By the half way mark, this Disney made movie looks set for an Above Average rating. It’s drama heavy, and goes on for 2 full hours, but it also has plenty of good action, decent acting and a decent story. The acting is particularly strong by the lead actor, Taylor Kitsch playing John Carter, and the story is captivating, even if the aliens look and behave disgustingly.
Although the back end of the movie is a chaotic muddle and not so fascinating as earlier on, the very ending is a cleverly pleasant one so I’m happy to stick with an Above Average rating.
This movie features Hackers style music & visuals, which is not surprising since it’s from the same year (1995).
It also features agents in long black leather coats, and probably inspired many things about The Matrix, except that this movie is about the data being stored inside a cybernetically enhanced human, rather than the human’s mind being captured by a virtual matrix. Although there is one woman who lives on in a virtual realm after dying, like a kind of AI. Keanu Reeves‘s character Johnny even does a bit of Tai Chi in this movie, early on, to help cope with brain capacity overload.
Dina Meyer plays Jane, the cybernetically enhanced bodyguard Johnny hires to save his life and help him get where he needs to be. They become quite close.
A youngish Dolph Lundren (in his mid to late 30s) with long messy hair plays one of the main baddies.
Udo Kier (the pureblood burnt in the sun, in Blade) plays one of the main characters early on, who double crosses Johnny then is killed by the Yakuza when Johnny gets away.
This movie was probably great in its day, and is still quite memorable but the pace is a bit slow and the action is a bit mild by the best of modern standards. Still, the acting quality is real even if they seem to be slightly winging it with a shallow plot and loose script put together on the fly.
By half way through, this movie looks set for a Below Average rating, but that’s no knock on the acting level, it’s more due to the datedness of the special effects and the tameness of adrenaline, and with all that considered, it’s quite a respectable rating. Some bits are of course better than others. But the second hour is very trashy throughout — barely watchable in fact. So I think a final score of So-So is plenty fair, if not generous.
The first 15 minutes of this movie comprise boring, irritating drama — highly skippable, even though it features an aged Danny DeVito (in his mid 70s).
After that, it gets really weird. If you thought a bunch of grown men & women acting like teenage goofballs in new bodies wasn’t weird enough, this time they’re acting like irritating elderly cripples — always complaining & ignoring etc. That’s quite a turn off in the first half hour, and there’s still a good 90 minutes to go! At this rate, this movie will be lucky to score Below Average which is a darn shame seeing how it stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart.
It’s sad to say, considering its star cast members in Dwayne and Kevin, but this movie is genuinely hard to watch at times. Especially when they start waffling with the new co-main cast member after 50 minutes in — that’s Awk Wafina, the same docile-come-hyper dumpy-butch Chinese chick in all the action movies lately — and then things stay boring for pretty much the entire movie thereafter. The Rock doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, and when he does, it’s so lifeless & bad, it kind of seems like it’s been Deep Faked, like he was ever really there and it’s all made with AI. As such, this movie warrants a Barely Watchable rating, which is several levels worse than the 2017 movie which was bad enough at Bang Average.
Tron: Legacy is quite faithful to the original concept, even continuing with a lead role for Jeff Bridges while focusing more on his son. It’s got a similar storyline but has been upgraded to modern style in both special effects (great) and drama (irritating).
With strong-ish new cast members and upgraded effects, while staying true to the original cult classic theme, the producers have clearly taken this movie seriously, and I have done too: I rate it Bang Average which is a few levels better than the original (by today’s standards). What could be improved? Well the script was all over the place without ever much happening, which is a bit weak in a 2 hour movie. It’s more than watchable — it’s quite entertaining at times — but the plot is lacking; and the cast could be improved too, even though it wasn’t particularly weak.
I’m not a fan of the privileged Chinese-Jew lead character in this movie (Even Kim, played by Greta Lee) — it’s clear she was gifted this role for her family allegiance rather than any significant talent. The next main female, Athena, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, a privileged black tomboy woman, wasn’t any better either. Indeed, most of the cast are pretty weak here too — it’s a typical LGBT lineup for 2025. The lead antagonist warrior, called Ares, played by Jared Leto, is alright, but it’s not enough to make the movie any better than Below Average. The script is messy for the most part, and hard to enjoy early on — the first half hour was especially weak, but it does improve after half an hour. It gets particularly interesting around half way through, when Ares goes rogue from his evil dictator in the human world, because he doesn’t want to kill Eve Kim, the lead female who he was hunting earlier. By 1 hour in, this movie looks set for a Below Average rating — not quite as good as the second movie from 2010, but better than the original from 1982.
This movie also benefits from an aged Gillian Anderson (from the X Files) playing Elisabeth Dillinger, the mother of Julian Dillinger, the main baddie, played by Even Peters — another typical annoying modern casting choice.
There’s some good action here — the main reason I rate it so low is because of the pace, with all the slow annoying soppy Netflix-grade drama, and even the fast action scenes are very slowed down. Add that to the annoying modern casting style and this movie is a clear level down from 2010’s even though it does have some strong special effects.
This movie gets off to a strong start, with consecutive scenes of high quality humour, mixed with some respectable action and intrigue.
Although the pace calms down before long, the higher quality than usual of Jackie Chan movie continues to shine through for a good hour — especially with the addition of Jennifer Love-Hewitt, who was still in her prime, at the age of 23 when shooting this movie, shortly before rapidly deteriorating (or being replaced by a lookalike).
But this movie is terribly let down by the last half hour, which is little more than a chaotic mess of a nasty laboratory scene. As such I rate this movie Bang Average, even though it showed great potential in the first half — not dissimilar from Jackie Chan’s movie 10 years later, called Chinese Zodiac (aka CZ12) which showed great potential early on but went terribly down hill as the movie progressed.
True story: in the making of The Tuxedo, Jackie Chan made JLH laugh so hard she peed herself on set (according to her own confession on a Graham Norton show).
The first 10 minutes are cleverly designed to build a backstory to this movie, and while it starts off a bit messy, Tom Cruise‘s presence sharpens it up nicely. By 10 minutes in it’s clear Tom Cruise is playing Major William Cage, some top marketing guy for the military who doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, and upon attempting to blackmail a general, finds himself railroaded to the frontline with his rank stripped and nobody believing his story.
By 20 minutes in, the Major is getting his first taste of battle on the front line and it’s a bit of a nightmare, but it’s well executed, and it soon becomes something quite intriguing, when 5 minutes later he dies and his day restarts and everything becomes Déjà Vu. Then 5 minutes later still – now half an hour in – the day restarts again, so it’s now the third instance of the same day. This time he’s less confused, and tries very hard to prove himself and alert everyone what’s going on, but fails only ends up with a taped up mouth. He also tries fighting the aliens proactively using his limited foresight, but dies pretty quickly. Then we see him die quickly again. Then on the fifth attempt he tries talking to the lead female – the Angel of Verdun, Sergeant Rita Vrataski, played by Emily Blunt – and it’s already clear that he’s been here many times before, the movie’s just skipped several iterations. One the next full reset, we see him try a different tact. He subtly proves his strange abilities to predict the future, and assures everyone he’s not trying to avoid the war – he’s now acting enthusiastic and friendly but not controversial at all – this is of course a rouse to gain everyone’s trust so they all lower their guard and he’s free to do what he needs to do – this time it’s meeting up with the woman who told him to come find her when he wakes up. It seems she has the same ability as he does, and knows all about it. There’s a few nice touches of humour here too.
By 50 minutes in, William Cage (Tom Cruise) and Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) have met Rita’s friend, a top scientist who understands how this alien enemy operates, and what’s causing the day to keep resetting, and everything becomes clear, or at least as clear as it ever will be. Rita starts training Tom in combat skills, which he’s gravely lacking, and she tells him he needs to make sure he dies every day, else he’s out of the game.
It gets a bit tense, gritty and uncomfortable towards the end of the first hour, and it’s safe to say, most of the fun is already gone now. But there’s still nearly an hour left to go. For this reason, although this movie showed great potential to be arguably the best action hero movie ever made, in the end I’m going to settle for a rating of Very Good, which is no mean feat of course.
After a solid 20 minutes of gritty drama and uncomfortable action, the mood picks up with half an hour to go as the Major & Sergeant come up with a new plan and head to HQ to get what they need. Unfortunately though, this refreshing uplift only lasts a few minutes before it gets gritty again and doesn’t let up till the very end. Nevertheless, we can’t discount the great entertainment value of the first hour, making this a Very Good action hero movie on a par with Denzel’s equally great movie The Equalizer from the same year.
This movie is a strange mix between fast action and vibes of dispair. It takes about half an hour to really warm up, with a strong backstory already built, but it stays a bit confusing right the way through the movie.
By the start of the second hour, the three main protagonists are now somewhat introduced and are working together in a team to track down their loved ones – to rescue them from the aliens who have abducted them. This is probably the highlight of the movie, in terms of mood. But it doesn’t take long till they’re all captured and things become quite depressing right through till the end of the movie – that’s quite a missed opportunity to have a lot more fun, and it brings this movie down from what looked set for a very high rating, down to just Decent which is still no mean feat.
Andy On was impressive, as one of two roughly equal co-stars, called Connor, with vibes similar to Jet Li, just a bit less intense. He was able to match Scott Adkins (who played Quinn – the other co-star) in terms of charisma and screen combat capability, while coming from such a different culture – they made a quite good team.
The lead female – Adkins’ psychiatrist – was played quite well by Vietnamese actress Trương Ngọc Ánh. The second main female – Connor’s kidnapped wife – was played adequately by Lily Ji.
The best bit about this movie is arguably the very ending – it’s got a cool bit of mysterious music at the end, blended in very well with the final scene. It’s not an adrenaline-rush tune, but it’s quite spiritually stirring nevertheless.
This movie is also abundant with metaphors that coincide significantly with theories that became popular around world events that followed this movie’s release in 2019. It’s as if someone were trying to get a message out, but had no permission or trick to do so any more explicitly than were done here. Of course this is pure conjecture, but it kind of makes me respect Scott Adkins a bit more than I previously did. Maybe it’s misplaced credit, who knows. And by the same token, maybe we should respect the weird Wachowskis too, since even though they seem to be much deeper ‘in the club’, and even though they seemed to have the full backing of the system to do so, they basically promoted the same kind of metaphors via The Matrix, and somewhat in Jupiter Ascending too.
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.
The first 10 minutes are a mix of plot-building drama with mild humour, and a couple minutes of irritating anti-Islamic conditioning. We also get a nice little action scene where Robert Downey Jr shows off some of his Wing Chun skill, before putting on his latest Iron Man suit at super high speed.
The plot takes some refreshing twist within the first hour, and although it dries up a bit in the second hour, the action is generally decent throughout – there are some really strong scenes from time to time, and plenty more mediocre. There’s also several instances of good humour in this movie. So I have to say it outperforms Iron Man 2 (2010) as well as The Avengers (2012) where Iron Man was one of the main characters and pretty much stole that rather muddled show. But Iron Man 3 is not quite as original or awesome as the original Iron Man 1 from 2008 of course, so ultimately I rate Iron Man 3 as just Above Average for an action hero movie – just one step down from the original which I rated as Decent. With a bit more of a smooth & comfortable, confident vibe, and a bit less scary, depressing and irritating, I would have rated this movie equal to the original. It would have been nice to see at least one of the women being kind of happy but every single one of them is a tormented soul – especially Iron Man’s woman Pepper Potts played by Gwyneth Paltrow who is literally tortured throughout this movie. It’s not meant to be a horror movie, it’s meant to be a cool action hero movie, but what do you expect from Hollywood – they’re addicted to horror and usually find a way to make it ruin an otherwise pretty cool movie.
Guy Pearce plays the main villain in this movie, called Aldrich Killian. He does a decent job of it.
Ben Kingsley plays the villain early on – a terrorist called The Mandarin who’s really just an actor called Trevor Slattery who didn’t think anyone was being hurt. His acting was excellent here.
Don Cheadle also returns as a core character, Tony Stark’s old friend Colonel James Rhodes who has his own suit and calls himself Iron Patriot – formerly called War Machine. He does an alright job here.
Iron Man 3 is eventually rounded off with a strong dose of conditioning against those who preach caution toward technological advancement. I’d guess this plus the anti-Islamic conditioning earlier on were probably what got this movie sponsored.
While there are some interesting aspects to the plot and some decent action scenes too; for the most part this movie is one or two levels less entertaining than the previous one. They seem to be doubling down on the drama aspect, to boost the plot, but it’s not working well for me as an action hero movie fan – it even gets quite boring from time to time, although it ends quite strong. Obviously there’s no revelatory unveiling of the Iron Man superhero to the world in this movie, since the world already knows all about him, including his identity and his capabilities, so this sequel is in dire need of additional creativity to keep the plot fresh and the action captivating – this movie is noticeably lacking in these departments, so I rate it a couple levels down from the first Iron Man movie.
It’s good to see the return of Robert Downey Jr, and alright to see the return of Gwyneth Paltrow.
It’s also great to see the addition of Scarlett Johansson into the core cast of this movie. Her character initially seems a bit too consistently cold-hearted and blank-faced for my liking – a touch of warmth wouldn’t go amiss – but it keeps us on our toes about who she is and what are her intentions, until it’s all revealed after an hour in, and then it suits her role nicely. Scarlett Johannson and Jon Favreau (from Stark’s company) make a great team in some awesome action scenes towards the end, which includes multiple moments of good humour too. Credit to the writers, producers, directors and actors for that. It’s good to see Jon have a more significant role this time round too – he had only a minor role in the previous Iron Man movie but deserved something better and this has been remedied in Iron Man 2.
Samuel L Jackson makes a refreshing appearance at the top of the second hour, causing the movie to gain positive vibes and become generally more interesting. Better late than never, although I’ll never be able to justify rating this movie as highly as the first, after sitting through its weak first hour.
The intrigue and positive vibes are cranked up another notch about half an hour before the end, as Tony Stark finds a message from his late father with a clue towards creating a new element that can replace the plutonium in his power core (his artificial heart) which is slowly killing him.
Mickey Rourke plays the main antagonist (with techie brain plus brawn) quite well, while his new partner (with business brains, money & influence) is adequately played by Sam Rockwell.
Don Cheadle plays the role of James Rhodes – a black man with quite a senior position in the military, who is friends with Tony Stark, but when Stark is dying and goes a bit crazy, Rhodes steals one of his Iron Man suits believing he’d make a more worthy superhero himself. Don does an adequate job, but he’s no Wesley Snipes or Michael B Jordan.
Don and Sam both carry a bit of a beta-male vibe. Very much lacking that ‘main man in the room’ vibe; although that may be the intention, since Sam shouldn’t overpower Mickey, and Don shouldn’t overpower Robert, but Mickey and Robert are both so-so themselves, half way between Alpha and Beta I’d say. And/or maybe Sam & Don sold their souls to be rewarded with these roles, as is often the way in Hollywood.
Action Hero Movies
