Simon's Movie Reviews

The Losers is kind of old school in the sense that you have a team of American ass-kickers who can kill dozens of bad guys while injured, yet the bad guys never seem to be able to aim for their heads. But who cares? This is mindless fun. This is charismatic characters fighting a ruthless villain at sunny locations. This is also a good excuse to see Zoe Saldana firing a bazooka, apparently as a means to distract the bad guys. The action begins in Bolivia where an elite U.S special forces unit (is there any other kind?) has the mission to destroy the compound of a drug dealer. Unfortunately the dealer is using children as drug mules, so the titular Losers chose to break protocol and ride in to save the innocent little tykes. They succeed and let them use their helicopter to fly out of the jungle, only to see the helicopter get blown out of the sky. It doesn’t take them long to realize that they have been double-crossed by Max, their handler, who has always been just a creepy voice...

I would like to begin with the following statement: HO-LY-SHIT! Kick-Ass by Mathew Vaughn is a movie that truly deserves its name. This is a comic book movie that takes every comic book movie convention, spins them over their heads and adds into the mix an eleven-year-old girl who punches, shoots, and stabs gangsters right after saying what I hope will be one of this year’s most memorable movie lines. To say that this film goes over the top implies that you have to redefine where the top is. The “hero” of the movie is Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) an average high school in New York who lives in a suburban neighbourhood that really resembles the one Peter Parker lives in. Dave is an average kid in every sense of the word: he is not athletic, he is not the brightest kid in school, nor is he the dorkiest. He is just somewhere in the middle and enjoys hanging out at the comic book store with his friends. One day he asks them why is it that no one has ever tried to be a real super hero...

I love it when Nicolas Cage goes bat-shit crazy. He can have this manic energy on screen that will slowly get your attention until he does something so outrageous that you will wonder how he pulled that off. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Calls New Orleans he is directed by Werner Herzog, with whom I hope he will work again because the result is electrifying. Cage plays the titular lieutenant, Terence McDonagh, who gets that rank after rescuing an inmate from a flooding jail cell during the landfall of hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, he seriously injures his back and is told by his doctor that he will be suffering from back pain for the rest of his life. He is given prescriptions for Vicodin, the pain medication that Dr. House used to eat like M&Ms before he went into rehab, but that’s not enough for McDonagh. Soon he is using marijuana, cocaine, crack, and heroine, but the heroine was an accident. Despite being on enough narcotics to give Keith Richards second thoughts, McDonagh is ...

Man that is one big Kraken. I thought the one in Pirates of the Caribbean was big, but the one in Clash of the Titans could challenge Godzilla and King Kong to a bare-knuckle fight and come out relatively unscathed. This is the second time this year that I have seen Greek mythological gods and creatures chewing the fat on the big screen. Last time was with Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief, which featured Steve Coogan as Hades. Clash of the Titans is somewhat of an upgrade since this time Hades is played by Ralph Fiennes, a specialist in villainous roles. Joining him on Mount Olympus are Liam Neeson as Zeus and Danny Huston as Poseidon. My Greek mythology is a bit rusty, but this movie informed me that these three gods are brothers who rule heaven, the sea, and the underworld. The titans, which oddly enough for this particular movie are never seen, created them, but Hades’ enormous spawn, the Kraken, wiped them out. The god’s now rule over man, who either fear Hades ...