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Knight and Day (2010)

Early reports about Knight And Day, a film that’s been in development hell for ages, suggested another flop after Lions for Lambs and Valkyrie. Cruise’s enduring success — and the intensity with which he has clung to it — has always been the most fascinating thing about him: what’s left when the halo slips?
Knight and Day, directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) from a script by Patrick O’Neill, goes out of its way to avoid…

Killers (2010)

In Killers, Spencer (Ashton Kutcher) is a gorgeous spy with a perfect body who hangs out with hot models and drives fancy cars when he’s not killing bad guys (shirtless!) but longs to give it all up because the bad guys aren’t always bad and suburbia and normalcy is starting to sound awfully good. Just as he’s coming to this conclusion, he meets Jen (Katherine Heigl), an awkward, neurotic, freshly dumped woman who’s on vacation in Nice with her parents;…

Repo Men (2010)

There are a lot of people who are going to hate Repo Men. There are even more who are never going to see it just because the marketing and timing of the sci-fi thriller’s release is a bit off. And there are still more folks who just aren’t going to know what to make of the thing even if they do check it out. But for those of us who have a willingness to indulge a filmmaker who’s working both…

Green Zone (2010)

Iraq has not been, in any sense, good box-office. Even Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-feted The Hurt Locker struggled to pull in the crowds when it was first released – and that’s not to mention the slew of soapboxy dramas (In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss, Redacted) whose messages fell largely on deaf ears. Reuniting the director and star of the last decade’s savviest action franchise, Green Zone hopes to break that pattern, and its method is simple. “Bourne goes Epic!”, boom…

The Crazies (2010)

Breck Eisner’s remake of a 1973 George A. Romero creepfest — about the accidental release of a bioengineered virus (it causes insanity) near a small town — has the imprimatur of the master: Mr. Romero is executive producer of the new film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have his style or sense of humor.
The filmmakers (the tepid screenplay is by Scott Kosar and Ray Wright) seem so determined to make a serious, respectable horror movie that they have only the bare…

Shutter Island (2010)

Martin Scorsese’s new movie is a tale of sound and fury, signifying … well, not nothing exactly, but a heck of a lot less than it promises, given the straining intensity of those performances, the glowering darkness of mood, the grand gesture at 20th-century history’s grimmest nightmares, and the sheer length. This was supposed to be Scorsese’s experiment in B-movie thrills, but no mere B-movie director would go on for two hours and 20 minutes. That’s an auteur running time…

Legion (2010)

Angels are awesome! Not wussy angels like Nicolas Cage in City Of Angels, but real kick-ass angels like Christopher Walken in Prophecy, or, errr, other macho angels.
So, when presented with Legion, a film in which a gun-toting Michael the Archangel drops down to Earth to protect us from an army of evil, it can only be a good thing.
Michael (Paul Bettany) has come to Earth because God isn’t happy with the way that mankind is going about its…

Kick-Ass (2010)

A story about a teenager who yearns to be a superhero, and a little girl who’s the star of her own splatter-happy head trip, the big-screen comic “Kick-Ass” could not be more calculating, or cynical. Fast, periodically spit-funny and often grotesquely violent, the film at once embraces and satirizes contemporary action-film clichés with Tarantino-esque self-regard — it’s the latest in giggles-and-guts entertainment.

The filmmaking isn’t in the same league, of course, and the blonde doing the slicing and dicing here…

Salt (2010)

Angelina Jolie, she of a million tabloid cover scandals, makes you forget all of that in the first two minutes of “Salt”. As CIA agent Evelyn Salt, Jolie is at the top of her game; unmistakably out to show the world what a hard-hitting female action hero looks like – although the performance is never obvious about that intention. Once upon a time, when asked if she ever wanted to be a Bond girl, Jolie famously answered, “No, I want…

The Expendables (2010)

Now, since Simon has already written an articulate critique of The Expendables, I’m going to take this opportunity to be a little less professional.
The Expendables is, to my action movie eyes, awesome. It’s like some kind of fevered dream, a surreal out of body experience, which I still can’t believe happened.
My critical facilities were going to be no use to me when watching the film, for the simple reason that, albeit briefly, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold…