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Suicide Squad

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Suicide Squad
  • IMDb: link

Suicide SquadMaybe DC should shy away from its major heroes and concentrate on the fringes of the DCU. I don’t know that you should call a $175 million theatrical release with an excessive marketing campaign a B-movie but that’s exactly what Suicide Squad is. Writer/director David Ayer delivers an unapologetically trashy B-movie that, despite its faults, is fun.

Sure, the script spends far too long awkwardly introducing the various super-villains thrown together by Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) for her super-secret black ops squad. And yes, the final act suffers from a villain more interested in putting on a giant light show than presenting a coherent threat. However, somewhere in-between these problematic areas Ayer provides room for his cast of malcontents to shine.

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Jason Bourne

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Jason Bourne
  • IMDb: link

Jason BourneLargely ignoring the events of The Bourne Legacy, Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return to the Bourne franchise. In the years since The Bourne Ultimatum Jason Bourne has become a wandering nomad and underground street fighter. With his memories restored he lacks the purpose which drove him in the first three films of the series.

The return of Nicky (Julia Stiles) and her quest to expose the government’s new black ops programs will shock Bourne out of his malaise when she provides him additional information about Treadstone and his recruitment into the program asking questions he desperately needs answers to.

Resurfacing after years, Bourne immediately becomes the focus of a manhunt by CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and his new hot-shot protege Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) who begins to wonder if the CIA wouldn’t be better off attempting to bring Bourne in rather than assassinate him. Vikander’s addition, similar to a younger version of Joan Allen‘s character from the third and fourth films (with a questionable accent), allows for some conflict within the CIA as to Bourne while setting up potential ally for our protagonist within the agency.

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The Legend of Tarzan

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Legend of Tarzan
  • IMDb: link

The Legend of TarzanCreated by Edgar Rice Burroughs more than 100 years ago, Tarzan has been adapted countless times in film, radio, television, and print. The latest version of the jungle hero from director David Yates chooses to forgo an origin story (which is given to us in small flashbacks over the course of the movie) in favor of a more civilized Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) returning to Africa with his wife Jane (Margot Robbie) to investigate troubling news concerning the Congo, where he was raised and became a legend – and where an old enemy (Djimon Hounsou) is waiting.

Physically Skarsgård is an imposing figure and he manages to capture both Tarzan’s fierceness and his large heart. Robbie is delightful as the feisty Jane. Kidnapped by Christoph Waltz as a corrupt Belgian, whose resemblance to René Emile Belloq is hard to see as coincidental, Jane finds a way to fight the villain and buy time for her husband to swing in on a vine and ultimately save the day (and all of the Congo). And if Waltz is sleepwalking in the lesser version of characters he has played countless times over, what is to be said of Samuel L. Jackson playing himself in order to add a little comic relief to the proceedings?

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Samurai Jack – Episode IV

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Samurai Jack – Episode IV: Jack, the Woolies, and the Chritchellites
  • wiki: link

Samurai Jack - Episode IV

An initial error in judgement by Samurai Jack (Phil LaMarr) is put right in “Episode IV.” Witnessing a runaway Woolie burst through the forest, Jack wrangles the animal and returns it to the mounted Chritchellites who were perusing it on other Woolies. Invited to their village, a starving Jack accepts despite having serious objections to how the the strangers are treating the Woolies. Learning that the Woolies, tortured for the Chritchellites amusement, can speak, Jack decides something must be done about the situation. A dream leads Jack on the proper course of action. Freeing the Woolie he helped capture, Jack and the creature help break the Chritchellites’ dominance of the Woolies, freeing the creatures and sending the aliens back into the spaceships to flee.

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X-Men: Apocalypse

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: X-Men: Apocalypse
  • IMDb: link

X-Men: ApocalypseX-Men: Apocalypse is a bloated film that wants more than anything to be epic in scale. Stuck with a ponderous first 45 minutes resetting up the world of the X-Men one decade after the events of X-Men: First Class (where apparently only some of our characters have actually aged) the movie has to spend far too much time catching us up on current events. With the script hamstrung by the need to properly introduce not only the movie’s villain Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), which means flashbacks to ancient Egypt, but also several new characters who will make up both Apocalypse’s Four Horseman (Olivia Munn, Ben Hardy, Alexandra Shipp) and the new version of the X-Men (Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lana Condor) it takes quite some time before director Bryan Singer‘s movie gets on track.

With the resurrection of Apocalypse, who begins recruiting new mutants for his army, the movie begins in earnest with Mystique‘s (Jennifer Lawrence) return to the mansion and Professor X‘s (James McAvoy) abduction. After an appearance by Stryker (Josh Helman), used only to shoehorn in a cameo of Singer’s favorite mutant, Mystique will gather a few mutants together to reform the X-Men.

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