Hercules (2014) Movie Review

Hercules Movie Review:


Release Date: Jul 25, 2014

Director: Brett Ratner

Genre(s): Action, Adventure

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Ian McShane, John Hurt,Joseph Fiennes, Rufus Sewell

Summary: Both man and myth, Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) leads a band of mercenaries to 

help end a bloody civil war in the land of Thrace and return the rightful king to his throne. A tormented soul from birth, Hercules has the strength of a God but feels the suffering of a human.

Review: Give "Hercules" this much: It knows what it is.

And what it is is a meat-headed delivery system for action set pieces and Dwayne Johnson's brand of smirking heroics in a blissfully unserious take on the legend of Hercules, Greek demigod, son of almighty Zeus.

And for a spell, it seems like the movie is going to be a lot of dumb fun, opening with an eager, over-the-top history of the legend and the 12 labors, Hercules slaughtering Hydra and other cartoonishly designed CGI mythical beasts, emerging from the flames draped in a lion's pelt.

But that gleefully dumb fun doesn't last long. "Hercules" puts a human spin on Greek myth. And humans, as directed by perpetual frat boy Brett Ratner, are kind of boring.

Hercules isn't really a demigod, you see, just a super strong dude — he's a god in reputation only. He's also a mercenary, fighting battles with a friendly band of warriors (one of whom is a scantily clad woman who bares her midriff like it's armor) in exchange for gold so he can retire and live out his days in solitude and ruminate on the slaughter of his wife and children, of which he has been accused.

That means one final score. He's commissioned by the lord of Thrace (John Hurt) to defeat a tyrannical warlord named Rhesus who threatens his kingdom. Things are not as they appear, of course, and, demigod or not, with his weight in gold on the line, Hercules has to do some soul-searching and decide how much of a hero he really is.

It's boilerplate heroics, the kind of movie where someone says, "The people need a hero." The battle sequences are equally undistinguished, busy, blurred melees that bleed into one another in a world where anything magical or mythical is a delusion, a trick of the light.

It has all been so done. But still, there's a welcome lack of pretension to the proceedings. Stalwarts like Hurt and Ian McShane are on hand to class up the joint — everyone's got a British accent except for Johnson — while the predictable story bludgeons its way towards an inevitable conclusion.

It's all just fun enough. And depending on how big a fan you were of "Deadwood," it's worth the price of admission to delight in McShane's performance as a smart-aleck soothsayer exclaiming his PG-13-allotted swear words with relish.

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Dracula Untold (2014) Imdb Movie Review

Dracula Untold (2014) Imdb Movie Review:

Score:4/10

Director: Gary Shore

Genre(s): Action, Drama, Fantasy, Horror,War

Starring: Dominic Cooper, Luke Evans, Samantha Barks,Sarah Gadon

Summary: Vampire mythology combines with the true history of Prince Vlad to tell the origin of Dracula.

Review: As far as classic characters go, the Universal Monsters franchise has for the most part been madly mismanaged or outright ignored. A spooky cabal that includes the Invisible Man, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Universal Monsters have only intermittently been employed in recent decades. In 1999, director Stephen Sommersgave us "The Mummy," a swashbuckling period film that seemed to start a new franchise and suggested that the monsters were on their way back… until Sommers ruined it all with "Van Helsing," a monster mash that most certainly did not turn into a graveyard smash. Since then we've had a lukewarm, creatively strained "The Wolfman" remake and… not much else. But with Universal buckling down and attempting a vast, interconnected mythology along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the monsters should once again flood the big screen. And the first cog in this very large and complicated machine is "Dracula Untold," a historical epic retelling of the Dracula myth that recasts the bloodsucker as a tragic hero. It doesn't quite work.

"Dracula Untold," like most of the films of this ilk, starts with a voiceover (this one supposedly delivered by his grown and very British son). It runs down the historical specifics of the legend (that Dracula was a warrior known as Vlad the Impaler, who retired to quietly rule in Transylvania), before introducing the new, mightily chivalrous Prince Vlad (Luke Evans, anonymously handsome), who lives in a big castle with his comely wife Mirena (Cronenberg muse Sarah Gadon) and moppet of a son Ingeras (Art Parkinson). When Turkish brute Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) threatens to capture 1,000 of Transylvania's youngest, most eager boys (including Vlad's son), the prince makes a deal with the devil to protect his kingdom. Of course, this deal ultimately sees him becoming the Dracula that we know, love and hide under the sheets from.


It's hard to think of an "origin story" for Dracula and not think about the operatic prologue to Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula." It was a jaw dropping feat, but across the span of a feature length film, "Dracula Untold," can't match what Coppola covered in a handful of minutes. Instead, it falls back into the tired, humorless tropes of most big budget historical epics, and since it has a straight-jacket-like PG-13 rating to uphold, that means that the impressionistic violence that made something like "300: Rise of an Empire" so satisfying is nowhere to be found. Dracula might drink blood, but you see precious little of it in "Dracula Untold."

There are moments when you can see flashes of what the filmmakers (led by first timer Gary Shore) were trying to accomplish. Consider a moment when Vlad meets with a mystic in a craggy cave. This is the story's original vampire, played by Charles Dance, who makes the Faustian bargain that Vlad can have vampiric powers for three days. If, within those three days, he resists the urge to drink blood, he can remain a mortal. But if he feeds, he stays a vampire forever. It's a nifty scene that flips the supposedly historical setting back into the magical land of fairy tales and the perennially underrated Dance pulls it off with aplomb. But in the press notes for the movie, it's mentioned that Dance is actually playing Roman emperor Caligula. But this is never expressed in the movie, and could have added a layer of naughtiness to a damnably chaste exercise. Maybe this backstory was cut because Caligula doesn’t exactly scream PG-13. But some mention of what would have been an intriguing story beat would have been nice; it would have been a thematic mirror to Dracula's plight, and would have added some spice to an otherwise largely bland experience.

And that's the biggest problem with "Dracula Untold:" there's nothing really there. This is a monster without a soul. It's a supposed epic that clocks in at a swift 92 minutes. Whole subplots are alluded to in promotional materials (like the saga of a witch named Baba Yaga), but have been cut entirely from the movie, and there's not one supporting character that makes much of an impression. Instead you have to designate characters by the length and severity of their beards ("Light Ginger," "Dark Brown," etc.) and try to guess their profession based on what they're wearing. When Dracula unleashes his powers, they are visually dazzling (he commands a swarm of vampire bats that pummel the enemy troops) but are ultimately thematically and emotionally hollow. "Dracula Untold" tries to have its cake and eat it to; it's a supposedly historically derived epic that also features clouds of psychically controlled bats. Huh.

Evans, for his part, isn't a bad Dracula by any stretch of the imagination. For the first time in his career, he doesn't fade into the background. He has genuine screen presence and dark features suggesting a man haunted by a past and defined by brutality. But the movie contorts itself into uneasy pretzels, trying to make Vlad the Impaler a good guy, yet even the slight amount of on-screen malevolence he commands is wasted, buried underneath layers of a half-formed script. Dracula is ultimately a character that actors love to ham up (everyone from Bela Lugosi to Frank Langella to Gary Oldman), and Evans is never given the opportunity tolet it rip. He's always subdued, contained, simmering with otherworldly anger but never allowed to fully unleash it. Dracula might be a tortured soul, damned to an eternal life defined almost exclusively by horrible levels of violence, but there's also a gleeful component to his carnage. He's a romantic and a psychopath and creature of the night. Sadly, "Dracula Untold," with its humorless aura and been-there-done-that feel, doesn't allow Evans to inhabit many of these aspects. Instead, "Dracula Untold" feels largely uninspired.

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The Avengers (2012) imdb Movie Review

The Avengers (2012) 

imdb Movie Review:


Director: Joss Whedon

Starring: Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Robert Downey Jr.,Scarlett Johansson

Summary: Continuing the epic big-screen adventures started in Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel's The Avengers is the superhero team up of a lifetime. When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as SHIELD, finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins. (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)


Review: There were ripples of anticipation - and some anxiety - when Marvel Enterprises announced that Joss Whedon would direct "Marvel's The Avengers," the comic-book-movie to end all comic-book-movies, featuring Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye and (did I miss anyone?), oh yes, Thor.

Whedon is known for his cerebral humor, on display in his TV series "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" and most recently in the Web series "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" and the slasher send-up "Cabin in the Woods." He also has an unrepentant sentimental streak, evidenced by his work on the first "Toy Story" movie. When it came to Whedon having his way with the rabidly beloved Marvel franchise, fan-boys wondered (to borrow a phrase from the movie itself): What's his play?

Those faithful acolytes can breathe easy: "The Avengers" has been executed with all the reverence the super-fans demand, as well as the winking, self-referential humor that has made it palatable for filmgoers disinclined to take a bunch of grown men dressed in spangles and spandex so very seriously.

Whedon has adapted Stan Lee's masterwork with skill and economy (if you can believe that given the film's nearly 21 / 2-hour running time), if not with a surfeit of style. Most crucially, he's enlisted terrific actors - some of them reprising already beloved roles, a few earning their bones with scene-stealing performances - who function both as individual stars and a cohesive team. That balancing act is precisely what's called for in "The Avengers," which pivots largely on the tensions between super-heroes accustomed to being singular, now forced to work in harness with one another's often ungovernable strengths - and egos.

When Robert Downey Jr. first played Tony Stark in "Iron Man," he brought a bracing dose of sophistication and flippant humor to what could have been a turgid exercise in overseriousness. In "Iron Man 2," he took the cockiness and entitlement of his character to a new, not altogether welcome, level of glib self-regard. In "The Avengers," he dials the swagger back to where viewers first fell for Stark, the smart-but-silly playboy whose superpower may reside in a distinctive metal sheath but also lies in his ability to puncture even the most cherished pieties.

That impudence doesn't sit well with Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America, whom Chris Evans introduced last year as a refreshingly clean-cut avatar of retro wholesomeness and rock-ribbed values. Befuddled by Stark's snark - not to mention references to Stephen Hawking and assorted 21st-century ephemera - he now looks more like a moralizing prig.

The competitive psycho-dynamics between Stark and Rogers play out after they're assembled by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the peacekeeping agency S.H.I.E.L.D., when an interplanetary interloper named Loki (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on Earth and wreaks chaotic havoc in keeping with his name. If Stark doesn't immediately bond with the straight-laced Captain America, he finds a more easy alliance with the brainy Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), the mellow, modest genius scientist who, to avoid getting angry and turning into what Stark calls an "enormous green rage monster," has been living in Calcutta and tending to the sick.

From Eric Bana to Edward Norton, the role of the Hulk has proved problematic over the years - often nicely played, but not always in good movies. In "The Avengers," Ruffalo makes not just Banner's nerdy glasses but the dirigible-size green suit his own, effectively defining not just the film's heart but the hyperbolic action that dominates its concussive climax.

Another newcomer, Jeremy Renner, doesn't get as much screen time as Ruffalo. But as Hawkeye - whose complicated back story with Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow forms another fractious subplot - he proves that, along with "Mission: Impossible" and the "Bourne" films, he's thoroughly capable of holding his own within a franchise juggernaut.

The performances are so well-pitched in "The Avengers," meshing with such vividness and ease, that it's tempting to overpraise the good but not great movie that surrounds them.
Probably wisely, Whedon seems to have tamped down his instincts to play up irony and camp. Instead, he focuses on simply making the characters legible and the story easy to follow from the Imax theater cheap seats - all the while interjecting witty lines and bits of business, from Stark's quippy asides to the literal punch lines Hulk delivers with a wordless grunt.

By tacking so close to audience expectations, Whedon has made a movie that's more efficient than inspired, one that propels the series along and hits the necessary beats, without breaking any substantive or stylistic ground. ("The Avengers" was converted to 3-D in post-production which, as in the case of "Titanic," does nothing to add or subtract from the experience.)

Then again, breaking ground is precisely the last thing fans want from movies that at their best play like elaborate pop-up versions of their source material, with enough psychological complexity to keep things interesting. In this case, that extra interior layer has to do with reconciling with one's own shadow material, even at its most frightening and destructive.

Laying waste to midtown Manhattan while tickling the dark side of his dualistic protagonists, Whedon has positioned "The Avengers" exactly where it needs to be in order to keep spinning out in perpetuity. Bidding good-bye to at least one beloved character and saying hello to another in a tantalizing closing-credits hint, he leaves us wanting more - which, for now at least, is undoubtedly the right play.

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Annabelle (2014) Movie Review

Annabelle Movie Review:

Starring: Alfred Woodard, Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton

Summary: John Form has found the perfect gift for his expectant wife, Mia—a beautiful, rare vintage doll in a pure white wedding dress. But Mia’s delight with Annabelle doesn’t last long. On one horrific night, their home is invaded by members of a satanic cult, who violently attack the couple. Spilled blood and terror are not all they leave behind. The cultists have conjured an entity so malevolent that nothing they did will compare to the sinister conduit to the damned that is Annabelle

Review: While it’s possible that Annabelle might give a few audience members goose bumps, anyone who’s ever seen Rosemary’s Baby – or pretty much any film James Wan’s had a hand in since helming 2007’s Dead Silence, the Saw franchise excepted – will figure out what’s going on within the first 30 minutes.

Wan served as producer here, but director Leonetti is fresh from doing the director of photography chores on Wan’s 2013 Amityville Horror meets The Exorcist knockoff The Conjuring. Effectively a prequel to that above-average freakout, Annabelle provides an origin story for the titular tiny terror with the awfully agog eyes.

Set against the backdrop of Charles Manson’s summer of blood, Leonetti, working from a script by Gary Dauberman, starts strongly with a pair of winning turns by Horton and Wallis as doctor-and-wife John and Mia Gordon, a believably bland Californian couple with a bun in the proverbial oven. After a minor tiff, John surprises his doll-collecting spouse with the as-yet-uncursed (and unnamed, but still pretty ghastly) doll. Subsequently, the pair endures a home invasion by creepy-crawling “cult” members, and Mia urges John to toss the bloodied Annabelle out with the trash, which he does. Predictably, though, she turns up in the bottom of a box after the pair moves to a Pasadena version of Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse’s famed Dakota. Equally foreseeable are the ominous events that begin plaguing Mia: sewing machines, rocking chairs, and hi-fis that go on and off by themselves, and a shadowy figure in the basement. The devil, you say!

Annabelle’s production and set design go a long way toward creating a vague sense of unease early on; everything is painted in the muted, muddied pastels of the era, as if in mourning for the day-glo grooviness of the recently concluded Summer of Love. No amount of studiously uncool decorative metal wall hangings and billowing chintz, however, can make anything original out of the low-rent proceedings. The Polanski rips begin with the obvious (having a couple named Mia and John, as in Farrow and Cassavetes, is about as blatant as you can get) and continue throughout, to an annoying degree. Add that to the fact that the formulaic script offers genre fans nothing whatsoever that hasn't been done before, and done better, and you might find yourself quoting Rosemary: “This is no dream, this is really happening.” And I don’t mean “happening” as in “far out, man.”

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Gone Girl (2014) Movie Review

Gone Girl Movie Review

Release Date: Oct 3, 2014

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• Director: David Fincher
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• Genre(s): Drama, Mystery, Thriller
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• Starring: Ben Affleck, Neil Patrick Harris, Rosamund Pike,Tyler Perry
• Summary: On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) reports that his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has gone missing. Under pressure from the police and a growing media frenzy, Nick's portrait of a blissful union begins to crumble. Soon his lies, deceits and strange behavior have everyone asking the same dark question: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

Review: If you read the book, you'll be thrilled by David Fincher's movie, rife and lively with all the right deceptions. If you didn't, I envy your ignorance of Gone Girl's course.

Flynn gets a rare chance for a successful author to adapt her book for the screen, and that's the second-smartest choice made for this project. The first was hiring Fincher to direct, a filmmaker who at his best works with a clinical and cynical eye, perfect for Flynn's prose. It's a marriage made in heaven, presenting another stuck in hell. Or more accurately, Missouri.

That's where Nick and Amy Dunne moved from Manhattan after the recession cost their jobs as writers. Amy's trust fund, stockpiled by her parents' Amazing Amy books depicting a childhood she never had, is nearly depleted. Nick bought a break-even tavern, and Amy isn't a heartland woman. A once-dazzling couple begins to fizzle.

On their fifth anniversary Amy disappears, with signs of a struggle in their home. Naturally, Nick is suspected, and a media circus ensues, fueled by Amy's ersatz fame and Nick's apparent lack of concern.

From there, Gone Girl spins a dark and sexy mystery that Flynn masterfully pares

down for Fincher to film. Everything necessary is here, for plot mechanics and reader satisfaction. She tightens that bothersome climax, while retaining its acrid impact. This is a remarkable case of a movie's quality matching the book's.

Fincher's casting is again impeccable. Ben Affleck provides the right balance of hunk and lunk for Nick, his blankness as an actor working in favor of a character designed to be inscrutable. The marvel here is Rosamund Pike as Amy, a complex bundle of secrets. Pike's superbness in Gone Girl can't be fully described without spoilers, but we'll get more chances through awards season.

Same for practically anyone from the supporting cast, each given time to shine. The showiest — Tyler Perry, Missy Pyle, Casey Wilson — support the story's digs at deathwatch media, the Nancy Graces filling time and pockets with this week's crime of the century. The sturdiest are Carrie Coon as Nick's sister, and Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit as detectives eyeing Nick.

The time shuffle of Flynn's novel, between the present and Amy's diary entries, is Gone Girl the book and now the movie is on one level a satire of "the primal questions of any marriage," and the answers are chilling.

intact, and expertly edited by Kirk Baxter. Fincher occasionally uses the conceit for dark humor, such as flipping from Nick's marriage proposal to his DNA swabbing, as if that's part of the vows.

Gone Girl is a terrific movie, everything the book and its fans deserve. And what it deserves in return is the chance to surprise anyone who didn't read Flynn's book. Pass the popcorn; hold the egg salad.

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Source//Tampa Bay Times