1.5 Razors

The Astronaut

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  • Title: The Astronaut
  • IMDb: link

I’ll give Kate Mara credit for taking unusual projects. However, when they don’t work they really don’t work. The Astronaut starts out as a psychological thriller with Mara cast as our astronaut recently returned from space and suffering “common” side effects while kept in seclusion in a secure facility off the grid (which at least makes for an interesting setting as events devolve). Mentioning several times what our astronaut is experiencing is normal, the film continues to push and prod Mara’s character to question her reality and her sanity.

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Raw Deal

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  • Title: Raw Deal
  • IMDb: link

Inarguably lesser Schwarzenegger, Flashback Friday takes us 40 years to 1986’s Raw Deal when Hollywood was still struggling with turning the former bodybuilder into a consistent blockbuster action star. Perhaps not surprisingly, throwing Arnold Schwarzenegger into the middle of a crime drama as a blackballed cop turned small town sheriff working undercover with the mob, with no sense of humor given the absurdity of such an idea, isn’t the most believable of scenarios.

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Mercy

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  • Title: Mercy
  • IMDb: link

Set in a dystopian near-future (which seems to loosely blame the growing homeless for all crime in the city), the convoluted thriller from screenwriter Marco van Belle and director Timur Bekmambetov stars Chris Pratt as LAPD Detective Chris Raven. As the film opens, Raven has already been strapped to an electric chair and forced to prove his innocence to an Artificial Intelligence (played by Rebecca Ferguson) who has already judged him guilty.

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The Carpenter’s Son

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  • Title: The Carpenter’s Son
  • IMDb: link

For every highlight of Nicolas Cage‘s career there are three or four baffling choices which we can now add The Carpenter’s Son to the list. Inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the film offers a look at the adolescence of Jesus Christ (Noah Jupe) coming into his powers and knowledge of his destiny. Cage, as you might expect, plays the carpenter Joseph who struggles to keep the boy safe and hidden while also attempting to forcibly instill his own sense of piety.

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Killer Heat

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  • Title: Killer Heat
  • IMDb: link

Killer Heat is a flaccid attempt at neo-noir starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a private detective hired by a widow (Shailene Woodley) to look into the death of her husband (Richard Madden). The film is also burdened with a subplot of the family life our private investigator fled from which haunts him (when convient to the script). Adapted from a Norwegian short story, I don’t know if something got lost in translation or if there just wasn’t much here to begin with.

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