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The Pickup

  • Title: The Pickup
  • IMDb: link

I love of a good heist movie. The Pickup is not a good heist movie. It’s generous to call The Pickup a film at all. The braindead comedy features Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson as armored car guards who get targeted in convoluted scheme by a beautiful young woman (Keke Palmer) with a sob story and a pair of goons (Jack Kesy and Ismael Cruz Cordova). There’s almost nothing believable about the script by Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider and less likable about the movie. 

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The Rundown

  • Title: The Rundown
  • IMDb: link

Following his appearance in The Mummy Returns and The Scorpion King, in 2003 Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson began a series of middling to fair action flicks (most of which are easily forgettable, although The Rundown is one of the better ones). The Rock stars as Beck, a retrieval specialist working off his debt to Billy Walker (William Lucking) who offers to cancel Beck’s debt if he retrieves Walker’s loudmouth son Travis (Seann William Scott in the kind of role Ryan Reynolds would corner the market on by the end of the decade) from the Amazon where he’s searching for treasure.

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In a Lonely Place

  • Title: In a Lonely Place
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back 75 years to the 1950 thriller featuring Humphrey Bogart as the temperamental screenwriter Dixon Steele who local police wrongly believe is responsible for the murder of a young cocktail waitress (Martha Stewart) which leads to continued harassment, although the events of that night do introduce him to his lovely neighbor Laurel (Gloria Grahame) and the beginning of a love affair. Despite the amount of time spent on its aftermath, including a memorable scene in the police station where Dix is first questioned, it’s actually little more than an unusual setup to our two leads together.

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KPop Demon Hunters

  • Title: KPop Demon Hunters
  • IMDb: link

KPop Demon Hunters is an odd, although likable, all-ages animated film centered around the idea that demons are prevented from overtaking our world through the use of music sung by a select trio of women who also, when demons do slip through the cracks, take them down by more direct means with magic blades made by music. The current trio are Rumi (Arden Cho), Mira (May Hong), and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo) who together make up the uber-popular K-pop girl group Huntr/x.

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War

  • Title: War (2019)
  • IMDb: link

Part of the shared YRF Spy Universe, 2019’s War stars Hrithik Roshan as Major Kabir Dhaliwal, the best agent of R&AW who goes rogue forcing his prized pupil Captain Khalid Rahmani (Tiger Shroff) to go after him. Kabir’s struggles with initially training Khalid (although the film is dripping with homoerotic overtones regardless whether they are working together or opposed in any individual scene), and his reasons for later going rogue, are shown in extended flashbacks finally uncovering the motivation for the spy’s killing spree and ultimate goal.

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