DVD review: 14 blades

A master assassin, armed with the fabulous 14 blades, try to thwart a plot against the emperor.

The concept of the 14 blades is wonderful, a rectangular box hiding inside the titular blades, every blade has a different shape and a different purpose, but in practice this is more of a missed occasion. I understand that they wanted to convey the holy nature of those blades but in practice we hardly see them at all and considering that the title of the movie this is quite a big problem.

Having said that the action overall is good if a little bit confused. It suffers from that peculiar martial arts movie problem where too much wacky stuff is happening on the screen at the same time making it difficult to follow.

The plot is fairly interesting, mainly thanks to the relationship between the hero and a girl he kidnap during his quest. On the other side it is overlong and the main plot manages to be complicated and boring at the same time.

A martial arts movie for martial arts movie fans, non believers will not be converted by this.

DVD review: The rebound

A divorced woman starts a relationship with her much younger male nanny.

I really don’t understand why this one was rated above the current atrocious crop of American comedies. The laughs are few and far between, some vague smiles and a couple of chuckles really. It’s still disconcerting how they make dozens of these rom-coms without any noticeable comic element in them.

The romantic part dwells on the aforementioned unusual relationship, subplots are virtually absent, not even the customary gay best friend that usually enlivens and comments these kind of affairs.

It is somewhat interesting and there are some nice insights on the perks of such a high age difference but then Hollywood Puritanism strikes back basically declaring that this stuff simply cannot be and that a big age gap is really too much of a hurdle. Considering the highly publicized relationship that Catherine Zeta Jones, the female lead, has with Michael Douglas, 25 years older, this is simply baffling.

This movie certainly got his niche audience, basically MILF lovers and cougars apparently, but everybody else should stay clear.

DVD review: REC 2

A special force team enters a quarantined building overran by the undead.

Another interesting Spanish horror, this is the follow up to the very interesting 2007 hit “REC”. As in his predecessor the gimmick is found footage Blair Witch style combined with zombie mayhem so we see everything trough the cameras mounted on the special operations operatives or other similar tools.

As it is bound to happen in zombie movies the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, in particular the “heroes” make a lot of very questionable, borderline suicidal decisions, but this is part of the trappings of the genre so we shouldn’t complain. The hordes of the undead shouldn’t pose that much of a trouble for a fully armed team but of course if we do it realistically we wouldn’t have a film at all so it’s better not to pay to much attention to it.

Smartly the Spanish duo behind the serie, Jaume Balaguero  and Paco Plaza, knowing that it’s pointless to try a straight repeat of the slow revelations of the first one, switch gears and deliver something more akin to Resident Evil (the game not the movies). A couple of interesting revelations make the prospect of the third movie actually appealing.

The various character are the usual cardboard figures so common in these type of movies, it’s very hard to empathize with them, it’s actually hard to distinguish them at all, but this is not such a bad problem considering that this is a horror movie, of the gory kind, and so they are there only to be dismembered in various way for our amusement.

This is still a visceral experience, in many ways even more so than the first one but were the first one made us actually care about the events here is all about the body count and the scares.

DVD review: Knight and day

A normal woman gets entangled in the crazy life of a super spy.

This movie was nailed down by critics and performed very poorly at the box office; it was the worst opening for Tom Cruise in the last twenty years. After watching it on DVD I must say that I think that this reputation is unreserved.

Maybe the main problem was that the premise is too meta. The whole point of the movie is how the wacky antics of the stereotypical action movie protagonist would look from the point of view of the poor damsel in distress. It’s very hard to convey this trough the usual channels, going into the movie I had no idea, but the critics chorus of “It doesn’t make any sense! It’s too illogical” is disconcerting; they watch a movie like this one and point at plot holes? It’s like complaining that James Bond is the only spy who goes around telling is real name to everybody. It misses the point, completely.

It certainly is not perfect, not at all. The script went through nine official rewrites and changed completely tone at least three times and it’s easy to spot dreg and bits that clearly hails from previous iterations but overall it works, maybe because action movie plot are often messy and confused and so it doesn’t look out of place in its own genre.

There are a couple of nice stunts and action sequences, again nothing mind blowing just nicely done.

Tom Cruise practically plays his movie persona and he is still clearly believable doing it. Cameron Diaz got the hardest part, the script requires her to whine a lot about everything, but she manages to deliver the tricky mix of suburban life and action girl in potential.

Overall it’s a really enjoyable experience, good for a relaxing evening.

DVD review: Killers

A woman meets and falls in love with a man without knowing that he is a spy.

If you got the distinct impression of having watched this movie at least a couple of times without knowing it rest assured, it’s true. The “Oh my god! My husband is an undercover spy!” it’s something that Hollywood seems to really love, we got so many iterations of this basic premise, sometimes she is the spy, maybe they are both spies but they don’t know it.

Anyway as usual like seems to be very complicated for these undercover James Bond, eventually their jobs interfere with their real life, the con is discovered and they need to face their spouse with “I got a really high paid job with many, many perks. Do you want to visit the white house next week?”.

Jokes aside this sub genre spawned at least two excellent movies, “True Lies” and “Mr and Mrs Smith”, so evidently it’s possible to do this stuff right.

Killers clearly aim to do a rom com version of the aforementioned cliché. Sadly this requires funny jokes, which this movie clearly lacks. The romantic part is decent but there is no spark between the two protagonists. Ashton Kutcher, it’s there physically but it’s not really there, there is a strange kind of actorial void. Notionally he is supposed to be the impossibly cool guy but, c’mon, we are talking about Ashton Kutcher, he simply lacks the necessary charisma. Katherine Heigl is also oddly detached, she still has good comic timing but she still plays the trademarked Katherine Heigl character which we had to endure during her last four movies and still isn’t able to bring it to a semblance of life. We know that she can be good, we saw it in “Knocked up” but considering this is her only movie that she doesn’t like I fear that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

There is some action but it’s so tame that I can’t help but wonder why they bothered; we saw better stuff in any random episode of Chuck.

Not even for Rom Com fans, this movie will appeal only to Katherine Heigl completists.

DVD review: Hierro

A mother returns to the island where her son disappeared.

Spain is becoming synonymous with good quality horror and “Hierro” doesn’t disappoint the trend.

This is not a scary movie per se, this is more an “atmosphere” movie, a psychological thriller. There are not a lot of scare or gory moments but in their place we get an interesting story, with an actual plot and a mystery that we actually want to solve.

Where the mood is king the various characters are very thin. The grieving mother is an horror staple while the various hostile people of the island are more part of the general background than true people. Indeed it would have greatly beneficiated from some subplot and a change of pace every now and then, as it is it’s a study of grieving and pain 90 minutes long.

Recommended for fans of the genre.

DVD review: District 13 Ultimatum

The mad French parkour masters are back!

Strangely in the five years following 2004 District 13 nobody followed his lead and so to get another dose of parkour acrobatic we had to wait for the sequel.

The answer to the obvious question “Does it live up to the first movie legacy?” sadly is a resounding no. It’s not a bad effort but it was misconceived from the beginning.

The plot is stupid but this is not the real problem, we don’t expect the plot for a parkour movie to be any intelligent. The real problem is that the plot is not really very fun, it’s like a strange mutant version of “The warriors” were the various gangs, all good guys, are presented as real bad asses but somehow they never do a lot. An inordinate amount of time is spent on the French president, played by a serious French actor, Philippe Torreton, who, according to the extras, always wanted to be in an action movie, just to drag it down with inane gravitas I would like to add.

The two heroes from the first one, Cyril Raffaelli and parkour god David Belle, are back. They choreographed personally the stunts and all the action scenes bringing in their usual level of cheerful insanity but it just doesn’t manage to get to the next level. The inane plot robs it of every sense of urgency and an extremely clean cinematography made every action feel very detached.

It’s still a good action movie, with incredible stunts that are way above most of the CGI and cable enhanced stuff that Hollywood feed us every day, but it clearly fails prey to the sequel law of diminishing returns.