Star: Morgan Freeman

Batman Begins (2005) – Christian Bale and Liam Neeson

Batman Begins (2005) is a star-studded action-drama thriller starring Christian Bale (of Equilibrium, 2002) as Bruce Wayne and Batman. In Batman Begins, we see Bruce Wayne’s growth from childhood into adulthood, we see how he became the Batman, who he formed his initial friendships & alliances with, who he became early enemies with, and we follow his first few missions as the Batman.

Also starring Liam Neeson as the Ninja clan leader who helped train Batman near the start of the movie, while harbouring a dark intentions that come back into the plot towards the end of the movie.

Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman play the roles of Batman’s senior helpers – Alfred the butler, and Mr Fox the technologist who was a former board member and friend of Bruce Wayne’s late father.

Gary Oldman (from Léon and The Book Of Eli) plays the detective who Batman forms an early alliance with, and Katie Holmes (ex-wife of Tom Cruise) plays the lead female who Bruce Wayne grew up with and Batman rescues.

Tom Wilkinson plays the main bad guy early on, and Cillian Murphy plays the main baddie in the middle of the movie.

Generally, it’s a great cast with great acting ability expressed throughout the movie. Batman’s car and technological gadgets are also very nice.

But it’s disappointing that we get some annoyingly hard-to-see fight scenes where everything’s dark and the camera keeps switching between pieces of unclear footage – this is not the kind of action scene I enjoy to watch, but I appreciate there’s no real martial arts skill to be demonstrated by any of these guys and this is a way to cover it up and make it still look credible for drama lovers and suspense or even horror genre fans. Indeed, this movie gets a bit boring with a lot of drama genre creeping in, but when the plot gains legs and the action picks up it becomes very entertaining from time to time.

There’s a great plot twist about half an hour before the end of the movie, when Liam Neeson’s character comes to Gotham.

All in all, I rate it pretty good for fans of this kind of mixed action-drama genre; but for pure action hero movie awesomeness, I rate this movie just ‘OK’ on a par with golden oldie action dramas like Lethal Weapon that have minimal special effects and gadgets etc.

Sequels

If you loved this movie, you might also love its immediate sequel The Dark Knight (2008) which brings back most of the same major cast members and gets regularly called a masterpiece by movie critics, although it doesn’t work so well for me – the star of that movie is actually the Joker rather than the Batman. Maybe it’s good for drama and horror movie fans, but it’s not so pleasant for smooth action hero movie connoisseurs to enjoy. But if you do enjoy the sequel, you’ll be pleased to know most of the same guys come back again for a threequel, The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

Assassins Training

Wanted (2008) – James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie

As the plot goes, there are certain nerdy people born with extra sensitivity, who think they’re prone to panic attacks. But if they recognise, appreciate and tap into this hyper-sensitivity, they can become abnormally skilled movers with supernatural reflexes and calculation capabilities. Kind of like Rain Man (with Autism) meets Limitness (on NZT).

I’m not a fan of the mentality pushed early on in this movie, that it’s somehow a good thing, and a superior thing, to be a killer. But to its credit, this mentality kind of gets dispelled later on.

Action wise, it’s pretty strong from the outset. There’s Matrix-style diving through windows in bullet time, and there’s spinning bullets round corners like Beckham bends footballs. Plus there’s a few high-budget high-speed car chases. This is a fast action movie, intermittently. It has many story-setting slow drama scenes too, but fortunately they usually don’t drag on too long.

James McAvoy takes the lead role in this movie. He does a fair enough job. Not the typical macho action hero, but that’s not the vibe this movie was going for. Not to everyone’s taste, but it kind of works OK.

Angelina Jolie (in her early 30s) plays the lead female in this movie. She’s the main selling point of this movie, considering her fame since Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) where she became a household name and soon went on to hook up with Brad Pitt on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith (2005), although she was also in some strong movies in the 90s such as Hackers (1995) where she played the lead female, although she looked a bit different there.

Morgan Freeman plays a major supporting role, in a Morpheus-like position, as the head of the cult of assassins.

Chris Pratt plays a minor supporting role early on in this movie, as a colleague of the lead character. He’s best known to action hero movie fans as the star of the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies. He looks a bit different in Wanted though. Fun fact: he’s been married to Arnie’s daughter, Katherine Schwarzenegger, since 2019.

Overall, I rate this movie as Pretty Good, alongside the likes of Wonder Woman and Ghost In The Shell. The reason I don’t rate it even higher, on a par with movies like Hitman, The Equalizer and The Transporter, is because the lead male character isn’t totally my cup of tea. He’s a bit of a beta-male. Plus, the script has a few too many moments of intentional distastefulness for my liking. It’s a shame, because the goodness in the plot, and many exciting moments in this movie, are worthy of a higher rating; but I guess every Pretty Good movie has some relatively outstanding moments.

Great plot twist half an hour before the end, to keep things very interesting, just when it seemed like the plot was starting to run stale. Great ending too. It’s rare to see an action movie whose creativity and entertainment value doesn’t dwindle towards the end.

Sci-Fi

Lucy (2014) – Scarlett Johansson

The movie Lucy starts off as an aggravated drama edging somewhat into the Horror genre. But once it gets going, it becomes a very entertaining sci-fi fantasy action thriller with a very simple plot and a very minimal core cast but executed very nicely.

The star of this movie is Scarlett Johansson who plays the role of Lucy herself and does a pretty good job of it. But we’re also treated to a decent performance by Morgan Freeman as a ground-breaking professor, and a great performance by Amr Waked as a French police captain.

This movie has shades of The Matrix, as well as the movie Venom, but is unequivocally its own thing. It’s all about a random bimbo who unwilfully takes a revolutionary drug that gradually unlocks the hidden capacity of her brain. Soon she reaches a tipping point – repairing, defending & modifying herself with ease. Then she seeks increasingly more knowledge and energy until she can eventually make herself immortal. The ideals pushed by this movie, of incessantly seeking knowledge and power, like some kind of drug, are drawn from Luciferianism – hence the name Lucy. Here’s a rough translation of a quote from Laozi to counter that narrative: when you seek knowledge, you gain every day; when you seek peace, you lose every day – lose, lose and lose again, until you have nothing left to lose and nothing left to do, then there’s nothing more to do.

Even though it’s such a short & simple movie, over in less than 90 minutes, because it’s such a great concept and so well executed, I rate Lucy (2014) about equal to Divergent from the same year, and about equal to Scarlett’s other nice sci-fi movie Ghost In The Shell (2017).

ps. Did you notice the glass bottle of Evian water, used by Choi Min-Sik playing Mr Jang, the main baddie in this movie, to rinse the blood off his hands in one of the earlier scenes? That’s my main drink right there (the water, not the blood) unless I’m near a good natural source, which can be even better. Glass bottled Evian is available from Amazon and many other retailers online.