Thriller

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

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  • 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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Martha Marcy May Marlene

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Martha Marcy May Marlene
  • IMDB: link

martha-marcy-may-marlene-dvdElizabeth Olsen stars in writer/director Sean Durkin‘s story of a woman’s struggles to reassmilate with the outside world after living in a cult for two years. Durkin’s tale is a slow burn thriller that jumps between flashbacks of Martha’s (Olsen) time in the Catskill Mountains and her present paranoia and uncertainty now that she’s left that world behind.

Out of the blue Lucy (Sarah Paulson), receives a phone call from a phone call from her younger sister and brings Martha home to live with her and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). The longer Martha stays with the couple the more obvious it becomes that there is something seriously wrong with her.

Not only does Martha not understand basic boundaries (like not coming into her sister’s room and laying down on the bed when Lucy is having sex with her husband), but she’s also haunted by memories of the cult, which she will not discuss with her sister, and feels increasingly suspicious that they are still watching her and laying in wait to bring her back into their family.

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