Year:  2011
Genre:  Action
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Michael Angarano 
Director:  Steven Soderbergh
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I don’t think Haywire was designed as a starring vehicle for MMA superstar Gina Carano.  Yes, Carano has serious star power.  She’s definitely hot, and unlike 99% of the female action stars out there she has serious ass-kicking bonafides, in that she was a real force in womens’ mixed martial arts for a few years.

     But when fighters or wrestlers or someone of that ilk tries to break into movies, it’s never done this way.  When John Cena or Stone Cold Steve Austin stars in a movie, it’s directed by some guy who runs cameras at WWE Raw and maybe once did a 1-800-Victim-2 commercial, and it co-stars Treat Williams. If you’re lucky.

     But then we get Haywire.  Which stars Gina Carano of the MMA.  And it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven).  And it stars Ewan McGregor.  And Michael Fassbender.  And Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas and Channing Tatum.  You know, people with NAMES.  And – even more rarely for a fighter’s starring vehicle – it’s GOOD.

     Carano is an operative for some kind of secret, high-level independant contractor that specializes in black ops.  She is betrayed by her employers and goes on a prolonged rampage where she kills people and beats up other people.  It’s pretty cool, if a little predictable.  Nothing we haven’t seen before, but slick.

     One thing though.  For those of you looking for a super-hot chick who can kick ass, you’re still better off renting Underworld for the ninth time and looking at Kate Beckinsale in tight leather.  Because although Gina Carano IS blazingly hot, Soderbergh has purposefully dulled her up through most of the movie.  And even at her hottest, she is no Kate Beckinsale.  Compared to other MMA fighters, she’s a 25 out of 10. (Cyborg, I’m looking at you.)  But compared to Hollywood actresses, she’s middle of the pack.  That being said, the fact that she can kick my ass is a huge selling point for me.  I love this woman.

     All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t seek out Haywire based on the female lead.  Carano is great, but the movie stands on its own merits – frenetic, fast-paced action, big stunts, and a whole bunch of silly but fun black-ops intrigue and fistfights.  That’s more than enough for me.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Action, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Michael Nyqvist
Director:  Brad Bird
Run time:  133 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The absolute worst advertisement for Mission: Impossible 4 is the first three Mission Impossibles.  Oh, I know, the first one was okay.  Maybe even decent.  But the second and third movies were two of the worst blockbusters of all time.  Well, until Transformers came along.

     So you would have every reason to believe that the fourth Mission: Impossible¸ Ghost Protocol, was going to be a steaming pile of turd from the get-go.  I went into this one fully expecting to be cringing and weeping by the halfway mark.  But I was wrong.  SO wrong.  Ghost Protocol is, in fact, AWESOME! 

     Gone are John Woo and JJ Abrams, the directors of the last two films.  Instead it’s Brad Bird, the Pixar director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille directing the fourth movie, his first live-action film, and a huge success.  It’s a non-stop whirlwind film, with Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton jetsetting around the world to Mumbai and Moscow, among (many) other places. 

     There is some solid humour, some great dialogue, and some of the most incredibly breathtaking stunts I’ve ever seen in a movie.  The scene where Tom Cruise climbs the outside of the highest building in the world in Dubai is positively heart-stopping.  Woody, who has a fear of heights, would not watch this scene.  I think because he didn’t want anyone to see him cry.

     Of course, Mission Impossible four is as silly as the other three, with the masks and the explosions and the contact-lens-fax-machine-scanner gadgets and so forth.  But it has a huge leg up in that it’s well made, well acted, and it actually MAKES  SENSE!  This is by far the best of the Mission Impossible movies, and one of the best major blockbusters in recent years.  And it’s on DVD April 17^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Years:  1987, 1989
Genre:  TV series, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Richard Dean Anderson, Dana Elcar, Michael Des Barres
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     MacGyver remains one of my favorite shows of all time.  Not so much because of the quality of the show which, in retrospect, was seriously deficient.  For me, it’s more of a nostalgia thing, from the days when I was a little kid and didn’t know any better and thought MacGyver was the coolest guy I could even imagine.

     So the Fan Favorites DVD of MacGyver, out March 6^th from Paramount Home Entertainment, was exciting for me.  No Cuba Gooding Jr., no Teri Hatcher, no Mayim Bialik, three of the most famous recurring actors on the series.  But three of the five episodes are some of my best childhood memories, like the one where MacGyver and his grandfather get trapped in the Phoenix foundation by international terrorists. 

     The only episodes I didn’t really like are the Legend of the Holy Rose episodes, a two-part show where MacGyver is essentially re-imagined as Indiana Jones.  Even when I was six, that was a little too silly for me.  But the highlights of this best-of set have to be the episodes that involve MacGyver’s unkillable nemesis, Murdoc. 

     There’s an episode where Murdoc is chasing MacGyver through the mountains and appears to fall to his death.  But of course he lives, somehow.  And the greatest episode of them all, the utterly silly, totally bonkers episode where MacGyver and Murdoc team up to save Murdoc’s sister from this shadowy, evil and totally insane assassin’s club. 

     They have to crawl through a supposedly unbeatable obstacle course where they are shot at with automatic weapons and left to die.  It’s staggeringly cheesy, utterly implausible and totally awesome.  It’s MacGyver.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Comic book, Action
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving, Dominic Cooper, Toby Jones, Stanley Tucci 
Cameo:  Samuel L. Jackson
Director:  Joe Johnston
Run time:  124 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     One good thing I can say about Captain America is that they sure got the name of the movie right.  Captain America sure is a captain.  And he SURE is American!  Real Americans, you see, are patriotic to the point of lunacy.  So is Steve Rogers, who is a short little 90 pound athsmatic weakling deemed unfit for military service. 

     But Steve won’t take no for an answer, and does everything in his power, like a good little American, to trick his way into the army so he can go overseas and be (almost certainly) killed by the Germans in World War II.  He is SO patriotic, and wants SO BADLY to fight for his country, that it never occurs to him that if he DID get to go over there to fight, he would surely be more of a hindrance than a help.

     Like all good Americans, Steve Rogers never backs down from a fight, even when four huge guys are beating him to death.  All good Americans must be…really stupid?  Then, he gets some kind of crazy scientific experimental procedure done (thanks military!), and now he’s no longer a little weakling.  Now, he’s a jacked up muscular huge guy. 

     Like all good Americans, he realizes that being huge is far more important than being smart.  And he chooses a brightly painted red white and blue shield to carry, so no one can forget that he’s American.  This makes a little bit of sense, because the shield is this really cool brand new matal material that stops bullets and…well, I guess that’s it.  It stops bullets.  But it stops them Better Than Anything Ever In The World.

     Like Linus and his security blanket, Steve Rogers (now Captain America) carries the shield everywhere he goes.  Which once again, makes sense – he’s doing a USO tour to lift the spirits of the troops…or something?  No one including the Captain seems to understand exactly what he’s doing at these silly shows.   Of course, though, the Captain is upset about the dog-and-pony show, because he’s Just Not Helping His Country with his new big muscles.

     So of course he goes on a singlehanded raid behind enemy lines to break his army buddies out of a nazi POW camp.  He’s going to be really stealthy, so he wears the same clothes as the Germans and hides behind tanks and trucks and then runs very fast so he won’t be spotted.  Except that you can spot him from SPACE, because he’s still carrying this stupid, gaudy, red white and blue shield!

     I realize that in this review, I’m criticizing the character of Captain America more so than the movie itself.  And my feeling that Captain America is a really stupid superhero creates the feeling, in me, that his movie is a really stupid movie.  And I guess this is the way you decide whether YOU like it.  Captain America is a cartoon character that runs fast, lifts heavy stuff and does some very, very stupid things that just happen to work out because he’s the hero of the movie.  If that sounds like something you might like then, by all means, rent this one on DVD, out October 25th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

     One last thing – the big question here is of course this – do you have to watch this film before watching The Avengers when it goes all blockbuster next summer?  Frankly, I don’t know.  I doubt it.  There are some vague tie-ins – Dominic Cooper plays Howard Stark, the father of Robert Downey’s Tony Stark in the Iron Man series.  Samuel L. Jackson makes the same brief cameo at the end that he does in all the others – Iron Man, Thor, etc.  And that’s about it.  Captain America is a muscular super-soldier, he’s American to the point of silliness, and he has a really strong shield.  Now you can skip this and wait for The Avengers, next year.

Year:  2011
Genre:  Comic book, Action
Country:  United States
Languages:  English
Starring:  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgard, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Clark Gregg, Rene Russo
Cameo:  Samuel L. Jackson
Director:  Kenneth Branagh
Run time:  115 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Thor has as much going for it as it has working against it.  The cast is truly amazing – Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Kat Dennings, Colm Feore, Rene Russo – tons of my favourites.  But without exception, every talented actor in the movie is given nothing to do.  The star, Chris Hemsworth, seems to be better at flexing than he is at acting, but then that’s really all he is asked to do.

     Thor, you see, is the god with whom we are all familiar – Norse, muscular, long blond hair and blue eyes, hammer.  He lives in Asgard with his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), his brother/step-brother/something else Loki, and his small clique of friends.  The realm of Asgard was once menaced by some creatures who appear to be half-monster, half-popsicle.  They proved very easy to smash, being frozen and all, and Odin smashed enough of them to achieve peace.

     Now, as Odin is preparing to hand the crown of the kingdom to his eldest son Thor, these popsicle-beasts suddenly return to be smashed easily once more.  Thor, showing just how young and headstrong he is, rushes out to the Kingdom Of The Popsicle Monsters to wreak havoc and vengeance upon them.  He and his clique are almost killed in the battle, until they are saved by Odin and brought back safely to Asgard.

     Now, Odin knows that his son is too headstrong and, frankly, stupid to become king.  One would hope a wise old man would have realized this before he was mere seconds away from crowning the idiot – but some parents are just blind when it comes to their kids’ deficiencies.

     Thor is cast out of Asgard for having started a war which will lead to much bloodshed.  He ends up on Earth, of course, because otherwise how could there be a movie?  Once there, he meets a bunch of scientists – Portman, Skarsgard and Dennings.  Skarsgard and Dennings are there to sit on chairs while the action plays out, Portman is there to look pretty and eventually fall in love with Thor for no apparent reason.  This works, because he falls for her also for no apparent reason.  They’re the perfect couple!  Beautiful but vapid!

     The rest of the movie consist mainly of Thor searching for his hammer, a government agency hiding his hammer, and Thor beating up government agents in search of his hammer.  There’s a whole lot of flexing and fighting and Thor establishing his ass-kicking bona fides.  Then, of course, the big threat to humanity appears, Thor kicks its ass, and the stage is set for the big super-movie that will partner Thor with Captain America, Iron Man and the Hulk.

     I can’t wait for that super-movie.  Captain America was awful.  Thor is passable at best.  Iron Man was great, and The Hulk was pretty good, but the longer we wait for the big everyone-together movie, the more likely it is we’ll have to suffer through Iron Man 3 or something equally horrible.  Like maybe Thor 2.  Ugh.

Year:  1986
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Romance, Action, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards, Tom Skerritt, Meg Ryan, Val Kilmer, Michael Ironside
Notable bit parts: Clarence Gilyard Jr, Tim Robbins
Director:  Tony Scott
Run time:  110 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Top Gun is a movie that, more than most, foreshadows the rest of the 80s, much of the 90s, and even a bit of the new millenium’s cinematic landscape.  For example – Tom Cruise played a cocky prodigy with daddy issues, a role that he would come to define in the next 20 years – A Few Good Men, The Firm, Days of Thunder. 

     Also, it’s hard for me to see Tim Robbins in his tiny, itty-bitty walk-on role here without thinking of the time he and Tom Cruise shared the screen in the recent War of the Worlds (an encounter that turned out very differently for Robbins). 

     Then there’s Tom Skerritt, who I love.  At the end of Top Gun, you’ll remember, Skerritt tells Cruise “I’ll fly with you”.  But then he doesn’t.  And Cruise goes out alone.  And Skerritt disappears from the film, much as he disappeared from public consciousness over the past 20 years.  I miss remembering who Tom Skerritt is.

     Meg Ryan shows up briefly as Goose’s wife, all pretty and perky.  This foreshadows her pretty perkiness in every movie since then.  But when Goose is killed, she disappears.  No sad scene where she cries over her dead husband.  I suspect that this is because when Meg Ryan cried on set, her face swelled up and she was no longer photogenic.  Just like it has in real life of late.

     Then there’s Anthony Edwards, who went on to a very successful run on the TV show ER, and Kelly McGillis who really wasn’t that good an actress in this film, and was super-hot only in a dated, 80s sort of way.  She was recently in town here in Ottawa stripping down in the stage presentation of The Graduate.  Nice to see she’s still getting work.

     That brings me to Val Kilmer, who of late has apparently been willing to work for food, showing up in movies like Columbus Day, The Traveler and The Chaos Experiment.  I think the downward arc of his career can be explained by the volleyball scene in Top Gun, where he shows his well-defined abs.  Now, when he shows up in movies, he’s a pudgy chunker.  I think that as his abs went, so went his career.  Like Meg Ryan’s lips – the chubbier they are, the less we want to see them on screen.

     I love Top Gun.  Love the fighter planes and the over-the-top cockiness of the whole thing.  I also love the cheesiness and the sappy romance, because it continues to make me laugh.  Watch Top Gun again, and try to count the number of times Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” plays.  Or Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”.  Any time someone does something macho, it’s Loggins.  Every time someone does something romantic, it’s Berlin.  The movie could have been half an hour shorter if Tony Scott hadn’t insisted on including montages of shirtless men playing volleyball to the strains of “Danger Zone”.

     And now, with Paramount’s Blu-Ray release of Top Gun August 30th, you can get this 80s classic in the format it deserves – hope you have surround sound too!  Those fighter jets are meant to dogfight in HD and they are meant to leave the flight deck in surround sound.  So work it out!

Year:  2011
Genre:  Adventure, Action, Fantasy
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Claire Foy, Robert Sheehan, Stephen Campbell Moore, Ulrich Thomsen, Stephen Graham, Christopher Lee
Director:  Dominic Sena
Run time:  95 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Season Of The Witch looks bad, it sounds bad and it IS bad.  It has bad dialogue, awful action sequences, poor pacing and absolutely dead-eyed wooden performances from its stars.  (With the exception of Ron Perlman, who is merely playing Ron Perlman from so many other movies – but to no avail.)  It misfires as a horror movie, as an adventure movie, as a sword-and-sorcery epic, and even as an unintentional comedy.

     The opening of the movie is promising enough – a priest has condemned three women to death for being witches.  It’s that time of history – priests and witches and Good vs. Evil and so forth.  In this case, it’s the priest who appears to be evil, as two of the three women are clearly not witches and are victims of (as it were) a witch hunt.  They are all three hanged, then drowned.  Then the priest has to read the magic words from his magic book to make sure they stay dead.  Two of them do.  The other one, however, escapes and wreaks vengeance.

     Interesting enough.  But that’s the first four minutes.  After that begins the tedium, as Nic Cage and Ron Perlman are introduced as Crusaders, under the Banner Of God, who fight in a montage of battles, each confusing and unnecessary, that culminate in the slaughtering of women and children in a particularly horrific raid on a city.  Cage and Perlman confront the religious leader who ordered the massacre, essentially doing a riff on the old cop-movie cliche “I didn’t sign up for THIS!”

     Now they are gone, wandering off across the plains, until they reach a village that has a witch.  The village (and surrounding area) is consumed by a plague, and this “witch” is responsible.  Cage and Perlman are enlisted to help transport the “witch” to a monastery of some kind, the only one in the world with a book powerful enough to destroy the power of the “witch”.  And thereby free the region of the plague.  A lovely young woman (Claire Foy) gets thrust in a cage and carried to this monastery. 

     The whole time she’s being moved, she continually plays coy with whether-or-not she’s a witch.  But having displayed superhuman strength and flashing eyes in her very first scene, there is little mystery there.  Extra characters get added to the transport party, including a convicted swindler who is the only one who “knows the way”.  At first it seems this swindler was added to the party for comic relief.  But this movie has ZERO sense of humour.  So it turns out he was added so he could be killed by wolves a little later.  Like one of the ensigns from Star Trek.  Same goes for the other, useless knight.

     The DVD of Season Of The Witch has an “alternate ending” special feature.  The alternate ending is little bit better, but by the end of the movie I didn’t care at all what the “trut” nature of the “witch” was, or what became of the characters, or even whether it made sense.  Either way, it was too dark and confusing just to figure out what was going on, and I was just pleased it was over.

Year:  2005
Genre:  Blu-Ray, Thriller, Sci-Fi, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:   Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Clarke Duncan
Eye candy:  Scarlett Johansson in that white jumpsuit is stellar.  In HD!
Director:  Michael Bay
Run time:  136 minutes
Blu-Ray distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Without a doubt, The Island is Michael Bay’s best movie.  In fact, it is head and shoulders above the rest (the rest including Transformers, Transformers 2, Bad Boys II, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and the Playboy video documentary Playboy Video Centerfold: Kerri Kendall).  This is also the only Michael Bay movie for which I have written a positive review, ever.

     I am tempted to say that The Island works despite the ham-handed direction of Bay, but I think he deserves a little more credit here.  The problem I (and most critics, I think) have with Bay in general is that he gets an idea for some huge action scene (cars transforming into machines and blowing up a city!  An asteroid exploding!), then appears to build the movie around the explosions and car chases and ludicrous excess.

     In The Island, he doesn’t do that.  Instead, the long, ludicrous action scenes appear to be inserted into the plot because he can, not because they are the plot.  And the action scenes here ARE cool.  The car chase on the expressway with the giant iron…whatever they are…coming off the back of a flat-bed truck and colliding with armored cars is genuinely awesome.  Then, of course, a couple of little flying motorcycles show up, and the whole scene becomes Michael-Bay-excessive once again.

     The Island is similar enough in structure to movies like Logan’s Run that it’s tempting to call it a rip-off.  But I don’t think it is – Bay creates a plausible, creepy sterilized world in the first half of the movie, and it’s a different vibe than other similar films.  A lot of this is thanks to some stellar acting performances from Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, as well as bit parts by Michael Clarke Duncan and Steve Buscemi. 

     McGregor and Johansson are two inhabitants of a massive underground bunker.  They have jobs and a routine, and must obey a set of rules – most of those rules are designed to make sure they don’t have sex with each other.  The denizens of this sterile world exist with one special desire.  To be chosen to move on to The Island, a paradise where they can live out their days in peace, outdoors.  The reason they are confined to this bunker is that there was a Great Contamination, and the outside world is no longer safe for human life.  Or so they are told.

     Little cracks begin to appear in the cover story, and only one inhabitant of the giant facility has a brain that is developed enough to question his surroundings – Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor).  He soon finds out that the “lottery winners” who are chosen to go to “The Island” are being killed instead, and their organs are being harvested.  The inhabitants of the facility are not survivors of some kind of apocalypse, but rather clones of real human beings who are being kept alive in case their human counterparts need a spare liver or lungs.  Or, in the case of the women, in case they want to have a baby without going through all that irritating pregnancy.

     The premise of the movie raises some interesting ethical dilemmas, and there is a little bit of exploration on that front – but much later.  There is no time for exploration halfway through, because as soon as we discover the real nature of the facility, Lincoln Six Echo escapes with Jordan Two Delta (Johansson), and the explosions and chases must begin in earnest.

     The Island is really two movies – a creepy sci-fi thriller, and then a futuristic car-chase action film.  Both parts work, and the disconnect between the two isn’t jarring enough to really hurt the movie.  As with all Michael Bay movies, the action sequences are spectacular, and (in this case) not so excessive that they ruin everything.  And as with all Michael Bay films, they are meant to be seen in high definition. 

     The Blu-Ray of The Island is wonderful, the action sequences are sharp and that much more exciting as a result, and the underground bunker takes on even more sterility and becomes creepier as a result.  The only problem with the HD is that occasionally Scarlett Johansson looks more like a mannequin than a human being…but then, it’s only occasionally and the rest of the time she looks like Scarlett Johansson – in high def!  The Island is made for the Blu-Ray format, it looks tremendous, and it’s the only Michael Bay movie (up to this point) that I will advise anyone to buy.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (*********9/10)

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis 
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp
Director:  Niels Arden Oplev
Run time:  152 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I loved the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo books by Stieg Larsson, even though I didn’t find them to be quite as powerful a “feminist fantasy” as did some others.  (More on that way, way down in this post.)  And as a fan of the books, I was initially disappointed in this first movie adaptation.  Huge portions of the story were left out, huge leaps were made between plot points, and I kept waiting for scenes that never came.

     It was only on the second viewing that I realized how great this film really was.  Noomi Rapace gives one of the best performances I have ever seen as Lisbeth Salander, the girl of the title.  Michael Nyqvist is perfectly cast as crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist, and Lena Endre is almost exactly as I pictured Erika Berger while reading.

     I also realized that the stuff that was left out of the movie made it a better film.  Still long, at two and a half hours, it would have been interminable had they included Blomqvist’s affair with Berger, Berger’s husband’s free-thinking take on the subject, and the inner workings of the news magazine.  They would have had to make this a SIX-movie trilogy instead.  As it stands, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is tight, fast-paced and perfectly contained in its run time.

     Another great thing about Dragon Tattoo is that it stands on its own.  Even though it leads into two sequels, it could just be its own movie and that would be good enough.  A satisfying conclusion, everything wraps up nicely, and only a few threads are left to lead into the sequel…

The Girl Who Played With Fire (****4/10)

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Niklas Hjulstrom, Micke Spreitz
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp, Lorentzon
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  129 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     This second installment in the Dragon Tattoo trilogy almost killed the entire thing for me.  Unlike the first movie, this one asks more questions than it answers, doesn’t work on its own as a film, and ends up being totally disjointed and confusing.  Rapace is once again magnificent, but she really doesn’t have a ton of screen time considering pretty much the whole film is about her back story.  A couple more characters are added (bikers this time) but they appear to be in the movie just so they can get beaten up by Lisbeth so we can see how badass she is. 

     A little more context is needed here.  A lot more, actually.  Unless you’ve read the book, there’s a good chance you won’t have a clue what’s going on most of the time – otherwise, you’ll have to wait until the third movie to actually figure most of this stuff out.  Now, about the third movie…

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest (********8/10)

Year:  2010
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Mirja Turestedt, Niklas Hjulstrom, Hans Alfredson, Micke Spreitz
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp, Lorentzon, Turestedt
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  148 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The third installment in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy is good.  It’s a solid, competent finale to a really good trilogy of films.  And it’s far better than the second movie, The Girl Who Played With Fire.  (In that it makes sense, and it’s possible to follow the plot.)  It is NOT as good as the first movie, which was spellbinding.  What sets this third one apart, however, is that it’s the ultimate performance in the series by Noomi Rapace, reprising the role of Lisbeth Salander for the third and (presumably) final time.  She has been great in all three, this time she’s masterful.

     More on Rapace in a minute.  First, a quick deconstruction on the books.  Because I think most people who were interested in these movies first read the books.  The Stieg Larsson trilogy has been hailed as a contemporary vision in feminist iconography.  Some of that makes sense – all rapists, molestors, abusers, stalkers and woman-killers get their comeuppance, and every woman in the novels is strong, powerful, brilliant, and totally together.

     But by the time I got to the third book, I realized a few things.  It all clicked in for me when Lisbeth Salander, almost inexplicably, bought herself breast implants.  Why would this girl, who ostensibly doesn’t care at all what anyone thinks of her appearance, get her boobs done?  Then the rest fell into place a little bit - consider this – every woman in the series is, yes, tough and smart and great at her job and better than most of the men.  But they are also…beautiful.  Every one of them.  And almost every one of these beautiful, powerful, brilliant women sleep with the same man.

     That same man is crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  It is interesting to note that Larsson, who wrote the books, is himself an investigative journalist.  And has written a book where the one basically flawless character is Blomkvist.  He is so self-assured and charismatic that every hot woman he meets (and he meets only hot women) comes on to him and hops into his bed.  (It should be noted that they all come after him, he never makes any effort to initiate the proceedings.)  The women know about each other, and don’t care, as long as they can spend some time with this magnificent man!

     Blomkvist is, of course, entirely successful with every woman in his life, and none harbour animosity toward him except for the one who may have fallen in love with him.  (And how could they NOT fall in love with him, he’s flawless!)  But he is also successful beyond the wildest dreams of any investigative journalist in his professional life.  He and his magazine, Millenium, are constantly uncovering massive corruption scandals that reach the highest levels of Swedish society and government.  Quite a life, this guy has!

     On an unrelated note, I am currently preparing a series of screenplays that will revolve around an intrepid radio personality who solves crimes through his radio program, becomes a national celebrity with a syndicated show that earns him millions of dollars, and who bangs the hottest women on the planet two and three at a time, only to wake up each morning to see them cooking me – I mean him – breakfast.  It will be lauded by feminists everywhere!

     Back to the movie.  The thing I like best about the transfer of the books to the screen is that the films have (for the most part) done away with this unnecessary plot device.  The second and third movies make it clear Blomkvist is nailing his editor, Erika Berger.  But that’s about it as far as the sex goes.  It actually makes the story better and the movies are much more of a feminist fantasy than are the books, on closer inspection.

     And so now we get the final film, directed once again by Daniel Alfredson, and Noomi Rapace.  Rapace makes the absolute most of her final screen appearance as Salander, a character she has come to define by herself.  I could no longer read the books without picturing Rapace as Salander, and I will not be able to watch the American version of these films, the first one coming out this year, without making the comparison. 

     Although there’s less of a back story in Hornet’s Nest than in Played With Fire, more focus is put on Salander herself this time.  And although she spends time in only three locations in the movie – the hospital, the prison and the courtroom – it’s a welcome change that she gets the bulk of the screen time.  She is as emotionless as ever, as cold and brilliant and intense as I have come to expect.  But when things start going her way, and the evil men in her life start to receive their comeuppance one by one, the veneer cracks just a little. 

     What’s amazing about Rapace’s performance in those moments is that the little half-smile that plays across her face is NOT an indication that she is trying to hold back that emotion.  In most scenes like this, you think the character would be bursting into peals of laughter were she alone, but that she’s repressing the urge in the company of others.  Not Lisbeth Salander.  She is not capable of such subterfuge.  No, Rapace makes it clear that this little half smile is the most emotion Salander is capable of showing.  And therein lies the brilliance of these moments.  And of this movie.  And, to an extent, of the whole series.

     The trilogy is being released together, as a box set, on May 10th from Alliance Films.  I highly recommend picking up all three.  Make a weekend of it or something.  And even though the second one is pretty weak, you DO have to watch it to get to the third.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Action, Thriller
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Gugino, Moon Bloodgood, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Maggie Grace, Tom Berenger, Mike Epps, Xander Berkeley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Director:  George Tillman Jr.
Run time:  98 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Faster is an enjoyable movie, despite its many, many flaws.  It works thanks to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who has become a dependable action star in recent years.  When he made his first foray into action films, The Rock was big.  And that was about all he had going for him.  He looked menacing, but couldn’t act his way out of a parking ticket.  Now, he has expanded his repertoire of facial expressions just enough to become believable as a one-dimensional tough guy.  Which really just means that he is now better than Seagal or Van Damme.

     In Faster, all Johnson has to do is look angry and kill people.  And he does, with a single-minded determination akin to Mel’s in Payback.  Only without all the nuance.  See, Driver (no one has a name, but they all have occupations) was sent to prison for his part in a robbery (he was the driver, you see) after being betrayed by some thugs.  Thugs whose connection to Driver and his brother and the rest of their gang is never exactly clear.

     Those thugs killed his brother, then they shot Driver and left him for dead.  But of course he survived.  And went to prison.  Where he apparently worked out 20 hours a day, got into fights with a bunch of other inmates and killed them, all while waiting to be released so he could exact his angry, bloody revenge.  Why he didn’t get extra time in prison for killing all those other inmates, I’m not sure.  I guess it would have made him too old when he got out, and this movie wouldn’t have worked with Ernest Borgnine as the star.  HE just looks SILLY when he flexes.

     The second Driver is released, he walks into what appears to be the set of Office Space, complete with cubicles and Swingline staplers, and shoots some guy in the head.  I don’t know where he got the gun, or how he found this guy, but he sure found him and he sure shot him and he’s sure dead.  As The Rock continues to cut a swath through the bad guys (most of them appear to be ex-bad guys who have ostensibly gone straight), little pieces of his back story begin to emerge.

     In the meantime, a badly underused Carla Gugino and a badly overused Billy Bob Thornton play a couple of cops trying to figure out who this guy is and what’s going on.  There is more of a connection between the Driver and the Cop than we initially see, but the movie spells out the mystery so plainly early on that it really isn’t, in any way, a “mystery”.  The Big Revelation in the final scene is so obvious that it’s laughable.

     Another subplot involves a professional killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who has been hired by some mysterious guy (although we all know who it is) to kill Driver.  He keeps showing up where The Rock shows up, and they have shootouts and car chases.  Just to keep the action lively, I suppose.  Killer serves no real purpose in the movie, unless it’s just to provide a contrast to Driver.  Killer is meticulous and well-groomed and elegant in his attempts to assassinate Driver, while his target is brutish and single-minded and utterly inelegant in his pursuit of revenge.

     There are enormous plot holes.  The finale leaves a TON of questions unanswered, and perhaps the most notable antagonist unpunished.  Many characters have no discernible motivation whatsoever to do what they do, and Killer especially appears to be an utterly nonsensical character.  Every side plot feels like it was sloppily stapled onto the main one with no regard for relevance.  The one exception here, I think, are the surprisingly tender, awkward scenes between Thornton (Cop) and his chubby, unathletic son.

     So why, with all these things working against it, am I giving Faster a mild recommendation?  It’s almost entirely because of Dwayne Johnson.  Yes, he’s a one-dimensional character, despite the weak attempt to humanize him right at the end.  And yes, his acting in this film is confined to scowling and snarling and staring at victims without emotion.  But this is the kind of role that requires that very character.  And after his painful five-year foray into kids’ fare, Johnson is back doing what he’s supposed to be doing, and he’s better than ever.

     I couldn’t help but get swept up in the kinetic energy of Johnson and his quest for revenge.  Stylish camera work, a myriad of references to other movies (some better, some worse), and a protagonist who is more a force of nature than he is a human being make Faster too charismatic to fail.  It didn’t bore me, it didn’t annoy me, and although I found myself groaning at it quite often, I was mostly just enjoying the ride.

Year:  1982
Genre:  Comedy, Action
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, Annette O’Toole, Frank McRae, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Sonny Landham
Director:  Walter Hill
Run time:  96 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     48 Hours comes to Blu-Ray today, which has given me an opportunity to take another look at this old 80s classic.  I couldn’t remember it well – it has, after all, been likely 20 years since I last saw it.  I wondered if it just seemed like a classic because it was surrounded by all kinds of crap in the early 80s, and shone brighter as a result.  Or, was Eddie Murphy actually funny at one time?

     It turns out – a bit of both.  Eddie Murphy WAS funny at one time.  And before he became the “after” picture for the don’t-get-electrocuted PSA, Nick Nolte was the toughest, most grizzled, ideal hardass cop in the movie business.  Both were at the top of their game here, 20 years before Nolte’s infamous mugshot and 25 years before Murphy’s even more infamous Norbit.

     It may only be in the light of the hundreds of thousands of buddy-cop movies since 1982 that 48 Hours feels dated and tired.  Yeah, they’re partners who hate each other, but they will of course gradually grow a modicum of respect toward each other over the course of the film.  I’ve seen it a hundred thousand times before.  And it always gets old.  Even in the older films that originated the genre.

     48 Hours works on a few levels – the action and the chase of the cop-killers takes precedence over the comedy.  The comedy, and Eddie Murphy, are secondary to the plot and the action.  And that really, really works.  Murphy’s scene in the redneck bar is as funny and great today as it was then, and the cool cars and action scenes still work.  It isn’t solely a product of the 80s the way so many of its contemporaries are.

     That being said, the necessity of upgrading to Blu-Ray if you already own this film is unclear to me.  It looks great, but this was a gritty and dark movie to begin with, and your existing DVD will do fine.  However, if you don’t already own 48 Hours, now’s a good time to revisit a fine film.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Country:  Sweden
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl, Mirja Turestedt, Niklas Hjulstrom, Hans Alfredson, Micke Spreitz
Eye candy:  Rapace, Hallin, Endre, Ledarp, Lorentzon, Turestedt
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  148 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     The third installment in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy is good.  It’s a solid, competent finale to a really good trilogy of films.  And it’s far better than the second movie, The Girl Who Played With Fire.  (In that it makes sense, and it’s possible to follow the plot.)  It is NOT as good as the first movie, which was spellbinding.  What sets this third one apart, however, is that it’s the ultimate performance in the series by Noomi Rapace, reprising the role of Lisbeth Salander for the third and (presumably) final time.  She has been great in all three, this time she’s masterful.

     More on Rapace in a minute.  First, a quick deconstruction on the books.  Because I think most people who were interested in these movies first read the books.  The Stieg Larsson trilogy has been hailed as a contemporary vision in feminist iconography.  Some of that makes sense – all rapists, molestors, abusers, stalkers and woman-killers get their comeuppance, and every woman in the novels is strong, powerful, brilliant, and totally together.

     But by the time I got to the third book, I realized a few things.  It all clicked in for me when Lisbeth Salander, almost inexplicably, bought herself breast implants.  Why would this girl, who ostensibly doesn’t care at all what anyone thinks of her appearance, get her boobs done?  Then the rest fell into place a little bit - consider this – every woman in the series is, yes, tough and smart and great at her job and better than most of the men.  But they are also…beautiful.  Every one of them.  And almost every one of these beautiful, powerful, brilliant women sleep with the same man.

     That same man is crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  It is interesting to note that Larsson, who wrote the books, is himself an investigative journalist.  And has written a book where the one basically flawless character is Blomkvist.  He is so self-assured and charismatic that every hot woman he meets (and he meets only hot women) comes on to him and hops into his bed.  (It should be noted that they all come after him, he never makes any effort to initiate the proceedings.)  The women know about each other, and don’t care, as long as they can spend some time with this magnificent man!

     Blomkvist is, of course, entirely successful with every woman in his life, and none harbour animosity toward him except for those who fall in love with him.  (And how could they NOT fall in love with him, he’s flawless!)  But he is also successful beyond the wildest dreams of any investigative journalist in his professional life.  He and his magazine, Millenium, are constantly uncovering massive corruption scandals that reach the highest levels of Swedish society and government.  Quite a life, this guy has!

     On an unrelated note, I am currently preparing a series of screenplays that will revolve around an intrepid radio personality who solves crimes through his radio program, becomes a national celebrity with a syndicated program that earns him millions of dollars, and who bangs the hottest women on the planet two and three at a time, only to wake up each morning to see them cooking me – I mean him – breakfast.  It will be lauded by feminists everywhere!

     Back to the movie.  The thing I like best about the transfer of the books to the screen is that the films have (for the most part) done away with this unnecessary plot device.  The second and third movies made it clear Blomkvist was nailing his editor, Erika Berger.  But that’s about it as far as the sex goes.  It actually makes the story better and the movies are much more of a feminist fantasy than are the books, on closer inspection.

     And so now we get the final film, directed once again by Daniel Alfredson, and Noomi Rapace.  Rapace makes the absolute most of her final screen appearance as Salander, a character she has come to define by herself.  I could no longer read the books without picturing Rapace as Salander, and I will not be able to watch the American version of these films, the first one coming out this year, without making the comparison. 

     Although there’s less of a back story in Hornet’s Nest than in Played With Fire, more focus is put on Salander herself this time.  And although she spends time in only three locations in the movie – the hospital, the prison and the courtroom – it’s a welcome change that she gets the bulk of the screen time.  She is as emotionless as ever, as cold and brilliant and intense as I have come to expect.  But when things start going her way, and the evil men in her life start to receive their comeuppance one by one, the veneer cracks just a little. 

     What’s amazing about Rapace’s performance in those moments is that the little half-smile that plays across her face is NOT an indication that she is trying to hold back that emotion.  In most scenes like this, you think the character would be bursting into peals of laughter were she alone, but that she’s repressing the urge in the company of others.  Not Lisbeth Salander.  She is not capable of such subterfuge.  No, Rapace makes it clear that this little half smile is the most emotion Salander is capable of showing.  And therein lies the brilliance of these moments.  And of this movie.  And, to an extent, of the whole series.

     The trilogy is complete with the release of this third one on DVD and Blu-Ray January 25th from Alliance Films.  I highly recommend picking up all three.  Make a weekend of it or something.

Year:  2010
Genre:  Action, Parody
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Danny Trejo, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert DeNiro, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Shea Whigham, Tom Savini, Mayra Leal, Avellan twins, Marci Madison, Alicia Marek
Eye candy:  , , , , , ,
Director:  Robert Rodriguez
Run time:  105 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     My stars.  What a lot of stars.  The Expendables got a lot of press for the extensive cast of action luminaries.  But it’s Robert Rodriguez’s Machete that has managed to cobble together the most intriguing and amazing group of actors in a film this year.  Sure, some of them are there only to get their names in the movie (Lindsay Lohan, I’m looking at you.  And I don’t mean in an internet-perv sort of way).  But every time I saw another familiar face, I got more and more excited.  It’s Cheech!  What’s HE gonna do?

     Invariably, every new star does something awesome.  As does every new hot chick.  The movie opens with Danny Trejo, the Machete of the title, busting up a Mexican drug ring single-handed.  With his machete.  Heads and hands go flying, blood is splashed everywhere, and then the bad guys are dead.  So Trejo picks up the naked chick (Mayra Leal) and heads for the door.  This leads to a very hot, very memorable cell phone scene.

     Then Steven Seagal shows up.  In this movie, Seagal is playing a Mexican for the first time ever.  I have seen him play Inuit, Italian, Russian, Irish and many other nationalities.  All of which appear to have the same accent and delivery.  And so Torrez, the Mexican bad guy here, just talks like…Steven Seagal.  The instant he shows up, he must prove how badass and evil he is, so he chops Machete’s wife’s head clean off.  Then he sets fire to the house and assumes Machete will die.  Which of course he will not.

     Now Machete can no longer be a federale in Mexico, and he ends up working as a day-labourer in Texas.  Michelle Rodriguez runs a taco truck and also an underground network helping illegal immigrants get into America and get jobs and so forth.  Jessica Alba is hanging around, conducting surveillance on the illegals, as a member of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.  See, Alba has turned her back on her own people!

     Then there’s Don Johnson as the creepy racist leader of a group of vigilantes patrolling the border.  And Robert DeNiro as a state senator campaigning for re-election on a platform that would crack down hard on illegal immigration.  And Jeff Fahey as DeNiro’s right hand man with connections to drug dealers.  And Lohan as Fahey’s slutty internet-porn-producing drug addict daughter.  And Alicia Marek as Lohan’s equally slutty and clueless mom.  (The “love” scene between mom, daughter, and the tattooed, scary Mexican Machete is a creepy yet sexy moment that will someday be remembered as a classic – just you wait!)

     Then there’s Cheech Marin as a priest, an endless parade of hot chicks and boobs, and Tom Savini as an utterly inexplicable hit man for hire named Osiris Amanpour.  I’m not really going to divulge the plot, because I don’t think it’s that important.  I also won’t describe too many bonkers scenes, because it might ruin your enjoyment upon seeing them for the first time.

     But here’s the thing.  Machete is a parody.  It’s a sendup of the exploitation violent films of the 70s, and in that respect it’s masterful.  And here’s how.  Every now and then, I forgot about the genre.  I started getting into the story, and the politics of illegal immigration, and I would really get engrossed in a conversation two bodyguards were having about letting Mexicans do their gardening.  And just at that moment, Machete would do something to remind me that oh right – this is an insane movie. 

     And these moments pop up at exactly the right times.  Scenes involving a weedwhacker, a man’s intestines, a meat thermometer, a severed hand – they are all so over the top that they jarred me back to reality.  Oh yeah.  I’m not supposed to be taking this movie seriously.  I’m just supposed to sit back and enjoy it.  And oh man, did I ever enjoy Machete.  Every single glorious minute of it.

Year:  1997, 1998
Genre:  TV series, Crime, Action
Country:  Canada
Language:  English
Starring:  Cameron Daddo, Carrie Anne Moss, Christina Cox, Jacqueline Torres, Jason Blicker
Eye candy:  Moss, Cox, Torres
Producers:  Jay Firestone, Stephen Downing
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films   

     At the beginning of Season Two of FX, on DVD October 26th from Alliance Films, the cop who starred in the first season is killed.  This is done so they can replace him with a hot babe cop who will take his place.  And THAT is being done because this show needed more hot babes.  Anything to make it at least a little bit interesting.

     Here’s the thing though.  My DVD remote was screwing up, so I couldn’t move around in the menus, and therefore couldn’t access the play-all function on these DVDs, so I could only watch the first episode on each disc of Season Two.  Also, because of the way the DVDs slide around inside the package, two of them were damaged and the episodes wouldn’t play.  Alliance has this new way of packaging TV series, that they’ve been using for about six months, and every time I get a TV series from them, at least one of the discs is screwed up because they’re all over the place by the time the thing gets opened.

     So I managed to watch only three episodes of season two.  One was the first one which introduced the new hottie, and the other two were about stuff blowing up and people disguised as other people.  All three were boring.  At least this series stars Christina Cox, one of my all-time favourites.  There were no pictures of the DVD online anywhere, because I guess no one else cared about it.  So I included a picture of Christina Cox.  At least I like her, if not her series.

Year:  2009
Genre:  Action, Crime, Thriller
Countries:  Sweden, Denmark, Germany
Language:   Swedish w/ English subtitles
Starring:  Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin, Lena Endre, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Eriksson, Sofia Ledarp, Yasmine Garbi, Johan Kylen, Tanja Lorentzon, Hans Christian Thulin, Ralph Carlsson, Georgi Staykov, Michalis Koutsogiannakis
Director:  Daniel Alfredson
Run time:  130 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I don’t mind that there is little action in The Girl Who Played With Fire.  And even though I read the books, and remember them well, I didn’t mind that the film spent a lot of time explaining the things I already knew.  What I DID mind, however, is that a two-hour-plus movie, which spends most of its time explaining things, doesn’t take any time to explain the plot of this movie.  It gives us an extensive back story on the title star of the series, Lisbeth Salander.  We learn a lot about her origin and her childhood and her life up to this point.  But – we don’t really learn what the hell is going on NOW.  In THIS movie.

     Of course, I do know.  Because I read the books.  So throughout the film, I was pausing to fill in the gaps for my wife, as the movie was doing a piss-poor job of doing that itself.  The movie starts out with a young man coming to visit crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) at his Millenium magazine, promising a story on humna trafficking, murder, and girls forced into prostitution that will blow the lid off a vast conspiracy and implicate many prominent Swedish citizens in the police, in government and elsewhere.

     Soon, that young writer is murdered, and all signs point to Lisbeth Salander as the murderer.  Well, her fingerprints on the murder weapon point to her.  But nothing else shows any connection at all between her and the victims.  The police, nonetheless, launch a massive nationwide manhunt for the heroine of the film, who now hides out in a lavish penthouse thanks to her ill-gotten gains at the end of the first movie.  A boxer shows up…then goes away.  There’s a huge guy beating people up.  There’s a lesbian relationship that crops up…then goes away.

     The biggest problem with the movie is that every major revelation, including the exposure of former Russian spy Alexander Zalachenko (a major character in the back story of Lisbeth Salander), is not connected in any way to the central story.  OK, here’s Zalachenko, and this is who he is and who he used to be…but what does that have to do with the trafficking of girls for the purposes of prostitution?  Why does his giant blonde henchman deal with bikers and carry drugs around?  What does this have to do with that?

     It was helpful to me to watch this with my wife.  She hasn’t read the books, and so when I thought the movie might be getting confusing, she would confirm that yes, indeed, something made no sense.  I could give her the pertinent details thanks to the books that I had read, but she had a really hard time with this second movie without that added benefit.  I think the third movie in this trilogy will be better, since it’s a little more straightforward, plot-wise.  And Noomi Rapace is sensational as always as Lisbeth Salander.  But this second movie is pretty weak in comparison to the first.