[Review] – Rise Of The Guardians

Title: Rise of the Guardians
Year: 2012
Director: Peter Ramsey
Writer: David Lindsay-Abaire, based on the book series by William Joyce
Starring: Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Hugh Jackman, Isla Fisher, Jude Law, Dakota Goyo
MPAA Rating: PG, thematic elements and some mild scary action
Runtime: 97 min
IMDb Rating: 7.5
Rotten Tomatoes: 76%
Metacritic: 57

If I’m to be perfectly honest, I’m quite disappointed by Rise of the Guardians. Not because it’s bad (it’s not) but because a part of me was really looking forward to it and thinking that it would be in contention for the title of best animated feature of the year. Granted, that would be a hard title to get considering how amazing Wreck-It Ralph was (I gave that one an A), but this one’s not even in the Top 5 and it just looked so cool to me from the trailers I’d seen.

[Review] – People Like Us

Title: People Like Us
Year: 2012
Director: Alex Kurtzman
Writers: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert
Starring: Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mark Duplass, Jon Favreau
MPAA Rating: PG-13, language, some drug use and brief sexuality
Runtime: 114 min
IMDb Rating: 6.7
Rotten Tomatoes: 55%
Metacritic: 49

Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are one of the most in-demand writing duos in the movie industry nowadays, thanks mostly for what they did with the first two Transformers films which obviously made a ton of cash, J.J. Abrams‘ Star Trek reboot from 2009, which also made a ton of cash and was actually a pretty amazing movie, too. So, yeah, from those credentials, plus the fact that they’re also the guys behind TV’s Fringe and the Hawaii Five-0 reboot, you can see why they’re the ones people go to for big-budget action-packed extravaganzas.

[Trailer] – People Like Us

 

I’ve been following this film for quite some time, for some reason or another, back when it was titled Welcome To People, and now that it’s titled People Like Us, we’ve finally gotten our first look at it thanks to the just released trailer which you can watch above.

[Trailer] – Rise Of The Guardians

 

Yes, we all know The Avengers are assembling this May, and that’ll no doubt be awesome, but the Marvel characters aren’t the only team of iconic characters gearing up to save the world this year. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman and Jack Frost are also teaming up to protect the children of the world in the upcoming Rise of the Guardians, the trailer for which you can watch above.

This Means War

Title: This Means War
Year: 2012
Director: McG
Writers: Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg, based on a story by Mr. Dowling and Marcus Gautesen
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, Til Schweiger, Chelsea Handler, Laura Vandervoort, Angela Bassett, Jenny Slate
MPAA Rating: PG-13, sexual content including references, some violence and action, and for language
Runtime: 97 min
IMDb Rating: 6.5
Rotten Tomatoes: 25%
Metacritic: 31

Wow, talk about a lot of squandered talent. You have three incredibly likable and charming stars; Reese Witherspoon, the Academy Award winner with the lovely smile and girl-next-door charm, as well as Tom Hardy who’s just on the brink of super-stardom (and who’ll achieve it this summer with The Dark Knight Rises, obviously), and Chris Pine, who’s the guy that starred as Captain Kirk in the recent Star Trek reboot and will do again next summer when the sequel hits theaters. So yeah, we have a trio of highly likable stars, but the result is pretty bad and totally wastes their talents.

The main problem, for me, is the same problem that the film’s marketing team had, and that caused the studio to back down from the Valentine’s Day weekend release date it had originally planned (which was smart because The Vow took total control of that weekend); and that’s the fact that this film is neither too action-y, nor too romantic, nor too funny, and it just doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. The film revolves around a couple of skilled CIA operatives who are partners and best friends until they fall in love with the same girl. So now they’re pitted against each other so they’ll use all their spy expertise and crazy-ass gadgets in order to win over the girl.

You get why this was once thought as a solid Valentine’s Day option. Two attractive guys women can swoon over fighting over a girl women actually like because she’s charming would attract the female crowd, and the fact that the film features action set pieces with spy gadgets would take care of the male demographic. This was potentially the one film both men and women would like to check out for the romantic holiday. But it didn’t pay off at all, because the film is just so clumsy. The director is McG, who did both Charlie’s Angels movies, but those at least had the self-awareness of how campy they were and played off it, while this one thinks it’s actually cool and tries to be hip and just fails so, so badly at it.

I mean, if you think about the stuff that’s going on in this film for just a second you’ll understand how ludicrous it all is. Firstly, you have two guys blatantly lying to a girl just to be with her, you have those same two guys wasting valuable resources of the nation in order to spy on her, which in turn is a huge violation of privacy, and they plain-out put all of their lives at risk while doing so. If McG had wanted this to be a parody of these kind of films, mocking both the spy and the rom-c0m clichés, this would have all worked out splendidly, but instead we a film that’s pretty idiotic for most of its running time and that’s never once funny at all. There’s a scene here in which Chris Pine wrestles a small dog, people, that’s the sort of crap we have to deal with when watching This Means War.

Of course there’s also the matter that, as they’re wasting resources and manpower trying to woo Ms. Witherspoon, who hasn’t done anything close to great since winning her Oscar, the two guys are also forgetting to pay attention to the actual case they’re supposed to be working on. Well, the film pays absolutely no mind to that for most of its running time, but then it suddenly brings it up out of nowhere with a huge sense of urgency that had nothing we had seen previously on which to base itself, only so that it can use it to bring forth the big climatic action set piece towards the end of the film and try to justify itself. And boy does it never work, this film squanders the talents of three really charming stars that are actually game for everything the film asks of them, but the material they’re given is totally dumb and never once resembling anything close to funny.

This Means War essentially has two intruding creeps (“but at least they’re handsome”, would say the film’s marketing team) spying on a girl they both want to seduce while trying to foil each other’s sexual advances with said girl, all of which is done with taxpayer’s money. This whole thing about secret operatives and their love lives just isn’t all that awesome anymore; I mean, yes, Mr. & Mrs. Smith was a massive success (and had its good parts), but let’s leave this new subgenre alone, Knight and Day may have been decent enough (barely, I gave it a B-), but most of these films are more like this one and Killers (the unfortunate film with Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl I gave a D+). This is a film that doesn’t have a single ounce of wit, and spends quite a bit of time throwing around cringe-worthy double entendre’s, and even the action sequences are painfully edited to the point of utter incoherence. Avoid this film if you’re smart, no matter how likable the leads are, this film achieves not one of its many dumb ambitions.

Grade: D+

Unstoppable

Title: Unstoppable
Year: 2010
Director: Tony Scott
Writer: Mark Bomback
Starring: Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, Ethan Suplee, Jessy Schram, Kevin Corrigan
MPAA Rating: PG-13, sequences of action and peril, and some language
Runtime: 98 min
Major Awards: –
IMDb Rating: 7.3
Rotten Tomatoes: 85%

 

I really like what comes out of every Denzel Washington-Tony Scott collaboration, the duo had already worked together four times before Unstoppable. The first one was in 1995’s Crimson Tide, they reunited nine years later for Man on Fire, then again in 2006 for Déjà Vu, and finally last year in The Taking of Pelham 123. Those have all been seriously solid films, Man on Fire I thought was particularly good, and shows that the partnership between these two is really consistent, and in my opinion Unstoppable is the best film they’ve made together thus far.

Simply put, this is sheer entertainment, a seriously nicely paced film. It’s fast, it’s thrilling and it’s loud, and if you need a film with those three qualities then Mr. Scott is definitely the man for the job. Reportedly Mr. Washington himself suggested Chris Pine for the other lead role to Mr. Scott, and that was one seriously spot-on recommendation. Mr. Pine came to my attention for all the wrong reasons in 2006, when he starred in that horrible Lindsay Lohan film Just My Luck and had a supporting role in Joe Carnahan’s underwhelming Smokin’ Aces. But then, as we all know, last year he turned it all around when he played Captain Kirk in J.J. Abrams’ spectacular Star Trek reboot which I went gaga for. So yeah, I love Chris Pine now, and considering that the next projects he has lined up are This Means War, alongside Reese Witherspoon and Tom Hardy, and Welcome to People, a potentially awesome film by the writers of Star Trek in which he’ll co-star with Elizabeth Banks, not to mention the eventual Star Trek sequel, I doubt I’ll stop liking the guy any time soon.

But, anyways, back to the film. If you’ve seen the trailers then you’ll know pretty much what it’s all about, which is, basically, an unstoppable train, not in the sense of The Taking of Pelham 123 because the train here is unmanned and there’s no John Travolta, but Mr. Washington is still the one poised to stop it here as he and Mr. Pine race against time to stop the huge freight train from crashing at full speed.

The similarities to that previous film go to state that Mr. Scott knows how to handle speeding trains all too well, and Mr. Washington knows how to deal with this amazing amount of energy and create some seriously believable tension for us sitting in the audience. We have a director who likes to shake things up a bit, literally, and throw as many loud trains or police sirens our way, and the effect it has when done so well like it is in Unstoppable is tremendous.

The stunts here are all pretty cool, and they’re not CGI, which is something that is far too underrated in our digitalized world, and Mr. Scott actually had Mr. Washington and Mr. Pine spend a lot of time atop the moving train. Apparently Mr. Pine did a lot of his own stunts while Mr. Washington only some, as he has a fear of heights, and left the others to very capable stuntmen. Whoever did whatever, the stunts all look seriously wicked on top of that huge train that sounds like a ferocious beast that can’t be controlled.

Mr. Pine’s character, Will, is a new young conductor that hasn’t spent much time assigned to railway, and has been partnered for the day with Mr. Washington’s character, Frank, who’s a veteran engineer. We learn a bit of their personal lives along the way, Will is having some bad marital problems and Frank is learning how to cope with his daughters. And then disaster strikes as the character played by Ethan Suplee, who has become an expert at playing dumb slackers since his days in My Name is Earl, makes a mistake as he thinks he has managed to bring the train to a complete stop, but no one with Mr. Suplee’s slacker demeanor is brought to a film like this to that. And sure enough, the train hasn’t stopped, instead it’s picked up speed and is full of dangerous chemicals and headed straight for a highly populated area.

You’ll obviously think that this happening would be impossible, however the movie sets some guidelines that make this seem plausible, not to mention that the film was inspired by a real-life event that was quite similar, so the groundwork was there and this could actually happen. Obviously this is the exaggerated and primped up version of things to make it all very entertaining, but it’s plausible and that’s all I care for, because the rest is handled remarkably well by the director and his stars.

Mr. Scott makes of his film something very much like the train it focusses on, the first half hour or so it’s on track, setting things up, but the last hour or so is unstoppable, a very thrilling ride with many suspenseful moments. We get to see this from the point of view of Will and Frank, from the point of view of Connie, the Rosario Dawson character, who’s in charge of dispatch and operations, and from the many news choppers Mr. Scott likes so much to have flying around creating cool shots of the action to intercut with the ones in which we’re right there.

I won’t go ahead and tell you guys how the problem is resolved, how Frank and Will, who started out a regular day aboard their train, will end up saving the day. But I will say this, Unstoppable is the best Scott-Washington collaboration to date, and it’s the movie in which Mr. Scott’s set of strengths have been on display the most awesomely, his frantic style of direction, his love of very tense moments in which split-second decisions are made by the dozens. This feels like a huge old-school action movie. And in these final months of the year, in which the majority of the films released are Oscar bait and more a bit more heavy, it feels good to have a plain out entertaining flick, especially one that’s so good.

Grade: A-