Movie Reviews - new films reviewed

The biggest excitement in retired CIA agent Frank Moses’ (Bruce Willis) life is to flirt with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), his customer service agent in his pension office. But that changes when an assassination team tries to off him in his house. He dispatches the assault team and goes to make sure Sarah is safe, and to team up with his old colleagues (Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren). Together they have to find out who wants to kill them and uncover a conspiration.

R.E.D. (for Retired Extremely Dangerous) is proof that Bruce & Co are not “too old for this shit”. R.E.D. is good fun, has lots of action, charm and a great cast – it’s fun while it lasts, but is hardly a classic and will soon be forgotten.

R.E.D. Movie Trailer

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) lives in Charlestown, the place with the highest concentration of bank robbers according to the movie. He has inherited his dad’s (Chris Cooper) “business” and works as a professional robber for “Fergie” Colm (Pete Postlethwaite) together with his friends “Jem” Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), “Gloansy” Magloan (Slaine), and “Dez” Elden (Owen Burke).
During one of their robberies, they take bank manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) as a hostage, and after her release, Doug meets her and they start a relationship without Claire knowing Doug is one of her kidnappers. With the FBI already on their trails, Doug wants to retire, but “Fergie” won’t let him go before another job.

Good performances all around, the action scenes are more than adequate – this is one of Ben Afflecks finest hours, both as director and actor. But groundbreaking The Town is not, the most obvious comparable movie being Heat – and in this euqation, The Town will always be the little brother.

The Town Movie Trailer

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole employee of Lunar Industrie’s Sarang lunar station, supervising the production of helium-3 which is the key element to supply Earth with cheap and clean energy. His only company is the AI of the station, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). It’s already near the end of Sam’s three year-contract when he encounters himself after an accident with the moon rover. Both Sams believe the other one must be a clone, but this is not the only mystery on the station.

Moon’s story is like one of those of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, an extrapolation of the future based on reality, classic hard science fiction such as you find it today in magazines like Analog Science Fiction & Fact (and which is not even closely related to flicks like Transformers which pose as SF today). Moon’s themes are none less than society and corporate behavior and the value of human life in the near future. One not to miss!

MOON Movie Trailer

Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger – an 80′s action film fan’s dream cast, or so it seems. And there is a lot of action when Stallone’s gang of mercenaries rough up a dictator’s army of goons in a fictional South American country.

But instead of rebooting the action genre with with the benefit of hindsight, The Expendables is not much more than a revisit of the same old territory without anything new to say, and without the sizzle you are entitled to expect when all those heavyweights share the screen.
Not a complete dud, but sadly expandable.

The Expendables Movie Trailer

When CIA agent Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) interrogates a russian defector, he tells about a plan to destroy the USA with the help of sleeper agents trained from early childhood. And he names one of the sleeper agents – Evelyn Salt. Salt escapes her colleagues who want to arrest her and goes on a quest to find out who the sleeper agents are, to save the United States (and the world) – and who she herself is.

Initially a Tom Cruise-vehicle, the script was rewritten for Angelina Jolie. Probably a good decision, as Angelina Jolie is the best thing in Salt. The plot is by the numbers, with holes in it larger than the ego of two Hollywood superstars, and Salt is saved from looking like the latest Bourne-ripoff only by Jolie’s performance and the gravity-defying stunts.

SALT Movie Trailer