The beginning of this movie is pretty well made. It’s well cultured, well choreographed, well planned and well edited to keep things moving at a good pace. The sound and picture could be improved but everything else is on point. The casting and acting is pretty good too. Jet Li with his well honed awareness, kung fu skill and quiet charismatic charm, makes a great 007-style Chinese agent, licensed to kill. And his counterpart, Tchéky Karyo, makes a first class baddie too.
Having said that, it is a bit gratuitous early on, and then it gets particularly nasty shortly after half an hour in as the main baddie — the head pimp who is also the local police inspector — forcibly injects drugs back into a prostitute who recently cleaned herself up — to keep her sick, weak, dependent and subservient. Then she gets beaten up by fellow prostitutes, and then by another pimp. This is uncomfortable viewing, but on the plus side, it sets up the following phase of the movie, where she meets Jet Li, the shy respectful gentleman — this part of the movie is convincingly made too.
By the half way mark, it looks set for an Above Average rating, give or take a bit since the plot has yet to really unfold yet — we’ve had little more than a strong opening thus far, with some nasty bits dragging it down.
As the movie progresses, the entertainment dwindles while the unpleasantries fail to subside. As a result, in the end I’m going to rate this a Bang Average movie. Indeed, the build up is considerably better than the middle. Not that the entertainment completely dies off, but the smooth fun vibe from early on is mostly absent in the middle, only to reappear briefly near the end — if not for the cool ending when Jet Li openly storms the police station, I would have rated it Below Average due to the low quality middle that significantly lowered the rating from the Above Average beginning.
This movie is a refreshing but simple concept, at least early on. And there’s some nice interactions between Jackie Chan and John Cena throughout.
What lets this movie down though, and results in a Bang Average rating, is the last half hour which has several scenes that are too longwinded and monotonous. So even though the rest of the movie is pretty well made, and John & Jackie had good banter, Bang Average seems like a fair rating in the end, especially considering the very simple storyline and minimal key cast members.
Elysium starts off with an interesting dystopian sci-fi concept but rather gritty screenplay. In the first half hour, not much happens to the least cast member except he receives a fatal dose of radiation poisoning in his workplace and is given five days left to live. This urges him to rekindle his old master criminal ways in order to reach the satellite city called Elysium – a place for the privileged to live away from the rest of humanity on Earth. He attempts to get there in order to heal himself, but it’s a dangerous mission – families have tried before and they tend to get shot down indiscriminately.
There’s a nice bit of action before the end of the first hour.
Much of the second hour constitutes a bit of an anxiety & depression fest – probably good for horror-drama junkies, but not so much for smooth action hero movie connoisseurs. Easily skippable if you’ve seen it before. Fortunately, that toxic junk at least intermittently subsides to make way for some half-decent action. This movie had a lot of potential to be a lot better than it eventually was though. Unfortunately, due to the amount of bad mixed with the good, I really struggle to rate it Above Average but I will on account of its genre & stars, and its resultant memorability.
Matt Damon manages to shave off his Jason Bourne identity (see what I did there?) by going bald in this movie – it’s not pleasing on the eye but at least it succeeds in creating a fresh new persona for this movie – this one having much more of an air of vulnerability from the start, since he gets radiation poisoning early on – quite fitting for a regularly toxic movie experience.
The fight scene at the end is dry and over dragged out – easily skippable, even though it’s kind of fast action – reminiscent of a Tony Jaa movie – no flying elbows, but just as spiritually dead.
Promoting radiation chamber type beds as cancer cures, at the end, was the icing on the cake – quite inkeeping with the Big Harma theme since the start.
On the plus side, the main baddies are played quite well by Jodie Foster (brains) and Sharlto Copley (brawn). Many of the cast members are pretty good, even if the movie is a bit thin and nasty while posing like it’s strongly representing a really cool genre.
This movie kicks off with some terribly tedius non-plot quasi drama scenes that attempt to build backstory but are executed in a seeminly intentionally messy muddled way.
Within 10 minutes, things start to get real, as Liam Neeson‘s NPC type character gets a rude awakening in the form of an unexpected termination from work. But the movie goes straight back to muddled drama mode.
20 minutes in, it starts to get interesting, as Neeson’s character meets a strange woman who sets him a challenge with a large cash prize, and the core concept of this movie begins to reveals itself.
Around half way in, Neeson’s character gets framed for the murder of an FBI agent, all the while staying on a commuter train where he’s been for most of the movie already. At this point, this movie looks set to be rated Watchable – no more, since the first half has been so boring with such little going on. Sure, there’s a vibe of mystery among the semi-helpless angst but that’s literally the entire movie thus far summed up already, so it’s not a great fit for an action hero movie fan but not completely off the mark either.
Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t get any better until the last half hour. The angty stress & tension takes a long time to subside. It turns into a bit of a horror train ride in the secod half, and takes forever to let up. It’s a very one dimensional movie in this respect, and falls short of the ideal vibe us action hero movie connoisseurs are most interested in. But it’s not completely off the mark – Neeson still plays a bit of an adept hero – kind of. He especially comes into his own in the last half an hour, when he takes the lead and starts telling everyone on the crashed train what to do, to help them survive. From that moment on, he gets more dominant as the movie goes on, until in the closing scene he’s full re-instated as a cop and re-finds the woman behind the phonecalls.
In the end, I rate it So-So. A couple levels down from Bang Average, and just a few levels up from utterly Unwatchable. But this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it at all – it’s still a level above Watchable.
This movie begins with Liam Neeson‘s character acting rather stressed and dazed in an airport, ignoring random people who speak to him, and looking at everyone suspiciously, especially a man dressed like a traditional muslim. Within 5 minutes you can probably guess where this movie is going, and why it’s been commissioned – to make everyone look at everyone suspiciously in public places, especially airports and train stations etc – and especially muslims. And the speech by the actual hijacker in the last 15 minutes is really pushing this narrative hard, so much that if you’ve ever seen this movie before, you might be tempted to switch off at that point in order to skip that nonsense while knowing you’re not missing anything special in the ending. Anyway, there’s nothing new about Neeson pansying to this kind of agenda, so let’s get back to seeing how the movie goes down.
In the 11th hour, ahem, the 11th minute, things finally start to get the slightest bit interesting, as Neeson’s character texts a message to someone saying “we are go” when the plane’s about to go. This tells us he’s probably doing some kind of job on that plane, but we still don’t know quite what it is.
In the 15th minute we see he is indeed an air marshall, or at least, he has the gun and badge of one while on the plane. Then one minute later, someone starts texting him, to mess with him, and the movie really kicks in, as the anonymous texter threatens to kill someone every 20 minutes until 150 million dollars is paid into his account.
The movie proceeds into a session of scrutinising all the passengers, trying to figure out who is the killer. In the real world, of course, bank accounts get frozen very easily, so this whole “wire me the ransom money” concept that’s so common in movies like this, is utter nonsense.
This one a very gritty, suspenseful action mystery movie with an extremely simple yet still confusing plot until the last 15 minuts. I have to rate it Below Average, and even that’s complimentary considering the BS it’s pushing. First time viewers may rate it more highly, but when you remember the vague outline of the story, there’s not much left to rewatch it for, until several years later by which time you’ve mostly forgotten how it goes and can kind of enjoy it again until it get ridiculous near the end in which case you might want to switch off early.
This movie begins with the lead character wearing a white wig, not dissimilar to Atomic Blonde. She then goes on a bit of a killing spree, to obtain something from someone’s safe. There’s a lot of John Wick style shooting, stabbing and general hand-to-hand combat. But it’s lacking personality – all that grunting doesn’t make it any more charismatic – it’s really quite shallow in the opening scenes. The monotonous yet fast paced opening ends just about soon enough before I feet the need to fast forward, which makes for a respectable start.
After the opening action scene, we get a bit of domestic drama & romance which really shows the lead character Avery Graves (played by Kate Beckinsale) and her boyfriend David Brooks (played by Rupert Friend, from the Agent 47 sequel) as both having a serious lack of credible acting ability and a serious lack of action hero quality on top of that. Their acting is really emotionless, not even skin-deep, but in an irritable way, not in an ice-cold slick action movie star way. It’s like they’re both sleep deprived, numb zombies concentrating on something else and going through the motions while half asleep. The acting could hardly be any worse even from an indie B-movie, and come to think of it, the cinematography is pretty weak too, but it took a bit longer for me to clock on to this. Kate and Rupert both seem better suited to some kind of argumentative soap opera drama series. They’re both droning out their lines with terrible timing and zero sentiment early on – it’s really quite strange how random it is. Maybe AI made it up? It’s got a similar level of lifelessness as AI generated pictures. Maybe the audio is poorly synchronised with the lip sinking. Maybe the accents are a terrible choice. The outfits too. But the facial expressions and body language are that of sleepy grumpy teenagers while pretending to be hotshot secret agents having interesting and romantic chats. I blame the casting first & foremost, and by 10 minutes in I’m confident this movie is going to be rated Below Average at best. Aside from their individual flaws, the chemistry between the two of them couldn’t be any weaker if it tried.
The backing sound of this movie early on is a lot of white noise and screeching – it really makes me want to turn it off by the 13 minute mark. There’s very little going for this movie at all, in the beginning, and it’s really quite irritating, but it lasts over 100 minutes (including time for rolling credits). So far it’s on course for a rating even weaker than Below Average, but if the plot and action pick up in a good way, and the terrible background sound sorts itself out, then Below Average could surprisingly still be on the cards.
Fortunately, the movie does get a lot more real & interesting when the lead character’s boyfriend gets kidnapped and the kidnapper calls with his ransom demand in the 15th minute. Impressively, this energy is sustained for most of the movie, making it deserve of respectable rating of just Below Average. If it had a more advanced plot, and better actors, and more dynamic action, and higher budget cinematography, it would be easier to rewatch, but as it stands, it’s not so rewatchable until you’ve totally forgotten how it goes, and this is a big factor in why its rating remains Below Average as opposed to Bang Average – a score it only just falls short of.
Other key cast members, who are also slightly familiar faces from other movies, include Ray Stevenson who does a decent job as Avery’s boss Jarvis Hedlund (Ray passed away in May 2023 due to heart problems); Ben Miles as Nathan Evans who has a superior position to Jarvis, and Jaz Hutchins as Agent Maxfield who works directly for Nathan and has no problem outcasting & interrogating Avery and even her boss Jarvis as if he holds a more senior role or is at least on the same level. Apparently they’re all meant to be CIA agents, and I think Nathan is meant to be the director of the CIA, but it seems like Nathan & Maxfield are working for a superior agency to Jarvis & Avery, and at one point Nathan answers the phone seemingly calling someone else ‘Director’ so who knows. Their exact roles and agencies are not clearly defined in this movie, but their roles in relation to each other are clear enough.
This is a bit of a fun action movie, starring a 70-year-old John Travolta, with slight vibes of Mission Impossible. Although it gets off to a slow start, and gets a bit nasty in places, and is generally quite a simple movie, and has a long monotonous action scene towards the end; once it gets going it sustains an upbeat vibe and remains mildly captivating pretty much until the end scenes, which is rare for a movie so plain & simple as this one – especially one with a bit of a B-movie vibe about it. It’s actually quite an achievement and earns this movie a rating of slightly Below Average which makes it not much weaker than a lot of classics, which is quite an achievement considering some parts have a slight whiff of B-movie acting & cinematography, which is especially obvious towards the end, but does not make the movie a complete write-off – even the ending is slightly captivating, and the very ending is alright. It’s even tempting to rank this movie Bang Average on a par with many classics, but we have to consider its rewatchability which considering the minimal plot, simple script and intermittently weak acting & cinematography would make it quite hard to rewatch until it’s been pretty much totally forgotten again.
Travolta’s age is telling here – not so much in his face, but in the way he moves like a stiff & fragile stumbling old man.
Purely based on appearance, one of the supporting cast members called Caras, played by a guy who calls himself Swen Temmel, is almost certainly a real life son of John Travolta. Add to this how he looks nothing like his official father, but looks so much like Travolta he’s even been pictured doing impressions of him and the resemblance is striking.
The main woman on the protagonists’ team is a hacker called Link, played by Natali Yura, who is like a pound shop (or dollar store) Scarlett Johannson. Not as smart, classy or attractive but a similar flavour nevertheless.
Demián Castro does a solid job in playing Zade Black – the “target” and brother of the main antagonist. And the main antagonist – a man called Salazar, who has coerced the team of protagonists into helping him – is played quite adequately by Danny Pardo, although he doesn’t make as strong an impression and doesn’t get so much screen time as Castro.
All in all, I’d say this is a Netflix-grade movie, that’s blessed with a single elderly A-List star, and seems to have heavily supplemented its team of old-school industry dogsbodies with green new blood, such that it sits somewhere between Respectably Average and Hard To Watch.
Although it stars a celebrity of massive Star Wars fame in Daisy Ridley, this movie sits somewhere between Hollywood and B-movie level. It reeks of indie-level production. It seems like a British production with mostly sub-par acting. The camerawork ranges from not bad, to annoying – there’s too often too much zoom on emotional faces doing bad acting, which makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience at times.
The plot starts gaining momentum from around half an hour in, when a building gets hijacked. Prior to that it’s little more than irritating drama. Once it warms up, the action is a bit thin, and drama is a bit OTT, and the quality of acting is mostly weak. Daisy Ridley’s character doesn’t actually enter the building to properly tackle the baddies until 45 minutes later. That’s a massive fail of this movie, from an action hero movie point of view – how the lead star never actually gets inside the building to properly fight the baddies until the last 20 minutes of the movie! What a non-descript drama-fest.
The autistic guy namedropped Piers Morgan a few times, including asking “what would Piers Morgan do”, which makes me think he may have personally sponsored this movie in an attempt to improve his own public image.
I rate this movie Barely Watchable. It’s several levels down from Bang Average, and just one level up from Unwatchable. I’m really surprised to see Daisy Ridley get involved with of movie of this calibre. Maybe she’s struggling to find work these days. Maybe she’s being blanked by Hollywood for walking away from their darker antics – if ever I found that to be the case, she will have earnt my respect, but as it stands, this movie is bad – real bad, and barely watchable at the best of times. I honestly recommend just giving it a miss – it’s a desperate waste of time unless you’re tragically bored stiff already. Would you believe it actually had a Box Office release, grossing over 1 million dollars? It even had a budget of 25 million dollars – I wonder where that money went. Maybe this movie was really just a money laundering exercise. They successfully managed to make nearly 24 million bucks disappear. I almost feel embarrassed for wasting my time sitting through this movie and taking the time to review it on this site. The things I do so you don’t have to!
The basic concept is a good one but the script and cinematography never catch fire, they seem a bit soul-less, a bit like a B movie. The UNISOLs are meant to be cold, not the whole movie.
This movie lacks any significant female role. It had potential for a bit of warmth with the introduction of a non-UNISOL soldier played very well by Mike Pyle, giving Andrei Arlovski‘s latest generation of UNISOL a run for his money. But just as Pyle was growing into his role he got killed off. Interesting plot twist at the very end though, as Pyle’s character appears to have been cloned to create a load of new UNISOLs – this whets the appetite for the fourth & final movie in the saga (Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, 2012) which brings back Van Damme & Arlovski while also co-starring Scott Adkins, but unfortunately does not feature Pyle so the ending to Regeneration is a bit of phony cliffhanger.
Dolph Lundgren does well in his return to the Universal Soldier movie series, as of course does Jean-Claude Van Damme – the main star of every movie in the series except the last (Day Of Reckoning) where Adkins takes over as the main protagonist since Van Damme is getting quite old by this time (in his early 50s) while active soldiers in the real world are generally young (with elastic bodies and impressionable minds). It’s just a shame they’re working with a weak script and deadpan cinematography, so I can’t rate it higher than So-So even if the genre, stars and concept are all excellent.
From the outset it’s apparent that this movie is a better production than most of Van Damme’s movies. Sudden Death is a proper movie and has a very similar concept to Die Hard.
Van Damme plays a fire marshal working at a Pittsburgh Penguins v Chicago Blackhawks hockey game where he also brought his kids, and it turns out the Vice President is having a party in the owner’s box and has a large security detail but it’s been infiltrated by a highly organised gang of crooks who hold the Vice President and all people in the arena to ransom after rigging the whole place to explode, while everyone’s watching the game oblivious. Van Damme’s character smells something’s up when his daughter gets kidnapped after she witnessed a murder, so Van Damme tracks her down and begins to get to the bottom of the whole operation.
I’m generally not a fan of political dramas, but this movie contains just the right amount of that stuff and has just about strong enough actors to make it work well between the faster action scenes.
There aren’t really any boring bits in this movie, so long as you’ve not seen it already within the last few years. But it’s also pretty standard, in a way. So I rate it Upper-OK.
Action Hero Movies
