Denzel Washington (Flight, He Got Game) and Ethan Hawke (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Boyhood) began their careers in 1985. Washinton has a more storied career with four Oscar nominations between 1987 and 1999 (Cry Freedom, Glory, Malcolm X, The Hurricane). The underrated Hawke had starred in movies such as Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, Gattaca, and Hamlet before the turn of the century. But it took Antoine Fuqua’s (Southpaw, Tears of the Sun) gritty, determined, and so far over the top that it might be believable Training Day for these two Hollywood heavyweights to meet on the big screen for the first time. The result is the crowning acting achievement in the careers of each actor.
Category Archives: Action
Braven (2018)
Braven is basically On Deady Ground/Above the Law/Under Siege/Out for Justice or any Steven Seagal masterpiece of the early 1990s meets one of the best movies of all time (Young Guns) meets one meets the best Christmas movie of all time (Home Alone). And I don’t know if that sentence is a ringing endorsement or enough to get you to stop reading right now. In all honesty, it’s both. Lin Oeding’s feature-length debut, Braven, is far from a perfect movie. It is very, very flawed. But it is also highly entertaining. If Die Hard is your thing, then the Jason Momoa-led (Aquaman, Justice League) Braven will also be your thing. I can’t say you’ll love or remember much from it 24 hours later, but you will enjoy it, especially if you turn your mind off. Also, if he wants it, Momoa can be the new Segal, though he’s already proven he has more acting range than the former ever showed.
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Why did the Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin – W., Sicario) need to grab hold of the power of the six Infinity Stones to destroy the universe? I think it’s important to understand what causes a villain to do certain actions rather than just to have a bad guy. The stronger the villain’s arc and the more we sympathize with them on any level, the more we understand and appreciate the underlying of who they are. In Avengers: Infinity War (directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo), we have a powerful bad guy motivated by a tortured past and willing to destroy all the good guys in the universe to atone for it. After the planet Titan is no longer inhabited, he is not allowed to prevent things from destroying it; he thinks he will prevent it. Instead, he lost his planet and everyone on it. Vowing not to let something like that happen again, he makes it his mission to balance the universe by completely wiping out half of it. But to do so, he’ll need all six of the Infinity Stones that will power his Infinity Gauntlet, allowing him to bend time, space, energy, and the laws of physics and reality.
Annihilation (2018)
It took me two watches, some 12 months apart from one another, for me to be able to say emphatically that Alex Garland’s (Ex Machina) Annihilation isn’t a great movie. While I appreciate its ingenuity and ambition, the overall execution, delivery, and continuity could not be overlooked. For as much as I was in awe of Garland’s 2015 directorial debut, Ex Machina, I was even more disappointed with Annihilation, a movie for me that came and went as it felt, broke its own rules, left me bored at times, and hoping for more, while knowing it was never going quite to deliver. With a critics’ score of 88% but an audience score of just 66%, I am comfortable saying that, after watching it twice, some artistry I was missing made this movie so likable by those who review movies for a living. I couldn’t help but remove myself from critic mode and, even after taking off that hat, couldn’t get behind Annihilation to come close to recommending it.
Revenge (2017)
Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (a terrible title since it has the same name as the Kevin Costner 1990 movie, a 2002 Roman Polanski film, a 1971 Shelley Winters film, and more) might be the best movie of 2018 you have yet to hear about. However, I can’t think of a better one for a movie that makes no bones about it, a movie about revenge, and nothing more. Driven by a first-time director in Fargeat, a cast that has no one that you’ve ever heard of, and a marketing campaign that likely consisted only of trailers on just as unknown straight-to-DVD releases, Revenge earned less than $125,000 at the box office and its limited May 2018 release, the movie resonated with the critics (92% with 119 reviews) though, with more than 2400 ratings, just over half (55%) gave the movie a favorable review. Much more than a simple popcorn flick, Fargeat creates a highly likable protagonist in Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz – Somewhere Beautiful, Rings) and three highly unlikeable antagonists, whom I’ll discuss in subsequent paragraphs. You’ll find yourself cheering hard for Jen and hoping, even if you are against violence, that those who have wronged her get what they deserve.