Movie Review - Escape Plan (2013)

Ah, another women in prison movie!  Nothing like a good, old fashioned, tits and ass flick with naked chicks and...   wait, what?  It's guys in prison?  With Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger?  Who the hell wants to see them naked?  They're OLD!  Why would...  Oh, they're not naked?  And it's an action movie without any shower scenes?  Whew.  Okay, I can do this.  Whew.  Close one.

Escape Plan (2013) is another action movie by a couple old geezers, I mean, uh, veteran actors and action stars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a security expert who has made his living escaping from various federal penitentiaries and then writing about and reporting the results of his many successful escape attempts.  After escaping from a maximum security prison, Ray is approached by a CIA agent who wants him to test out one of the new, secret, corporate-run facilities for double his usual fee.  Ray decides to give it a shot, only things immediately begin to go wrong, and Ray realizes he's been set up from the get-go.  Imprisoned and abandoned, Ray is left to fend for himself in a cage full of world-class thugs and terrorists.  Can he escape the ultimate prison, even with all his skills?

I'm not really sure how to quantify this movie.  It's got a little revenge in it, it's got a little buddy-cop vibe to it, and it reminds me of escape from alcatraz with Clint Eastwood way back in the day.  There's explosions, gunfights, prison riots, black-ops covert stuff, and a mix of betrayal and insanity tossed in.  Technically, I suppose it best qualifies as an action movie.  With, those masters of the action movie genre, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  So.  if you like those guys, and like action, it's hard to go wrong with this movie.  The acting is decent enough, with Sylvester Stallone playing the lead role, Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Rottmeyer, Ray's new best friend in prison, and Jim Caviezel (from Person of Interest) playing the thoroughly corrupt corporate prison warden.  Sam Neill, interestingly enough (interesting because I didn't expect to see him in such a minor role), plays the prison doctor.  Vincent D'Onofrio plays Ray's business partner, so the cast is pretty damned experienced.  This isn't Madame Butterfly or anything, so there's not much character development, and nobody acts the shit out of it, but it is what it is.  Nobody seems to just be going through the motions, as far as I can tell.  Then again, they're professionals, so how would I know?  I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag.

I thought this was a decent enough movie.  It's action, so there's not supposed to be much character development.  I was waiting for a line from Stallone about how Hobbes (Jim Caviezel) the prison warden, had only read the book on prison security, whereas Ray Breslin (Stallone) was the one who wrote it, but that never happened, so maybe that line was too obvious.  There weren't any obvious plot holes in this movie, which I found refreshing, or at least, none that I can think of offhand.  Pretty much everything gets explained at the end, rather quickly, but it gets explained.  I think it's good that Stallone and Schwarzenegger stick to mostly outsmarting their opponents, with a minimum of hand-to-hand combat (since they really are getting up there), which made things slightly more believable.  I mean, sure, they are action heroes, so there has to be some fighting, and they manage to pull that much off well enough.  The explosions, technical know-how and mechanical gimmickry is done as well as any other blockbuster, which, I guess this movie really wasn't.

I guess what hurt the movie was possibly the lack of character development, I mean, there's a small blurb 2/3rds of the way through where we find out why Ray spends his life doing this kind of thing, but pretty much everyone else is a total damned mystery.  There's a little head-to-head mental combat going on between Hobbes and Ray that is kind of fun to watch, but you got to wonder why Hobbes tells Ray he's still in total control of the prison at a certain point in the movie.  I'm not going to give away any real spoilers, but if the addition of a successful escape artist to your prison population hasn't completely destroyed your ability to be in control of the situation, I'm not sure what would.  The fact of the other things going on at the time just underscores Hobbes' complete and total loss of control, and I wonder what makes Hobbes, who seems like an otherwise intelligent fellow, cling to his beliefs about his prison's efficiency.  Some better looking chicks, a little female nudity, and perhaps a little more character development might have really helped this movie.  Also, it might have helped to explain exactly who the hell Mandheim (or whoever the hell it was Rottmeyer mentions) really was, because I have literally no idea.  If it's something floating around in the news, I stopped watching the news years ago because it was just all bad.  Oh well.  It was still a decent enough action flick, even if Arnold doesn't say "I'll be back." in it, and sadly, nor does Sven-Ole Thorson appear in it.  I guess he and Arnold had a falling out?  Meh.

So, all in all, worth a watch for a good action movie, but not exactly something I'd watch over and over again.  That's almost all for tonight.  I already started my xmas movie viewing, and I'm going to get back to it.  I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving, and I am thankful for everything I have, and everything I am going to get.  Sure, I'm about as stressed and fucked up as anyone else, but dammit, there's always good food and a warm bed to be thankful for, right?  And shit, I still have games and internet access!  What more could a lifelong geek want?  :-D  OH, and I almost forgot!  I passed 10000 pageviews this past week!  Dayum!  I'd do a whole Sally Field thing and gush about how everyone likes me, but I couldn't possibly bring it off as well as she did.  I'd just end up looking goofy, which, is about normal for me, anyway.  :-/  Catch you guys next weekend!

Review - Sabotage (2014)

I always knew Arnold Schwarzenegger would get back into acting after his run in politics.  I personally can't figure out what would make a guy like Arnold, an actor, a man of appearances, public opinion and make-believe, want to get into the world of politics, which is really all...  appearances and...  public opinion and...  make-believe.  Uh....  Never mind.

Sabotage (2014) marks what I believe is Schwarzenegger's second or perhaps third acting gig since ending his stint playing the Governator.  I'm not sure Expendables 2 counts, because I can't tell if he was acting in that one, or just hanging out with Bruce Willis and trying not to get hit with stray shrapnel.  Sabotage is about a crack team of undercover DEA agents, led by John 'Breacher' Wharton (Arnold), who decide to dip into the ridiculous amounts of money that drug smugglers seem to rake in all the time.  During a typical (for them) drug sting, they fish about ten million off the top of a stack of money, then blow up the money to cover their tracks.  Going to recover the money later on, they find that...  it's gone.  Despite the lack of any corroborating evidence, the DEA launches an internal investigation against the team, while the team tries to figure out just where the hell their money went.  Needless to say, this kind of stress can play havoc with the bonds of trust that make a good team, and when the bodies start to pile up, the shit really hits the fan.

Sabotage wasn't a super-stellar movie, and wasn't a blockbuster.  Despite the cast of good actors led by Arnold, the movie failed to generate any real momentum, despite some excellent shooting scenes, car chase scenes, and even some suspense and intrigue.  There was a whole "whodunnit" thing going on there for a while, and I can't say the cast hit it out of the park, but there weren't really any actors in this one who were so secure in their careers that they just phoned it in (maybe Arnold).  The woman on the DEA team, and I can't remember the actress's name (if I ever knew it), did a bang-up job.  She basically played a washed-up DEA drug addict who was hanging on to her DEA job by her fingernails, and damned if I didn't believe every minute of her time on-screen.  Sure, I hated the fuck out of her character, and didn't think she should have been a DEA agent at all, but that was the point.  You were supposed to think she was a DEA agent who was just this side of a crack-whore.  And I did.  So, Mission Accomplished.  Well acted, DEA crack-whore lady.  Well done.

What I did love about this movie was that nobody was perfect.  From Arnold on down to every last member of the cast, nobody was doing the right thing.  John "Breacher" Wharton's whole damn team was dirty, loudmouthed, asshole-ish, and generally unlikable, and they were the "good guys."  Yes, that's right.  A team of dirty, corrupt DEA agents who stole ten million dollars, were the good guys.  The bad guys were everybody else, from the homicide cop who investigates the killings, to the drug-cartel-hit-men who target John's team, to the heads of the DEA who won't even cooperate with the homicide police long enough to prevent the deaths of their own agents.  And the bad guys had their flaws as well.  Even the homicide detective sleeps with a potential suspect, and I don't think I'm giving away any spoilers here.  Everyone's as imperfect as they can possibly be, and still manage to do their jobs.  Which, is probably pretty realistic, at least in my limited experience of the world.  Admittedly, I don't get out much.

This movie did have some gaping plot holes.  Possible spoilers to follow, so skip this paragraph if you want to actually watch this movie, though I'll try and keep things vague.  One, I have no idea how the hell the DEA managed to tally up how ten million went missing.  There was literally a huge pile of drug money sitting in the middle of a shitty vault in the bowels of a building, and it seems that the DEA team's only job is to blow the shit out of that pile of money.  Which, they do, with a big bomb.  How the HELL anyone could have tallied up all the scraps of currency after that kind of blast is beyond me.  The interrogators said there was a separate investigation that had an exact total on the amount of money that the drug dealers had.  However, I still fail to understand how you can count off scraps of ash and come up with a total that exactly tallies up with what went missing.  It's just not possible.  Second spoiler, and this one is especially confusing, is how the killers actually managed to kill everyone that they did.  I mean, let's think about this.  If you've seen the movie, and you know who did it, like I have, you realize that, not only did they somehow take out an entire team of hit men, but they also killed an entire team of crack DEA agents, men who were used to being undercover, who were used to being targets.  Not only don't I understand how any of that was possible, but there shouldn't have been any possible way that they knew the team of hit-men, hired by the drug cartel, was even after them.  It just doesn't make a lick of sense.  And I really hate movies like that.  Sigh.  End of spoilers.

So, if you like the occasional action movie, as I do when I am not watching horror flicks, and you enjoy your explosions, shootings, car chases and a tiny smidge of nudity, then you might like this movie.  If glaring plot holes keep you up at night and make you scream quietly into your pillow (as they do to me), then don't watch this one.  It's available on netflix if you decide to give it a viewing.  After that, just let it go, breathe, relax, do some yoga or eat some yogurt, and try to forget about what made this movie absolutely impossible.  Ridiculously impossible.  Just....  ugh.

In other news, I just found the Undo button for my blog, so when I accidentally hit Ctrl-A and delete everything, I can fix it.  It was staring me right in the face the whole time, and I just wasn't seeing it.  Figures.  The best place to hide something is usually in plain sight.  And yes, I did it this time, and i was freaking out and DAMMIT if I didn't look around for an UNDO button, and actually find it this time.  Why couldn't I find it those other times?  Did they just add it?  Who knows.  It's there now, is all I can tell you.

In other other news, I survived the snowpocalypse.  Yes, I live in Western New York State, and we had lake effect snow off of Lake Erie for pretty much an entire work week, from monday night to friday morning.  Three to five inches of heavy wet snow per hour, 30 to 40 mile per hour winds, drifting and blowing snow, white-outs, the whole works.  We got buried.  The initial storm dumped 57 inches of snow on us, and the follow-up lake effect snow later in the week gave us another 21 inches, for a snow total of 78 inches of snow in a single four-day period, or six and a half feet of snow.  That's an entire winter's worth of snow all at once (and I'm suitably amazed that we get six and a half feet of snow per winter).  Our house was buried, the front door was blocked with snow, and several roofs collapsed in our area.  I managed to shovel out the front door, and luckily our roof didn't collapse, and the national guard (I think?) was brought in to help with snow removal.  We have had dump trucks and bulldozers removing snow at all hours of the day and night, just in the immediate residential area where I live, for the last three days.  The snow plows were getting stuck in the snow during the initial blizzard, and though I saw one scoot down the street once the first day, there wasn't another one again until today.  I guess they either all got stuck, or were all working elsewhere.  But, we're almost all shoveled out now, and there's only minor damage to the garage and the gutters.  Me, I'm wrecked.  I can barely move.  Shoveling the snow was like shoveling ice.  You had to break it up for a few minutes first, just to get a shovel full.  Then you had to carry the weight of an anvil's worth of ice and snow, toss it over a snow drift that was taller than you were, and then walk back over the icy narrow walkway you just cleared and do it all over again, just to make a few inches headway.  Initial reports by the newscasters that the snow was light and fluffy were not only untrue, but deeply painful to me personally, in so many ways.  I hurt all over, and I want morphine.  Lots of it.

For those that are interested, Charlie Brown's thanksgiving special is on wednesday night at 8 pm.  I forget what channel it's on, but at least you know when, so you can look for it.  I've been watching the Peanuts holiday specials since I was a kid, and my favorite of the three is the Thanksgiving one.  The Halloween one is all about Charlie Brown getting rocks, and Linus awaiting the great Pumpkin.  The Christmas one focuses on the special religious significance of the holiday, which is all sappy and nice and all, but doesn't really reflect how I feel around the holidays.  The thanksgiving one is more my cup of tea.  It is really all about the food, and having fun, which sums up all four seasonal holidays for me, from Halloween til New Year's.  In the Thanksgiving Peanuts special, there's several fun scenes of Snoopy having a battle with a lawn chair, playing a little basketball, and hanging out with Woodstock (the little yellow bird), while charlie brown tries to organize a short turkey day feast.  What I find so amusing is that, while Snoopy actually cooks two meals that day, the first one, for Charlie Brown and friends, has toast, and jelly beans, and popcorn.  The second one, Snoopy manages to somehow perfectly cook a turkey, and make a pumpkin pie, and he and woodstock have a feast all their own.  Makes you wonder why Snoopy didn't just cook the good stuff the first time around, doesn't it?

I for one am thankful that I survived our latest round of winter storms here, in what I used to think was called the snow capital of the world (which it may well be).  For my part of the world, 4 days and nights of continuous lake-effect blizzards are all really just part of another winter.  We get one of these bad storms every two to three years or so.  That's not to make light of the 13 deaths from the storm that I know of so far, from those caught on the roads and frozen to death in their cars, to the people who had heart attacks while shoveling, but dammit, there was THUNDERSNOW, which I love.  I'm just glad I wasn't one of the heart attack victims.  I usually do my shoveling late at night, and I can't imagine a worse death than having a heart attack out on the driveway by myself and not being found til morning.  There's tons of other things I should be thankful for, and I might go into those next weekend, but that'll do for now.

I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving holiday, those that celebrate it.  Catch you guys next week, when I will hopefully have recovered from my shoveling-induced agony, and all the wine I shall be drinking on Thursday (and friday, and saturday).  :-D

Old Movie Review - Deepstar Six (1989)

Deepstar Six (1989) was one of a string of underwater horror flicks that uh, 'surfaced,' (heh) in the late 80's and early 90's.  The cast wasn't as stellar as either Leviathan or the Abyss, but they did their best.  Sort of.  Maybe.  Meh, really, how the hell would I know?

Deepstar Six is the story of an underwater habitat set up to locate, place and build an underwater launch platform for nuclear missiles for the US Navy.  Six months in, they are already three months overdue for finishing their job, and the inhabitants are getting a little stir-crazy.  With only a week before the deadline, the captain and the doctor in charge are pushing the crew a little hard.  When the final site for the last missile silo is about to be finalized, sonar soundings reveal a large cavern beneath the site.  Because any instability in the sea floor might throw off the missile's targeting systems, the small crew in charge of placing the final silo is ordered to blow up the cavern and place the silo atop the flattened area.  The technician team sent to blow up the cavern is nearly swallowed by the collapse of the sea floor, and the biologist warns that the cavern could contain sea life that is hundreds or thousands of years old.  The technicians send in a remote camera to explore the remains of the cavern, and the camera is lost.  The technicians go in after the camera drone, and the work team loses contact with the technicians.  Then, Deepstar Six, the habitat containing the rest of the underwater team, loses contact with the work crew.  Yep, you guessed it.  All hell has broken loose.

Deepstar Six has a number of veteran actors among the cast.  Greg Evigan plays a mini-sub driver who is friends with the Captain of Deepstar Six.  Nia Peeples plays the biologist who tries to warn them to proceed with caution.  Miguel Ferrer (son of jose ferrer, whom you may remember from the original Robocop) does an awesome job playing the fuckup that manages to make everything go from bad, to really, really, really bad.  Matt McCoy (who was good in Abominable, which was one of the few mildly scary bigfoot movies) is the mini-sub co-pilot, and Elya Baskin (who I last saw in Spider-Man, playing Peter Parker's affable landlord) plays a scientist on the work crew.  All of these are veteran actors, but the movie is of rushed along by the action, leaving little time for character development.

There's a lot of water, a lot of explosions, and a bit of a weird conundrum that I haven't really been able to figure out.  Spoilers to follow, because, well, this movie is ancient and not really that good.  Supposedly, this thing is large enough to take out a camera drone, then a small work vehicle, then knock the large, heavy work station over the edge of the sea wall.  When seen on radar, it's mistaken for a whale, and it moves ridiculously fast underwater.  Then it attacks the large steel habitat, hard enough to do damage.  Then...  it sneaks in through an airlock and is only slightly larger than one of the underwater work suits the divers wear.  Wait.  What?  Now I'm confused.  End spoilers.

Deepstar Six, despite the adequate acting job by the veteran cast, lacks in a number of other areas.  While technically somewhat sound, with reasonable special effects, the monster and the whole plot around it is somewhat lacking.  The action tries to move you along fast enough that you don't have time to think about it, and that is somewhat successful, but then you wonder why someone like Snyder (Miguel Ferrer), who is so ridiculously inept that they'd never have let him handle scrubbing the toilets, let alone working the machinery.  Minus the ever-shrinking beast and Snyder's complete idiocy, the movie might have been entertainingly thrilling.  With them, you just wonder how Snyder didn't manage to wreck the place his first week there, instead of 6 months in, because the 'monster' certainly couldn't have done the damage without a lot of help.

Surprisingly, each of the three underwater movies I mentioned above, Deepstar Six, the Abyss and Leviathan, all have a similar background.  They each have an undersea base, they each have a monster, and they each have paranoia generated by the Russians.  There was a Cold War going on between the US and Russia at the time, and they made good villains in all three of these movies, despite the fact that no russians actually showed up in any of them.  Well, unless you count Elya Baskin, who acted in Deepstar Six, and may very well be russian (I'm too lazy to look it up).  Still, the paranoia and tension at the time was enough to serve well as the backdrop to these movies.

This movie is currently on Netflix if you want to watch it, however, I highly recommend watching Leviathan instead if you want a solid B-monster-movie, or the Abyss if you want something a bit more uplifting (and a bit more A-list).  There's no nudity in Deepstar Six, but the gorgeous Nia Peeples almost has a shower scene anyway.  So, if you like almost seeing Nia Peeples naked, or want to see a wise-cracking Matt McCoy, Deepstar six is the movie for you.  Otherwise, this movie is memorable only for the massive screwups, both on purpose (Snyder) and by accident (the incredible shrinking monster).  Watch it once to laugh at Snyder's screwups, then move on.

That's all for tonight.  Catch you guys next weekend!

Movie Reviews - The Debt (2010), The Legend of Hercules (2014)

Short review tonight.  I'm actually in the midst of being deathly ill.  Okay, maybe not deathly ill, but I have a cough that would make Death stop and tell me I better go see a doctor.  Tonight's review isn't even a horror movie, but I'll do a double review so at least one of the movies is a fantasy flick.

The Debt (2010) is a story about a team of Israeli agents who went after a Death-camp doctor in 1965, and were supposed to take him to trial for his war crimes.  It was a normal enough tale in the years after the war, jewish agents searching for the nazi war criminals who had fled after the fall of the third reich.  I guess some of them went to Brazil, or had been there during the war, or something.  In any case, the one they were after decided to stick around berlin, and become a gynecologist, because...  well, why wouldn't he?  The 3-man team of israelis verifies his identity, kidnaps him, and then, due to circumstances beyond their control, they screw shit up.  The Debt is the 30-year story of how the mistake is finally rectified.

I liked this movie well enough.  I'm not such a huge fan of horror or gore that I need a body to drop every 15 minutes or I give up on the movie.  This movie was more about the human element of the aftermath of the war, and the story of an older agent that goes back in the field for one last gasp, than it was about the horrors of the nazi death camps.  That having been said, the death camp doctor is sure one hell of a scary villain.  I like how, 30 years after the original mission, and many years past his prime (he was old in 1965, which would have been 20 years after the end of WW2, and he's 30 years older than that when this movie takes place), the nazi death camp doctor is still just as goddamned dangerous as he was back then, perhaps even more so.  And if a story about an escaped nazi death camp doctor isn't partially a horror story, then what is, I ask you?  This movie was also kind of a spy/espionage thriller, without much action to it.  Which is fine.  I like spy stories, too.

The acting was good overall, and I thought Jessica Chastain as the young Rachel was suitably attractive.  She seemed to draw my eye on several occasions, and the rest of the cast did well enough.  Helen Mirren plays the lead role, as the older Rachel.  Not a ton of action, but more of a suspense and atmospheric thriller, with a message, something about telling the truth, I guess.  What action there was, was very well done, I thought.  Pretty realistic.  But, there wasn't any nudity at all.  I don't think I've given away too many spoilers that you wouldn't enjoy the movie, so please, watch it on Netflix, where I did, or see if it's still playing on HBO, as I remember seeing it on there once or twice.  When, I can't tell you right now.  I'm pumped so full of cough medicine I'm not even sure I'm wearing pants.

The Legend of Hercules (2014) was on HBO last night.  I can tell you right now, that HBO managing to get this movie in the same year it was released is not a testament to HBO's aggressive desire to bring you the best movies out there as soon as they can.  Mainly because the Legend of hercules wasn't very good.

The Legend of Hercules (2014) is, in case you haven't guessed, about Hercules.  yea, you know the guy, probably heard of him.  Greek hero, bit of a strong man, son of Zeus?  Rings a bell, right?  Anyway, this is sort of a different take on his legend, which, as you may know, if how they do thins nowadays.  They reinvent the same bored old trash.  But I digress.  This movie tells a little backstory of hercules birth, and why he came into the world, and pretty much tells you why the greeks referred to him as Heracles (the romans renamed him Hercules because the queen of the gods was named Juno in their pantheon, not Hera, and they pretty much just stole all the greek gods and made them roman because they didn't have any gods of their own, the thieving wankers).  Then, you fast-fowards 20 years to a short 3-month period in hercules young life when he was son to the king of...  um...  well, wherever he was born.  yea.

No nudity in this movie either.  Strange for a sword-swinging fantasy epic that there wouldn't be any nudity but eh, there it is.  The actors were mainly forgettable and unknown to me except for the guy that plays Chiron, hercules' tutor.  Supposedly, in the myth, he was a centaur, but the guy in this movie didn't ever even ride a horse as far as I recall.  The special effects were a bit lame and the action was, meh, so-so, I guess.  There were a few good fight scenes, though mostly short ones, and the only really heroic thing hercules did in this movie, I mean, something that you might recall from knowing his legend, was to kill the Namean Lion.

Which brings up an important point.  Supposedly, the Namean Lion's skin couldn't be pierced (much like achilles, perhaps... maybe they swam in the same pool of magic water), so really, the only way you could kill the thing was with the strength of hercules, or maybe catching him in a rockslide or something.  So hercules does the heroic thing, and kills the lion, and I thought, yay, now the movie is going somewhere! and then.. it didn't.  hercules let his brother take the credit for killing the lion (wait, what?) and then, somehow, in the final fight, the Lion's skin ends up being worn by hercules.  But..  how'd he get it?  Maybe i dozed off at some point during the movie, because, his brother supposedly killed the lion, then kept the hide, and hercules went away, and was never near it again, and then POOF it's around his shoulders during the final battle.  Where the shit did that come from?  :-o  Either I missed that part or they edited it out.  Meh.  There wasn't much else in the movie that was of note.

So, to sum up, maybe catch The Debt if you like aging spy thrillers or suspenseful dramas, or like seeing Jessica Chastain's legs.  Only watch hercules if you really want to see just how a lion whose skin can't be pierced can be killed, because otherwise, the rest of the movie is kind of lame.

Okay, I'm going to go crawl into bed and try not to die.  Catch you guys next weekend, assuming I make it.  No, go away Death, it's just a cold.  Shut up, it is not ebola.  That Death guy, what a jokester!