"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Matthew Modine’

Wrong Turn (2021)

Thursday, March 17th, 2022

WRONG TURN (2021) was marketed as a remake of WRONG TURN (2003), but is I think either a bonafide reboot (starting over from the beginning) or un-subtitled sequel (after they dropped the original title, WRONG TURN: THE FOUNDATION). If you consider the premise of the six previous WRONG TURN movies to be “travelers are hunted by a family of deformed cannibals,” then this is not a remake. It’s more like a re-asking of the question “what if some young people got attacked in some woods in West Virginia?” that gets a different answer.

I like the structure of it. It begins with grey-haired real estate agent Scott Shaw (Matthew Modine, TRANSPORTER 2) out of his element driving through Appalachia in search of his missing daughter Jen (Charlotte Vega, AMERICAN ASSASSIN). He finds an inn that she and her friends stayed at, and only knows they meant to hike an Appalachian trail. The police chief isn’t much help and also asks “Who’s the Black fella?” when he sees her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley, 2 episodes of Riverdale) in a photo. Locals at a bar basically tell Mr. Shaw to give up because if she got lost in those woods she’s surely dead. Rude. But he says he’s not gonna give up. (read the rest of this shit…)

Cutthroat Island

Wednesday, September 18th, 2019

It took me nearly a quarter of a century to get around to giving CUTTHROAT ISLAND (1995) a shot. Certified by the Guinness Book as the biggest financial bomb of all time, it got poor reviews, bankrupted Carolco Pictures (FIRST BLOOD, T2) before it even came out, diverted director Renny Harlin (following DIE HARD 2 and CLIFFHANGER) from the A-list and failed to create momentum for its revolutionary notion of giving a woman the lead role and top billing on a big budget summer adventure.

But I had reason to be suspicious of its reputation. Many of Harlin’s ‘90s movies, particularly his also-starring-Geena-Davis followup THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, deserve more credit than they got at the time. And there’s definitely precedent for mob mentality panning of movies that have been heavily covered as over budget, out of control productions. This had the additional gossip-bait of the star and director being married to each other, causing mean-spirited speculation that one was only hired because of the other one’s clout. (For example, an informative 1996 Independent article about what went wrong manages to refer to them as “Renny Harlin and his demanding wife.”) On top of all that, you know how it is with what I call the Old Timey Adventure genre. They almost always lose money, even when they’re great. That’s just how it is. (read the rest of this shit…)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Monday, July 2nd, 2018

SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO, like its predecessor SICARIO, is a bleak, uncomfortable peek into a hellish world of violence depicted near our southern border. Cartels go about their business with savage brutality. U.S. agencies blur and push and blatantly leap across every legal or moral line they ever heard of. The Americans hire a Mexican lawyer turned killer to do the dirty stuff because he wants revenge on those who murdered his family. But they also seem pretty okay with doing the dirty stuff themselves.

Criminals, cops and soldiers all ride on the backs of humvees or pickup trucks or in helicopters, some of them caravanning across the border with impunity, wrapped in armor, strapped with high capacity rifles, hiding behind their sunglasses and gritting their teeth until something pops off and then they pound hundreds of rounds through glass, metal and meat, leaving the wreckage of vehicles and their inhabitants to bake under the hot sun on the pavement or in the dirt. (read the rest of this shit…)

Transporter 2

Monday, March 27th, 2006

One day not too long ago I was sitting in a theater waiting to watch some movie, the identity of which has by now dissolved into the fountain of time. (that’s not a real saying, I just made it up. My audience deserves new sayings, not the same old shit they’ve heard before and understand.) And suddenly there was a trailer for a sequel that probaly nobody, and definitely not me, asked for. The movie of course was THE TRANSPORTER 2 in case you forgot which review you’re reading here. There was kicking, jumping, cars flipping, things exloding, a half naked lingerie wearing sexy nurse assassin with makeup smeared down her eyes Tammy Faye Baker style, that sort of thing. There was this ridiculous shot where The Transporter jumps his BMW from one parking garage into another and skids out right on the edge of the thing. All that flash and bang got me excited and I realized that somehow, even though I kind of hated THE TRANSPORTER, I wanted to see the sequel. I can’t remember ever being excited about a sequel to a movie I didn’t like. But like Jesus and the correctional system said, you gotta give a guy a second chance. (read the rest of this shit…)