Mile 22

Mark Wahlberg does his best Rambo.

(2018) Action (STX) Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, Ronda Rousey, Terry Kinney, John Malkovich, Carlo Alban, Natasha Goubskaya, Chae Rin Lee, Sam Medina, Keith Arthur Bolden, Jenique Hendrix, Billy Smith, Myke Holmes, Emily Skeggs, Brandon Scales, Poorna Jagannathan, Peter Berg, Elle Graham, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Ariel Felix, Tom Astor, Kate Rigg. Directed by Peter Berg

There is nothing wrong with a chest-thumping testosterone epic. Those movies have their place and when done well, can be extremely entertaining as the careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone can attest. HOWEVER, when not done well they can be almost painful to watch – particularly when they have every reason to succeed.

Jimmy Silva (Wahlberg) is the leader of an elite covert CIA team that does all the dirty deeds (and not dirt cheap) that our country needs done under cover of darkness. The world is on the brink; radioactive material is missing and there are terrorists on the hunt for it. The cesium must be found before all Armageddon breaks loose. Policeman/CIA informant Li Noor (Uwais) has a disc that has the information they need, but he needs to be transported out of the country before he’ll decrypt it – the corrupt Minister of Oppressing His People and Making Huge Personal Profits is out to get him, you see.

Because of a complicated set of circumstances I won’t even go into here, the plane to take Li Noor outta Dodge can only touch down for no more than ten minutes. The rendezvous point is 22 miles from the safe house that they have him stored in. In order to get him there, they’ll have to fight their way through motorcycle gangs, well-armed mercenaries and the Ip Man School of Martial Arts. Okay, I was exaggerating about the last one.

The plot is confused and confusing; nothing really makes much sense. I attribute most of that to lazy writing; first time scribe Lea Carpenter seems more interested in excuses for fight scenes than in crafting a riveting action movie. The team doesn’t even embark on their main mission until the film is more than halfway over.

Those fight scenes are at least well-staged; casting Uwais, the veteran from the two Raid movies, was a boon for the film. Unfortunately, there’s too much voiceover (another sign of lazy writing), too much exposition, too little character development and too much plot. There are a lot of great action movies out there. That means you don’t have a reason to check out a mediocre one. If you give this one a miss, I’ll certainly understand.

REASONS TO SEE: The fight scenes are well-staged.
REASONS TO AVOID: A confusing mess.
FAMILY VALUES: There is all sorts of violence and profanity.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The airport that is playing the Moscow airport in the film is actually Long Beach airport.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango Now, Google Play, Microsoft, Redbox, Showtime, Sling TV, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 1/11/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 23% positive reviews: Metacritic: 38/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Gauntlet
FINAL RATING: 5/10
NEXT: Operation Finale

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Entourage

Rollin’ with E, Vinnie, Drama and Turtle.

(2015) Comedy  (Warner Brothers) Kevin Connolly, Adrian Grenier, Kevin Dillon, Jerry Ferrara, Jeremy Piven, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Perrey Reeves, Rex Lee, Debi Mazar, Rhys Coiro, Constance Zimmer, Haley Joel Osment, Billy Bob Thornton, Ronda Rousey, Emily Ratajkowski, Scott Mescudi, Alan Dale, Piers Morgan, Nina Agdal. Directed by Doug Ellin

Hollywood is as much a state of mind as it is a place on Earth. You can drive to it but you can never really achieve it; that is, unless you’re one of the lucky, magical few who make it in that town. And when you make it, so do those you brought up with you.

Vincent Chase (Grenier) is a movie star who is celebrating his divorce (or rather, his annulment) after nine days of wedded bliss on a yacht off of Ibiza. His boyhood chums – Eric (Connolly) who has been Vincent’s manager since his younger days; Johnny Drama (Dillon), his older brother whose stunning lack of success in becoming an actor is probably rooted in the fact that he can’t act for squat – and Turtle (Ferrara), Vinnie’s driver who just recently hit it big in a vodka line with Mark Cuban – are joining Vincent to drink away their sorrows, or whatever it is they’re drinking away.

Ari Gold (Piven), Vincent’s long time agent, has retired to Italy with his wife (Reeves) but at the behest of studio CEO John Ellis (Dale) has taken over the studio as production chief. His first order of business is to get Vincent locked into a new movie that looks like it could possibly become a smash hit – Hyde, a techno-retelling of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic .

When the movie runs into some financial issues and needs a few extra mill to finish up, Ari is forced to go to the money for the film – Texas rancher Larsen McCredle (Thornton) who sends his son Travis (Osment) to Hollywood to find out why more money is needed and whether or not the money already invested has been well-spent.

In the meantime, Vincent’s boys are having their own problems. Eric’s ex-wife Sloan (Chriqui) is about to have their baby and is willing to give their relationship another chance. However, perpetual nice-guy Eric has a relationship going with Dana (Zimmer) which might get in the way. Turtle is trying to get in good with MMA superstar Ronda Rousey (herself) who may nor may not be amenable to the idea, and Johnny Drama may have found the role that may finally turn his career around. The trouble is, it’s in his brother’s movie and Travis, the affable but dopey Texan, wants to cut him out of the film. And Vincent’s relationship with gorgeous starlet Emily Ratajkowski (herself) may complicate things more than either of them can imagine.

This takes place right after the HBO series ended its run four years ago after an impressive seven years on the cable network and is awash in celebrity cameos. So many that they are often of the blink and you missed them kind, like a venal encounter between Ari and Liam Neeson. Some of the cameos, like Rousey and Ratajkowski, are much more substantial and integral to the plot.

The good news is that if you didn’t watch the HBO series, you can still enjoy the movie – which is a fear I think may have kept some people away from theaters. Fans of the series will get a lot more of what they want; the teenage boy fantasy of endless parties, endless money and endless women, all of whom are SoCal gorgeous. Of course, there’s plenty of digs at the shallow Hollywood society, from the drug dealers to the studio heads to the creative sorts. Everyone has an angle, or so Entourage would have you believe, other than the innocents from Queens who stuck with their guy through hard times and are there with him to enjoy his success.

The humor here is crude and profane, and those offended by such things are going to have plenty of reasons to stay away. However, there are a lot of good reasons to go see this, in no small part thanks to Piven who made Gold an iconic character on HBO and shows that Ari, despite anger management courses and therapy, still rages with the best of them. Also of note is Osment, who after a successful child acting career has simply developed into a fine actor and shows some fine comic timing here; hopefully roles like this will help him garner more parts in a town which may have pigeonholed him into seeing dead people.

I don’t know that there was a demand to see Entourage again; while the creators were hoping that this would spawn a trilogy of big screen installments, the reality is that the show had something of a cult status at best and probably didn’t have enough of a core rabid fan audience to make those plans ill-advised. However, the movie that resulted was entertaining enough and even if you’re not counting cameos – which would be a fun drinking game when it makes it to home video – there’s plenty to make it worth your while.

REASONS TO GO: Ari Gold, man; Ari Gold. Osment shows some real comic chops.
REASONS TO STAY: Too many cameos spoil the broth. Maybe excessively crude.
FAMILY VALUES: A whole lot of profanity, nudity and sexual references, and a little bit of drug use.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The character Turtle is based on Mark Wahlberg’s real life assistant Donnie “Donkey” Carroll, who passed away at age 39 on December 18, 2005 from an asthma attack.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 6/22/15: Rotten Tomatoes: 39% positive reviews. Metacritic: 38/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Spy

Furious 7

Paul Walker and Vin Diesel prepare for one last ride.

(2015) Action (Universal) Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Lucas Black, Kurt Russell, Natalie Emmanuel, Elsa Pataky, Gal Gadot, John Brotherton, Luke Evans, Tony Jaa, Djimon Hounsou, Noel Gugliemi, Ali Fazar, Sung Kang, Ronda Rousey, Iggy Azalea, Levy Tran. Directed by James Wan

If there is a motion picture franchise that has escaped convention and turned all Hollywood wisdom on its ear, it is this one. The first movie in the series that has now reached seven films was pretty good, the next two not so much, the fourth one was excruciating but the fifth and sixth ones were the two best of the series. Would this continue that trend?

Picking up directly where Fast & Furious 6 left off, Dominic Toretto (Diesel) is looking forward to some down time with his friends – except he has no friends, only family. His sister Mia (Brewster) is in full-on maternal mode, bringing up a little baby girl with another one on its way. His best friend Brian O’Connell (Walker) is moving into the daddy role although he’s not always happy about it, telling Mia in a moment of reflection that he misses the bullets. His wife Letty (Rodriguez) is still suffering from amnesia and doesn’t remember that she and Dom are married. Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Gibson) are getting on with their lives after the run-in with Owen Shaw (Evans) that nearly killed them and left the bad guy comatose.

Except that Owen’s bigger and badder brother Deckard (Statham) is out for vengeance and he has already murdered Han (Kang). He drops a bomb on Dom’s house and puts their own private federal agent Hobbs (Johnson) in the hospital. The crew realize they’re being hunted down one by one by a superior killer.

Enter Mr. Nobody (Russell), a black ops sort who is willing to help them drop Deckard out of the world but there’s one little catch; they must retrieve Ramsey (Emmanuel), a comely hacker and her ultimate surveillance hack Godseye from ruthless warlord Jakande (Hounsou). Considering that he doesn’t care how many civilians die for him to get ultimate power and control through Godseye which essentially accepts the feeds from everything with a camera or a cell phone in the world, it can locate anyone anywhere on the planet.

They’ll have to pull out all the stops, taking crazy to a whole new level in the process. None of them will be safe, either from the heavily armed drone that is chasing them or from the lethal Deckard who has already offed one of their numbers and looks to add others to the tally before all is said and done.

This continues the frenetic pace that has made the last two movies in the franchise so enjoyable. The stunts are more breathtaking with cars dropping out of airplanes and flying out of skyscrapers into other skyscrapers. This is some of the best car-centric action you’re likely to see this year and although some of the stunts defy logic, they will nonetheless leave even the most intellectual moviegoer on the edge of your seat. Just go with it, says I.

And there are some pretty badass baddies to deal with. Statham is the best villain to date in the franchise and he is absolutely lethal, having one of the better fight sequences in recent memory with Johnson early on in the movie. Hounsou, an Oscar nominee, also makes for a mad dog African warlord that while somewhat over-the-top and somewhat stereotypical is still one you love to hate. And the great Tony Jaa makes his English language debut as Jakande’s enforcer and he gets a couple of fight scenes with Walker that are amazing.

Yeah, that’s a lot of superlatives to throw around but in fact this may well be the best of the franchise, although I think that the sixth entry edges it out by a hair. There’s a little bit too much mention of “family” by Dom (which would make a great home video drinking game if you take a shot every time he says the word) and this really doesn’t do much more than give us more of the same only at greater volume.

There is also a very nice tribute to Walker at the movie’s end. Walker, who passed away in a car crash (ironically) on November 30, 2014 was about halfway through filming his role when he died, but thanks to stand-ins and body doubles (supplied in part by his brothers Cody and Caleb) as well as timely CGI and archival footage the movie was able to be finished. Now there are some snarky critics who claim they could tell when Walker was “real” and when he was CGI. That’s odd because I couldn’t and I suspect the average moviegoer won’t be able to either. However, Walker’s voice was stilled for much of the film and the actors and crew paid tribute to him in subtle ways throughout.

It is a fitting farewell to Walker who was just coming into his own as an actor and looked to be moving past the typical mumble-mouthed wooden action hero he was generally cast as. Imagining what kind of career he had ahead of him will haunt an awful lot of people’s imagination as to what sort of future he had ahead of him. That his last movie broke box office records is kind of a lovely grace note to all this.

REASONS TO GO: Incredible stunts and driving sequences. A fitting farewell to Walker. Statham, Jaa and Hounsou make fine adversaries.
REASONS TO STAY: More of the same but who cares?
FAMILY VALUES: Nearly non-stop action, violence and automotive mayhem, a fair amount of cussing and some sexually suggestive visuals.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: At 2 hours and 17 minutes, this is the longest entry to date in the film franchise.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/8/15: Rotten Tomatoes: 82% positive reviews. Metacritic: 67/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Need for Speed
FINAL RATING: 7/10
NEXT: A Better Life

The Expendables 3

Jason Statham and Wesley Snipes decide to settle who has the bigger blade.

(2014) Action (Lionsgate) Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham, Harrison Ford, Kellan Lutz, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Banderas, Dolph Lundgren, Wesley Snipes, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Ronda Rousey, Kelsey Grammer, Glen Powell, Victor Ortiz, Robert Davi, Ivan Kostadinov, Slavi Slavov, Natalie Burn, Sarai Givaty. Directed by Patrick Hughes

Back in 2010, action fans eagerly awaited the debut of The Expendables which united action heroes from days gone by Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Bruce Willis and of more recent vintage Li and Statham. The novelty factor alone made the movie a big hit but a single soliloquy by Mickey Rourke made the movie more memorable than the average action film.

Then came The Expendables 2 which added Jean-Claude van Damme and Chuck Norris (as well as more recent action star Liam Hemsworth) which was still entertaining in its own way but the novelty was beginning to wear off. Would the pattern continue?

Yeah, it does. While this is the most star-studded of the series, it is also the least fulfilling. I use that term advisedly – The Expendables 3 has a massive dose of testosterone that will grow hair on the chest of a Disney princess, and is surprisingly entertaining but not necessarily in a good way. You can sit back and watch this and take it for what it is, but if what it is doesn’t thrill you so much, you’re in for a long evening.

The team – leader Barney Ross (Stallone), right hand man Lee Christmas (Statham), surly Gunnar Jensen (Lundgren), just as surly Toll Road (Couture) and abs-tastic Hale Caesar (Crews) board a prison train carrying a single prisoner – former Expendable Dr. Death (Snipes). As usual, lots of people get shot and stuff blows up but Team Ex wins out in the end.

But it turns out that the prison break was kind of a side trip on the way to something else. They’ve to head out and intercept a shipment of bombs from an arms dealer, who turns out to be Conrad Stonebanks (Gibson) who just happened to co-found the Expendables before turning rogue and going out on his own. That job turns out to be something of a cluster frump and gets one of the team shot and in critical condition. Shaken up, Barney decides to retire the team and find a new one.

He needs one because their CIA contact Drummer (Ford) wants Stonebanks picked up alive and taken to the Hague to answer for his crimes. That’s easier said than done however and while Barney’s new team – including tech wizard Thorn (Powell), chatterbox Spanish killing machine Galgo (Banderas), team muscle Mars (Ortiz), beautiful but deadly Luna (Rousey) and anti-authoritarian potential team leader Smilee (Lutz) has more of a modern edge to them, they don’t do any better than the first team and things go sideways in a hurry. It will take the old team to rescue the new team and a final mano a mano brawl between Stonebanks and Barney to settle this once and for all.

Da Queen, being a pragmatic sort (and a bit of a masochist) decided to count up the ludicrous scenes in the movie when something that simply was too much of a stretch of the imagination to ignore; the end figure was in double digits. I can take a certain suspension of disbelief; after all, I used to love those ’80s action epics as much as the next guy. However, there comes a point where you’re inner brain starts to say “come on, you can’t be serious” to your testicles (or the female approximation of same) and the action fix begins to clash with your inner need for some sort of logic. How much you like the movie will depend on how bad you need an action fix.

Stallone, clean-shaven for the first time in the trilogy, looks every bit an AARP member at this point. There are several close-ups on his trademark sneer and as his righteous anger leeks out from his upper lip and into his eyeballs, you can tell he’s going to go all Rambo on somebody’s ass. Statham, not so nearly long in the tooth, merely looks uncomfortable most of the way through – perhaps that’s because he was involved in a near-fatal truck crash when the brakes on the truck he was driving in the movie failed and he was forced to abandon truck before it crashed into the sea.

I will say that the much-maligned Gibson fares the best here, channeling his Martin Riggs from back in the day and if Riggs were a villain in the Lethal Weapon series this is how he’d have turned out. He’s actually pretty fun to watch although I imagine that those who still haven’t gotten over his anti-Semitic drunken rant to the cops will be less sanguine about his performance. Snipes, recently released from prison, reminds us why he was such a great action star in the first place. I thought at one time he had the potential to be as big as Will Smith, although a series of bad roles and poor life choices derailed that. It still might happen though – he could use his performance here as an audition tape for any action movie in the offing and get serious consideration. He also has the best line in the movie; when asked by Toll Road what he was in prison for. I won’t tell you what he responds because the surprise is half the fun.

There is some CGI here and they must have done it on somebody’s Commodore VIC-20 because it is absolutely miserable, some of the worst I’ve ever seen. For example, for the scene near the movie’s end where he is hanging from a winch cable on a helicopter as the chopper pulls away from the camera, I’d much rather have stopped the scene with him dangling underneath it asking his snarky teammates to winch him up now right at that point instead of seeing a clearly CGI silhouette of the copter with the distant semi-humanoid figure and cable being sucked into the helicopter like a strand of spaghetti. I don’t like my action reality messed with.

This is a series whose novelty has run its course and needs to survive simply on the success of its action sequences and the quirkiness of its characters. For one thing, too many characters get virtually no screen time (Li shows up near the end and gets three or four lines and no fighting sequences which is a complete waste of his talents) and while the cast members are pretty able individually, the whole isn’t equal to the sum of its parts.

REASONS TO GO: Definite testosterone overload.

REASONS TO STAY: Super predictable and super brainless. Some of the worst CGI ever. Novelty has worn off.

FAMILY VALUES:  Oh yes, all sorts of violence with guns, blades, you name it – mayhem deluxe. There’s also a fair amount of language.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: This is the first Expendables film not to be rated R.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 8/21/14: Rotten Tomatoes: 35% positive reviews. Metacritic: 35/100.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Commando

FINAL RATING: 4/10

NEXT: Code Name: The Cleaner