A less successful adaptation of the Parker novels than that of Jason Statham (there’s a sentence you don’t hear often), Mark Wahlberg stars in what is easily the worst, and most bland, Shane Black movie ever made. After a heist gone wrong, Parker (Wahlberg) works with the duplicitous Zen (Rosa Salazar) on an even larger heist which will pit him against his old enemy Lozini (Tony Shalhoub) and the Outfit.
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Written by Shane Black and directed by Richard Donner, 1987’s Lethal Weapon offered the classic odd couple pairing throwing together 50 year-old buttoned-down family man Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) with the reckless and suicidal Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson). Everything we need to know about both men is in each’s separate introductory scenes. We find Murtaugh in the chaotic, but loving, house full of his wife and children celebrating his birthday which is in drastic contrast to the hungover Riggs waking up on his trailer on the beach with only his television and dog as company (only one of which survives the morning).
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Throwback Tuesday takes us back to the summer of 1987 and the team-up between director John McTiernan and and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger which gave us Predator. While I wouldn’t rank Predator as his best film, it’s certainly worthy to be in the discussion coming during the greatest stretch of his career between 1984 and 1991 when he starred in The Terminator, Commando, Predator, The Running Man, Twins, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
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In his latest film writer/director Shane Black returns to a formula he knows well. Set in the 1970s, The Nice Guys delivers on the buddy-cop genre by pairing hired thug Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) with drunk private detective Holland March (Ryan Gosling) on a case involving a missing girl (Margaret Qualley), a murdered porn star (Murielle Telio), political activism, and the United States Justice Department.
The Nice Guys is an attempt to recapture the brilliance of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang by similarly throwing together an unlikely pair to solve a case involving a missing woman. The Nice Guys lacks the snappy dialogue of Black’s best film and the pulp detective and noir elements add an entire layer to Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang which is missing here. Given their similarities, it’s impossible not to compare them, but even if his latest doesn’t quite measure it still delivers in its own ways.
Gosling and Crowe work well together, but it’s the addition of Angourie Rice (as March’s daughter Holly) that ultimately makes the pairing work. Even if the murder plot is a bit convoluted, it’s a joy to watch them slowly uncover the truth.
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The 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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