Connect with us

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: St4llone, St4tham are back in ‘Expend4bles,’ yet another expend4ble sequel

Published

on

Movie Review: St4llone, St4tham are back in ‘Expend4bles,’ yet another expend4ble sequel

It’s a throwaway line, but maybe a bit too meaningful, under the circumstances. “Gravity is setting in,” says Barney, Sylvester Stallone’s aging character in “Expend4bles,” when someone asks how he’s doing.

Indeed. Gravity is setting in throughout “Expend4bles,” a movie whose most enticing mystery is not the secret identity of its shadowy villain, but how you pronounce the film’s title. Are we supposed to enunciate the mid-word numeral, or is it merely visual? Is this what stands for a smart new spin on a tired franchise? Will we soon have “My Big F4t Greek Wedding”? Are these questions supposed to distract us from how stunningly mediocre the film is?

Perhaps we digress. This is, obviously, the fourth “Expendables” film, but our considered scientific opinion is that you needn’t see the first three to catch up. True, there’s no explanatory intro, but if you’ve seen earlier “Expendables” films, you’ll know there’s not much to know. These guys are the indestructible mercenaries who swoop in – literally, on Barney’s turboprop plane – to do dirty work in miserable places. The body count is head-spinningly high (this film, directed by Scott Waugh, returns to an R rating after a switch to PG-13 for the last installment). The dialogue is head-spinningly mundane. The flow of testosterone is, well, head-spinning.

Leading the pack, as ever, is Stallone’s Barney Ross and his expert knife-wielding best bud, Lee Christmas — Jason Statham, reveling in his Cockney charm and smiling more than usual. (This is not a bad thing. Statham has a nice smile. This may be the only good thing.) Also back are Dolph Lundgren’s Gunner and Randy Couture’s Toll Road.

And now, perhaps in a nod to the previously unrecognized fact that half the human race is female, we have Megan Fox as mercenary leader Gina. More on her in a bit. Also providing new blood is Andy Garcia as a prickly CIA handler, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as an ex-Marine and new team member, and two martial arts stars: Iko Uwais as ruthless arms dealer Rahmat, and Tony Jaa as quiet warrior Decha. Other additions: Jacob Scipio is the son of Antonio Banderas’ character from the last film, and Levy Tran is a new female teammate, adept with a whip chain.

Advertisement

Got all that? In a prelude scene in New Orleans, we reconnect with Barney, who now has salt-and-pepper hair, and a bad back — so bad, he enlists Christmas to help him recover his prized skeleton ring at a biker bar, which he’s lost in a thumb-wrestling contest. The thugs dispatched and the ring collected, it’s time to get back to work.

This means a trip to Libya, to “Gadhafi’s old chemical plant,” where aforementioned arms dealer Rahmat (Uwais) is securing detonators for a nuclear weapon. CIA handler Marsh (Garcia) needs the Expendables to stop him. The other thing you should know is that Barney is determined to unmask a shadowy figure codenamed Ocelot who’s maybe pulling all the strings.

This image released by Lionsgate shows Iko Uwais in a scene from “The Expend4bles.” Credit: AP/Yana Blajeva

Not surprisingly, the Expendables run into resistance. The body count mounts, and then something happens that will change the trajectory of the film. We can’t give it away, but let’s just say it brings Statham’s Christmas to the forefront for much of the film.

But he makes an early error that sidelines him for a bit. Leading the next stage of the mission will be Gina (Fox), his ex (or maybe current?) girlfriend. Gina is introduced to us the only way a woman in a testosterone-dripping franchise like this can be: Sexy AND crazy, yelling like the dickens in a hot little dress. She also wears an absurd amount of makeup, including on the mission. Apparently, there’s a brand of matte lipstick that holds up very well through mortal combat. Which is convenient if your ex-boyfriend may or may not be showing up.

Advertisement

All this action takes place on a freighter where the aforementioned nuclear bomb is being stored. It includes countless killings and also a motorcycle chase (on a freighter!) It all gets very tiresome.

It doesn’t help that the special effects sometimes seem thrown together with about as much care as the script. Some of the most obvious green screens provide inadvertent comedy. As for intended comedy, the only truly funny scene is when Christmas, sidelined, tries out a job as security detail for an obnoxious social media influencer.

This image released by Lionsgate shows Jason Statham in a...

This image released by Lionsgate shows Jason Statham in a scene from “The Expend4bles.” Credit: AP

The likable British action star is having a busy year. In “Expend4bles,” as mentioned, they let him smile a lot, and it’s a nice touch. Still, if there’s an “Expend5bles,” they’re gonna need more than a Statham smile and another mid-word numeral in the title.

“Expend4bles,” a Lionsgate release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong/bloody violence throughout, language and sexual material.” Running time: 103 minutes. One star out of four.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Movie Reviews

Ti West – 'MaXXXine' movie review

Published

on

Ti West – 'MaXXXine' movie review

Mia Goth has reprised her widely beloved role of Maxine Minx in MaXXXine, the third instalment of Ti West‘s X film series, previously comprised of 2022’s X and its prequel Pearl. Modern scream queen Goth is joined by an impressive cast, including Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Halsey, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Kevin Bacon.

Such a roster of actors and musicians proves the kind of reputation West has earned in recent years and shows the increasing calibre of entertainment figures wanting to work with him. The real question, though, is whether the films themselves stand up to those performing in them. Three movies into his 2020s era, West has largely been revealed as a director who knows how to make a horror films look fun and flashy even if they lack originality.

MaXXXine takes place six years after the events of X as Goth’s character has left behind the “Texas porn star massacre” of the first movie to find her fame and fortune in Hollywood. Initially making her way as an adult entertainment actor, Maxine eventually finds herself making a ‘proper’ film; well, at least a dodgy horror B-movie by the name of ‘The Puritan II’, directed by Elizabeth Debicki’s domineering filmmaker, Elizabeth Bender.

At the same time, 1985 Los Angeles is suffering the crimes of notorious serial killer Richard Ramirez, dubbed in the media the ‘Night Stalker’, who appears to be targeting Maxine’s stripper and porn star buddies as his victims. MaXXXine’s Hollywood is generously doused in all the nostalgic expectations of the most excessive decade of the 20th century with neon lights on every corner, shitty horror movie rental stores (including one owned by Moses Sumney’s Leon) and a groovy soundtrack comprised of ZZ Top and, of course, Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’.

Advertisement

Narratively and aesthetically somewhat typical, then, but where MaXXXine excels the most is in its many moments of self-aware homage. At one point, our hero Maxine is chased to the Bates Motel (from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) on the Universal studio lot by Kevin Bacon’s seedy private eye John Labat, while a later moment sees Lily Collins’ dodgy-accented Molly Bennett have her mouth splattered with blood by Bender in a scene likely paying respect to Andrzej Zulawski’s horror classic Possession and its iconic Isabelle Adjani performance.

In addition, West seems to have fun positing the notion that horror movies in the latter part of the 1980s were deemed B at best, toying with the idea that they could never be taken seriously. Judging from the popularity of his X series, though, such a belief has been proven wrong ten times over. Still, there are a handful of issues with MaXXXine, as well as with the films that preceded it, that prevent admittance to the canon of horror greatness.

One of the film’s most engaging and genuinely exciting moments is when Maxine’s past finally catches up with her, and a motive for the entire series, which had been starkly missing (whether supernatural, religious or just downright maniacal), is finally revealed. However, by the time this antagonism finally arrives, one can’t help but feel that it’s somewhat too late and that West has only managed to deliver a pastiche of the horror world’s past with a 1980s gloss rather than provide an effort of originality or even one that genuinely feels scary.

Sure, there are some brilliantly gory set pieces, including the splattering of a man in a car crusher and the decimation of an even more unfortunate gentleman’s genitals (let’s not forget that the X series is undoubtedly feminist in tone). Still, such standout moments do not guarantee a good horror movie and West’s most recent entry seems to suffer from a lack of an overall haunting spectre or suchlike. MaXXXine is exciting, flashy, funny, sassy, self-aware and incredibly sexy, but it fails to be anything more than the sum of its parts: a neon-lit homage to the horrible history of Hollywood horror rather than a fear-inducing glimpse into the genre’s future.

Advertisement

Related Topics

Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

‘Tiny Lights’ Review: Empathetic Czech Drama Sees the World Through a Child’s Eyes

Published

on

‘Tiny Lights’ Review: Empathetic Czech Drama Sees the World Through a Child’s Eyes

If you’re lucky enough to remember memories from your early childhood, you’ll know they tend to be fragmentary, skewed from an outlook incapable of fully grasping the adult world. Czech filmmaker Beata Parkanova captures that feeling beautifully in her film receiving its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Related entirely through the viewpoint of a six-year-old girl, Tiny Lights emerges as a small gem.

It helps that the little girl, Amalka, is played by adorable child actress Mia Banko, possessing wide, saucer eyes that are endlessly expressive and long red hair of which Heidi would be jealous. In the opening scene, Amalka hears voices emanating from a closed-door room and, naturally curious, attempts to listen. She hears her grandmother angrily say to her mother, “Happiness? Save it for the fairy tales,” but she has no idea of what it means.

Tiny Lights

The Bottom Line

Skillfully observed.

Advertisement

Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Cast: Mia Banko, Elizaveta Maximova, Marek Geisberg, Veronika Zilkova, Martin Finger
Director-screenwriter: Beata Barkanova

1 hour 16 minutes

So she goes to play with her very submissive cat, apparently named Mr. Cat. But she tests Mr. Cat’s patience by putting him inside a wooden chest, from which her grandfather (Martin Finger) soon rescues him. She returns to the room, and when she opens the door, the adults grow silent. “I’m bored,” Amalka says petulantly, and her grandmother (Veronika Zilkova) tries to assuage her by promising that she’ll take her to the lake that afternoon.

After naughtily picking flowers that we later learn came from a neighbor’s garden, Amalka has soup for lunch, unaware of the tensions surrounding her. Her grandparents live up to their promise by taking her to the lake, where her grandfather teaches her how to dive. They hike in the woods and pick blueberries, but Amalka throws a tantrum when told they have to leave.

Advertisement

And so the film goes, with Amalka trying to amuse herself as the adults seem to be engaged in tense confrontations, especially when her mother (Elizaveta Maximova) shows up with a strange French man and announces that she’s going with him to Prague. Amalka, of course, doesn’t comprehend what’s happening except when it relates to her, as when her father (Marek Geisberg) gently upbraids her for picking the flowers and tells her that she’ll have to apologize to the neighbor. As the day ends, she goes to bed, unaware of the fissure in her parents’ relationship, and her father wearily reads her a bedtime story that she’s heard a thousand times before but clearly still finds fascinating.

Even with its brief running time, Tiny Lights demands a certain degree of patience with its intense focus on banal childhood preoccupations. The filmmaker also indulges in stylistic flourishes — principally quick inserted shots that look like they were captured on 8mm and feature a series of close-up views of objects and facial features ­— that are more distracting than illuminating. The strained attempts at artiness just feel self-conscious.

But for most of the film’s running time, Parkanova maintains tight control over her material, making us fully identify with little Amalka and her preoccupations. The film presents things from her viewpoint, even physically; DP Tomas Juricek often places the camera low down, aligning with her diminutive size. The story takes place over the course of a single day, and its poignancy derives from the fact that we, if not Amalka, are fully aware that her life is going to change, possibly forever.

Or maybe she does realize it, as evidenced by the haunting, lingering final shot, in which we see the silhouette of her body as she peers through the large windows of her bedroom, as if trying to see the world beyond her limited perspective.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'Despicable Me 4' is exactly what you'd expect

Published

on

Movie review: 'Despicable Me 4' is exactly what you'd expect

Charm sets the film apart

“Despicable Me 4” isn’t amazing by any means and probably won’t be in conversation for Best Animated Film at the Oscars, but, like “Rise of Gru,” what sets it apart from any other run-of-the-mill animated film is the charm of the franchise. The reason people continue to rush to the theaters to see these films is their consistency. No matter if it’s a spinoff or a direct sequel, you know walking into a “Despicable Me” film what you’re going to get, and that’s perfectly fine because you’ll still have a good time.

The new additions of Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) and Poppie (Joey King) are fine. They don’t get much setup and are just thrown at you as new characters, which is fine but very forgettable. The standouts, of course, are the Minions, as well as the addition of Gru Jr. The combination of the two was probably the best part of the whole film. I could’ve watched a 90-minute film of just that.

Continue Reading

Trending