Jean-François Richet’s “Blood Father” is supposed to be considered Mel Gibson’s cinematic comeback as the action hero we all knew and love before… you know. “Blood Father” is one in the many growing titles of fifty something men displaying vigilante justice, and Gibson plays well to type. He’s that crusty fifty something man who often resembles Martin Riggs if Riggs became a convict, and attempted to spend his life redeeming himself or something. Gibson plays Link, an ex-convict working hard to live out the rest of his life as quietly as possible. But things don’t go as planned when his estranged daughter, who is involved with a vicious gangster, shows up at his door begging for shelter. But when her boyfriend is convinced she knows too much, he goes looking for her.
Tag Archives: Crime
Con Air (1997)
I would have loved to be there at the pitch meeting for “Con Air.” Take “Die Hard,” make the villain John Malkovich and make its two heroes once popular eighties stars, and you have yourself what is a tonally uneven but pretty solid action movie all around. Star Nicolas Cage does double duty camp as hero Cameron Poe, an army ranger who accidentally murders a man while attempting to defend his wife one night at a bar. For some reason this qualifies him to travel on a transport flight to a new prison alongside some of the worst criminals in the world (?). This includes rapists, cannibals, child molesters, and vicious serial killer Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, as played by John Malkovich.
Face/Off (1997)
America never did John Woo any favors, did it? The man who gave us “The Killer” and “Hard Boiled” now offers us a movie where American stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage seem to be competing to see who is a worse actor. I guess when you’re working alongside Cage, though, you either have to be as awful as he is, or else risk causing some kind of black hole. Either way, for a man who has such a skill for delivering breakneck action films, “Face/Off” is that movie so moronic, you can’t even excuse it as science fiction. It’s kind of that movie you just accepted in 1997 mainly because Cage and Travolta joining forces was a little better than when Travolta met Christian Slater in “Broken Arrow.”
Wild Wild West (1999)
As we all saw with Tarantino a few years ago, the idea of Will Smith in a Western isn’t a bad one. Smith has a modern look that’s not accessible for every film, but with the right director Smith could shine. It’s just too bad he straddled himself to Barry Sonnenfeld who casts Will in one of the most poorly conceived TV to movie adaptations of all time. “Wild Wild West” is worse than “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Charlie’s Angels” combined. What’s worse is that director Sonnenfeld has absolutely no idea how to utilize Smith in a Western setting. So by the time the movie has started, rather than rely on the pulpy martial arts theme from the original series, the movie just becomes a showcase for Will Smith to be Will Smith. Even in the old West, Smith is the wise cracking, shade wearing, cowboy who is a hit with the ladies.
The Spirit (2008)
I will never understand the reasoning behind Frank Miller ever wanting to direct his own superhero movie. It’s not that he’s directing a movie, either, it’s that he’s directing a movie in the style of Robert Rodriguez’s fast and cheap process where he merely places his cast in front of a green screen for ninety percent of his film. And we must endure a hundred minute crime thriller with people that stumble around a CGI world. Frank Miller has no idea how to grasp at anything other than dark, violent, and gritty thus he takes Will Eisner’s groundbreaking comics and tacks it on to his “Sin City” neo-noir universe. Miller doesn’t outright say it to us, but Miller wants us to very much believe that “The Spirit” is a shared universe with “Sin City.”
The Phantom (1996)
Simon Wincer’s “The Phantom” just doesn’t get any respect, damn it, and I think it deserves a lot more than it receives from movie fans. Not only does director Wincer embrace the source material of the Phantom, but he casts someone like Billy Zane, who fits so well in to the mold of the Phantom, it’s eerie. I just wish more audiences appreciated the boldness of the pulp hero sub-genre for “The Phantom” to have caught on and perhaps spawn a movie series. The best we got in the nineties was a pretty awesome animated series that provided a futuristic spin on Lee Falk’s comic strip superhero. “The Phantom” is a sleek and breezy action film in the vein of “Indiana Jones” that finds Zane as Kit Walker.
Tales from the Hood (1995): Collector’s Edition [Blu-Ray]
Twenty years later, and Rusty Cundieff’s horror anthology “Tales from the Hood” is probably the most socially relevant horror anthology ever created. 1995 gave way to some pretty tame horror entries, but “Tales from the Hood” doesn’t just try to scare, but has a good time delivering some schlock, and sneaks in a lot of social commentary about the race and class warfare that divided us then and continues to divide us more than ever, today. It’s too bad the movie never caught on as a cult classic, since re-watching it years later has allowed me to appreciate it so much more. “Tales from the Hood” tells four horror tales centered on an urban setting and social problem that ensues to this day, incidentally, and they end up being rather compelling and often very creepy.