are spoofed in both obvious and subtle ways, in turn. A prime example is when Danny is first transported into the latest Jack Slater movie, right into the back seat of Slater's speeding muscle car. As he looks around at the ridiculous and cacophonous action unfolding around him, he takes note: "Wait a minute. The bad puns...the explosions...the hard rock soundtrack...I'm in the movie!!" And with those observations, Danny was unwittingly giving Michael Bay his formula to mindless action movies that net disgusting amounts of money (for those counting, Bay's latest Transformers movie grossed $100 million on its opening weekend, despite being labelled all but worthless by any critic worth his or her salt).

The ideas behind the movie are good, and some of the intentionally cheesy dialogue is funny enough. Among the highlights are the police station in Slater's world, where we see an amalgam of every action movie police station cliche in the book. An added gag is the pair of lines of mismatched cops who are being partnered up for their "buddy movie" pairings: old cop + young cop, real cop + cartoon cat cop, living cop + Humphrey Bogart's ghost cop, and on it goes. Such jokes border on Zucker brothers zaniness, but never quite go all the way, which is probably for the best.

While the gags are pretty good, the movie does lose steam about halfway through. I attribute this to just how much time Danny spends in Slater's movie world. Sure, a lot of the gags are pretty funny, but not all of them hit the mark. And there are actually moments when you get the sense that the director McTiernan fell into his own trap - he actually wants us to be enthralled by Slater's ridiculous exploits, rather than simply ask us to keep laughing at them. This incongruous tone is completely at odds with the point of the movie.

The Ripper - one of several uninspired elements of the film.
The idea of using villains from movies is great, but they
could have done far better than this bland parody.

This same shift into a real attempt at action movie intensity carries into the end of the film, at which point its lost any impact. The one saving ingredient is that of Benedict's attempt to draw various fictional film villains into the real world. However, even this intriguing plot device isn't used to much effect. What we end up with is simply one already-introduced Jack Slater villain and the personification of Death (in a pretty cool little cameo by Sir Ian McKellan, incidentally). Otherwise, why is the film asking me to take seriously the very thing that it just spent over an hour mocking? Poor planning, if you ask me.

To me, this is the textbook mediocre movie. I didn't feel like I wasted my time watching it, but I feel no need to ever watch it again. There's just enough merit to see you through the two-plus hour running time, but it's too inconsistent to be called anything more than a really good idea that couldn't quite live up to its vast potential.