Salon.com > Action movies

“Iron Man 3″ box office hit in China

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:15:00 +0000

Despite the minor controversy sparked by product placement in its made-for-China scenes, "Iron Man 3" garnered almost $21 million in the Chinese box office, topping the one-day sales record set by “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” in 2011.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Online reactions to the film have been largely positive, but bloggers appear united in their consternation of the deliberate product placement that sees new a character named Dr Wu (played by mainland Chinese actor Wang Xueqi) consume a [milk] carton of Gu Li Duo.

Not that audiences outside mainland China will get a glimpse of this, though: this scene is part of the film’s China release, a version which is four minutes longer than the normal cut seen everywhere else in the world.

"Transformers 4" is the next Hollywood studios film expected to follow the similar model of dual version releases.

“Iron Man 3″: A playboy grows up

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:45:00 +0000

As far as bored and cynical, playing-out-the-string comic-book action sequels go – hey, “Iron Man 3” is a pretty good one! The third and purportedly last of Robert Downey Jr.’s adventures as the armor-clad but increasingly vulnerable Tony Stark features one of Downey’s most nuanced performances, arguably a lot better than the movie around him, and keeps him separated from the physical and emotional protection of the Iron Man suit for extended periods. There are several good supporting performances, not even including Gwyneth Paltrow’s abdominal muscles, which is really all I can remember about Pepper Potts: Guy Pearce, as a nerd genius spurned by Tony Stark years earlier who comes back for revenge; Ben Kingsley, most delicious of all, as a shadowy techno-Osama known as the Mandarin.

Michael Bay proud of “Armageddon,” after all

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:21:00 +0000

Yesterday, action movie director Michael Bay surprised the entertainment world when the generally unapologetic, pyrotechnic-loving director apologized for his 1998 blockbuster hit, "Armageddon."

He told the Herald: “I will apologize for 'Armageddon,' because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine."

But Bay, who is currently promoting his Miami crime drama "Pain & Gain," quickly squashed any (mis)interpretations of the quote. Taking to his online forum, Bay released said he is not apologizing for "Armageddon" at all, and is "proud of the movie":

Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000

Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

“Fists of Legend”: Ludicrous (and delicious) action extravaganza

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Not to indulge in cultural stereotypes about how Asian movies involve several different genres at once, along with a lot of ass-kicking – but that’s exactly what the overloaded and outrageous Korean martial-arts saga “Fists of Legend” is like. One of the mini-stories of global movie distribution in the last year has been the sudden emergence of Korean pop cinema in the American market, which is partly about the fact that the Asian-American audience is now spread across the continent and partly about the fact that Korean movies tend to draw so heavily on a blend of familiar Western and Eastern references, and aren’t likely to strike anyone as incomprehensible. Like the recent gangland thriller “New World,” “Fists of Legend” will open in numerous cities before moving rapidly to home video.

“The Place Beyond the Pines”: Almost a great American father-son fable

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A sprawling, epic-scale triptych about fathers and sons in America that seeks to combine the spirits of Charles Dickens and Bruce Springsteen, “The Place Beyond the Pines” might be better off if it were just a crime movie with Ryan Gosling. Still, there’s no mistaking the immense ambition and tremendous craftsmanship of director and co-writer Derek Cianfrance (who made “Blue Valentine” with Gosling and Michelle Williams), and I think the movie is most effective if you know little about the story going in. So I’ll be pretty guarded in what I tell you about the story, which takes a couple of surprising narrative left turns and jumps forward in time.

Pick of the week: A Korean mob thriller that could teach Hollywood a thing or two

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since the Hong Kong action-movie boom of the 1980s, the film industries of East Asia have arguably been better at making old-fashioned, hard-boiled crime thrillers than Hollywood has. Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed,” after all, was a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs” (albeit an excellent remake with its own spirit and considerable subtlety). While Asian pop cinema remains just off the radar screen of mainstream American culture, it’s a whole lot easier to find than it used to be. This week, Korean writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s byzantine, slick and bloody mob drama “New World” opens theatrically in numerous North American cities, just a few weeks after its smash-hit premiere in Korea.

Who’s to blame for gun violence? Movie critics!

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000

At last the real villain has been revealed in our poisonous and circular culture of violence: It’s me. Well, OK, maybe not me personally, but the underpaid, disheveled and endangered tribe to which I semi-reluctantly belong, the movie critics. Even by an optimistic count, America is down to a few dozen professional film critics, most of whom traipse back and forth between screening rooms in Manhattan and Los Angeles, often appearing to have recently arisen at 7 o’clock in the evening. (The general fashion statement and social mode, as a friend once put it, is one of “Troll Under the Bridge.”) And yet, according to a baffling new article in Harper’s by cultural critic Thomas Frank, our sad-sack crew is a crucial enabler of American gun violence. (That’s a firewalled link, so I’ll try to quote liberally from the article while staying on the fair side of fair use.)

“A Good Day to Die Hard”: Bruce Willis smirks the Russians to death

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000

So Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis – with 188 years of life on the planet between them — have all released new action-adventure movies within the last month (pairing themselves conspicuously with younger co-stars), and God help me, I sat through all three. Willis is the baby of the trio at 57, and it’s reasonable to expect that the bewildering and idiotic “A Good Day to Die Hard,” the latest installment of a franchise that has yet to fail at the box office, will prosper where “The Last Stand” and “Bullet to the Head” have bombed. It’s also the worst of the three films, by far, at least if you’re sticking somewhere in the vicinity of old-fashioned ideas about the coherence of plot, characterization and setting, but I recognize that's irrelevant. (For the record, Stallone’s “Bullet to the Head,” while totally cartoonish, is more fun and better made than the other two.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sad-sack return

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:06:00 +0000

So I just saw the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, “The Last Stand,” in which the 65-year-old one-time bodybuilding champ tries to stage yet another messy, jokey, meta-style comeback. This is a role very much in the mode of Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone – in fact, I kept thinking that Eastwood must have made this film, sometime around 1997 – with Schwarzenegger playing a small-town Arizona sheriff forced to go mano a mano, under exceptionally unlikely circumstances, with an escaped Mexican drug lord. It’s one of those mixed-up Hollywood pictures that has too much going on: It tries to protect the action-hero status of its visibly enfeebled star and it has Johnny Knoxville of “Jackass” in a moronic supporting role and the story doesn’t make any sense and it’s the American debut of whiz-kid Korean action filmmaker Kim Jee-woon (for you film-festival geeks, he made “I Saw the Devil” and “The Good, the Bad, the Weird”).

“Gangster Squad” whitewashes the LAPD’s criminal past

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:28:00 +0000

If you view Ruben Fleischer’s “Gangster Squad” as a violent period crime thriller in a familiar dress-up vein – as a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it’s reasonably successful entertainment. It’s got overacting from Sean Penn, beneath a ton of makeup, as legendary Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen, along with underacting from Ryan Gosling as the slightly nebbishy romantic lead and down-the-middle acting from Josh Brolin as its upright cop hero. Add in the digitally re-created, noir-flavored locations of postwar L.A. and the dazzling eye candy of Emma Stone in terrific period dresses and heartbreaking auburn hair and, hey – by the standards of midwinter Hollywood releases, not bad at all.

“Baytown Outlaws”: A Tarantino wannabe takes on rednecks

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:30:00 +0000

I’m tempted to tell you that, except for its thoroughly repellent racial and sexual politics, the imitation-Tarantino action flick called “The Baytown Outlaws” – which you could be watching on your TV or computer or mobile device right now, instead of “working” – isn’t much worse than “Django Unchained.” But that’s admittedly like saying that, except for that episode in Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth was one of the cooler Americans of the 19th century.

How’s that for sneaking two Oscar contenders into an article about a January VOD release that will never be nominated for any awards by anybody? In all seriousness, I’m not sure whether to recommend “The Baytown Outlaws” as a guns ‘n’ glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I’ll do both. A superficial and stylish redneck-sploitation spree, “Baytown Outlaws” has no real reason to exist beyond the quest for cash. Its appealing B-plus supporting cast, including Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and Andre Braugher, almost elevate it to the level of mainstream mediocrity – but then again, that was never the goal.

Tarantino’s incoherent three-hour bloodbath

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000

Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers. “Django Unchained” feels like a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens, a slavery-revenge melodrama cum salt-‘n’-pepper action film that would be awesome if it actually existed. Like so many trailers, it’s packed with memorable scenes that don’t go anywhere, and keeps promising payoffs that remain theoretical. It’s got Western scenery on a grand scale and scenes of madcap comedy involving inept members of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s got veritable geysers and fountains and gushers of blood, an ocean of fake gore even by Tarantino’s standards. You could claim that he’s “quoting from Sam Peckinpah” with those slapsticky water balloons full of blood, except that that’s not quite it. It’s more like he’s quoting from crappy ‘70s drive-in movies that were quoting from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which was quoting from something else that was quoting from Peckinpah. (I may be missing an intermediate stage there, such as a cannibal film that was dubbed from Italian into Spanish and projected once, with the reels out of sequence, at a downtown Los Angeles theater in 1983.)

“Jack Reacher”: Tom Cruise’s terrible timing

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:44:00 +0000

In the larger narrative of Tom Cruise’s late-career comeback, the new Paramount thriller “Jack Reacher” had a clear role to play – at least, before it became toxic, thanks to its accidental and superficial similarity to a real-life tragedy. It would be insulting to suggest that Cruise or Christopher McQuarrie, the film’s writer and director, are “victims” in any way, or that the commercial fate of a mainstream entertainment has any meaning in the face of the unbearable grief and tragedy of Sandy Hook. But it’s also useful to remember that Cruise and McQuarrie have done nothing wrong or unusual, beyond what people in Hollywood do all the time, which is to spin out violent and grotesque fantasies for our enjoyment. I think the problem “Jack Reacher” suddenly represents is more about us than about the movie. Confronted with our evident eagerness to consume simulated real-world horror as entertainment, we feel ashamed, at least temporarily.

Pick of the week: Kathryn Bigelow’s mesmerizing post-9/11 nightmare

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I do not believe that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s mesmerizing, operatic and profoundly troubling “Zero Dark Thirty” offers any apology or justification for torture, and certainly does not “glorify” it, to use Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald’s term. But it’s important to recognize that the people who think it does are responding to the moral ambiguity of the movie, which pervades not just the question of torture as an instrument of American policy but its entire portrayal of the CIA’s obsessive and insanely expensive hunt for Osama bin Laden. Here’s the sense in which they’re not wrong: What “Zero Dark Thirty” has to say about torture and many other things is not entirely clear, and what you see in it depends on what you bring with you. That moral ambiguity will drive some viewers nuts, but in my view it is also the quality that makes “Zero Dark Thirty” something close to a masterpiece.

Pick of the week: “Deadfall” is a sexy, snowbound rural noir

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

You won’t find Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “Deadfall” on anybody’s 10-best list for the year, but if you need a break from the po-faced seriousness of holiday moviegoing as much as I did, this atmospheric, suspenseful, snowbound crime thriller with a creepy, sexy undertow may be just the ticket. In other times and other circumstances, I can imagine “Deadfall” being a semi-big deal: We’ve got an Oscar-winning European director (Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters” captured the 2007 foreign-language prize) making his first American film, with a terrific B-movie cast, an eye for wintry northern landscapes, tremendous sense of pacing and a passion for genre filmmaking.

But the classic rural-noir setup of “Deadfall” is just slightly out of step with the times, and so it ends up on our collective doorsteps as a December indie release, reaching theaters several weeks after its VOD debut. Maybe screenwriter Zach Dean should have made Eric Bana’s folksy, charismatic stone-cold killer character into a one-man al-Qaida sleeper cell, sweeping through the north woods of Michigan on a frostbitten mission of jihad. Bana is one of those actors I always enjoy seeing, even though he’s often consigned to crap roles in crap movies. He’s good-looking, moves well and has a slightly snakelike charm, but may just lack that undefinable something that could have made him a major star rather than the guy who plays the lead in obscure thrillers.

“Skyfall”: Bi-curious Bond?

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Reinventing the James Bond franchise to fit the sexual and cultural politics of the 21st century is a dicey proposition at best, and it’s safe to say we’ve seen mixed results so far. If Daniel Craig’s 2006 debut as Bond in “Casino Royale” was a smashing success, bringing a new physicality and cinematic verve to the series along with a touch of real-world anomie, the dour and violent “Quantum of Solace” arguably went too far in the latter direction. (I actually thought it was an interesting experiment, if not an entirely successful one, but fans who complained that it didn’t seem much like a Bond movie were correct.) That $225 million misstep nearly succeeded in killing off the series – which left the world of Ian Fleming’s novels behind long, long ago – but now Bond and Craig are back in “Skyfall,” a rich, impressive, overstuffed and rather chilly spectacle that already looks like the biggest hit in franchise history, even before its American release.

“Taken 2″ beats “Argo” in box office

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:53:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Liam Neeson's "Taken 2" has defended its box-office title with a narrow win over Ben Affleck's "Argo."

Sunday studio estimates put 20th Century Fox's action sequel "Taken 2" at No. 1 with $22.5 million in its second weekend. "Taken 2" raised its domestic total to $86.8 million.

Affleck's "Argo," an Iranian hostage thriller from Warner Bros., opened in second-place with $20.1 million.

Ethan Hawke's "Sinister," about a true-crime writer caught up in supernatural horror, debuted at No. 3 with $18.3 million. The movie was released by Lionsgate's Summit Entertainment banner.

Sony's "Here Comes the Boom," with Kevin James as a teacher who becomes a mixed martial arts sensation, started weakly at No. 5 with $12 million.

The weekend's other new wide release, CBS Films' crime comedy "Seven Psychopaths," also opened to small crowds, taking in $4.3 million to finish at No. 9. The movie's ensemble cast includes Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken and Woody Harrelson.

The follow-up to "Taken," the hit that established dramatic star Neeson as an action hero, "Taken 2" was dinged by critics who called it a replay of the original. The sequel has Neeson's ex-CIA guy up against a gang of Albanian goons out for revenge for their kin that he killed in the first movie.

“Seven Psychopaths”: A goofy, tormented near-masterpiece

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:24:00 +0000

I have contradictory things to say about playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths,” which is pretty much in the spirit of the whole thing, since this movie is constantly rewriting itself and puncturing its own balloon. On one hand, McDonagh’s move into the American mainstream, and his follow-up to the Oscar-nominated international hit “In Bruges,” is admirably ambitious and brushes close to greatness at times. Both a movie about the movies and an L.A. crime thriller in the postmodern Tarantino tradition (forgive me for that phrase, if you can), “Seven Psychopaths” is loaded with scabrous, funny McDonagh dialogue and arguably overloaded with offbeat performances by terrific character actors: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson and a little shih tzu named Bonny.

“Taken 2″ and the spy-movie problem

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 19:50:00 +0000

Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive “Taken 2” don’t seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don’t think our spooks are good guys anymore. Okay, I realize the situation is a bit more complex than that. I don’t want to wander into the “people like me” fallacy: Everyone in my parents’ neighborhood in 1972 voted for George McGovern, so he must have won easily, right? But I do think it’s true that in recent years — and arguably a good deal longer than that — movies and TV shows about spies have reflected our increasingly bad conscience about the hidden world of America’s global secret police. That’s just as true, or almost as true, for overtly right-wing products like the odious but addictive “24,” with its ludicrous litany of ticking-bomb scenarios and torture justifications, as it is for bleeding-heart, pseudo-sophisticated fare like the “Bourne” franchise.