Released or distributed by
Canal+

Taken 2

Don't shoot this one. I like him.

Taken 2 is the epitome of the unnecessary sequel. The original was lean, efficient, and narratively self-contained (if morally suspect). It needed no elaboration or follow-up. This movie does not add anything to the experience, but is a cynical attempt to mine the goodwill earned by the first film by tricking its fans into seeing the same movie again. Of course, that last sentence could be written about a lot of sequels.

What does work here, but not as well as in the first installment, is the Mills family dynamic. The emotional core of the estranged father fighting for his daughter against all odds is diminished. Continue reading

Taken

While shooting Taken, Liam Neeson thought this movie would be a straight-to-video actioner, but he was getting paid to work in Paris, so it was a fair trade under the circumstances. Based on the crudest outline of the plot, it’s easy to see where he would make that mistake.

What makes this movie work, and elevated it to the cinematic first team, was an emotionally valid setup and an actor with the chops for the important father/daughter dynamic, and who can still credibly bring off the physical requirements the action scenes.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

The Queen

[/types]]

The Queen is the story of the near-eternal struggle between tradition and modernity. The bare plot outline of Stephen Frears‘s thoughtful portrait of Great Britain in the throes of that struggle probably does not excite the casual moviegoer, but this quietly engrossing drama is anything but dull or sedate.

Continue reading

March of the Penguins

[/types]]

As I noted in my review of Grizzly Man, some people have a tendency to imbue animals with human characteristics that they don’t possess. The writers of March of the Penguins indulge in this minor foible on occasion, speaking of the “unbearable” loss of a chick or the “joyous” reunion of a penguin family. While it’s likely that penguins possess instincts similar to ones that a few million years of evolution honed into human emotions, it’s not accurate to describe them in explicitly human terms. Of course, human terms are the only ones we have to work with.

Continue reading

JFK

[/types]]

”[types
[/types]“]

Oliver Stone‘s JFK is a movie as admirable in its technique as it is troubling in its agenda. Much like Birth of a Nation sought to rewrite the early history of the original Ku Klux Klan, JFK represents a concerted effort on Stone’s part to insert certifiable falsehoods into the historical record of the Kennedy assassination. He gets two basic facts correct. John F. Kennedy was indeed assassinated on November 22, 1963 and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison did actually prosecute businessman Clay Shaw for his role in an alleged conspiracy. After that, the facts and Mr. Stone have a strained relationship at best. I sincerely hope that this movie will be as routinely dismissed by future generations as Birth of a Nation is today.

Continue reading