Movie Review Bullet Train

Bullet Train (2022) 

Directed by David Leitch

Written by Zac Olkewicz 

Starring Brad Pitt, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Bryan Tyree Henry, Joey King, Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny, Zazie Beetz. 

Release Date August 5th, 2022 

Bullet Train gives us a whole new side of Brad Pitt, a mature, comic, borderline neurotic, voice that somehow fits with his uncommon movie star good looks. Where Pitt has spent years trading on cool, Bullet Trainfinds the actor giving himself to a fully comic performance in a way that is completely un-self-conscious. Brad Pitt is still a movie star but his performance in Bullet Train is not a movie star performance in the traditional sense. And it's certainly not a typically Brad Pitt performance. 

Bullet Train stars Brad Pitt as a criminal given the code-name Ladybug by his unseen handler, voiced by Sandra Bullock. Ladybug is headed back into the criminal world for the first time since a nervous breakdown took him to a therapist's couch and time away from death that has haunted so much of his life, especially recently. As related in a terrific sequence that opens Bullet Train, we learn that Ladybug is paranoid about his luck. He stopped killing people a while ago and yet, his bad luck finds him repeatedly in proximity of death.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Nosferatu

Nosferatu 

Directed by Robert Eggers 

Written by Robert Eggers

Starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bill Skarsgard

Release December 25th, 2024 

Published December 3rd, 2024 

Robert Eggers is an exceptionally talented director. He’s a master of tone and production design. He has an unfailing eye for compelling visual storytelling. He’s also weird and willing to bring the weird in his movies, see Willem Dafoe’s entire performance in The Lighthouse. This weirdness is part of Robert Eggers’ charm for me and it’s what is missing from his new film, a remake of F.W Murnau’s seminal silent film, Nosferatu. It’s such a straightforward, everything-you-expect remake of Nosferatu that it lacks a personality of its own. 

Nosferatu stars Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a newly married woman who has terrifying dreams of a man who claims that he is coming for her. While she’s troubled by her dreams, she tries to keep a brave face for her new husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). Meanwhile, Thomas has received a promotion at work. He’s to travel into the Carpathian Mountains to finalize the expensive sale of a local rundown castle. An aging Count is eager to move to Wisborg and retire, of course we know that his real motivation just happens to be Thomas’s wife.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Kraven The Hunter

Kraven the Hunter 

Directed by J.C Chandor 

Written by RIchard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway 

Starring Aaron Taylor Johnson, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe 

Released December 13th, 2024

Published December 13th, 2024 

Kraven the Hunter has me wondering if Hollywood has somehow discovered a Mel Brooks-The Producers style scheme where a flop can actually be a moneymaker. I don’t know how that would work in the film space but it’s the only way I can conceive of how movie studios can release movies as bad as Kraven the Hunter, movies that are almost guaranteed to lose money, and simply move on to the next movie without everyone involved losing their jobs. And when you consider that this is the studio behind Madame Web and Morbius, suddenly my theory becomes at least a little bit plausible. 

Kraven the Hunter is a bafflingly silly proposition. A kid named Sergey, the son of a famed gangster played by Russell Crowe, is mauled by a lion while on a safari vacation in Africa and is rescued by a mysterious potion that, mixed with the lion’s own blood, gives Sergey super-human strength, speed, agility, and instincts. The potion is a gift from a stranger named Calypso, whose grandmother, and I truly cringe to write this, is a voodoo priestess. Best not to unpack that.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy (2024) 

Directed by David Leitch 

Written by Drew Pearce 

Starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Hannah Waddingham 

Release Date May 3rd, 2024 

Published May 3rd, 2024 

The Fall Guy is so much fun. Ryan Gosling stars as stunt man Colt Seavers, the double for famed movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor Johnson). Colt has everything going for him, a great job that he loves doing, a great reputation, and he's just fallen in love with a camera operator on the new movie he's working on. Jody (Emily Blunt) and Colt are making plans and fliting and generally getting along smashingly when a stunt goes wrong. Performing a fall from a few stories up, Colt's rigging fails, and he smashes to the ground. 

Having suffered a devastating back injury, costing him his job and reputation as a stunt man, Colt retreats into a self-imposed isolation. This includes leaving Jody behind as he doesn't want her to see him as less than the man he was. 18 months go by, and Colt is just getting by parking cars when he receives an emergency call. Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Tom Ryder's protector and producer needs Colt to fly to Australia immediately to help out on Tom's new movie, Metal Storm. Tom has gone missing, and Gail needs Colt to stand in for him on the movie and also help find the missing star. 

Tom has apparently fallen in with some dangerous types down under and while Colt feels no obligation to help Tom, he decides to help because if he doesn't the movie will fall apart. Why does this matter? Because the director is Jody. It's her first time directing a major motion picture and if Tom disappears, she could get fired and lose everything. Wanting to reconnect with the woman he loves, Colt sets about trying to find Tom while performing his stunts on the movie, all while Jody finds new ways to punish him for ghosting her after his accident. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review Kick Ass

Kick Ass (2010) 

Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Written by Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn

Starring Aaron Taylor Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz Plasse, Nicolas Cage 

Release Date April 16th, 2010 

Published April 16th, 2010 

Few movie titles are as fitting as Kick Ass, Indeed the movie does kick ass, balls, teeth and anything else that can be kicked. Also stabbed, shot and variously eviscerated. Director Matthew Vaughn set out for comic book carnage and delivers big time and along the way he gives us characters we like and come to care about even as they are greatly exaggerated, comic book versions of real people.

Aaron Johnson stars in Kick Ass as Dave Lizewski, a teenager who claims that his only superpower is being invisible to girls. Dave longs to be a costumed hero fighting crime and protecting the innocent. Since Dave is subject to harassment and even crime on a regular basis his feelings make sense.

After being robbed by thugs Dave makes up his mind to give the superhero thing a shot. Thus, Dave buys a green and yellow wetsuit and a pair of sticks wrapped green and begins his superhero career by getting stabbed and hit by a car. Several months of recovery later Dave does come away with a minor superpower, nerve damage that allows him to take a better beating.

Get a beating he does but a cell phone video showing him getting knocked around but continuing to fight and defend a downed man makes him a star and eventually a target for a mob boss who mistakenly believes Kick Ass is disrupting his business. As it turns out, another pair of costumed heroes, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) have been targeting the mob boss and are killing his men.

Where the story goes from there I will leave you to discover. I can tell you it's a fun, if slightly overlong, ride filled with ass kicking violence and some shocking laughs, mostly, and controversially, supplied by Chloe Moretz's ingenious Hit Girl. At a mere 11 years old when the film was made, Moretz shocks and appalls with her language and taste for severe violence.

Many of my fellow critics are terribly uncomfortable about Hit Girl. Her age and propensity for harsh, bloody vengeance gives them pause and many find it reprehensible. For me, the action fit the character and while I may take issue with such a young girl in amongst such brutally violent acts, I cannot say I wasn't entertained.

Matthew Vaughn and his young star never flinch from the violence or the character's vulnerability. In the end, during the controversial final showdown, that vulnerability played against a comic book hero's sense of invulnerability raises the stakes and gives the audience an extra jolt ahead of the killer finale.

Should someone as young as Chloe Moretz play a character as morally compromised, violent and fetishized as Hit Girl? Maybe not, but try not to be entertained by how well she plays this character, it's impossible. This kid has so much talent that you cannot help wanting to forgive the movie 's many sins because you enjoy her so much. It's transgressive in the best possible way. 

As for the rest of the cast, Nicolas Cage delivers yet another of his wonderfully off-beat characters. Driven by a need for violent revenge, Cage's Big Daddy plays as a mixture of Cage's typically manic action movie characters with bits of the nerdier or dopier aspects of his comic characters. It's a brilliant mix and Cage's wild energy during action scenes is incredibly entertaining. Cage brings a chaos to the movie that stands out even among the chaos intended in Kick Ass. 

Aaron Johnson has a difficult task in playing Kick Ass as an action hero and as an overmatched kid in way over his head. Audiences want to see him in action but the character isn't necessarily up to it and that creates a clever twist on the comic book hero that Johnson plays well. Johnson is even better in the romantic subplot that has him pretending to be gay to get close to the girl of his dreams, Lyndsey Fonseca.

Edgy has become a cliché but it seems an apt way to describe the delicate balance of offensiveness, humor and excitement that is Kick Ass. Campy yet violent, offensive yet shockingly entertaining, Kick Ass quite simply Kicks Ass.

Movie Review: Outlaw King

Outlaw King (2018) 

Directed by David Mackenzie 

Written by Bash Doran, David Mackenzie, James MacInnes 

Starring Chris Pine, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Florence Pugh, Stephen Dillane 

Release Date November 19th, 2018 

Published December 1st, 2018 

I had been avoiding watching Netflix’s Outlaw King mostly because I value the director, David Mackenzie so much. The director of the acclaimed Hell or High Water is a director I have high hopes for so when I saw his latest film, Outlaw King, getting less than rave reviews, I decided to keep it sight out of mind. That was easy as my field is, generally theatrical releases and Outlaw King was on Netflix. Eventually, however, my curiosity got the best of me. 

Outlaw King stars Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland. Oddly however, when we meet Robert he is on his knee promising fealty to King Edward. Robert was told by his father that the politics of surrender were better than the bloodshed likely if they continued to resist English rule. This changes however, when the legendary William Wallace is captured and killed and his body parts are hung on the walls of a Scottish border city. 

With his father having recently died, and now Wallace, Robert decides it is time to act. His family has a claim on the Scottish throne and he aims to take it. He is opposed by another Scottish family that also has a claim on the throne. Robert would prefer they unite for now and decide on the throne after disposing of the English but when Robert is forced to murder his rival, he knows the fight has begun and that he will not have all of Scotland with him, in fact, they may be just as dangerous as England. 

As you can tell from the mention of William Wallace, this story is in the same vein as Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. Robert the Bruce was a character in that film as well and he was indeed inspired by Wallace’s love of his country to rise up against the English. This story proceeds as if a sequel to Braveheart in some ways, at the very least a continuation of the story. Wallace is killed off-screen in Outlaw King, but his legend hangs over the story, just as Braveheart casts an Oscar winning shadow over Outlaw King. 

That’s a shame because I happen to think Outlaw King is a better movie than Braveheart. Blasphemy, I know, but I have never cared for Mel Gibson’s epic. I found Braveheart loud and boorish and GIbson’s accent was something that I just could not get over. Outlaw King isn’t that much better, Chris Pine’s Scottish brogue is almost as laughable as Gibson’s, but I enjoyed the violent madness in Outlaw King more than I did in Braveheart. 

Chris Pine may not have a great accent but he has a fearsome presence as Robert the Bruce. I enjoyed his straight ahead performance, he rarely appears to be putting on the airs of machismo, he seems genuinely tough. I liked the battle sequences which are raw and gritty and while they may not have the epic expanse of Gibson’s Braveheart, the closeups and the uptight tension of the smaller scale Outlaw King gives the film an authenticity I feel was lacking in Braveheart. 

Nether Outlaw King or Braveheart are movies I ever plan on watching again as neither one is much fun. Director David Mackenzie however, at the very least, compelled me more with his Robert the Bruce story. I was genuinely invested in his story and while I don’t love the movie, I wasn’t compelled to get on my phone and ignore it. Perhaps if you are a fan of historic epics on muddy, bloody battlefields, Outlaw King is the movie for you.