Movie Reviews

Iron Man 3

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  • Title: Iron Man 3
  • IMDb: link

Iron Man 3The third time is hardly ever the charm in movie franchises, especially those adapted from comics. Shane Black, who replaces Jon Favreau behind the camera (although Favreau stays on to continue his role as Happy Hogan), delivers a thoroughly satisfying third (and quite possibly final) entry in a way Sam Raimi, Christopher Nolan, Richard Lester, and Brett Ratner all failed to do.

After some rather unsubtle foreshadowing involving Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) meeting with a pair of scientists (Rebecca Hall, Guy Pearce) back in 1999, we catch up some months after the events of The Avengers with a shaken Stark agonizing over the enormity of how much his world has changed since the alien attack that leveled much of New York. While struggling with both anxiety attacks and his relationship with the ever-plucky Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark’s world is further shaken by an attack that leaves Happy severely injured by the hands of a new terrorist calling himself The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley).

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Antiviral

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  • Title: Antiviral
  • IMDB: link

AntiviralWritten and directed by first-time feature director Brandon Cronenberg, Antiviral is an unusual look at mankind’s obsession with both celebrity and germs in a not-too-distant future where the combination of both becomes the world’s most highly sought after commodities.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) has an unusual job. He works as a salesman for the Lucas Clinic, a company that specializes in the world’s most bizarre fetish. Lucas harvests diseases from celebrities and injects a non-contagious version of them into paying clients who wish to feel closer to the people they see on television and in magazines.

Syd’s problem starts with his personal use of the viruses and his willingness to sell them on the black market to a local butcher (Joe Pingue). After extracting the latest illness from the firm’s biggest celebrity (Sarah Gadon), Syd decides to sample it before turning it over to the lab. However soon he discovers the celebrity has died of the mysterious illness, and he has started to exhibit the same symptoms.

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Pain & Gain

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  • Title: Pain & Gain
  • IMDB: link

Pain & GainBased on a somewhat unbelievable true series of events, Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne “It’s Okay to Call Me The Rock Again” Johnson, and Anthony Mackie star as a trio of bodybuilders who decide to kidnap and rob a local businessman (Tony Shalhoub). Played to the hilt, the insane over-the-top Pain & Gain embraces the ridiculousness of the situation to deliver some truly funny sequences. Sadly, it delivers almost as many groan worthy moments and some disturbing violence that doesn’t always mesh well with the zany tone of the movie. The true story the film is based on is so unbelievable director Michael Bay even stops the film at times to remind the audience that (some form of) these events really occurred.

The characters, who don’t seem smart enough to remember to breathe, aren’t even caricatures so much as full-blown cartoons. There’s a scene from Michael Bay’s first awful Transformers flick where a group of giant robots tiptoe around a suburban house hoping no one will see or hear them. That plan is near genius compared to those of Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) and his confederates.

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The Numbers Station

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  • Title: The Numbers Station
  • IMDB: link

The Numbers StationDirected by Kasper Barfoed, The Numbers Station looks and feels every bit the low-budget thriller that it is. Set almost entirely in an underground bunker, the thriller somehow finds a way to make the setting feel empty and endless rather than claustrophobic. Mixed with what appears to be an extremely low budget and a circumspect screenplay that can’t find a way to make the idea of numbers stations exciting in 2013, The Numbers Station is the kind of straight-to-DVD B-movie that fizzles more than it entertains.

Our protagonist is Emerson (John Cusack), a government assassin with an acute case of conscience sent to Suffolk, England, after failing to murder a young woman (Hannah Murray) who was witness to his latest kill. Emerson’s new assignment is to protect Katherine (Malin Akerman), a cryptographer at a small numbers station used to relay encrypted codes across Western Europe. Haunted by his failure, and the death of the witness, Emerson tries to put the situation behind him, at least until the facility comes under attack by an organized group of terrorists.

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Oblivion

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  • Title: Oblivion
  • IMDB: link

OblivionSet in the year 2013, writer/director Joseph Kosinski‘s Oblivion is a post-apocalyptic tale of one man’s search for truth and heroism after a series of discoveries turn his world is turned upside down. Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough are cast as Jack and Victoria, the last two humans on the planet Earth. The team are tasked with overseeing the draining of the planet’s remaining natural resources (the planet’s water supply) before pulling out and joining the rest of humanity in their new home on Saturn’s moon Titan.

While haunted by impossible memories from his past (we’re told all agents undergo a mandatory memory wipe before being stationed) involving a beautiful woman (Olga Kurylenko) and Earth before the attack by an alien race known as Scavs, Jack performs his duty of keeping the military drones in good working order. Together with Victoria, his job is to protect the last bit of humanity’s resources the aliens didn’t destroy from the remaining tribes of Scavs still living on Earth who occasionally venture out to attack the giant water-vacuuming machines.

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