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Reviews
Kick-Ass (2010)
My Favorite Film of the Year so Far
This movie has great action sequences, great comedy, and genuine drama. Don't miss out on the fun. I don't want to get into too much detail, don't spoil the movie for yourselves, just watch the film.
If you are a fan of action movies, this will not disappoint. As far as the controversy, its an R-rated movie thats meant for adults. Just watched another r-rated film for adults called "the Prophet" which literally made me wince and almost have to look away from the screen. Kick-Ass is fun cartoon violence that I really believe kids as young as twelve could watch and not be traumatized by.
People have always been fascinated by violence and enjoy watching it. This is such cartoonish violence, no one could possibly take it seriously.
Takers (2010)
A hodge podge of other great heist films
After reading some of the positive reviews of this movie, I must put my two cents in. This film is absolute crap, and if you are one of the few people who like it, you must not have seen many heist movies in your life.
Spoiler warning for something that happens at the beginning of the film. The film opens with a bank heist that desperately wants to be like the bank heist in Michael Mann's Heat, except that instead of a hard-ass bastards like DeNiro, Val Kilmer, and Tom Sizemore, we have a bunch of soft-ass pop singers and pretty boys like Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen.
You're supposed to believe that these guys are highly disciplined and bad-ass outlaws?! Gimme a break! After they grab the cash, they escape by running to the roof of the building, and tricking a news chopper into landing so that they can use it to escape! Right there I was like, what if the news chopper decided not to be stupid? Now you're stuck on top of a damn skyscraper with nowhere to run! Can you imagine if DeNiro's crew in Heat decided that their only escape plan was to chopper jack an escape vehicle?! It's beyond stupid, and utterly ludicrous! The filmmakers rip off a plethora of classic and not-so-classic heist films including Heat, the Italian Job, and True Romance. If you have never seen any of these movies, you may find this somewhat entertaining.
Carriers (2009)
A Hardcore Apocalypse Thriller
This film could have been truly great, if not for a few scenes of "Forced" scares and suspense. The story opens with four young people traveling together in a car across the desert. They come across a father and daughter who have blocked the road with their SUV. We learn that the daughter is sick, and that some kind of deadly virus has infected the country.
Right off the bat, our main characters are in survival mode, and have no interest in helping people, or even offering words of comfort. This was a really good opening, that hooked me immediately. I'm not so cynical that I don't believe in real life heroes, but real life heroes also have self preservation instincts. People are willing to risk their health and safety to help others, as long as there is some decent chance of themselves being able to walk away afterwards. If an airborne virus has wiped out most of civilization, real people are not going to put themselves in contact with infected people unless they have pretty substantive protection.
I thought, okay, this movie isn't going to take the bull crap sentimental route of gold hearted heroes who will always do the "right thing". They did do the right thing, in that they left potential killers of their survival in the dust.
Later, they are forced to return, with the intention of stealing the vehicle of the man and his sick child! Even more, they plan on leaving them in the middle of the desert to presumably die of thirst and heat stroke! Chris Pine is armed with a pistol, and the only thing that keeps him from shooting the father, is the fact that the father positions himself in the vehicle, threatening to have infected blood and guts sprayed all over the interior.
This movie is about survival, and the lengths we will go to in order to live. They don't sugarcoat things by having characters engage in cinema heroics that clear thinking real people would never attempt. Except for one scene, (SPOILER) where the sick child needs her oxygen mask, and Piper Perabo exposes herself in order to help her. Gimme a break! This virus is wiping out the entire population! No one is able to be cured and no one survives it! You're gonna expose yourself to it so that the girl lives a few extra hours or days! You deserve to get coughed on with big streaks of phlegm and blood all over your big stupid face! There was one other (SPOLIER) stupid scare moment, where Chris Pine is standing on a diving board over what is clearly a disgusting and rancid swimming pool. A rotting corpse gets revealed and he almost falls in, except that he grabs on to the diving board. Maybe the producers wanted more suspense and a big scare, but it came off as unbelievable and unnecessary.
There were also a few times where I thought that in a real world scenario they would have kept their face masks on, but in a movie world scenario you don't want your lead actors hiding their gorgeous mugs.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this movie to fans of post-apocalyptic thrillers.