Simon's Movie Reviews

The theory is that Shrek Forever After is to be the last movie starring everyone’s favourite green ogre voiced by Mike Myers. The title sounds pretty finale, but then again there are five movies called Final Destination, so you know. Still, whether or not this is the end, the fact is that this is a pretty good chapter in the life of Shrek and company. Shrek is now living in his swamp with his wife Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and his three kids while his friends Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) drop in for a visit every day. On paper, he has a good life: a good house, nice kids, a great wife and a few pals. Yet, married life is getting to Shrek. He has no time for himself, Fiona keeps asking him to unclog a sewage pipe, the kids need their diapers changed, and Donkey keeps coming home uninvited with his half-donkey half-dragon mutant kids for play dates. (I still think these offsprings are the weirdest fairy tale creatures ever animated and quite frankly are a lit...

Origin stories are big these days. Recently studios have shown us how James became Bond, how Bruce Wayne became Batman, and how Captain Kirk met his crew. Now with Ridley Scott’s take on Robin Hood we get to see how an archer from the crusades called Robin Longstride would become an outlaw called Robin of the Hood and steal from the rich to give to the poor. His first crime is to steal seeds to give to farmers, but you have to start somewhere. All the usual suspects are there: Russell Crowe, an expert at playing mythological heroes who are great at both decapitating people with a sword and giving a great speech to fire up a crowd, plays the titular hero. His Robin Hood is a practical one. When he hears that King Richard the Lion Heart (Danny Huston) has died in battle, his first thought is to make for the coast and to hell with the wages. “Imagine how hard it will be to get paid now that he’s dead” he points out. His merry men are not so much merry as feisty and looking for a place...

“It’s good to be back!” Those are the first word uttered by Tony Stark, played with glee as ever by Robert Downey Jr., as he lands at Stark Expo after jumping from a plane, with AC/DC playing gloriously in the background. Man, what a great kickoff to the summer movie season. This is indeed Iron Man 2 in the sense that this time around Tony will have to share the spotlight with a second man in an armoured suit in the shape of his best friend James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, stepping in for Terence Howard). The introduction of this second iron man, or War Machine, is one of the many sources of conflicts in the story since the government does not trust Mr. Stark when he tells the government that his technology cannot be reproduced, putting him at odds with a senator (Gary Shandling) who wants him to turn over the technology to the military, for whom Rhodes works. Watching Tony bask in the glory of being a superhero is the movie’s main villain, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a brilliant Russia...

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, or Millennium 3 for short, is the last movie adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s massively successful trilogy of books that feature a gothic woman who is an ace hacker and has an unlikely ally in the shape of a middle-aged crusading journalist. This third chapter, directed by Daniel Alfredson, finds Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) hospitalized after having been shot twice and buried alive. Not that that was a major inconvenience since she managed to dig her way out in order to attack the man who did it with an axe. The man in question is a criminal and a defector from the Soviet Union who received help from rogue members of the Swedish government in order to stay in the country during the cold war. He is also Lisbeth’s father, and the police wish to prosecute her for his attempted murder. Outside the hospital Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is building a massive exposé with his magazine Millennium in order to both clear Lisbeth’s name and exp...

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...