Action Hero MoviesI’m going to rate this movie Decent mainly on the merit of its genre, and its occasional good scene with suitably good cinematography, and its bringing back of many familiar actors from previous MK movies even if this one is lacking plot and excitement compared to them. Just Above Average could be justifiable too, but on the merit of its genre being pretty much spot on, the bad acting can be slightly forgiven.
Theme: Infiltration
This is the most comprehensively realistic spy movie I’ve seen by a long way. It combines military and special forces tactics with vip-class banter, sovereignty and underhandedness — to a level I’ve not seen movies do before — not even close. I guess this is designed to coincide with the ‘disclosure’ era.
By 40 minutes in, I realise this movie features not only Jake Gyllenhaal a baddie from Spider-Man (2019), but also Henry Cavill ie Superman himself (2013-2023), among other strong characters including the attractive lead female Eiza González. And it’s not got boring yet. So what began looking set for a Below Average rating has turned into something much more solid and now it’s looking set for Average or above.
By the end of the first hour it’s already looking like a cross between a firepower-heavy Expendables movie and a theory-heavy Mission Impossible movie. The first serious bit of action didn’t come till near the end of the first hour but it wasn’t too late and it didn’t disappoint so at the one hour mark this movie is looking set for a Decent rating — a couple levels above average already. I’d call it a chilled action thriller. It’s got a cosy niche cult style to it, similar to Hackers or The Net, but obviously more modern. It even features an aging Fisher Stevens, the main baddie from Hackers, as the main villain’s lawyer and administrative assistant here.
The second hour begins with an interesting plot twist as the untouchable-until-now gets kidnapped and triggers an emergency beacon to her friends.
Some of the physical movement is so casual in the middle of a firefight. There’s a lot of strolling around the battlefield without concern. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it’s made by AI, although it could just be bad acting, as in shockingly gappy battlefield choreography, but it’s a minor issue and doesn’t detract from the general mood very much. It’s still pretty good overall, especially on the bulk scripting side — exactly what AI would probably do best.
This movie has a lot of cringe pompous novice British toffee acting, but it’s still entertaining enough to warrant an Above Average rating. Jamie Fox stands out as the best actor in this movie. He plays the Arab captured, then set free by Robin Hood and devoted to helping him thereafter. The rest of the main cast — including Taron Egerton as Robin Hood, and Eve Hewson as Maid Marian — are pretty poor — and the others including Ben Mendelsohn as the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Tim Minchin as Friar Tuck, and Paul Anderson as Guy of Gisbourne, and Jamie Dornan as Will Scarlet — aren’t much better — but the busy script and dramatic cinematography does a good job of saving the show.
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.
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 begins with a very realistic view of some of the troubles in today’s world, as it builds up the backstory before getting stuck into the meat & potatoes of the plot. Liam Neeson‘s acting is pretty good here, but the woman playing his daughter has a serious lack of acting ability – her emotional scenes are cringeworthy in how they’re so skin-deep and bone dry, although to her credit she does get into the role properly once or twice, for the most important scenes, such as the moment of her kidnap. She’s also built so butch she couldn’t possibly be Neeson’s daughter – they don’t look alike and they don’t think alike, and this only magnifies the issue of poor acting, but fortunately she won’t be doing much in this movie beyond her role in the beggining and even less in the end, so this isn’t a major issue once it gets going.
The kidnap scene happens shortly before the end of the first hour, and aside from this being a rare moment of good acting from the daughter of Neeson’s character, it’s also the first time Neeson shows his talent as a “preventer” which lays the groundwork nicely for whats to come and makes the movie quite exciting going forwards, with about one hour remaining. This particular kidnap scene is well directed, well scripted, well planned and well supported with good cinematography and good acting – it only lasts a few minutes but it’s easily the most memorable and powerful moment of the movie, and as such, quite appropriately it makes clever use of the word Taken which is where this movie gets its name from – in fact a trilogy of movies (Taken in 2008; Taken 2 in 2012; Taken 3 in 2014).
Aside from strong combative tactics & techniques empty hands, blades, guns and makeshift weaponary too (massive credit to the fight choreographers there), some of the other niche problems & solutions demonstrated by Neeson in this movie are pretty realistic too, on topics such as rush-job crimescene analysis, suspect tracking, ad-hoc interrogation, room-clearing counter-measures and stunt driving, which all adds to the credible impression of his character and makes for a better movie in general. He’s basically an ex paramilitary operator with very tidy hands-on skills plus connections that enable him to get any kind of info he needs from government. He doesn’t move like an athlete, he’s even a bit physically feeble in his movement, which is a big red flag to the trained eye, considering his alleged top-level hands-on military background; but considering his age, his variety of skills, and his extremely useful connections, his obvious physical flaws do actually match a different kind of agent that makes his character credible again, ie someone privileged in an agency like the CIA where he’d have access to all the best training and connections without really needing to train so hard physically as someone coming through the military system would. Now if we go with this concept just to make the acting credible, the main thing that doesn’t add up now is how he’s so broke – he ought to be well set. Retiring completely from any kind of well-earning work just to be closer to his daughter who he’s still very distant with, doesn’t really add up, especially if we go with the privileged agent narrative. If he were ever operating on that level, he would have earnt plenty before he retired; else with all those connections on top of the kind of drive displayed in this movie, he should be easily capable finding work that closely suits his lifestyle preferences and still pays quite well – especially something senior in the security industry. Enough to buy a last-minute plane ticket at least. With all that specialist training and such a conservative approach to parenting, one would expect him to have saved up and cached away some resources for a rainy day, if only to help in case of emergency – exactly this very kind of emergency for example, which he was already predicting and trying to prevent before it happened. So some things just don’t add up here, but it’s not so bad that it significantly detracts from the power of the movie – it’s mainly just something that comes to mind when stopping to think critically about the credibility of the lead character’s story. On the surface, things generally seem quite realistic (except for the daughter’s awful acting early on).
At the half-way mark, when he gets close to the trail of his daughter and finds someone who she befriended and gave her jacket to, this movie looks potentially set for a rating of Above Average if it continues on its current trajectory which has had plenty of slow & dry patches but some impressive occasional highs too and seems to be still building momentum and just starting to get into the thick of the plot. Unfortunately the highs are a bit less impressive in the second half – the creativity doesn’t dry up entirely, and the action scenes are stll respectably made, but the momentum dwindles slightly and this becomes a Bang Average movie in the end.
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.