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Jack Reacher

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  • Title: Jack Reacher
  • IMDB: link

Jack ReacherBased on the character created byLee Child, Tom Cruise stars as former Military Police officer turned professional nomad Jack Reacher who shows up after an old enemy (Joseph Sikora) is arrested for killing five people. What follows is part dumb action movie and part conspiracy thriller as Reacher uncovers the troubling fact that, as much as he wants the man to be guilty, the Army sniper the police have in custody was framed for the crime (which itself has complicated reasons far beyond a random crime by a lone gunman).

Reacher is the typical old school 80’s action hero, smarter than everyone else and able to take down five men without even breaking a sweat. Rosamund Pike stars as the man’s attorney, who also happens to be the daughter of the city’s cutthroat District Attorney (Richard Jenkins). Pike’s main job in the film is to get Reacher engaged in the case and then constantly question his theories before finally being relegated to the damsel in distress.

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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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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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G.I. JOE: Retaliation

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  • Title: G.I. JOE: Retaliation
  • IMDB: link

G.I. JOE: RetaliationFour years after the train wreck that was G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra, the sequel finally makes it to theaters after converting the movie to 3D and shooting additional scenes to cash-in on Channing Tatum‘s increased celebrity. G.I. JOE: Retaliation doesn’t prove to be worth the wait, but it’s certainly far better than the original.

For those of you unlucky enough to have witnessed the first film, you know that the terrorist organization known as Cobra had risen. Even if they had been defeated by the American special anti-terrorism force known as G.I. JOE, one of Cobra’s own, the master of disguise known as Zartan (Arnold Vosloo), had taken the place of the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce).

G.I. JOE: Retaliation picks up some months later with President Zartan orchestrating the public disgrace and destruction of the JOEs while Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and Firefly (Ray Stevenson) break Cobra Commander (now played by Luke Bracey) out of futuristic prison in an overly-elaborate plan.

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The Last Boy Scout is Under Siege after Olympus Has Fallen

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  • Title: Olympus Has Fallen
  • IMDB: link

Olympus Has FallenOlympus Has Fallen comes from a long line of dumb action flicks that are more concerned about high body counts and how many rounds of ammunition can be pumped into nameless causalities at high speeds than little things like plot, logic, and character. Twenty years ago this kind of film would have starred Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal. Not surprisingly, this dumb-as-dirt action flick comes from a pair of first-time screenwriters (Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt) who pull from numerous similar films about a lone disgraced hero in over his head.

Gerard Butler stars as Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, the best of the best and a personal friend to the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart) and his son (Finley Jacobsen). In the film’s opening sequence an unfortunate turn of events forces Banning to sacrifice the First Lady (Ashley Judd) in order to save the President’s life. Although Banning’s service is exemplary, and he performed his duty perfectly, he finds himself sitting at a desk at the U.S. Treasury for 18 months (which is when the story picks back up).

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