Stephen Fry – Action Hero Movies

If you can look past the way this movie is clearly trying to paint dissenders as hypocritical manipulative wordy nutjobs, attention-seeking childish pranksters, and deceitful thieving violent hateful terrorists — while also leading them down a beans-spilling chauvinistic avenue — and if you can also look past its manipulative military, medical and LGBT narratives — then you may be able to appreciate this movie.

To its advantage, this unexpectedly DC Comics affiliated movie, has some decent actors, including a forever-masked Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith from The Matrix) as the lead male who loves the sound of his own voice, and Natalie Portman (from Léon, Star Wars and Thor) as the lead female. And when you get past a slow boring patch early on, and another in the middle, you may find it also has a mostly engaging script which is some achievement for such a slow movie.

You may also recognise British TV personality Stephen Fry playing a supporting role here.

While people who particularly like this mystery-drama genre may find this to be an excellent movie, for the smooth action hero movie connoisseur like myself I rate this movie only So-So.

The Steal is another hacking movie from 1995 alongside The Net and Hackers. The Steal stars Helen Slater (best known as the star of the Supergirl movie from 1984) and in this movie she is a bank robber by way of hacking.

There’s a healthy dose of old fashioned British humour in this movie, with one of the supporting cast members (Peter Bowles) carrying an accent identical to John Cleese (from Fawlty Towers). Other supporting cast members include British TV personalities Stephen Fry and Jack Dee, as well as Heathcote Williams, and a co-main role played by Alfred Molina. All these guys do a decent job in making this a credible and banterful hacking-oriented bank heist movie with a funny kidnapping and a tracking down of the kidnappers.

While it’s hard to criticise this movie, it is a bit slow paced compared to most action movies reviewed on this site – there’s not much of an adrenaline rush to be had here. But it doesn’t become particularly boring for any significant period of time – it sustains attention quite well if you haven’t seen it in a long time and are generally a fan of this mix of genres. So I rate it an OK movie.