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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).

This is Jet Li’s final final action movie (wasn’t Fearless supposed to be his final martial arts movie?).

The story has been told many times over; Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars (Old West) and Bruce Willis’ Last Man Standing (Irish and Italian mobsters) both come to mind. In War, a mysterious “Rogue” (I’m sorry, but the name is ludicrous) deals with the Triads and Yakuza.

Not much else to say without spoiling what little there is to spoil. War has everything you’d expect:

• Impatient young Asian gangster chafing against the orders of older seasoned gangster.
• Asian gangsters dressed in expensive black suits.
• Asian gangsters riding fast motorcycles and driving fast cars.
• FBI watching the gangs take each other out.
• A half-hearted attempt at a plot twist.

This movie was barely worth the $10 ticket price.

This movie was typical summer blockbuster fare. It is not of the same caliber as the first two movies of this series, and it can’t really compare with the only true “blockbuster” of this year, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.

Things this movie borrows:

• Bourne must help the journalist Simon Ross escape from a crowded train station. The crowd cover scene is very much like that in The Minority Report when Agatha and John Anderton escape the shopping center.
• Too many look-alike scenes from the previous two movies: car chase, meeting in a park, looking at someone through binoculars while talking to them on the phone.

Things surprisingly lacking:

• Sufficient screen time for Julia Stiles :(
• Parkour seems to be in vogue these days; it’s missing from this movie. There are some building roof-top chase scenes, but they’re not quite parkour.

Finally, a summer blockbuster!

Live Free or Die Hard incorporates technology at the center of the plot without getting ridiculously detailed with ridiculous details. The upcoming “Agent 47″ Timothy Olyphant directs a gang of French parkour-practicing baddies; Bruce Willis defeats them with a brutish Daniel Craig-esque lack of finesse, with Justin “I’m a Mac” Long providing tech support. Maggie Q is the requisite eye-candy hot ninjette, and Kevin Smith makes a speaking appearance as War10ck.

Thankfully, there aren’t any forced references to any of the earlier Die Hard movies (they would be almost 20 years old!); this movie actually could have just stood on its own.

I never saw the first Fantastic Four movie, but I don’t feel like I missed much. And as is becoming expected for Marvel movies, I thought one of the secondary characters stole the show, in this case, the T-1000-esque Silver Surfer. They should have called this movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the TV Actors:

• Detective Vic Mackey (The Shield) as The Thing
• Dr. Christian Troy (Nip/Tuck) as Doctor Doom
• Dr. Ben Gideon (Gideon’s Crossing) as General Hager
• Clavo Cruz (CSI: Miami) as Major Cruz

… and those were just the ones I recognized and could identify. I’m pretty sure there were a few others.