Review by Patrick Hodges

If you’re like me, a voracious moviegoer, you have a lot of friends and co-workers who are always coming to you for the skinny on the latest movie news and reviews.  Sometimes you have to boil your opinion down to five words or less, which can often be tough when you write reviews, where you have to be a little more loquacious than that.  But for any friends or co-workers who ask me what I thought about From Paris With Love, I’ll simply reply, “It’ll do.”

That is to say, it’s passable entertainment.  I wouldn’t eschew something monumental for it, say, the Super Bowl or the birth of your first child, but for an hour’s pay, you could do a lot worse.  It’s co-produced by Luc Besson, who helmed some very good Europe-based action films himself (La Femme Nikita, Leon) and directed by Pierre Morel, who brought us the surprise hit Taken last year, so you pretty much know ahead of time the kind of movie you’ll get:  some ferocious action and a fair amount of ridiculous-ness.

Though the film’s title may invoke fond memories of the glory days of James Bond, all you get here is a bald, goateed, badass John Travolta, who plays the role of Charlie Wax, one of the least subtle spies in film history.  He is the government’s go-to guy for dangerous assignments – though a bit unorthodox, he does produce results, which is all that really matters.

Tagging along is James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), the aide of the American ambassador in France, whose only foray into the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage has involved switching cars’ license plates in dark parking garages.  He longs for something more – which of course begs the cliché, “be careful what you wish for”.

Thrown together with Wax under the pretense of promotion, the mismatched pair drive around Paris, with Wax taking out bad guys left and right.  What starts out as a run-of-the-mill drug-ring bust soon escalates into a much larger threat – involving terrorism – and the deeper Reece delves into the world he covets, he finds that his role in this affair is greater than even he imagined.

I’ve never been part of the making of a movie, but if there is one major gripe I have with From Paris With Love, it’s that it seems to suffer from an identity crisis.  One wonders whether the movie that was there the day the film wrapped is even close to what it was the day filming started.  It goes from being a pure action movie with a fair amount of comedic elements (thanks mostly to Travolta, over-the-top and having a ball), turns sideways into being a buddy movie, and the ends up being something a lot more serious, like Edge of Darkness.  (Well, maybe not THAT serious, but close.)

Had the writers and the director been on the same page all the way through, this might have been a more complete movie.  Not necessarily a much better movie, just more complete.  Was it enjoyable, though?  Well… it’ll do.

Review by Mark David Campbell

As long as the term “date movie” and “romantic drama” have been interchangeable, the films that fit that genre are pretty much for the woman’s benefit.  Men take their wives, girlfriends or significant others to them just to show what sweethearts they are, hoping like hell that it’s not the kind of movie that bores them to hell while their dates are busy dabbing their eyes with Kleenex.   I took my wife to see Dear John, and it was a real bonding experience, in a way… we actually both found it equally bad.

Based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, who also penned the source material for other recent “date movies” like The Notebook and Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John is more sickly sweet than an explosion at a syrup factory.  Direct Lasse Hallstrom lays the melodrama on so thick, it felt like emotional suffocation.

The film begins with John (Channing Tatum), a soldier on leave, committing the gallant and chivalrous act of diving into the ocean to retrieve a purse accidentally dropped off of a pier by the lovely Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), a college student in North Carolina.  A romance is born.

They relationship develops at a rocket pace, as John is introduced to Savannah’s (wealthy) family, and Savannah to John’s rather eccentric father (played by the always-good Richard Jenkins).  However, John’s leave must eventually end, and the happy couple promise to write each other every day.  But then, the tragedy of 9/11 occurs, and John must decide whether to re-enlist with the rest of his unit or be with his lady fair.  If you understand the significance of the film’s title, you can probably guess how the film ends.  But by then you’re so emotionally numb, you want nothing more than to grab your coat and head back to the car.

Seyfried is a pretty good actress, and I look forward to seeing her in better roles than this.  Jenkins, as I said, is quite good, as you’d expect.  And also as you’d expect, Tatum is a monument to stolid stoicism.  He fills out the uniform very well, though, and for a lot of guys’ dates, that might be enough.  But my wife and I aren’t teenagers any more, and we expect a little big more from our romances.

Review by Patrick Hodges

Welcome back, Mel.

It’s been eight years since M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs hit theaters, and due to Mel Gibson’s much-publicized travails with alcohol and tabloid-worthy encounters with law enforcement, we haven’t seen much of him since.  But no matter what you might now think of him as a person, there’s never been much doubt that he can turn in powerful performances as an actor.  And it’s refreshing to see that particular quality hasn’t waned during his extended leave of absence.

The 54-year-old Gibson stars as Thomas Craven, a Boston homicide detective and widower who receives a visit from his only family, his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic).  Though they clearly love each other, it seems they’ve left solitary lives, and don’t spend a great deal of time together.  The visit starts to turn sour when Emma becomes violently ill, and goes even more horribly wrong when she is gunned down on Tom’s front porch.

Naturally, the investigation begins under the assumption that Tom was the target… at least, until he begins digging into his late daughter’s life, and discovers that there were volumes of secrets that she had been keeping.  It seems that she worked as a research assistant for a huge corporation called Northmoor, who may or may not have been involved with the manufacture of nuclear weapons.  An interview with their CEO (played with civilized menace by Danny Huston) yields little in the way of results.

He also comes into contact with a shady figure named Jedburgh (Ray Winstone), who has been hired to fix the mess that threatens to bring down some very powerful people.  You may have inferred from the trailer that he is a “cleaner”, when in fact the opposite is true – his job is to obfuscate and confuse the situation so badly that no one will be able to understand it.  To that end, he enters into an uneasy truce with Tom, clearly out of sympathy and admiration. 

This film was directed by Martin Campbell, whose resume includes both Zorro movies, two very good Bond films (Goldeneye and Casino Royale), and the 1985 six-part BBC miniseries that Edge of Darkness was based upon.  Campbell does a great job keeping the film taut and tense from beginning to end (including a few shockers that may make you jump out of your seat), but it’s really the cast that really shines here.  Gibson is perfectly cast as the grieving father tilting at windmills to bring his daughter’s killers to justice, and Winstone brings a very obvious panache to Jedburgh, a character whose presence is so welcome that you wish he could have been in more scenes.

The film’s ending got a little hectic and went pretty far afield, I would highly recommend it.  Be warned, however… this is not the kind of story that ends with everything wrapped in a neat little bow.  Whether it triggers a career resurgence, however small, for Gibson, one can only speculate.  I, for one, hope it does.

I am getting a bad vibe from this trailer. Two moments that particularly stand out are the huge wireless phone and the man getting into the limo outside of the prison. I thought Oliver Stone would take this one seriously but apparently there will be some corny moments in this one. Hopefully not too many.

Review by Patrick Hodges

There’s a fine line between “guilty pleasure” and “nonsensical garbage”, a line that is often the distinction between a good review and a bad review.  “Guilty pleasures” are called that because you feel guilty admitting to anyone that you liked them.  But everyone has them; the G.I. Joe’s, the Death Race’s, the films with the terrible acting and shoddy editing that despite the fact that mainstream critics, your closest friends and even your queasy stomach tell you that you are supposed to hate but end up liking anyway.

I wasn’t supposed to like Legion.  The very idea that God, in His infinite wisdom, gets “tired of all our BS”, and sends an army of angels to exterminate mankind, is laughable but tolerable as plotline.  The idea that mankind’s sole champion is the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany), who must fend off an army of “possessed” humans (who exhibit their possession by their darkened irises and pointy teeth) along with his winged brother, Gabriel (Kevin Durand), is just as laughable.  But there we are.

Taking place at a remote diner in the middle of nowhere, Michael shows up to protect a waitress named Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), whose unborn child is (apparently) the second coming of Christ and humanity’s only hope.  Sharing her plight are a motley crew of people, including: diner owner Bob (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black), who has a not-too-subtle thing for Charlie; fry cook/veteran Percy (Charles S. Dutton); a lost traveler (Tyrese Gibson); and a family with car trouble (John Tenney, Kate Walsh, Willa Holland).

If you ignore the film’s editing (several gaping holes in the plot and many, many unanswered questions about God’s motivations behind all this), this is actually a pretty good action film.  There’s no situation as tense as a small bunch of individuals who must hunker down in an enclosed, isolated location (see: Tremors, et al.), beset on all sides by danger, a danger they can’t even begin to comprehend.

Enough clues are given that the terrible situation the characters are facing is not just local, but widespread.  However, any view or input we might have from the “outside world” is never elaborated on, which is, I suppose, why this film was directed by newcomer Scott Stewart and not Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay.  Still, the acting, such as it is, is ample.  Quaid is usually good as the gruff-but-lovable guy, and Bettany – in my mind, still a vastly underrated actor - has got the perfect face, demeanor and delivery to play Michael. 

So I will add Legion to my long list of “guilty pleasures”.  Not that I’ll go out of my way to see it again, but in the future, it may win the battle of what to watch some night on cable.