Taken 2 (2012)

How is it that I always forget about Famke? She acted in a lot of movies I like, playing both hero and villain. Each and every time I make a mental about how attractive she is and how weird it is I always forget her. I don't think she's forgettable. She a good actor and has played one of my favorite characters in her cinematic portrayal. Famke, please forgive me. I'll make amends by watching the X-Men films again soon, or maybe I can track down that one you did with Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy, and then I'll watch that.
Now, I don't forget Liam Neeson. As soon as I heard this movie was out on DVD I asked the librarian if he was in it and she assured me that he was. I didn't know what the plot was but recall thinking that if his daughter gets kidnapped a second time that it was just bad parenting. But, no matter how lame it was I would give it a try because it has Liam in it. And it totally does not suck.
I've often wondered what happened after the action movie is over. All of the so-called bad guys that die have families. Maybe the family doesn't know what their dead son did for a living. Maybe they thought he was just hanging out with his friends when some crazy ass American dude came along and killed them all. Or possibly they knew but were in denial or cared about the now dead son in spite of drawbacks. In some cases the families might condone or even encourage his participation in whatever ended up getting him killed. They are still going to be torn up over the young man's death. I think many times the families would want revenge. Though, if they were rational about it, some man who could on his own take out your son and his whole group of friends is either very lucky or very good. Either way, you would at the very least hedge your bets. You would not do what the baddies do in this film.

Taken 2 at IMDb

Five Minutes of Heaven (2009)

I was handed this video and told it looked like the kind of film that I would watch. It's a BBC production starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt. This is exactly the kind of thing I watch. All I knew about this film going in was the cover of the DVD case. Pictures, close-ups of Neeson and Nesbitt not looking too happy, someone in a ski mask, a sepia-toned picture of a 70s car, a hand holding a gun. There was also the line in block capital letters, "TO FACE THE FUTURE, THEY MUST FACE THE PAST". My way of thinking is that whether or not the movie is any good, Neeson and Nesbitt are two men that are always worth watching.
I was not wrong.
There is far less action than the cover implies, so anyone who wants to see an American style action film with Neeson should forget about this and go watch Taken. This is instead a well-told story about two men who are tied together by an event that happened in 1975 that forever changed both of their lives in horrible ways. The film is the story of how they each independently have tried to deal with what happened them and how they let it shape the men they have become. The main focus of the film is an arranged meeting of the men so that they can come to some sort of resolution.
This movie really is all Neeson and Nesbitt. I don't mean that the rest of the actors suck, because they don't, they all seem quite believable in fact. But all the other parts, maybe with the exception of a minor character played wonderfully by Anamaria Marinco, are bit parts. Other than Marinco, everyone else has just a few lines at most. But, when you have two of the finest living actors together in the same film, why would you clutter it up with other people? The way the story unfolds, it makes sense that these two are the focus. Okay, so maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic by adding Nesbitt into the rarified air of "greatest living actors", but I don't think I am with Neeson, and certainly Nesbitt is one of my favorite actors so please excuse my bias.
I can not tell you how great it is to watch a film and not know how it's going to end until it does. Okay, it's this great. You can't see me right now, but I actually stopped typing and held my hands as far apart as they would go. Really. And if you can see me now, well creepy, 'cause it's night time and I'm sitting in my bedroom typing this, but you would know that I'm telling the truth about holding my hands up at arm's length.

Five Minutes of Heaven on IMDb

Oh, and the four stars and exclamation point rating on the front cover must be a four star and not a five star system, right? Or a typo. If it were me, I would just give this film five out of five stars, no punctuation.

Batman Begins (2005)

Long before I discovered the X-Men or even the comic book version of Spider-man, there was Superman and Batman. Superman was simplistic and moralistic even to me as a young boy. It was so clear cut because it was a story about good versus evil. Every time out. Batman was more complex, more dark. It dealt with the notion of justice as well as good versus evil. What I think I found to be most interesting was that Batman/Bruce Wayne questioned himself about his beliefs and convictions. Now, somewhere around the age of 11 or 12 I discovered the "back catalog" of both Batman and Superman thanks to my local library and I discovered that earlier incarnations had been very silly at times, but most shockingly, more alike than they were now, er, then in the mid-80s. Just as I discovered the historical Superman and Batman, I started collecting more books including the Justice League pf America which featured both heroes, but used Superman as a tank and Batman as the mad-scientist or engineer. I started to lose interest, when the Batman, Year One storyline hit. It was brilliant. It ended and so did my subscription to Batman and not much later to all comics.
I wasn't just a fan of Batman in comic books, but the early serials and the show with Adam West. They weren't the same quality as the comic books, but historically they matched the flavor of the time they were created. But then something wonderful happened. Tim Burton made a Batman movie. My buddy and I went and saw it in the old Fox Theatre in Dallas. It was so enthralling that I didn't even notice how the broken down seats gave you a back ache by the end of the first hour. Michael Keaton was a new kind of Batman, the kind I had wanted to see, moody and complex, well more complex than he had been portrayed before. I remember two things about that movie 25 years or so on, first being that I didn't much want to go to the movies with that friend again because he was not a good movie watcher, and that while we both liked the movie, it was for two very different reasons. I predominantly liked the scenery - Tim Burton's Gotham City was indeed Gothic and a great backdrop for the Batman tale, but ultimately I had found the movie not serious enough. Batman was indeed darker than the Adam West version, but Bruce Wayne was distracted and not handsome enough (sorry Michael Keaton) and Kim Bassinger and Jack Palance were throwbacks to the West show. Little did I know what was to come with these movies. My friend? He liked the movie because he had never read Batman before. This was earth-shattering stuff for him. But then, getting his new model railroad magazine and hearing the latest Billy Joel song were about as exciting as his life got at that point.
I won't say that I didn't watch or even enjoy the other Batman movies, they were a fun romp, equivalent to a super hero James Bond (Bond before Daniel Craig of course).
Fast forward to a British bloke who wants to make a new Batman movie, a reboot, that takes the movie along a darker path than the previous franchise. I was completely hooked. Once names started dropping as to which stars were attaching themselves to this project, I became more and more excited. But, if The Phantom Menace was good for anything, it was good for teaching us not to get our hopes up. When Batman Begins finally hit the screen I was completely bi-polar about it. I knew it was going to be brilliant. I knew it was going to be horrible. Secretly I hoped that it split the difference, I could live with that.
To my great surprise, this turned out to be one of the best action movies I've ever seen, and I think the best super hero movie. I don't just mean up to that point, I think this might be the best super hero film. I just checked my movie shelf, and the only movie that comes really close is Hellboy (if Spawn had been consistent throughout, it would be the number two film). Yes. I'm sure about this. The Marvel movies have all been real-worldified or are just not great or both. The DC movies are all over the place, but one thing is consistent, they're not great, but most of them are entertaining enough, the exception being the Watchmen which misses the mark on the comic book in a couple of ways, but is one of the best super hero movies I've seen. Then you have the independents - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tank Girl, Aeon Flux, Mystery Men - all entertaining and funny, with the exception of Aeon Flux which was also real-worldified, but great because of Charlize Theron. The other movies with super heroes in my collection at least are not tied to a comic book and entertaining enough, but not really in competition.
Christian Bale is a very intense actor. I remember first becoming aware of him for a film called the Thin Man where he played the leading role and must have lost 60 or 70 pounds to play the role - he looked like a strong wind was going to snap him in two. He brings the same intensity to Batman Begins. He very definitely is playing Batman who has a secret identity of Bruce Wayne instead of the other way around. I think that's magnificent. This is the darker Batman that I've wanted to see for the last 25 years.
The list of supporting actors in this film is like a who's who of the craft's best: Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and, yes, Katie Holmes. Cillian Murphy, Rutger Hauer and Tom Wilkinson round out the main characters and the actors whom I am familiar with and all three really stepped up to the bar in their performances.
The only complaint I have about this film is the notion of Ra's al Ghul being either played by a Westerner or being so easily defeated and replaced. In the comic book, at least back when I was still reading the series, Ra's al Ghul was a mystic who had come across a way to extend his life to hundreds of years long, and was smarter, faster and stronger than everyone around him, and was also, not English. But, in the context of this movie, this rendition of al Ghul was certainly formidable and an interesting take on the character - I guess achieving his immortality by being the namesake and not the man.
I forget when I learned that this was the first of a trilogy by Christopher Nolan. I was certainly excited, though. Everything that happened likely happened with the endgame in mind, as opposed to the earlier open-ended goofballness. If the next two films were half as good as this one, this would be the best super heor trilogy ever.

Batman Begins at IMDb

Battleship (2012)

I went into this with two things on my mind. First, I will watch any movie with Liam Neeson and at the very least enjoy his scenes. Second, I played the game Battleship often enough to realize that a game based upon it is like basing a game on yahtzee - it's mostly random with strategy only coming into play based upon your results. This thinking very effectively set the bar low. It became almost a logical impossibility that I could watch this movie and not be entertained.
Something happened while watching this movie - I actually found myself liking it. Sure, the story is a bit predictable, but that didn't stop me from liking Independence Day or Minority Report, and it didn't stop me from liking this film. For an Action/Adventure movie, it had surprisingly good acting and almost know catch-phrasism. Taylor Kitsch in the starring role was a very pleasant experience, supported by Rihanna and Alexander Skarsgard (who it turns out is more than just a sexy vampire) who both do an excellent job.
The special F/X were top of the line, and that's good since they no doubt spent top dollar on this bad boy. The aliens were pretty cool. They were us with more thumbs and more toys. The alien ships and the way they moved, kind of like giant water skeeters, was not something I'd seen done before. I know that science fiction isn't all about seeing a new spin on an old theme, but sci-fi action/adventure often is, and this movie offers that. The alien grinder balls were ingenious. I don't know how they come up with that concept, but it seems like something you might see in a comic book, but far more effective, as drilling devices in comic books when not being used for transportation have a way of crapping out or not doing very much damage. These grinders though were pretty kick ass.
This movie did something different from most alien versus earth movies, they had the aliens be fallible. In your typical AVE movie, the aliens are all powerful until the earthers discover the one weakness that will lead to their ultimate downfall, the alien Achilles' tendon if you will. But in Battleship, the aliens screw up right off the bat by running into space debris and destroying one of their own ships. Sure, the plot needs for that ship to be destroyed in order to work, but the ship's destruction is believable and I think it works.
I was thinking about Michael Bey while watching this film. I know, god help me. There was more than one occasion when the visual effects reminded me of one or more of his Transformers films, yet this film still managed to be largely character driven, for an action/adventure movie at least. I concluded that I'm glad taht Bey did not direct this, but also that I hope he watched this and is moved by the use of characters and lack of catch phrases for Transformers 4.

Battleship at IMDb

Wrath of the Titans (2012)

Ladies and gentlemen! Gods and weird six-armed demon dudes! I present to you the fight of the year! And it's not what you think. You know after the first interaction between Perseus (Sam Worthington) and Zeus (Liam Neeson) how this movie is going to play out, and  being that it's rather starved for attention, it doesn't want to let you down. The real fight is between the storyline and Greek myth. And I don't mean to ruin this for you, but Greek myth does not win.
On one end of the Greek myth-as-movie spectrum you have Troy, which has all the names right and no godly stuff at all. On the second end of the spectrum you have Clash of the Titans (the new one) getting some of the names right and some of the deeds right and lots of godly super power stuff and on the the third end of the spectrum, you have the Percy Jackson books and movie which don't try to get it right because they are interpreting for a new generation and it has lots of godly stuff and demi-godly stuff. This movie, Wrath of the Titans falls equidistant between Clash and Jackson and three-quarters of the way away from Troy.
What the movie got right: Perseus is the son of Zeus. Zeus, Hades and Poseiden are brothers. Ares is the son of Zeus. Kronos is the father of Zeus, Hades and Poseiden.
What the movie got half-way right: Perseus and Andromeda - Perseus doesn't hook up with some chick to be his baby mama and then hook up with Andi years later, he's supposed to be with her from the start. Perseus and Pegasus - Pegasus assisted Perseus in his adventure with Medusa, but not any other adventures.
What the movie got wrong: Everything else. How can Perseus be the grandfather of Heracles if Zeus dies before Perseus has any kids with Andromeda? How is it that the Titans have power and the demi-gods have power, but the gods lose their power? How can Perseus have killed Ares before Ares makes his appearance in Troy? How is it that I'm even concerned about how this movie compares to Greek myth? The answer is sequels, baby! I am officially casting my vote for the movie to be called "Remember the Titans" so that people are always thinking they are about to watch a movie about football. Or, they can call it, 'Episode 6: The Return of the Demi'
It's time for me to get over my geeky worries and realize that no one is watching this film to see and accurate portrayal of the Greek myths involving Perseus. And they're not watching it to see Sam Worthington, because if they are it's just too sad for me to bear. If they're smart, they're watching this movie to see Liam Neeson, Ralph Feinnes, Rosamund Pike or Bill Nighy. If they had cast Clive Owen as Perseus, this could have been a brilliantly well-acted movie, and if they had different writers who were actually interested in Greek myth instead of making money, this movie could have been brilliant across the board.

Wrath of the Titans at IMDb

The Grey

Oh my god, I was not prepared for this movie. I had seen a trailer with a plane crashing and Liam Neeson with a rifle and lots of snow. Based on this information and the title, I concocted some theory about this film being a spy thriller with the title being some reference to a moral grey zone. Boy, was I off the mark. But, I did know that before I hit play, since I had described the above to the librarian when I was checking this out, and all she would say was, "she couldn't say" and that it was a very exciting film. She was right, for sure.
This film is gritty and depressing both on a personal and on an existential level. But, it accomplished this brilliantly. It really is such a simple story, quite elegant really. It is man versus nature (I can get away with saying this because there are only male characters involved in the main story) and man versus himself as he copes with the first conflict. Rounded out with realistic dialog and reactions to the situations that present themselves, this film doesn't try to get fancy or be anything it's not.
Normally, I try to stay away from the real depressing films, but this is an exception. The reality of the situation is so closely paired with hope for the future that you can make it through this film. Even more rare than watching said films is my recommending them, but I strongly recommend this one. Sure, I'll watch anything with Mr. Neeson in it, but this one is a good one. This is one of the better films I've seen in a while.

The Grey on IMDb