The Bank Job (2008) may sound like a generic crime vehicle from the title and the casting of genre action star Jason Statham, a stalwart tough guy with stocky presence and limited range, but don’t let that stop you from digging into this British film. Based on (or more accurately inspired by) the real life […]
Sylvester Stallone has a spotty track record as a writer/director: passably effective at best, painfully misguided and lost in blind alleys of melodramatic kitsch as worst (Driven). He’s best at serving his own screen image (especially if already established by a previous filmmaker, as in the Rocky and Rambo sequels). With The Expendables (2010), he […]
In Safe (2012), mid-budget action movie stalwart Jason Statham plays a former cop turned cage-match fighting burnout who, having run afoul of the Russian mob and his former colleagues in a thoroughly corrupt NYPD, rouses himself back to life as a one-man army top save Chinese math prodigy (Catherine Chan) from what appears to be […]
I don’t know how the heist-on-wheels The Fast and the Furious speed franchise became the blockbuster action series it did, but I’m a fan. I dig these movies, enjoy the comic-book plotting and pulp characters and macho codes of brotherhood and familia, and appreciate a modern action spectacle that favors actual rubber-on-the-road stunts over CGI […]
The Transporter (2002) – Luc Besson, the rather pretentious yet stylish purveyor of high concept action cinema born in France, found his true niche when he created his own production company and turned into an action mogul. His pictures are generally swift and sleek and sometimes silly and he’s ably filling the gap left by […]
