Despite striking visuals and Josh Brolin’s all-in performance, the new “Oldboy” fails to build a riveting, believable mystery strong enough to support its big twist.
In the Spike Lee film, Brolin stars as Joe Doucett, a deplorable advertising executive who has all the time in the world to drown himself in alcohol, but none to spend with his daughter. During one particularly drunken night, Joe is snatched off the street and wakes up trapped in a small room. After 20 years of solitary confinement and dumplings, Joe is suddenly released and challenged to figure out who ordered his lengthy prison sentence and why.
If you’ve seen the Chan-wook Park original, it’s impossible to experience this new version objectively, but Lee’s rendition does deserve a standalone assessment first.
Click here to read more.
After a supposedly tumultuous production process and getting bumped from its summer 2013 release and pushed to February 7, 2014, RoboCop finally rolled into Hall H and, despite those rocky times, everything sounds and looks relatively promising.
You can always count on Quentin Tarantino to go big and take chances to offer up some of the most wildly engaging, entertaining and all-around enjoyable experiences cinema’s got to offer.
When we’re getting superhero movie after superhero movie, it’s understandable to have that, “Oh, another one?,” reaction. However, in the case of The Avengers, it was unprecedented right from the start. Yes, it’s more superhero material, but this isn’t just a film that features the biggest team of super-powered crime fighters yet; it’s one that links together a number of other features and franchises and, in turn, really creates a living, breathing Marvel universe.
Not only do buddy cop comedies come with a major stigma, but so do both of the stars of The Other Guys, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. The guys are guilty of doing the same thing in just about every film, Ferrell in terms of his comedic style and Wahlberg, well, with acting in general. The Other Guys primarily stays within the subgenre mold and Ferrell and Wahlberg remain in their comfort zones, but the film has just enough freshness to it that it makes more of the same acceptable.