Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) ***/*****

The idea behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, that of rewriting Jane Austen’s classic novel of social repression so that it takes place in a world full of flesh-eating zombies, is one that should have been clever and amusing for about a minute or two. It’s the sort of thing you hear about, chuckle at the notion of, and then dismiss. It shouldn’t have been enough to actually support an entire book, let alone a film adaptation of said book. And yet, here we are, watching a Burr Steers-directed (Igby Goes Down) film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s bastardization of Austen’s novel, and the results are pretty dang entertaining.

Nine times out of ten a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film would have ended up being some kind of bottom of the barrel exploitation farce—something that looks cheap, lacks weight, and fails to connect with the audience in any substantial way, like Grahame-Smith’s other foray into this sort of cinematic myth corruption, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This one isn’t just a one-note joke though. Not only does it maintain the bulk of what makes Austen’s story entertaining and resonant to modern audiences, and not only does it handle the horror of its zombie elements pretty well, but it’s also surprisingly well-crafted.

Sicario (2015) ****/*****

Back in 2010, director Denis Villeneuve released a movie called Incendies that was about a pair of siblings researching a family history full of rape, torture, and murder. In 2013 he released a pressure cooker of a movie about child kidnapping and pedophilia called Prisoners. So the guy has got something of a style. His newest movie, Sicario, is about the war currently being waged between US law enforcement agencies and Mexican drug cartels, so given the violent nature of that war and the unflinching style with which Villeneuve tackles everything, it’s pretty hardcore.

Emily Blunt stars as a hard ass FBI agent who gets recruited by a shady government task force dedicated to thwarting the business of the Mexican drug cartels, on account of how their extreme violence and disturbing level of influence has begun to creep over the border and into small town USA. Blunt’s character doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to be doing, or what the ultimate endgame of her actions are going to be, but she’s more than a little sure that what she’s involved in isn’t going to be on the up and up, and more and more it gets to looking like she’s not going to feel very good about herself, morally, when all is said and done.

Short Round: The Man From UNCLE (2015) ***/*****

Back in the 90s it was popular for movie studios to adapt TV shows from the 60s into big budget features. Kind of like how it’s popular to adapt comic books into big budget features now. Apparently the makers of The Man From UNCLE didn’t get the memo that the 90s are over though, because they’ve adapted one of the few untouched shows of the era, one about an American secret agent (Henry Cavill) and a Soviet secret agent (Armie Hammer) having to team up, even though it’s 2015. Usually when these things get adapted their stories are brought into modern times, but UNCLE has a concept so specific to its era that it was necessary to keep things back in the 60s and make a period piece. Given the dated nature of the source material and the late to the party release of the adaptation, is The Man From UNCLE an irrelevant property that should have been left in the past?

Not exactly. For one thing, director Guy Ritchie is able to utilize the 60s setting to make one of the most aesthetically slick, pleasant to look at action movies that’s come out in a while. Thanks to the costuming, to the affectations of the actors, and to all of the split-screen action choreography that gets put on display, UNCLE is chalk full of vintage cool. It’s hard to imagine a version of the film set in modern times being as visually dense or having nearly as much swagger—and it’s hard to imagine Cavill being so slick as the roguish American agent if he wasn’t always wearing an impeccable 60s suit, or Hammer being as affectively masculine as the steaming kettle Soviet agent if he didn’t have the era’s social cues and gender norms to lean into. The Man From UNCLE is a gorgeous movie full of great acting, and the fact that it’s swimming in the world of the 60s only accentuates that.

The problem with the film is that, even though its actors are surrounded by gorgeous things, and even though they’re all charming and gorgeous themselves, they’re never given anything to do other than typical spy movie stuff that you’ve already seen play out a million times before. Despite the fact that this thing is full of fighting and espionage and world-ending stakes, its most memorable scene is one in which Alicia Vikander’s plucky femme fatale puts on a pair of sunglasses and dances in her pajamas. That girl is endlessly charming, and the camera loves her. With The Man From UNCLE, Ritchie might have made the most breezy, attractive, completely forgettable movie in recent memory. It will enchant you while it’s around, and then it will be completely forgotten the moment it’s gone, like a whiff of designer perfume farted out into a strong breeze.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) ****/*****

There’s nothing better than when you start watching a new movie and you realize that all of the big moments from its advertising are going to be taken care of within the first five minutes of its opening. Too often movie trailers give away the entire plot of the film, or at least all of the big, spectacular moments, in an effort to ensure that they capture as many potential customers’ interests as possible. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is one of the movies that’s confident enough in itself to fill its ads with mostly stuff that happens in the first five minutes, and then to let what’s left come as a surprise. Its confidence is not misplaced either, because this fifth Mission: Impossible is not only a really fun summer movie, it’s also one of the best entries in the franchise.

That doesn’t mean as much as it does when you’re talking about most other franchises that get to five installments though, because each Mission: Impossible movie has been made by a different director, and instead of being directed to make their movie as simpatico and cohesive with the others as possible, as is usually the case, each of these directors has clearly been directed to put as much of their own stamp on their work as possible, so your opinion on which ones are good and which ones are bad could very wildly to the opinions of the person next to you. For me, I found the first one to be generally fine, but fairly generic, the second to be wildly bad, the third to be a little short on thrills, but admirable in the way it tried to turn Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) into a more three-dimensional character, the fourth to be a hugely satisfying summer action movie, and this fifth one to line up pretty well with the fourth. It kind of feels like, despite the fact that each new director is likely to keep putting their stamp on future Mission: Impossible movies, that this could be a franchise that’s managed to find a voice anyway.

Terminator Genisys (2015) */*****

Hollywood has been remaking and rebooting so many huge movies from the 80s in recent years that it feels a little bit like I’ve been reliving my childhood—if my childhood were filled with really bland, bad movies made by studio committees instead of really great movies full of blood and boobs that were made by exciting young filmmakers, of course. Terminator Genisys takes this process a step further by not only remaking or rebooting the franchise started with James Cameron’s 1984 film, The Terminator, but by using the series’ killer-robot-sent-back-in-time conceit to actually revisit meticulously recreated scenes from The Terminator and spin them off in new directions, which effectively erases the other sequels and creates a launching point for a new franchise that still pays respect to the original. Watching the film must be what it feels like to experience déjà vu.

Or to use a more damning metaphor, watching Terminator Genisys is like having a dream that starts off as a revisiting of old memories and then spins off in nightmarish, hallucinatory directions. This is a bad movie—a really bad one—maybe the worst Terminator movie that could have been made by generally competent people. Its director, Alan Taylor, proved that he could work in a strictly controlled studio environment before by making the generally acceptable Thor sequel for Marvel in 2013, but when faced with the task of filming a script that’s as broken on a fundamental level as this one, he falls flat on his face.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) ****/*****

If you look back at the last few decades of popular cinema, it’s possible to see the state of the art form as being a pendulum swinging back and forth between realism and fantasy. The New Hollywood movement of the 70s ushered in an era where everyone was making movies that were gritty and street level, the rise of the blockbuster created an era in the 80s where everyone was making genre films that were sillier and more escapist, the independent boom of the 90s swung the pendulum back the other way for a while, and then the exploding popularity of things like Harry Potter and Marvel superheroes firmly put us back in a place where a premium has once again been put on the fantastical and the strange. 

Recently, modern Hollywood’s penchant for only investing in properties that have built-in name value has led to a new trend where things from the past keep getting relaunched, rebooted, and reconceptualized. So, seeing as genres like sci-fi and fantasy are all the rage right now, of course the film catalogue of the 80s has been raped and plundered in order to create a whole new generation of the same old franchises. The problem with most of these remakes is that they’ve been shit. They’re glossy and generic and they lack all of the insane personality that made the originals stand out back in the day. The new Mad Max reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road, has a big advantage over the rest of those boring studio-led reboots we’ve seen so far though—it’s brought Mad Max’s creator George Miller back to write and direct. If you haven’t seen a George Miller movie, he’s kind of a unique talent who’s hard to put your finger on, so his involvement has resulted in a nutty new take on the post-apocalyptic action genre that’s blowing a lot of people’s minds.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) ****/*****

Not only is Kingsman: The Secret Service a secret agent movie, it’s a secret agent movie about suave, well-dressed, British secret agents—so it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground. Add in the fact that these fashionable spies use a variety of high tech gadgets in their work, they battle silly, cartoon villains, and they have a series of sprawling though hidden secret bases, and one begins to wonder what this new film could possibly have to offer that we haven’t already gotten from the countless James Bond movies that have been released since the early 60s. Well, while it’s true that Kingsman is definitely a very self-aware take on the Bond franchise, it’s also crasser, more overtly comedic, and more exploitively violent than most of what we’ve gotten from 007 over the years, which keeps things just fresh enough.

The hero of the story is a young man from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks named Eggsy (Taron Egerton). Though he’s smart and athletic and probably has a lot of potential, living life in a crime-riddled neighborhood with only a single mother to watch out for him has recently seen him making poor life decisions. A chance to turn it all around comes when he gets pegged to possibly become a Kingsman though. You see, his father was once a part of the organization, but died in the line of duty, so they feel like they owe the kid a favor, and seeing as they’ve just experienced their latest casualty thanks to a conflict with a megalomaniacal captain of industry (Samuel L. Jackson), the best way to do that is to add him to the highly capable group of young people who have been recruited to compete to be his replacement. Eggsy’s goals, then, are to earn his place as the newest Kingsman, help his new mentors in the agency (Colin Firth and Mark Strong) foil the plans of their dangerous new adversary, and prove to movie audiences all over the world that him doing so is an entertaining enough proposition for this origin story to launch a successful new franchise (presumably).

Everly (2015) ***/*****

Everly is a boobs and blood movie, plain and simple. Its story is paper-thin—barely existent—and the two things it focuses all of its energy on doing are putting an absurd amount of violence on the screen and proving that Salma Hayek is a leading lady who’s still got it. Fans of B-movies and cinema exploitation are very much the targeted audience here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because all of the over-the-top deaths that director Joe Lynch and his team have conceived for this film are a lot of fun to watch be brought to splattery life, and Salma Hayek does indeed still got it. Boy, does she still got it. It’s not a sin for a movie to just want to be empty-headed and entertaining, is it?

There is a complication with tone that makes movies like this more difficult to pull off than they may seem though. Take the mayhem on display too seriously and the lack of a real story or any character complexity starts to look like a problem with the film, but wink at the audience and get too satirical with the bloodshed and you take all of the joy out of the ridiculousness. Movie cheese is less fun when it’s obvious the filmmaker is in on the joke. Fortunately, Everly is able to straddle this line by taking a comedy of errors approach to all of its endless killing.

John Wick (2014) ****/*****

Good action movies, the kind that make you wince in pain one second and then pump your fist with excitement the next, were so prevalent when I was growing up in the 80s and are so rare now that whenever one comes along it feels like you’ve stumbled onto some kind of priceless artifact, or like you’re indulging in some sort of outdated thrill that’s long since been made illegal. The only differences between action movies then and action movies now though is a willingness on the part of studios to embrace an R-rating and a willingness on the part of experienced directors who know how to construct an action scene to work in the genre. Too often now the action film, which should be aimed toward a niche audience, is instead aimed at a wide one, and the results are homogenized and bland movies. And too often the genre is used as a proving ground for new filmmakers who have just come off of making music videos or web shorts, and the results are movies that are messy and hard to follow, thanks to the people in charge learning while on the job and having to take editing shortcuts to simulate spectacles that were beyond their capabilities of actually creating. 

John Wick, a new action-heavy revenge film that stars Keanu Reeves as a former assassin who goes on a rampage after a group of young mafioso punks steal his car and kill his dog, is one of those rare modern movies that does action right. It’s exciting, it’s brutal, it’s gritty, and it knows how to construct action scenes that are both thrilling to look at and also easy to appreciate. Maybe that’s because its first-time directors, David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, both have lengthy lists of credits working as Hollywood stuntmen. Could it be possible that these guys got sick of punishing their bodies to create action scenes that were ultimately ruined thanks to the close-in camerawork and quick-editing of filmmakers who weren’t savvy enough to exploit their efforts, so they decided to take matters into their own hands and make their own movie where the craftsmanship of the stuntmen and fight choreographers could be featured front and center? Whatever their motivations, Leitch and Stahelski have made a movie that at least feels like it was put together by frustrated action junkies with something to prove.

Snowpiercer (2014) ****/*****

Seeing as Bong Joon-ho’s Korean-language film Mother, which was released in the US back in 2010, was one of the darkest, most complex, and most uncompromising thrillers that I’ve seen in a number of years, I went into his new film, Snowpiercer, feeling pretty optimistic—even though it’s a post-apocalypse movie built on the ridiculous premise that the world is a frozen wasteland and the last surviving members of the human race are all living on a super-long, self-sustaining train that continuously circles the globe. Is it possible for anyone, even a talent on the level of Bong’s, to take a premise this inherently head-scratching in its weirdness and still make a movie that’s engaging and relatable to audiences? Apparently it is, and the secret to the formula seems to be to cast Captain America as your lead. 

To get back to the plot though—this is a movie that shouldn’t work. If you give it a moment’s thought, there’s no reason for what happens in this movie to be set on a moving train, there’s no reason for the poor people who act as our heroes to exist on the train in the way that they do, and, in general, there’s no reason that an audience should buy any of the broadly drawn, cartoony characters who we’re introduced to over the course of the story. But Snowpiercer introduces us to those characters, it gives us ridiculous explanations for the particulars of its world, and not only do we buy everything we’re given, we lap it up greedily and we ask for more.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) ****/*****

The last time we saw Tom Cruise starring in a big budget summer movie, it was in the sci-fi mind-bender Oblivion, which was pretty to look at and featured the usual rock solid star turn from Cruise, but which caught a lot of flack for being a hodgepodge of science fiction conceits that had already been presented in other, better films. With his new project, Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise sees himself once again starring in a pastiche film that has melded together ideas from other genre works, only this time, under the watch of director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), he sees much better results.

This time around Cruise is playing a prissy bureaucrat named Cage who circumstances have put in the middle of a D-Day-type invasion of Europe meant to stop the spread of an alien threat that has taken over most of the continent and is about to advance on London. Alien invaders aren’t the only crazy thing going on here though. A freak occurrence during the battle also sees Cage gaining the ability to go back in time to the morning before the invasion every time he dies, effectively creating a time loop where he goes to war, gets killed, and wakes up ready to be sent off to war all over again, again and again. His only chance to move forward seems to be to keep dying over and over again until he can somehow figure out a way to save the doomed invasion and defeat the alien threat who has them so vastly outnumbered, by using the advantage of extreme trial and error. The bad news about that is that it sucks to get killed over and over again, but the good news is that an infamously badass warrior named Rita (Emily Blunt) seems to have some answers to what exactly has happened to Cage, and she may just be able to help him kill all the aliens, end the time loop he finds himself stuck in, and save what’s left of the world in the process.

Godzilla (2014) ***/*****

Seeing as the film industry has to come up with a whole new batch of big, destruction-heavy disaster movies every summer, in order to keep spectacle-seeking audiences rich in bright colors and loud noises, it often becomes necessary for them to engage in a bit of content churn. That’s probably why they pull legendary Japanese movie monster Godzilla out of mothballs for another go-around in theaters every once in a while. Godzilla is cool. He’s huge, he’s green, he can breathe nuclear fire, and he makes for a great excuse for a bunch of guns to fire and a bunch of buildings to blow up. Why not go back to that well for another round of large-scale mayhem every decade or so, once special effects technology has had time to take another leap forward?

This time around the big green guy is being brought to us by a fairly new feature director named Gareth Edwards, who impressed with the creature effects he was able to produce for his relatively small budget 2010 film, Monsters. The story this new Godzilla tells is kind of a soft reboot, where a small reference is made to the fact that there was a Godzilla attack in the 50s (a clear nod to the original Godzilla movie, Gojira, from 1954), but where the particulars of the existence of gigantic, radioactive monsters has been kept from the general public in the years since. The secrecy doesn’t last long into this film, however, because horrific creatures have started popping up in the Pacific again, Godzilla is on the move, government forces are planning a nuclear attack strategy, and a destructive battle of epic proportions is imminent. Though Godzilla is the real star here, a human element is necessary for storytelling purposes, so we see the events of the film mostly through the eyes of a straight-laced solider played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and sometimes from the perspective of his eccentric scientist father (Bryan Cranston), who’s been suspicious that the government has been covering up something big for decades, and who’s dedicated his life to investigating what that secret is.

The Raid 2 (2014) ****/*****

Gareth Evans’ buzz-creating martial arts film The Raid—which was released in the US as The Raid: Redemption—basically showed up the last twenty years of Hollywood action filmmaking in embarrassing fashion. Heck, The Raid was so good it might be the most thrilling action movie of all time. It hedged its bets by being solely about the action though. The structure of that film, which consisted of a hero fighting his way up a building full of bad guys until he got to the main boss, was so simple that it might as well have been the basis for an 8-bit video game, and not the plot of a feature film. The Raid made it clear to the world that Evans was a top-notch director of action scenarios, but whether or not he could handle the other aspects of making a good movie was still a big question everyone who was new to his work had. Well, seeing as The Raid 2 is a sweeping crime epic with a near two-and-a-half hour run time, it looks like we now have our answer. That answer being a resounding yes he can. 

The Raid 2 picks back up with our hero from the first film, Rama (Iko Uwais), pretty quickly after his surviving of the raid of the criminal stronghold from the first film. The basic plot sees him getting inducted into a super-secret faction of the local police force meant to root out corruption, and the basic plan is that he’s going to be thrown into jail, gain the trust of a powerful crime lord’s son, gain entry into said crime lord’s criminal empire, and then find out what public officials he’s been doing business with. Things don’t end up going as smoothly as planned though, and there ends up being about a half dozen other competing interests that all poke their noses into the proceedings, so by the time everything hashes out, The Raid 2 ends up being a fairly involved film. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with movies as ambitious as this one is, but thankfully Evans is able to avoid all of the usual pitfalls, and he’s also able to make that two-and-a-half hours of movie fly by so fast that you don’t even notice your butt getting numb. I guess it’s helpful when half of it is hanging off of the edge of your seat though (seriously, that’s not a cliché, this movie will affect your posture).

Need For Speed (2014) **/*****

When I heard that they were making Need For Speed, a film adaptation of a video game that’s little more than a racing simulator with no built in characters or storylines, I was incredulous. When I then heard that it was going to be the first big starring vehicle for Aaron Paul following his career-making run on TV’s Breaking Bad, my reaction to the project was downgraded from incredulous to skeptical. If Paul, who had reached a career crossroads where he likely had offers coming in from all corners of Hollywood, saw something in this project, then maybe there’s something to it? Maybe some ambitious screenwriter somewhere took a thin premise and nonetheless turned it into a screenplay worth getting excited about? Nope. Need For Speed is one of the most senseless, stupid, poorly written movies I’ve seen in a really long time.

When it comes to the story this movie tells, it turns out a dry racing simulation would have been preferable in almost every way. Instead, we get a melodramatic tale that sees Paul playing a down on his luck mechanic/street racer named Tobey who enters into an ill-advised race with an old rival (Dominic Cooper) that not only causes the death of his adopted little brother type (Harrison Gilbertson), but that also results in him serving two years in jail while Cooper’s character uses his connections to get off scot-free. Upon his release, Tobey decides to get revenge through an inexplicable plan that will see him racing across the country in order to get to San Francisco in time to join an underground race put on by an eccentric recluse (Michael Keaton). He intends to win the race, which would… somehow make things even between him and Cooper’s character? Cooper’s character, of course, doesn’t want this to happen, so he offers up a bounty to anyone who can hunt Tobey down and stop him from making it to the race on time. Oh, and also Imogen Poots is also along for the ride as Tobey’s passenger, because somewhere during the development process someone must have decided that the movie needed a romantic element.

White House Down (2013) ****/*****

Roland Emmerich has built a fairly impressive career based mostly on blowing things up. He’s the guy who did movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012, so he definitely knows his way around an explosion. His latest film, White House Down, stars Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, and it’s basically Emmerich’s meditation on destroying the White House. Over the course of the movie the iconic residence’s walls get riddled with bullet holes, its priceless relics get smashed by terrorists, its roof gets destroyed by crashing helicopters, and huge portions of it get blown to smithereens. It’s a solid concept for a movie that’s ready-made to be a crowd pleaser, barring any extreme incompetence from the filmmakers, so I guess the big question here is whether or not any extreme incompetence gets put on display. Turns out, this blank-faced sheep dog of a movie is actually pretty well put together. 

Action movies that exist on the scale that White House Down does only need to do a few simple things in order to be entertaining. They have to have a script that isn’t so poorly written you focus on how poorly written it is, they have to feature actors who aren’t so wooden when working with special effects that you’re distracted by how unnatural they are, and they have to feature action scenes that are edited together clearly enough that you don’t get frustrated because you can’t tell what’s supposed to be happening. Though what they’ve made here is vapid and disposable and completely without any insight or artistic merit, Emmerich and his people manage to accomplish all three of those simple things, so their movie ends up being quite a bit of fun to watch.

GI Joe: Retaliation (2013) ***/*****

When you’re about to watch a movie, it’s best to push all of your preconceived notions about it out of your head and view it open-mindedly as a singular viewing experience. Don’t judge it based on expectations that its source material or earlier films that it might be a sequel to have put in your head. Instead approach it on its own terms and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses in a vacuum. Or, at least, that’s the theory. But when you’re watching a movie like GI Joe: Retaliation, which is a sequel to a much-reviled adaptation of a beloved action figure/video game/cartoon property from the 80s, following those rules starts to seem a little silly. Making a live action GI Joe movie is kind of a crazy idea in the first place, but we all loved the Joe stuff from when we were kids enough that we were willing to turn our brains off in order to have fun with one for nostalgia’s sake anyway—so it was very off-putting that 2009’s GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra went and got everything wrong to the point where we couldn’t even enjoy it on a base level. Because of this, the most important thing to know about Retaliation is that it makes an effort to fix all of the mistakes of the first film.

Every GI Joe story is exactly the same—Cobra tries to take over the world and the Joes stop them—so we don’t really need to do any plot synopsis here. Instead, let’s focus our energies on what all it was that director Stephen Sommers’ The Rise of Cobra got wrong, and how Jon M. Chu’s new film fixes most of the issues. You might not think that bringing in the director of the Step Up sequels and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never would be the logical way to fix an action movie franchise, but damned if the strategy didn’t work out pretty well here anyway. There are a lot of criticisms that can and will be hailed at Chu’s GI Joe: Retaliation, but everyone should at least be willing to agree that he approached the material as a fan, or at least as a professional willing to do some research and honor what came before him.

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) */*****

After directing 1987’s Predator and 1988’s Die Hard, John McTiernan probably had one of the greatest back-to-back film runs in history, and he certainly made two of the greatest action movies of all time. Die Hard, especially, is widely regarded as being a true masterpiece and probably the best template of everything that an action movie should be. The same can’t be said for its sequels though. McTiernan came back for the third film and made a fun movie that presented a reasonable excuse for why its story would have happened, but Renny Harlin’s Die Hard 2 lacked the charm and smarts of the original and was little more than an implausible rehash, and Len Wiseman’s entry in the series, which didn’t come until 2007, was a forgettable piece of glossy pap that proved there wasn’t any life left in this mediocre series, even if it was initially spawned by a great film. 

Given all the history, there probably wasn’t much of a chance that director John Moore’s (Max Payne) latest entry in the series, A Good Day to Die Hard, was going to be anything that was actually worthy of carrying on the franchise’s name. But, putting all of the Die Hard baggage aside and viewing it as its own stand alone thing, does it at least manage to be a fun enough action movie that can be viewed as brainless entertainment? No. Not at all. A Good Day to Die Hard isn’t just so bad that it’s brainless, it’s so bad that it will actively harm any brains that do exist.

Parker (2013) ***/*****

If you’re still going to see Jason Statham movies at this point, you generally know the drill. To say that Statham is an actor who has developed his own niche is something of an understatement.  His movies are all about the action and the swagger. You pay to watch Statham bust people’s heads with his fists and cut them down to size with his snark. He’s always the toughest, best-prepared, smartest guy in the room. He’s never the hero. He’s always a bad man of some sort—but one who lives by his own code. The stories in Jason Statham movies are usually pretty simple, the dialogue is fairly ordinary, and the supporting roles are generally filled by serviceable D-listers who you may have seen in one or two things before, but whose names you don’t quite know and don’t really see any reason to learn. But none of that matters much, because you’re watching a Jason Statham movie. You know what you’re getting. Did you see the way he smirked right before he kicked through that guy’s sternum? Awesome!

On paper Parker looks like it could be something different than your regular Jason Statham movie. Sure, he’s still the smartest guy in the room, and he’s still playing an outlaw who lives by a twisted code of honor, but here he’s backed up by other notable actors. He’s got guys with strong TV resumes like The Shield’s Michael Chiklis and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce playing his antagonists, and he’s got an A-lister in Jennifer Lopez playing his primary female foil. Parker isn’t just another generic action script retrofitted to having Statham as its lead either. This is an adaptation of “Flashfire,” one in a lengthy series of very popular Donald E. Westlake novels that feature the Parker character. So you can presume that there’s going to be a good deal more depth, personality, and narrative intrigue to this film than you usually get from your typical Jason Statham flick.

The Last Stand (2013) ***/*****

Ignoring his disappointing cameo appearances in Sylvester Stallone’s lame Expendables movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t appeared in an action film since he made the third Terminator ten years ago. So, as a child who grew up on a diet of 80s genre fare, the chance to watch the undisputed warrior king of the action movie return to his element after a decade of absence is a pretty big deal. And the fact that Schwarzenegger’s big return is being brought to us by South Korean director Kim Jee-woon, the twisted talent behind features like The Good, the Bad, the Weird and I Saw the Devil, well that just makes things seem all the more promising. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of doubts people will be bringing into the theater with them when they see The Last Stand though. Is Schwarzenegger too old to pull off action stuff, even in a film that portrays him as being a Sheriff who’s at the end of his career? Will Kim still be able to make a movie as gleefully violent as the foreign language stuff he’s known for while working with mainstream actors in the Hollywood system?

The good news is that neither men fail at their tasks. The bad news is that they don’t manage to surprise by exceeding expectations either. Schwarzenegger has never been the strongest actor (or English speaker, for that matter), but he’s always been able to make up for his limitations with his one of a kind physicality and charisma. While age has most definitely robbed the man of every trace of his impressive physicality, he does manage to prove that he’s still charismatic enough to carry a film. Kim, while able to slip in a moment or two that will make you stand up and cheer, is clearly handcuffed by making a Hollywood movie, and isn’t able to come close to recreating the sick and twisted stuff he’s brought us in the past. He does manage to craft action scenes that are engaging and fun to watch despite the fact that they’re a little mundane, however, and given the physical limitations of the aging star that he was working with, one can barely imagine the feat of planning and execution that took. While Schwarzenegger is clearly no longer a physical adonis, never for a second in this movie does he come off as being incapable or frail, and that has to be largely due to the protective efforts of his director. Hopefully Stallone and company will watch this one and learn some things so we don’t get so many shots of wobbly-kneed old guys trying to run in the third Expendables film.

Gangster Squad (2013) ***/*****

On paper Gangster Squad looks like a sure hit. In the LAPD’s take no prisoners war against gang leader Mickey Cohen, it has an interesting story. Its period setting and organized crime subject matter makes it very much a gangster movie, which is a genre that produces entertaining films, more often than not. And, more than any of that, it’s the third feature film from director Ruben Fleischer, who made the wildly entertaining Zombieland and the funny and underrated 30 Minutes or Less, and it boasts a cast of talented and accomplished actors like Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Michael Peña, Robert Patrick, Giovanni Ribisi, and Nick Nolte, among others. On paper Gangster Squad looks like it has so many things going for it that it should be a guaranteed success. Unfortunately, movie making is a craft that involves intangibles, and despite its dramatic subject matter and the impressive talent behind its creation, this one is never able to accomplish more than just being passable.

Before we get to why that is, let’s talk a bit more about Gangster Squad’s specifics. Mickey Cohen was a former prizefighter turned gangster who took over the virtually untouched L.A. crime scene throughout the 40s. By the time 1949 rolled around, he practically had control of the whole town, including its politicians, judges, and police force. Sensing that the window of opportunity to take Cohen down before he became all-powerful was coming to a close, a police chief played by Nick Nolte gives an honest and honorable cop played by Josh Brolin the orders to put together a squad of guys who will work off the books, disrupt Cohen’s operations, and take him down by any means necessary. This gangster squad won’t be carrying any badges, they won’t be answering to any superiors, and they won’t be following the letter of the law. The first recruit Brolin tries to land is a slick and clever cop with a taste for gambling and sleeping with Mickey Cohen’s girlfriend (Emma Stone) who’s played by Ryan Gosling. Things get bloody from there.