Sicario: Day of the Soldado is not so much a sequel to 2015’s megahit Sicario that you must know what happened in the first one to appreciate the second as it is its standalone movie. The only thing you need to know to go into the 2018 movie fresh is that (spoiler) the drug war in Mexico has escalated to the point where the United States government is forced to use questionable tactics that force some of its operatives to question the morality of what they are doing and that the US is aided mystifying man with a unique set of skills but a checkered past named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro – The Hunted, Traffic) whose family is killed after an order by a Mexican Cartel Kingpin named Carlos Reyes. That’s it. This man’s men kill Alejandro’s family, and he wants revenge. If you accidentally read that brief spoiler, shame on you for going at least three years without yet seeing the phenomenal Sicario. And just because I gave a brief spoiler doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out if you have not already.
Category Archives: Action
Hostiles (2017)
The very first scene of Scott Cooper’s (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) under-the-radar Hostiles lets you know one thing right off the bat. We get a 10-minute scene where a four-person group of Comanche warriors comes rolling out of nowhere and attacks a family of five in the brutalist of fashions before burning down the ranch and taking off with their horses. After this scene, the title Hostiles pops up on the screen, and we quickly know that we are in for something different than Will Smith’s Wild Wild West. This movie is not for the weak at heart. If you do not like tragedy, this film is not for you. If you have the stomach for, sometimes, senseless killing, characters who carry anger so deep that it burns their souls and guilt so heavy that it tears lives apart, then this movie could be for you. If you crave a good old-fashioned western, this movie will suffice. And if you want to see A-listers like Christian Bale (The Fighter, The Dark Knight Rises), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl, A United Kingdom), Jesse Plemons (The Post, Other People), Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird) and Ben Foster (Hell or High Water, Lone Survivor) continue to cement their names in Hollywood then you can’t go wrong with Hostiles, easily one of the five best movies of 2017. Though it’s unlikely to dethrone Wind River for me, it’s doing its best to make a case in the 11th hour.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)
I love a good prison movie. Similarly to how I enjoy films set on trains, edgier (i.e., PG13 or greater) sports movies, alien movies, shipwreck movies, or survival movies set in the jungle, there is something about a good prison movie that perks my intrigue, keeps me interested, and has me thinking about it long after it’s over. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Hurricane, Rescue Dawn, Escape from Alcatraz, Lock Up, Murder in the First, Midnight Express, Brokedown Palace, Dead Man Walking, The Longest Yard, Felon, Law Abiding Citizen, Death Race, and others. So what could a prison movie offer that we haven’t seen before on the silver screen or television dramas like Prison Break or Oz or television documentary shows like Lockup or Locked Up Abroad? There are plenty of options for getting your prison fix. But you haven’t seen something in S. Craig Zahler’s (Bone Tomahawk) Brawl in Cell Block 99. Could it be that it’s the most brutal prison movie ever made? You could argue that it is. It certainly could be the goriest. If you have yet to see the horror-western Bone Tomahawk, prepare yourself. I had heard about it but still wasn’t ready for what I saw. I was not too fond of it. But I am going to go back and watch it again. And the reason for that is how much I really enjoyed Brawl in Cell Block 99.
Dunkirk (2017)
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises, Inception) might be the best technical director we’ve ever seen. His precession is perfect. His attention to detail is unmatched. His brain operates so that it is always ahead of his actors and two steps ahead of his audience. We’ve seen technical masterpieces throughout his already storied career. At 47, he already has masterpieces like Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar all underneath his belt. According to Rotten Tomatoes, his “worst” movie is Interstellar, which still has a 71% fresh rating. That means his “worst” movie still had five out of every seven critics gave the movie a positive rating. However, for all of the positives associated with Nolan’s films (and there are many), he has failed to capture the often-needed emotional component with every single one.
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Ridley Scott’s (Gladiator, The Martian) brainchild franchise proves a few things. First, the Alien series still has legs, its sequels continue evolving, and Scott has no plans to let his baby fall into the wrong hands again. Ridley’s monster first burst onto the screen in 1979’s Alien, a movie that did for space travel what Steven Spielberg’s Jaws did for swimming on beaches. It certainly wasn’t the first movie set on a spaceship. But, if it wasn’t the first horror film set in space, it was undoubtedly the first one we all remembered as the first one. And, just as the tagline of the original movie poster suggests, In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream, nothing can be more accurate as we sit down and prepare ourselves for one of the Alien movies.