The Killer Review

John Woo's "The Killer" (2024) is a remake of "The Killer" (1989), also by John Woo, with no relation to David Fincher's "The Killer (2023). And I'm sure a half dozen other films with the same name exist too, but I'm too tired to get into that 

Whether this remake is better than the original (or the same-named but unrelated one) is an irrelevant comparison I'm disinterested in making: "The Killer" (2024) is a decent time waster surprises no one by debuting on the streamer Peacock instead of in theaters. The action is stylized, well-staged and frequent, but since the rise of "John Wick" in 2014, it seems every Hollywood action film wants to also have action that is stylized, well-staged and frequent. Where's the originality?!

I will say this, though Woo uses slow-motion throughout, he understands when and why to use it, unlike, say, Zack Snyder and his "Rebel Moon" movies, who uses it to bludgeon the audience with its arbitrariness. You, Mr. Woo, know how to direct.

But where he fumbles is in the story, which, look, I get it, this is a remake, but the material was musty then too! Tell me if you've heard this one before: an incredibly talented hit(wo)man Zee, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, is sent on a job to take out "everyone in the room." Only she declines to kill a woman (Diana Silvers), a singer named Jenn who ends up blind due to the mayhem. Her boss (Sam Worthington) is pissed she let the girl live, and ends up entangled with an honest cop (Omar Sy), dirty cops, a setup, double-crossing, drug dealers, stolen heroin, missing heroin, kidnapping, hospital shootouts, an abandoned church, and a pet fish.

The plot ends up being simultaneously threadbare and complicated, thanks no doubt to its France setting, necessitating subtitles for certain characters (some real heavy accents don't help the matter), but that's not really what I'm talking about. When you deconstruct the narrative, there's practically nothing here that you won't find on some basic cable cop drama (only the streets of Paris and not Chicago or Brooklyn, etc.,), only, you know, quite bloody.

I knew the seemingly random girl was important because, why else would she be spared (or given a name)? I knew during the fights that Zee wasn't really in danger because there's still half a movie left. At one she has a gun pointed to her head, and the villain just talks and talks instead of just shooting her. Why antagonists keep doing that is the real mystery here. The real mystery is how this is all the three credited screenwriters (Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken) could come up with.

While I can commend the performances (specifically Omar, who balances world-weariness and authority quite well), there isn't a single piece of clever dialogue or interesting character development, hollow vessels we watch shoot, kick and punch each other in set-pieces that failed to stick with me by the time the credits rolled.

The Union Review

Mark Wahlberg stars in this lightweight romantic comedy as Mike, a New Jersey construction worker who misses his friend's bachelor party when his old flame Roxanne (Halle Berry) walks through his favorite bar one night. Oh the shenanigans that could happen!

Actually no, "The Union" isn't a romantic comedy - it's really an unremarkable, unfunny, unexciting and unoriginal action spy comedy, but it's never an unpleasant one. This Netflix original comes and goes through you as passively as one wants background noise to.

The two are former lovers, and though I won't say whether or not they'll rekindle their love, but boy howdy do they have all the chemistry as a kindergarten's homework. They're fine performers individually, but neither their flirting nor bickering feel like anything other than actors reading a script in different auditions. As partners, sure I could buy it, but as romantic partners? I've said sexier things to a vending machine.

But the plot, you might be wondering, and you're right to ask that. But it's built from scraps from discarded James Bond stories. Roxanne works for "The Union," a secret organisation who's only personality comes from them hiring blue-collar workers over college graduates. That and it's headed by J. K. Simmons, who plays bossman Brennan, sleepwalking through his role delivering terse dialogue with familiar intensity.

Mike's recruited because a recent job went south, when they lose a briefcase with "intel on everyone from cops to the C.I.A.," so you know, the same thing that tops the Christmas list of every bad guy, right after nuclear weapons. Then we cut to shady auctions, murders, double-crosses, and of course, evil Russians. It's all just an excuse to have big name stars fire guns, throw punches and drive recklessly through international scenery and greenscreens.

The major problem is just how unstimulating it all is; even the action just sorta hangs there, it happens then it ends. Much like the movie itself.

Jackpot Review

I sat in disbelief at Amazon Prime's latest would-be comedy "Jackpot," a film so disgustingly nihilistic involving, in the near future that looks absolutely no different from the present day, a lottery in California where losers of jackpot have until sundown to kill the winner and keep the money for themselves. It's "The Purge" with one-liners, but director Paul Feig and writer Rob Yescombe fail to inject the story with any meaningful satire. So people die, we watch the blood squirt from wounds, but don't worry, John Cena will make a joke about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so it's all good.

Cena plays Noel, a "lottery bodyguard" if you will, who happened to spot winner Katie (Awkwafina) right as people begin attacking her with shoes, knives, axes, purses and pretty much everything this side of a gun. See, firearms are forbidden by the terms and conditions of the game, which is odd considering the filmmakers don't even bother tying with the country's fetish for them, I dunno. I mean, the material was right there. I suppose the filmmakers felt excessive vulgarity, in both language and visuals, was not just what the audience needed, but all they needed 

The entire city of Los Angeles is after Katie, as Noel tries to keep her alive so he can collect 10% for his services. but eventually he needs to call in a favor to Louis (Simu Liu), an ex-friend of his who runs the "most popular lottery protection agency around." In case you couldn't guess it from the trailers, Louis is bent and well, there you go. Along the way bodies hit the floor with a level of violence that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger proud, whether it be a low-rent wax museum, Machine Gun Kelly's panic room, a dojo, or an abandoned theater, it all boils down to lots and lots of mayhem. And for what? Because people are greedy? Because they're OK with killing someone just for money? Is that what "Jackpot" thinks of us as a society?

Even if it's true, it's a pretty heavy concept for what ultimately amounts to an inconsequential action comedy, just using it as an excuse to show an old lady swear and attempt murder. Har he har har.

The action is competently staged, if a bit unremarkable; the only big chase scene involves a rundown building and an alleyway, so it's hard to sit at the edge of my seat in excitement. There's a lot more hand-to-hand combat, which is also filmed rather well, but so what? Am I supposed to feel good that John Cena just tossed some guy through a wall because he's protecting some soon-to-be billionaire? What if that poor chap was broke beyond all means and desperately needed the dough? There is this underlying and unrelenting sadness here, and it does nothing with it.

More egregious though are the attempt at the characterizations, with Katie struggling to cope with her dad abandoning her and her mom's recent death, and Noel probably dealing with PTSD. It's all just so melancholy, and a tonal and total shift from the dour worldbuilding and innocuous sense of humor. It's all just so awkward.

Speaking of comedy, while a few zingers were amusing, I never let out a big ol' belly laugh; and I mean, look at the cast! Awkwafina, John Cena, Simu Liu, these are funny performers, and the best this mean-spirited script can do is have them trade one or two witty barbs?

Trap Review

"Trap" gained some traction ahead of release by seemingly having a twist in its debut trailer. This is of course par for the course for writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, who is known for this sort of thing. In it, we watch Cooper (Josh Hartnett) as he takes his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert. Concerned over all the security guards, cops, swat, etc., he asks souvenir clerk Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) what's up- turns out, the whole show is a trap for a serial killer known as "The Butcher." Oh I'm sorry that's not the twist- that's that Cooper is the killer.

It's a great premise, even if it doesn't make a ton of sense when you stop and think about it. For one, we see an FBI profiler (Hayley Mills) throughout, telling her men to screen every male at the venue upon exit. You're telling me that they're going to screen thousands of men as they leave? I question the logistics of that plan, but it gets sillier: at one point Cooper acquires a police radio and listens in to their conversations, which is wild to me that they'd speak so freely over the air, which a quick interwebs search tells me is open to the public in Pennsylvania where this film takes place, surely they know he's smart enough to get a hold of that. (They also aren't smart enough to notice their equipment missing, but whatever.)

More unbelievable things happen without getting into spoilers, such as how Cooper lurks around the stadium looking for an exit. At one point he triggers a contained oil explosion to burn a food worker, distracting the guards so he can scope out the roof. He's stopped, and lucks into knowing the password (thanks Jamie) and having the right keycard (thanks apron left by chance nearby), but apparently this is not suspicious enough, even with his lies. That'd be fine once, but another time he's seen "checking" the coffee while the swat team is briefed. He talks to everyone like he's their friend, which again, sure whatever. But later on, when the singer "Lady Raven" (writer/director's own daughter Saleka Shyamalan, in some classic Hollywood nepotism) picks an attendee to go up on stage with her, literally putting Cooper in everyone's eye. Somehow, all these men and women in uniform just somehow don't see or remember him. Or how they don't bother checking all the cameras everywhere to see if, oh I dunno, he's done anything unusual. What a funny convenience I'd say.

A lot has been said about Hartnett, with some calling this his "comeback" picture, but I walked away unimpressed. He's clearly trying too hard to be charming and then too hard to be creepy, without it feeling natural. He's serviceable I suppose, but since the whole film, warts and all, rests on his performance to convince us that it's all really happening, his shortcomings are all the more disappointing.

Then there's the ending, which leading up to the climatic reveal, I had made my own guesses. I was wrong, of course, but that's only because I was coming up with actual narrative switcheroos. Instead, we watch the film come to a conclusion by matter of chances so outlandish that I could almost hear the audience groan. But wait, the film keeps going, only for another incidental moment to happen. And then another, and I think one more after that. It is all so convoluted that it all fails to register as an actual twist, with things happening like an episode of Murder She Wrote, only without Mrs. Potts and one F-word dropped as allowed by its PG-13 rating.

My Spy: The Eternal City Review

"My Spy: The Eternal City" is about as good as a sequel to a 2020 Dave Bautista-led family action comedy about a nine year old kid wanting to become a spy could be. It's not going to set the cinematic world on fire or anything, but it's a decent way to spend a humid July Sunday evening.

Bautista returns as JJ, a CIA agent-turned-analyst who since becoming Sophie's (Chloe Coleman) guardian, prefers to spend his time behind a desk and making scones when his muffin's fail to rise in the oven. But his pal Bobbi (Kristen Schaal, back from the first one) thinks he's lost his edge since becoming a full-time parent, as does his boss David (Ken Jeong), who wants him back in the field. Oh the fictional woes of well-off movie characters, what ever is going to happen I wonder.

Of course he gets back into the action, and that's not a spoiler, but the way about it is as goofy as it is convoluted: Sophie's school choir group wins a chance to go to Italy to play at the Vatican, and if it ain't a coinkydink, David's son Collin (Taeho K) is not only her best friend, but also in the same choir group! JJ chaperones the trip, but not before a thumb drive is stolen containing locations to long-forgotten nuclear bombs hidden all across the world.

To go on could give something away, but the narrative here is as heavy as a diet soda, so whatever: Collin is kidnapped, to blackmail him into getting the plot-twist of a villain the codes to the explosives. Or did they already have the codes but need the locations? Ah, I can't remember, but it doesn't matter, the story is just an excuse for some silly slapstick, surprisingly convincing action, and all-around delightful performances.

All the major players, including some I'm not mentioning to save any feeble surprises here from being exposed, are well-cast and are clearly enjoying themselves, so we enjoy watching their hijinks. But then the plot gets in the way, because now an assassin is going to kill JJ, or the still-not-saying-who baddie has drugged JJ with some vague neurotoxin. To kill him, slowly, while no one is around. I wonder if he'll be saved or something. It's just too stuffed with trying to be an espionage flick that it interrupts the overall comedy of it all, it doesn't let things breath and ease into the wacky situations. Because the actual plot is ridiculous if it were played straight, so why bother in the first place?

By trying to be both a spy film and a comedy, it fails at doing either well, and despite being rarely funny, it is consistently amusing, and perhaps most refreshing of all, it has its heart in the right place. There's nothing especially good here, but there's also nothing bad- its charming cast and mostly-zippy dialogue grounds the picture to be about family, despite all the explosions, bullets and killings.

Twisters Review

It has been a long time since we've had a good disaster movie, and unfortunately the long-awaited stand-alone sequel to 1996's "Twister," annoyingly called "Twisters," is not one. It's as silly as one could want from a big-budget spectacle, but it's got problems so big you could fit a flying cow through it.

Of course, it's hard to go into this without thinking of the original, and it doesn't help that there is only so much plot you can shoe-horn into a movie about dangerous winds. Kate is our lead, played adequately by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who early on, with her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack) & team, we see trying out the idea of distributing sodium polyacrylate into tornadoes, which will soak up all the moisture; it's "the same thing used in pads" we're told. The film is clever enough to use a joke to explain movie-science, but doesn't bother with explaining what happens to the water-logged salt once it supposedly kills the twister. Does it drop to the ground? Get flung everywhere? Who cleans it up after? Questions, questions and more questions, and I should not be asking myself those in a disaster flick.

Anyway, the plan doesn't work and only her and pal Javi (Anthony Ramos) survive. We flash forward five years and the two haven't kept in touch, Kate working an office job and Javi forming the company "Storm Par," which uses military technology to scan tornadoes. He has all the latest technology and, gasp, investors. Problem is that they would need to get in real close to one, which is where Kate comes in. She agrees to work one week with him in Oklahoma, but uh-oh, wouldn't you know it, another team of storm-chasers is there, lead by Tyler (Glenn Powell). He wears a cowboy hat and speaks inconsistently with a southern accent, and runs a YouTube channel with his eclectic crew. They have names according to the credits but it doesn't matter. They are exclusively defined by their role; like Lily (Sasha Lane) who flies a drone, and Boone (Brandon Perea) who films his show (and yes, I had to look them up), so to me they were nothing more than "drone girl" and "camera guy," respectively. Such fleshed-out characterization.

This is a crippling problem, since for maybe the first hour we just get scene after scene of people driving towards big storms, and Tyler's team spend almost all their screen-time yelping and hollering as they do stupid tricks like setting off fireworks inside a twister. It's obnoxious and grating, so you feel like you paid to watch a free YouTube video at a theater.

Now you might be wondering, how do you set off fireworks in a tornado? Wouldn't that require driving into one? Several characters, several times, explicitly say not to be in a vehicle during one. Ah but you see, Tyler's truck is specially rigged to anchor into the ground, keeping him safe. Why other vehicles are sometimes safe and others sometimes not, however? I'm no meteorologist, or filmmaker, but it seems the film can't follow it's own logic.

So the dualing groups really don't have much to dual about, one is funded by rich people and the other subscribers, so since they're not competing for anything, there is absolutely zero tension. They cut each other off on roads leading to storms, because of the script tells them (and of course, there is only one road per twister). Eventually the narrative introduces morals to the story, with Kate prioritizing helping those post-twister and Javi wanting to collect his data instead, so soon she leaves for Glenn, because, I dunno, he's supposed to be charming. Yet the two have no chemistry, just two decent actors being paid to talk cute to each other. (It doesn't help that he looks way too old for her, much more so than their mild real-life age gap suggests.)

So what about the meat-and-potatoes of it all, the tornadoes themselves. I saw this on the biggest screen I could, but "Twisters" fails to showcase the wonder of tornadoes, the majesty of mother nature being a force of nature. Instead the action is chaotically filmed, the camera struggling to clearly show the actors and special effects, so it harshly bounces around. I suppose it was to create a sense of disorientation and unease, but what we got was just frustration. There's a lot of money on the screen, and it's a shame we never really get a good look at it.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F Review

For such a belated fourthquel, "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" commits a cinema felon by adding a subtitle instead of a simple roman numeral like its predecessors. And while I can't forgive such flagrant grammar inconsistencies, I can forgive the film itself for being a pleasantly light-weight action comedy that has just enough thrills and laughs.

Eddie Murphy returns as Axel Foley, who despite some paunch hardly looks a day over fifty, despite being over sixty. He's the same old fast-talking Detroit detective who, after stopping some crooks at a local hockey game, goes to visit his estranged daughter Jane (Taylour Paige), a criminal defense attorney in, you guessed it, Beverly Hills. She hates him for prioritizing his work over his family, and not a story beat is beaten that hasn't been beaten to death in every other medium of entertainment. But it's fine, the two have chemistry, and it goes to show that with the right script (here credited to Will Beall, Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten) is still capable of being funny.

Anyway, Jane is working on a case to defend Enriquez (Damien Diaz), who claims to be framed for the death of an undercover cop. A cop who works for Grant, played by Kevin Bacon, and I'm not sure if it's the film or the actor himself, but the second you see him you know he's dirty. Of course the film comes out and says just as much soon after, so don't press that "play" button thinking there's any subtly here at all- Bacon's the kind of actor born who has the face of a slimy bent authority figure.

He's the kind of character that can only exist in movies like this, where their word is trusted by the entire department despite the fact that he or his goons are constantly planting evidence, kidnapping, arresting, breaking-and-entering without warrants, stealing, and oh yeah, killing, in the age where everyone in Beverly Hills and their pampered pooch have a phone capable of recording.

Oh don't get me wrong, Kevin is a fantastic actor, capable of range this belated little distraction doesn't deserve, but that doesn't mean he doesn't give it his all. Because he does, but man, he can do this in his sleep.

Judge Reinhold returns as Rosewood, as does Paul Reiser, Bronson Pinchot and John Ashton (as Jeffery, Serge and Taggart, respectively), and their participation is an extended cameo at best and just a plain old cameo at worst, but hey, part of me is happy to see someone like Reinhold still working in Hollywood. In actuality, Axel spends much of his time with Jane and Detective Abbot (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who's frizzy hair and relaxed, almost bored expression reminded me of disgraced and incarcerated actor Danny Masterson, which if unintentional is uncanny. He's working on the Enriquez case too, and previously dated Jane, which probably sounded like it'd provided suspense, but this featherweight actioner couldn't muster any dramatic or romantic tension if Eddie broke the fourth wall and said directly to the audience "this is dramatic and romantic tension."

But who cares, because director Mark Molloy keeps the familiar plot moving fast enough that you're never bored, but he fails to craft a single creative moment; your standard shootouts and chases punctuate the picture enough times to keep you from dozing off, but it never stimulates you. It never challenges your expectations, instead banking on warmed-over nostalgia and Murphy's comedic talents.