Films featuring
Robert Patrick

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Now don't take this the wrong way, but you're a terminator, right?

You have to hand it to James Cameron. He knows how to spend money. Not only did he spend $300 million on Avatar without blinking, but he was the first to sink $200 million into a picture, that being Titanic. Even before that, T2 was the movie to break Hollywood’s $100 million cherry. Considering the results, none of that money was wasted, but do we really want to keep encouraging this sort of behavior? What happened to the James Cameron who could make the first Terminator movie for less than the loose change he found in his sofa?

It’s hard to argue with the results when they look like this. Terminator 2 takes the lean, stripped-down muscle car that was the original and straps on a couple of booster rockets from the space shuttle. It’s sci-fi action filmmaking at such a level of relentless professionalism that it just wears you down and makes you hand over your skepticism like it was your lunch money.

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The Men Who Stare at Goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Like its protagonist, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) this movie can’t decide if it should mercilessly mock the idea of an Army unit researching psychic phenomena as an alternative to war or cheer for the collection of oddballs who threw their lives into the endeavor. Director Grant Heslov tries to have it both ways and comes close to pulling it off.

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Flags of our Fathers

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Clint Eastwood’s cinematic examination of the story behind one of the most famous photographs in history, the flag raising on Mount Suribachi during the Battle for Iwo Jima, does have a great deal of relevance today.

Media manipulation in cases like the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the death of Pat Tillman have somewhat cheapened the meaning of the word hero. This film attempts to look beneath what we think we know about our heroes at the real men beneath the image. It might have succeeded if the film weren’t such a disorganized mess.

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Walk the Line

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During the last Oscar ceremony, Jon Stewart cheekily referred to Walk the Line as “Ray with white people.” Like all successful humor, the joke has an element of truth to it. There are significant parallels between the two films and the lives of the men at the center of their stories.

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