2.5 Razors

The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow #2

/ / Comics

The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow #2While teasing us with the wanderings around London of the two enemy spies who will eventually come into conflict with The Shadow, The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow #2 is mainly concerned with Lamont Cranston finishing affairs in New York and preparing for his impending departure to England.

The second issue sees The Shadow start a gang war to weed out the ranks of two opposing families making it easier for the police to deal with the remnants of both organizations after he’s gone. Stoically the vigilante never considers the increased casualties caused by such extreme actions. We also see the dismantlement of The Shadow’s network of spies before he and Margo Lane board a ship and leave New York behind.

The first two issues represent one-third of Howard Chaykin’s tale, the point of which (other than Cranston leaving New York) is still murky at best. The idea of an older Shadow’s adventure in London is interesting, but two issues in Chaykin hasn’t sold me on that story that’s already cost me $8. That’s a problem. Hit-and-Miss.

[Dynamite Entertainment, $3.99]

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Pompeii

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Pompeii
  • IMDB: link

PompeiiJudged as an action film Pompeii isn’t awful, but there’s nothing all that remarkable about it either. Judged as a Paul W.S. Anderson film it’s actually better than expected. Gladiator-lite meets destruction porn in this tale of a Celtic warrior (Kit Harington) sold into slavery who makes his way to Pompeii on volcano day with just enough time to fall in love with a nobleman’s daughter (Emily Browning) and exact revenge on the men (Kiefer Sutherland, Currie Graham) who led the raid that killed every member of his village.

Teasing us with tremors and small quakes, the first two-thirds of the film center nearly completely on Milo’s gladiatorial life and Cassia’s (Browning) relationship with her parents (Carrie-Anne Moss, Jared Harris) on her return home from Rome and a Roman Senator (Sutherland) who follows her. The action is competently done, as is the eventually eruption of Vesuvius, but the movie certainly struggles to make the more dramatic scenes effective.

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The Art of the Steal

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Art of the Steal
  • IMDB: link

The Art of the StealWritten and directed by Jonathan Sobol, The Art of the Steal is your basic heist flick centered around getaway driver Crunch Calhoun (Kurt Russell) who, after spending seven years inside a Polish prison thanks to his brother Nicky (Matt Dillon), gets the old gang (Kenneth Welsh, Chris Diamantopoulos), his new apprentice (Jay Baruchel), and Nicky together for one last score.

The movie also includes a B-story involving a buffoonish Interpol agent (Jason Jones, hamming it up like a SNL skit) and his criminal consultant (Terence Stamp) which play much more lighthearted than the rest of the film giving it an inconsistent tone that doesn’t quite pay off.

Despite the cast (Baruchel being the stand-out and Dillon something of a head-scratching miscast), and some pieces of the story that work well, The Art of the Steal isn’t as smart as it thinks it is or as smart as it needs to be to pull of the big twists it has in store (most of which you should see coming).

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The Flash #31

/ / Comics

The Flash #31I’ve got very mixed reactions on the latest issue of The Flash. On one-hand the new creative team offers up a storyline involving the theft of Central City villain weapons leading to a future peek at an old-style Mirror Master adventure complete with original costume, gun and hall of mirrors. Set 16 years in the future (is that how long we have to wait for The Rogues to be cool again?), and the future version of Barry Allen working his way back through time, it’s the strongest part of the comic by far.

Sadly the current storyline, other than Barry discovering the theft of the weapons, leaves much to be desired. Brett Booth’s choice to feature that awful yellow piping of the Flash’s costume in every frame goes from distracting to downright infuriating before long. And the continuing B-story does nothing to sell me on the New 52 Wally West who continues to share far too many bad traits with the rebooted schmuck version of Billy Batson. The cover is also one of the weakest of the series, however if you want to spend some extra cash you can shell out for Mike Allred‘s fun classic-style variant. Hit-and-Miss.

[DC, $2.99]

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Godzilla

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Godzilla (2014)
  • IMDB: link

GodzillaGodzilla returns to the big screen in an American film for the first time since 1998. Although better than Roland Emmerich‘s much despised film, while outdoing the director known for CGI disaster porn, the new version of Godzilla isn’t without its own issues. As a summer popcorn flick the new Godzilla may satisfy in the short term but it’s unlikely to entice me to return to its story anytime soon (if ever).

Opening in 1999 in the Philippines where an ancient monster is awoken before it makes its way to Japan unseen (this happens more than you’d expect in the film) and destroys a nuclear reactor to feed on the radioactivity for the next 15 years, the film jumps forward to present day where the scientist in charge of the facility (Bryan Cranston) still struggles with what really happened. Although much of the extended opening centers around Cranston (which could be trimmed considerably), the movie’s main character is the scientist’s son Lieutenant Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a bomb disposal expert whose skills will come in quite handy before the end of the film.

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