Tag: female action hero

Movie Review: CHARLIE’S ANGELS – a female empowerment movie so brutally awful you’d think a man wrote it.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews5 Comments

I’ll confess to being a boring moviewatcher.  I am not one of those types who can get into bad movies, nor can I ever describe a bad movie that is somehow so bad it becomes good.  I just don’t have that capacity.  Bad is bad.  I suppose I also have a grudge against bad movies.  It takes a lot of money and a lot of talented people to make a movie, and when I watch a movie that fails on the basics, I actually get angry.  And I’m not talking about microbudget productions where anything that rises above competent is a success, I’m specifically talking about multiplex features.  Why do these movies get made?  Who finances them, and why?  These are questions I wondered even before the stupendously terrible Charlie’s Angels had ended. Continue reading “Movie Review: CHARLIE’S ANGELS – a female empowerment movie so brutally awful you’d think a man wrote it.” →

Movie Review: TERMINATOR: DARK FATE – Cameron and Co fumble a genuine chance to reboot the franchise, in this “same shit different day” sequel.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews2 Comments

The biggest thing that surprised me about this movie was not James Cameron’s much-heralded return to the franchise that made him a household name, it was the fact that it’s already been four years since the poor Terminator: Genisys.  4 years?  I think I’m suffering my own time-travel headache.  And really, the fact that this is the big surprise should tell you what I thought of this latest entry in the 35-year-old sci-fi franchise.

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Movie Review: ATOMIC BLONDE – some terrific fight scenes liven up an otherwise sub-Bourne action spy thriller.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie ReviewsLeave a comment

The action movie genre has produced some notable game-changers in the last 35 years.  For me, these are movies that hit the still waters like an obnoxious kid doing a cannonball in your pool.  They might not have that massive instant impact, but the effect ripples out across the surface.  First Blood, Commando, Die Hard, Predator, Terminator 2, The Matrix, and The Bourne Identity are the movies I’m referring to.  The splashes they made had a cumulative effect on the genre.  Without these movies, who knows where the action movie genre would be right now?  The Bourne Identity took The Matrix’s balletic violence to street level, and simultaneously muscled into the action spy thriller, whose main player up to that point was the Bond franchise.  Matt Damon, arguably at his peak in these movies, was a bone-crunching, take no prisoners mano-a-mano combatant, and it forced movies into a new era of fight choreography, where the scenes still have that videogame lack of consequence, but look and sound more natural.  The influence is most strongly seen in the post-Bourne Bond franchise, where Daniel Craig’s Bond is a return to the “enforcer” type played by Sean Connery, and in Marvel’s Captain America franchise.  The latest movie featuring this kind of hand to hand combat is this year’s Atomic Blonde.

Continue reading “Movie Review: ATOMIC BLONDE – some terrific fight scenes liven up an otherwise sub-Bourne action spy thriller.” →