One-liners like that draw me into a movie.

Unfortunately, neither the dialogue nor the Frank Miller styling could save this movie. The plot was simple yet somehow confusing. The action was ho-hum. And the styling managed to look like a Frank Miller copycat even though it was the real deal.

I’ve already paid the sunk cost of sitting through the previous two attempts to bring Frank Castle to the big screen. To recap:

• Dolph Lundgren, 1989. The lack of dialogue and acting can be forgiven (come on, this is Dolph, and this is The Punisher). The lack of the skull T-shirt can not.
• Thomas Jane, 2004. Too much dialogue and “acting”. The movie also pretty much just rips off the character name and does not follow much of the story, leaving this as a standard “man pursuing revenge” movie.

Ray Stevenson does a much better job with the character. The script is truer to the comics. The movie is distilled to an episode of the story of The Punisher; what little backstory references are made actually intrude on the movie rather than enhance it. This will alienate people unfamiliar with The Punisher, but helps those that already are.

My only complaint is that the movie’s violence is simply gratuitous, rather than serving as a vehicle for “action”.

The Cliff’s Notes: Moderate Boredom

Back in the day, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the video trailers for the namesake game Max Payne.

What made Max Payne stand out in a video-game market already extremely crowded with first-person shooters was a combination of John Woo-style cinematics combined with the concept of “Bullet Time“. I expected both the visuals and Bullet Time to be the true stars of the movie, but unfortunately these elements are not as integral to the movie as they are to the game.

After further research into the game, it appears that a plot was also not that integral to the game, and this unfortunately was faithfully carried over into the movie, making this yet another mediocre video-game-turned-movie.

Jason Statham firmly cements himself into his standard role of guy-with-weird-accent-who-drives-cars:

Watching the movie was like watching a video game (Twisted Metal: Black, maybe), except that the acting was worse. In short, a great time to be had by all who watch this movie.

I can’t remember ever being disappointed by a heist movie. The formula is so simple, how could anyone mess it up? The Bank Job is no exception:

• Planning.
• Execution.
• Aftermath (possibly with more executions, tee-hee).

The Bank Job joins my list of entertaining heist movies:

• Inside Man
• The Italian Job
• Heat
• Snatch
• Ocean’s 11

The Bank Job is different from some of the rest in that some rather bad things happen to some decent people (most bank heist movies don’t really involve people getting hurt).

The entire movie is available for watching here. My thoughts:

• I think we watched an 80-minute Ford commercial. Kind of like watching 24.
• Extremely short on plot and character development. So short that Patrika wouldn’t stop bugging me about “why didn’t they explain this?” “why don’t they explain that?” “I don’t understand …”. NBC needs to understand that certain segments of their audience can’t just watch a movie about a car and be happy. So they need to write in some plot to pacify that segment so the rest of us can just enjoy the movie.

Whatever. One signs up for all that when they decide to watch a movie based on a 25-year-old TV show.

The one unforgiveable flaw was that this movie about a CAR didn’t highlight the CAR. There were a few nice sequences of self-healing nano-technology (what back in the day would have just been a bulletproof car) and some other low-budget special effects, but NBC promised a super-advanced “weapons system”. Even the old K2000 had a grappling hook (which was removed from the K3000).

Instead, we get a lot of scenes shot inside the car with the two leads talking to each other. Meh.

Hitman is based on a video game, so not much needs to be said about expectations, etc. Resident Evil remains my gold standard for video-game-based movies, and Hitman was no Resident Evil. It was, however, better than Street Fighter and Double Dragon (but that’s not saying much).

My one gripe was with the casting. The video game art shows a totally bad-ass dude with a shaved head.

The movie cast a very baby-faced Timothy Oliphant:

I’m sorry, but Oliphant’s face is not one I’d take seriously. Just about any other actor in the movie would have made a better Agent 47: Vin Diesel (the producer), James Faulkner, and any of the other Agent-47-fodder “hitmen”.

This movie is long (2:40) and was probably longer before cutting. It is your basic “historical drama” – based on the true story of a drug kingpin in the 1970s.

I think the movie was marketed as, and I expected to see, a cop-vs.-gangster movie a la Pacino/DeNiro in Heat. However, the movie digressed into too many side stories (perhaps in the pursuit of historical narrative, or tribute to its still-living main characters), which ended up diluting the basic cops-vs.-robbers story.

I saw this at the new “Sundance Kabuki” (formerly known as AMC Kabuki) theater. The theater has been renovated and is actually quite nice now, although it has lost some of its “old theater” character.

Eastern Promises promises (heh) to be a different kind of gangster movie, but it doesn’t really offer anything interestingly new to the genre, not even the twist towards the end. In fact, it even provides the cliched segment where the police detective goes into a lecture of describing what the various kinds of gangster tattoos mean.

Basically, the movie faithfully follows a gangster-film formula – gritty atmosphere, hard-core criminals, crime-family politics. Viggo Mortensen adds nicely to his diverse repetoire of leading roles (though nowhere near as diverse as that of Kevin Bacon), playing a limo driver for a crime family.

A few members of the cast of Breaking News return for Exiled. Exiled is a typical Hong Kong gangster action movie, where plot, characters, and action sequences are all completely and absurdly stylized and glamourized. Exiled starts out with a typical-enough story: a former gangster hitman has gone straight to raise a family, but is paid a visit by some old associates. The movie somehow meanders into a tale of stolen gold and wifely revenge.

Meh. One doesn’t watch this movie for the plot, and the choreography and style more than satisfy.

We saw this movie at the 4 Star Movie Theater, an independent theater in San Francisco known for its Asian fare and an Asian film festival it hosts every summer; it is the only theater in the United States that shows first-run Hong Kong movies within days of release.

I got to feel good about myself for having a nice Chinese dim-sum lunch ($10), for supporting inexpensive local independent theater ($8.50), and for getting a cool T-shirt (the design is what is on the theater home page; $8).