After watching “28 Weeks Later,” the only thing I wanted to do was take a shower and watch “American Idol.” Granted, it contained all the elements that these movies need to be effective: it was bloody, disturbing and relentless, but not in a thrilling way. Instead, it was exhausting and bleak, and made me feel dirty just watching it. To gore hounds, that may sound like a good thing. I assure you, it’s not. And yet, the movie has its good points. There is some truly frightful stuff here, but it’s not in a boo-eek way as much as a…
Author: David Medsker
Woe is the brainless action movie that takes itself too seriously. “The Condemned” had the potential to be a harmless mash-up of “Con Air” and the Japanese classic “Battle Royale,” but instead is an insufferably preachy indictment of reality television and the soulless drones that consume it. You’ll be hard pressed to find a movie that talks out of both sides of its mouth as much as this one. The movie begins with a producer named Breck (Robert Mammone) watching video of a Russian prisoner laying a beatdown on two other inmates. The producer likes what he sees, and secures…
There is a scene in “Next” that made me fear for the future of celluloid. Two dozen Nicolas Cages were scoping the surroundings of a warehouse for traps. Now, imagine if all of those Cages chewed up scenery as voraciously as the original Cage. Let me guess: you just shivered, didn’t you? Oh, if that were the only problem with “Next.” Yes, Cage is woefully miscast, but he isn’t what derails the movie. Cage is Cris Johnson, a moderately successful Las Vegas illusionist that performs under the alias of Frank Cadillac. Cris, however, is harboring a dark secret, which is…
Bullz-Eye spent 15 minutes talking with an Oscar-winning screenwriter, and not once did we talk about his Oscar. (He adapted the screenplay for “L.A. Confidential.”) But there are perfectly good reasons for this. For starters, Brian Helgeland was not doing interviews to talk about something he did 10 years ago. In fact, he was chatting with us about the recently released (and surprisingly short) “Straight Up” director’s cut of “Payback,” his directorial debut, and we are never ones to miss an opportunity to talk about Crazy Mel Gibson. Secondly, the writer assigned to conduct the interview had to leave his…
“Disturbia” is every bit the “Clueless Rear Window” that you think it is. (That’s clueless as in Amy Heckerling’s awesome 1995 comedy, not clueless as in ‘people in horror movies do the zaniest things.’) And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Simple and direct like the 2005 airplane thriller “Red Eye,” “Disturbia” doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, and thank goodness for that. Shia LaBeouf is Kale, a seemingly normal teen whose life is turned upside down when he is in a car accident that takes the life of his father. Now sullen and impulsive,…
If you see “Meet the Robinsons,” may I recommend taking a bathroom break before the movie starts. The movie is the standard 90-minute length of most animated movies, but before it started, they showed us, no joke, 35 minutes worth of trailers, ads, and a Disney cartoon from 1953. Thirty, five, minutes. And if those trailers are any indication of the quality of the movies they represent, this is going to be a long, long summer for parents. “Shrek the Third,” in particular, looks dreadful. But I hated the first “Shrek” with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns, so…
It’s difficult to decide which aspect of “Reign Over Me” is worse: is it bad because of the overwrought melodrama, or is it bad because it exploits the events of 9/11 as a back story for that overwrought melodrama? “If you don’t like our half-baked dramedy about loss and healing, then the terrorists win.” Ye gods. Don Cheadle is Alan Johnson, a successful Manhattan dentist who sees his former roommate from college, Charlie (Adam Sandler, who looks like Bob Dylan’s lost son), riding down the street on a scooter. The disheveled Charlie doesn’t recognize Alan at first, which takes Alan…
Every movie that Antoine Fuqua makes from now until the end of his days will say “From the director of ‘Training Day’” somewhere in the poster or trailer, but make no mistake: Antoine Fuqua lives to blow, shit, up. He’s a poor man’s Michael Bay, though there is nothing poor (budget-wise, anyway) about his movies. His latest, “Shooter,” is an unabashed throwback to ‘80s action flicks like “Commando,” and believe it or not, that’s actually a good thing. The movie lives in a world where people who deserve to be dead get dead, and little else matters. You have to…
“Premonition” tries to meld the disorienting timeline of “Memento” with the loved-one-in-peril urgency of “Frequency,” but fails on both counts. It doesn’t have the smarts of the former or the emotional weight of the latter. In the place of those things are a pile of loose ends, clichés, quick cuts, and some bad, bad acting. TriStar should have shipped this puppy straight to DVD. It would have made a killing as a rental. As it is, it’ll hit the stores a few months from now, but will carry the stink of box office failure with it. Sandra Bullock is Linda,…
The ads for “Dead Silence” will tell you that the movie comes from “the writer and director of ‘Saw.’” A more accurate description, though, would be that it comes from “the writers of ‘Magic’ and ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’” since the movie’s premise borrows liberally from both. If it bears any similarity to “Saw,” it’s in the ending, but more on that later. Ryan Kwanten stars as Jamie, a man whose wife is brutally murdered while he’s out getting takeout. The detective assigned to the case, Jim Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), thinks Jamie is guilty, but Jamie thinks it has…