Keyword Archive:
Terrorism

Die Hard (1988)

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Man, if this is their idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year’s.

When 1988 began, this guy Bruce Willis was a popular enough TV star, known for his years on Moonlighting, but his two ventures into film were a pair of alleged comedies that had a negligible impact at the box office. At the same time, action movies had been in a creative black hole, full of invulnerable superman battling hordes of commies and terrorists. So, when Die Hard appeared with an unproven star, there weren’t a lot of expectations for its success. It certainly wasn’t expected to reinvent the entire genre. Well, Merry Christmas in freakin’ July, Hollywood.

Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

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The Siege (1998)

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

In this game the most committed wins.

Viewed through a post-9/11 prism, Edward Zwick’s The Siege seems at times both impossibly naïve and uncomfortably prescient. Ultimately, however, this movie is more effective as postulation than it is as a narrative, smarter about its subject matter than about its story. Whatever points it scores are undermined by shallow, clichéd characters and a stock, predictable ending.

The Siege

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World Trade Center (2006)

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

We prepared for everything. Not for this.

Okay, admit it. When you heard that Oliver Stone was going to make a movie about the events of September 11, 2001, a lot of you rolled your eyes and thought, “Oh, my God, what’s he going to do now?” Was he going to have Richard Nixon rising from the grave to plant explosives in the twin towers? How were the Grassy Knoll gunmen who killed John Kennedy involved? And how did it all tie back to the Vietnam War?

World Trade Center

Surprise. (more…)

Munich (2005)

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.

Steven Spielberg’s lengthy rumination about the effects of revenge as a response to terrorism succeeds on the level of a thriller but falls short of its larger goals. Seeking to be evenhanded, Munich ultimately sags under the weight of its own equivocation.

Munich

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Casino Royale (2006)

Monday, March 19th, 2007

In the old days if an agent did something that embarrassing he’d have a good sense to defect. Christ, I miss the Cold War.

You can tell right from the start that Casino Royale is cut from a different mold than the previous twenty James Bond films. For one, the pre-credits sequence features a brutal, drawn-out fight scene that is very atypical for the film series, which usually prefers its violence more stylized and sanitized. The credit sequence also breaks with Bond custom, which usually emphasized the female nude in discreet silhouette, this time depicting violence against male figures without a single naked girl in sight.

Casino Royale

Daniel Craig’s first outing as Ian Fleming’s classic super-spy feels like they tore down a Trump casino and built an army barracks in its place. (more…)

United 93 (2006)

Monday, October 9th, 2006

Of the four aircraft hijacked that day, United 93 was the only one that did not reach its target. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03am. No one survived.

Despite the highly speculative nature of the scenes set aboard the ill-fated flight, nothing about Paul Greengrass’s United 93 rings false. The heroics of the titular plane’s doomed passengers are not hyped-up or Rambo-ized, but carry a sufficiently believable air of fear and desperation to let you believe that, if it didn’t happen exactly this way, the real events were not far off.

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Paradise Now (2005)

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

That’s no sacrifice. That’s revenge.

The suicide bomber has to be the most impenetrable enigma to the western mind. I don’t think we can even comprehend the idea of a young person, presumably healthy in body and mind, purposely throwing away his or her life just to kill a few people who are often not even a party to the conflict in which the bomber is engaged. We can wrap our brains around the concept of a soldier sacrificing himself as he runs up Omaha Beach into the teeth of a German machine gun nest, but there are two key differences. One, his death is not the goal but just a consequence and, two, the people getting killed on the other side are soldiers as well.

Paradise Now

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Red Eye (2005)

Saturday, February 4th, 2006

Whatever female-based, emotion-driven dilemma you may be dealing with right now, I sympathize with you. But right now, we need to break this down into male-based, fact-driven logic.

Red Eye had the misfortune of being the film in last year’s “Hitchcockian thriller set aboard a jetliner” sweepstakes that didn’t star Jodie Foster. I haven’t seen Flightplan yet, so I can’t say which one was actually better, but that film will have to work hard to be as effective and efficient a thriller as Red Eye.

Red Eye

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Team America: World Police (2004)

Friday, January 27th, 2006

I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark
When he made Pearl Harbor.

If subtlety were a sin, this movie would be an immaculate conception. Team America is the cinematic equivilent of a fraternity hazing, not that there’s anything wrong with that. (more…)

Wrong is Right (1982)

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006

K-I-Double-L him, by God.

Wrong is Right bills itself as comedy, but it works better as a mediocre spy thriller with occasional bursts of humor. It largely fails as a comedy because, for the most part, it’s often hard to tell at what they were aiming their humor. As political satire, it’s too broad and too tame to be effective.

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