Category: Reviews

Movie Review: Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Though it’s often portrayed as something fun and adventurous, I suspect that the true nature of time travel, at least for the basement quacks and pseudoscientists working on such projects. Even Marty McFly, patron saint of time travel, booked it to 1955 under tragic circumstances. That’s why it’s hardly surprising to learn that the people who respond to personal ads like the one that inspires Safety Not Guaranteed are inmates and survivors, those looking to rectify a mistake or save someone from dying. This strikes me as about right. Sure, there are plenty of people who’d go back in time just to do it, but the right person for the job has the right reasons for going.

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September 11, 2012
Movie Review: Killer Joe (2012)

It isn’t immediately apparent, but William Friedken‘s Killer Joe is the year’s most effective horror movie, a dirty, sexual, gore-spattered test of nerves, a psychological grindhouse film that introduces us to some deeply unlikable people who only grow more unlikable—and more disturbing—with each decision they make. The reason this isn’t obvious from the start is because Killer Joe is also, at times, one of the year’s funniest movies. Its characters and set-pieces are so dumb they defy the theory of evolution. Surely, God shaped the Smith family of mud and forgot to breathe life into them. Save one, they’re a pack of witless bumblers. It’s funny watching them get what’s coming their way, at least to a point, at which you feel disgusting for having enjoyed anything that came before. (more…)

September 8, 2012
Movie Review: The Expendables 2 (2012)

Two years ago, I called The Expendables “the official movie of the 13-year-old boy.” With The Expendables 2, star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone doubles down, ramping up the violence while making an action movie for the Chuck Norris Facts crowd. Personally, I don’t think the whole Chuck Norris Facts thing has improved much with age. Neither has the core concept of Stallone’s budding franchise, which is to gather the elder statesmen of dumb action movies together with the titans of straight-to-DVD sport-to-actor crossovers and set their combined unstoppable juggernaut against some exaggerated, outdated kind of villainy. In the first movie, The Expendables visited the isle of Villena. Here, they take on a dude named Villain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), emphasis on whichever syllable you like. Here’s a guy so evil he only takes off his sunglasses before an intended kill. (more…)

September 4, 2012
Movie Review: Premium Rush (2012)

Premium Rush is the sort of title that works two ways, both as the kind of delivery service proffered by the bike messengers of David Koepp‘s film, and as a description of the sort of thrill one of those messengers—Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)—gets from his chosen profession. Let’s get the former out of the way quickly: The envelope handed to Wilee is a MacGuffin, the object that sets him pedaling across Manhattan, dodging pedestrians, taxi cabs, buses, and bicycle cops. Though the movie backtracks a bit to establish the particular importance of this envelope and its contents, it only matters so much as another man—Detective Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon)—wants it for himself. See, Det. Monday’s in deep with a Chinese gambling concern, and he has a very tight deadline, by which he needs to have his debt paid. The envelope is worth enough money to do just that, but, unfortunately for him, what goes in Wilee’s bag stays there until it’s delivered. (more…)

September 3, 2012
Movie Review: Lawless (2012)

Were it not for Killer Joe, Lawless would almost certainly be 2012’s standard-bearer for stylized violence, regarding blood and guts as substances just as important to its function as plot or character. That’s fair, given the particular violence of the era, but what’s so striking about the throat-slittings and tommy-gun massacres of John Hillcoat‘s film isn’t the level of violence, but the calm its characters exhibit in the face of it. Its protagonists, the Bondurant brothers, are a trio of outlaw bootleggers, the leader of which survived the Great War, the flu, and all manner of worldly calamity. When you’ve got a reputation as an immortal, I guess it’s no big thing, watching another man get perforated. (more…)

September 2, 2012
Movie Review: The Babymakers (2012)

Halfway through director/co-star Jay Chandrasekhar‘s The Babymakers, the movie takes a hard turn from being one of the worst movies of the year to being one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. That isn’t an exaggeration. To this point, Chandrasekhar’s movie was a failing attempt at a Judd Apatow-styled raunchy-if-sweet romantic comedy, plagued mostly by flat line readings and an almost admirable belief in the endless humor of testicular trauma. Before Tommy (Paul Schneider) knocks on the door of a couple who’ve purchased his sperm from a bank he donated to years ago in order to afford an engagement ring for his wife Audrey (Olivia Munn), The Babymakers‘ only crimes were its catatonic script and a sleepwalking cast and crew. (more…)

August 30, 2012