A powerful piece that captures the honesty of physical battle.
The Day After Tomorrow explores the "global disaster" genre in a refreshing way. Instead of a plague or a meteor or zombies, we have global warming causing global cooling. I won't go into the movie science that explains it, but just know that three cyclonic storms with centers cold enough to freeze gasoline are creating a new ice age across the entire northern hemisphere of the Earth. What's nice about this global disaster is that there's nothing to be done to stop it. No crazy contraptions drilling to the center of the earth. No nuclear warheads being detonated. The characters are just surviving.
Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a climatologist who's more involved with his work than with his family, which causes a bit of love loss with his son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal). Sam and his classmates are competing in New York when the storms strike, stranding him and forcing his father on a rescue mission against impossible odds. The plot is good enough, but being a disaster movie, the film forces the audience to watch tangents that aren't particularly necessary to flesh out the film.
Leading the way for the 2008 Summer Blockbusters is Iron Man, a beautifully crafted film based on the Marvel comic book by the same name. The film is well-paced, the actors make the most out of their characters and it's nice to see a superhero fighting real-world villains and not just outlandish costumed freaks. Also, the PG-13 rating makes Iron Man family-friendly and proves that a film can show real-world death without real-world gore and still be enjoyable.
The story follows wunderkind weapons developer Tony Stark who is a remorseless and flippant war profiteer. When the film begins, he's ambushed during a weapons demonstration in the Middle East and captured by terrorist insurgents. Stark is forced to create a super weapon out of a cache of armaments that his company designed that have fallen in the hands of America's enemies. Stark has a change of heart and builds the Iron Man suit to wage a personal war.
One of the best fantasy romances to found in cinema, Ladyhawke is a well-rounded movie that strikes a chord that is pitch perfect on many aspects that we look for in a good story. There is friendship, forgiveness, undying love and hate and revenge. Tie in beautiful cinematography and you have a formula that can't fail. Still, Ladyhawke is not without its flaws.
Matthew Broderick plays Phillipe "The Mouse" Gaston, a thief who converses with God and who is also the first prisoner to escape the un-escapable dungeons of Aquila. While eluding capture, he is befriended by ex-captain of the Aquila guards Etienne Navarre (Rutger Hauer). Navarre is always accompanied by a beautiful hawk. Gaston discovers that Navarre has been cursed by the evil Bishop of Aquila (John Wood) to turn into a wolf at night while the hawk turns back into his beloved Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer). With Gaston's help, Navarre hopes to kill the Bishop.
Releasing two movies with near-identical plots in the same year is like two girls showing up to the prom wearing the exact same outfit. I'm talking about Deep Impact and Armageddon. These movies are so similar in plot and story that when I saw the trailers aired separately on TV, I thought Deep Impact was a subtitle to Armageddon. Regrettably, Deep Impact is the lesser version of the same story in almost every way.
The plot is simple: A giant meteor is on a course to collide with Earth. The rest is all human drama surrounding several unrelated people. Téa Leoni is a reporter, building her career on the meteor story. Morgan Freeman is the President of the United States who guides the audience in his fatherly way, explaining what's being done to counter the meteor and precautions in case the attempts fail. Robert Duvall is an astronaut leading a team to land on the meteor, drill into it and plant nuclear warheads inside it. And Elijah Wood is the teenager who first discovers the meteor.
This straight-to-video remake of George Romero's Day of the Dead is an oddity among B-movie horror films in that it has more than one recognizable Hollywood actor, looks like it has a decent budget and has pretty good direction and visual effects. The only real downside is the lackluster writing. Still, most zombie movie aficionados will most likely be pleased by this offering provided they make a few concessions.
The tie-in to Romero's Day of the Dead is very loose here. Most of the story takes place topside instead of underground and it focuses more on the zombie action rather than the human interaction. In this version, a small town has been quarantined by the U.S. military and the townsfolk are suffering from some kind of virus. Those infected turn into flesh-eating zombies and it's up to a few survivors to get the hell out of dodge. Fans of Bub, the learning zombie from the original, may be disappointed to find Bud, the loving zombie here, but at least it's something.
Year: 2008 Directed by: Rob Minkoff Starring: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michael Angarano Written by: John Fusco Jackie Chan and...
Let's just cut to the chase and let me say what I want to say, because it's a biggie: In the Name of the King is actually decent.
It's no secret that most industry films follow very rigid formulas, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Every once in a while, however, a film comes along that does the formula so well that it sets itself a cut above other films. Death Sentence is one of those high-caliber movies.
At its heart, Death Sentence is a story about degeneration, veiled in a vengeance-tale. David Hume, played by the always-a-pleasure-to-watch Kevin Bacon, lives a middle-class life with his wife and two sons. His older son, Brendan, is a promising athlete and the future looks bright for the Hume clan. On the way home from a game, David and Brendan find themselves low on gas in the red light district and are targeted by street thugs as victims of an initiation killing. To find peace, David wages war on the men who killed his son.