Hard Target was John Woo’s first big film in the United States and Hollywood, and it paired him with one of the top action stars of the early ’90s – Jean-Claude Van Damme, a star who was very much not known for his gunplay, and was much more known for his martial arts. It’s generally been held up as a rough start to Woo’s Hollywood run, but that said, I think it’s still an okay fun little action movie, even if it doesn’t reach up to the heights of his earlier Hong Kong career.
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Film Review: The Replacement Killers
When Chow Yun-Fat came to the US, he brought a reputation from various Heroic Bloodshed epics, from John Woo and Ringo Lam – a reputation as an action star with a strong acting range. So, it’s unsurprising that his early roles would fall into that same category, with The Replacement Killers doing a film in that style, but with some admittedly more Hollywood sensibilities.
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No Time To Die: Film Review
When it was determined that, no really, No Time To Die was going to be Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond, we then had the question of just how his Bond was going to go out. Most of the previous Bonds to date ended at the status quo at the end of their last outing – each film having an ending like all the rest of the bond movies. However, Craig’s bond films, however, have generally never quite been like any of the other Bonds. Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were films setting up the start of Bond’s career, and Skyfall and Spectre were very much about changing up the status quo (changing of the guard for M and the re-introduction of SPECTRE, respectively). So, there was a real question here of whether Craig’s departure would be about continuing the plot thread with a new actor picking up the baton from the last, or doing a mostly fresh-start of the continuity, as was done with Casino Royale.
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John Wick Chapter 3: Movie Review
This week, the grace period is over, as John Wick Chapter 3 has hit theaters.
Please refrain from spoilers in the comments until July 2019.
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Movie Review: Terror in Beverly Hills (1989)
When it comes to bad action movies, there are some names in action films that can be reasonably taken as a warning sign that the film you are approaching is a stinkburger. Frank Stallone is one of those names. Frank Stallone started his career as a musician and composer and has had a reasonably successful career at that. However, as his older brother Sylvester became one of the action juggernauts of the 1980s and ’90s, Frank kept also getting action movie roles, presumably on the basis that he looks enough like Sly, that if you put “Stallone” in large enough letters on the poster, people won’t look closer and recognize that it’s actually Frank. Continue reading
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Film Review: Point Break
Cops & Robbers movies have been a part of cinema for as long as there has been cinema, though prior to the 1990s, the general tack was to either have the robbers be the good guys (going back to various western films), or to have the cops be the good guys, but with a few exceptions generally not really both. Continue reading
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Film Review: The Mission (1999)
Johnny To, as a director, has two extremes. On one end is gritty crime thrillers like the Election duology – which may have an action scene or two, but which otherwise are generally grounded in the real world. On the other end is Exiled, a film which has a fight scene early in the film where several characters in a firefight cause a table to flip and spin end over end with their bullet hits, but ultimately both come out of the fight uninjured. In the middle lies The Mission. Continue reading
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