Man oh man is Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire a complete waste of time. Usually this genre isn’t my thing, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a couple of these films in the so-called Monsterverse (notably the first Kong and their battle), but the bar was set low from the beginning. At some point it was going to crash back down to Earth, and it finally happened. In this one, Godzilla, protector of Earth, has grown restless. Humans find out it is because he is sensing signals from the vast Hollow Earth and he is preparing for a big battle. At the same time, in Hollow Earth, King Kong has been searching for any signs of others like him, but when he finally does, he won’t like what he finds. The apes have been following an evil member of their own, Skar King, who once before tried to destroy Earth thousands of years ago, and is now ready to try again. Kong and Godzilla must once again reunite to take down this big threat. The problem this series is running into is sometimes the best action takes place when they are fighting on top of (and inadvertently destroying) big cities, but you can only do that so many times before it grows stale, and when you try to take the cities away (as they did a few times in the movie), then you just have two big titans fighting over dirt or jungle. At which point it doesn’t look like two gigantic apes fighting, it just looks like two regular apes fighting (no perspective). And who cares to watch that? When it was over, and everything returned to normal, I just shrugged. ★½
Road House is a a remake of the classic Patrick Swayze film, starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role. He plays Dalton, a former UFC championship contender who has been down on his luck for quite awhile, hopping from place to place. He picks up a job as a bouncer in the Florida Keys for a cool waterfront roadhouse which has been seeing some rough visitors lately. Dalton ends up in the middle of a fight that he is plenty-well prepared to handle. Turns out the bar’s owner, Frankie, has been rebuffing efforts by a wealthy local businessman to buy the place, and the man has been sending goons to try to frighten Frankie and her patrons away. Dalton is able to “take out the trash” fairly effortlessly, but the calm isn’t to last. The bad guys hire a professional fighter from out of town, played by real-life mixed martial artist Conor McGregor, to come in and take care of Dalton. Not too deep of a plot, but it is plenty exciting, with the laid-back, matter-of-fact Dalton providing lots of laughs too. And the fight scenes are top-notch, you can see that Gyllenhaal put in the time to make everything look real. There’s some over-the-top scenes towards the end that suspend belief, but it is lots of rip-roaring testosterone-heavy fun. ★★★½
We move from one male-heavy film to another, with Land of Bad. Though there is some hand-to-hand fighting in this one, it is a military action film, so, more than the up close combat, we get to show off the USA’s military gadgets. An Army Delta Force is sent in to the Philippines to rescue a CIA spy, with support provided in the field by young Air Force tech “Playboy” Kinney (Liam Hemsworth), who guides the overhead drones flown from back at the base by “Reaper” Grimm (Crowe). Playboy has never been on a mission like this, but along with some good-natured ribbing, the experienced team settle his nerves and they get to business. There’s a few tense moments getting to the enemy’s base of operations, but they do get into the location, just before the shit hits the fan. More enemy combatants arrive than they were expecting, and the team is forced to move when the bad guys start beheading innocent women and children on site. Though handling vastly superior weapons and better training, the US troops are hugely outnumbered, and Playboy is the only man who makes it out of the firefight alive. He spends the day hiking back through the jungle, guided from above by Reaper’s camera, to a pick up by chopper, but the site is ambushed by the bad guys and Playboy isn’t able to make it to the helicopter before it is forced to flee. Now alone in the jungle, Playboy has to rely even more on Reaper’s guidance. Up to this point, I was in the solid 3 1/2 – 4 star range, but the last 30-or-so minutes, especially the big fight in the end, runs off the rails a bit, knocking down my satisfaction and ultimately my rating. Still, a decent one-time viewing for lovers of action films. ★★★
Sleeping Dogs brings back Russell Crowe, this time as a former police detective, Roy Freeman, who is pulled back in to look into one of his old cases from a decade ago. Unfortunately for him, he has no memory of the case or nearly anything else, as he has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Roy recently received an experimental brain surgery to help bring back some of those old memories, but it will take time, and the case won’t wait. A man is on death row with his end quickly approaching, and he is adamant that he is innocent of the murder conviction. Roy and his partner Jimmy (Tommy Flanagan, of SoA fame) were the detectives on the case at the time, and the more Roy looks into it now, the more he realizes that the two of them didn’t exhaust every lead to make sure they had the right killer. There’s a lot of moving parts in this movie and you really have to pay attention, but the end didn’t give me as big of a surprise as I’m sure the writer/director was hoping for. The whole “missing memory” thing comes off as a poor man’s Memento, but the saving grace is Crowe’s performance. He still knows how to own the camera when he’s the lead. A couple stars for him alone, but the movie by itself? Meh. ★★½
Baltimore (released in the USA as Rose’s War) is another one I saw just because of the lead, in this case, Imogen Poots. Based on a true story, she plays Rose Dugdale, a British aristocrat who left her wealthy family in the 1970s to get involved in the Irish Republican Army. The film follows a heist that she and 3 men pulled off in 1974, breaking into a wealthy home and stealing 19 paintings, which would have a value today of over $50 million. The movie takes place in 1974 as the quartet of them are hiding out in the English countryside, phoning in to the authorities demanding the release of other IRA members currently being held, in exchange for the paintings. In flashbacks throughout the film, we see how Rose got involved in the organization and how the heist went down. Like the above movie, this one is just OK too, but also like Sleeping Dogs, the lead is what drives the movie. Poots is spectacular as always, and the cameraman knows it. Lots of scenes where the camera is close up on her and we can see her range of emotions, changing slowly but noticeably, as events around her go down. Worth seeing for her alone. ★★★
- TV series recently watched: Battlestar Galactica (season 1)
- Book currently reading: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Jons Movie Takes 