Thriller

Kill For Me

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Kill For Me
  • IMDB: link

kill-for-me-dvdWould you kill for someone you just met? Kill For Me starts out as a basic thriller involving a pair of new roommates, Amanda (Katie Cassidy) and Hailey (Tracy Spiridakos), involved in some PG-13 college lesbian experimentation and the accidental killing of Amanda’s abusive ex-boyfriend (Ryan Robbins). Despite the fact the death is an open-and-shut case of self-defense, the two girls decide to hide the body. And that’s where things begin going downhill very quickly.

Kill For Me devolves into a series of twists, each more inexplicable and illogical than the last, as Hailey’s true motives become harder to discern as she goes to extreme lengths to blackmail her roommate and lover into helping Hailey seduce and kill her abusive father (Donal Logue). Given it’s ridiculous final hour the film’s only saving grace is it’s relatively short running time (95 minutes).

The only extra included on the DVD is a 13-minute behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of the film featuring cast and crew interviews from the set.

[Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $22.99]

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The Good Doctor

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Good Doctor
  • IMDB: link

good-doctor-dvdPeople who work in hospitals are the most awful human beings. I don’t think that’s the message screenwrieter John Enbom and director Lance Daly set out to make with The Good Doctor, but it’s the one constant theme of the entire film.

The troubles begin for first-year resident Dr. Martin Blake (Orlando Bloom), sporting a Matthew Broderick hairdo)  with a quarrelsome nurse (Taraji P. Henson) who is willing to threaten the life of a patient to prove her dominance. The ramification of her actions put him, not the nurse, in hot water with his superiors.

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Taken 2: The Wrath of Nameless Eastern European Thugs

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Taken 2
  • IMDB: link

taken-2-posterDirected by Pierre Morel and written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, 2008’s Taken starred Liam Neeson as retired CIA Agent Bryan Mills – a man forced to use his “particular set of skills” to rescue his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) who was abducted by an Albanian human trafficking ring while vacationing in Paris. Over the course of the film Mills racked up an impressive amount of property damage while assaulting, torturing, and killing dozens of people including shooting the wife of a French police officer (Olivier Rabourdin), and close friend, in front of him.

Taken 2 returns Neeson, Grace, and Famke Janssen (as Mills’ ex-wife), who take a family vacation in Istanbul only to find their past finally catch up with them. Mills and his family are hunted by members (who may, or may not, have ties to the trafficking ring) of the families of the men he killed in the first movie. When Mills and his ex-wife are taken the super bad-ass senior citizen will have to rely on the help of his daughter to wreck another city, rack up a hefty body count, and save both himself and her mother.

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Hit & Run

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Hit & Run
  • IMDB: link

hit-and-run-posterWritten, co-directed, and starring Dax Shepard Hit & Run is, simply put, a mess of a film likely to remind viewers of similar recent train wrecks such as Smokin’ Aces and Catch .44. Shepard stars as Charlie Bronson, a getaway driver from Los Angeles now living in the middle of nowhere in the Witness Protection Program. When his girlfriend Annie (Kristen Bell) gets an interview for her dream job in Los Angeles, Charlie throws caution to the wind and decides to go with her.

Their road to L.A. is complicated by Annie’s stalker ex-boyfriend Gil (Michael Rosenbaum) intent on proving Charlie is nothing but a crook, Charlie’s ridiculous United States Marshal (Tom Arnold) in charge of his safety, and the even more ridiculous Alex Dimitri (Bradley Cooper) the man who Charlie testified against and is still looking for revenge. Gil, knowing Charlie’s secret, contacts Dimitri in a last-ditch attempt to win back Annie by getting her current boyfriend killed. Yeah… that’s the kind of logic central to ever single plot point in Hit & Run.

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Gone

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

gone-dvdOne year after Jill (Amanda Seyfried) was kidnapped by a serial killer her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) disappears without a trace leaving the excitable young woman to believe the kidnapper has returned. The police (Daniel Sunjata, Jennifer Carpenter), who could find no physical evidence to back up Jill’s story of the first kidnapping once again believe the young woman with a history of mental illness is simply letting her imagination get away with her.

For Gone to work both stories need to be given equal weight, but despite Jill’s increasingly erratic behavior (which only grows because everyone refuses to help her) we know something has happened to her sister and Jill isn’t simply imagining the situation. The film follows the same movie logic of plenty of thrillers where dumb movie cops aren’t able to solve a crime for an entire year but one woman with no training is able to track the killer back to his lair in a single day. She also proves to have a remarkable ability to elude detection when an entire city’s police force is looking for her.

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