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.

This entertaining action/chase movie is just one more example of the winning combination of socio-political messaging and hunters-become-the-hunted action:

• First Blood
• The Rock
• Apocalypto

The lead actor Rudy Youngblood bears no relation to the funky Youngblood Brass Band, nor is he the warrior depicted on the promotional poster. And since we all know what happens to Mayan civilization after the Spaniards arrive in the final scene, we know he won’t get an Apocalypto II. So here he is for one possibly-final encore (he’s the one in the middle):

More retroesque fare from Quentin Tarantino. The first feature Planet Terror was the better of the two, basically a zombie movie in the vein of 28 Days Later, with Bruce Willis playing a Siege-like role as a military commander. The second feature Death Proof had Kurt Russell doing a great acting job with a terrible script.

My favorite part of the movie was the “preview” for Machete which apparently is a real (well, direct-to-DVD) movie:

Too much Peter Parker and not enough Spider-Man. Also, too much cheesy drama:

• Cheesy Peter Parker introspection and MJ storyline.
• Cheesy Spidey-gets-keys-to-the-city scene.
• Cheesy Spider-Man/Venom inner struggling.
• Cheesy Aunt May “revenge is like poison” conversation with Peter Parker.

Sadly, Spider-Man wasn’t even the coolest character in the movie (a sentiment echoed by the on-screen youthful spectator-characters in the final scene of the movie). I have to say that Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin 2 stole the show, with his flying rocket-powered snowboard:

The Spider-Man movies have given a weird Superman-like quality to the Spider-Man character in that Peter Parker/Spider-Man are basically completely unmasked by the end of the movie. He was unmasked at the end of Spider-Man 2 when rescuing Mary Jane from Doctor Octopus (thus revealing his identity to Mary Jane), but they were in a secluded area.

I don’t understand how he is supposed to maintain his secret identity after Spider-Man 3 because the final scene takes place in the middle of New York with tons of press covering the event …

We started off the day with a matinee showing of The Condemned, where the meeting of Battle Royale and MindHunters is given the Stone Cold Steve Austin treatment.

The Condemned starts off simply enough: the “contestants” – ten condemned Death Row convicts from around the world – are sent to a remote island where after 30 hours, a sole survivor will be given freedom and some cash, with the whole thing broadcast live over the internet to a world-wide audience. We even get, straight from BR, an over-enthusiastic Japanese contestant (fine, everyone in BR is Japanese).

However, what promised to be a straightforward movie was spoiled by:

• Some terrible dialogue about whether to blame the money-hungry producer for pandering to the baser tastes in entertainment, or to blame the public at large for harboring this bloodlust to begin with. In this movie genre, this kind of misplaced moralistic dialogue is known by me as the “don’t hate the player, hate the game” conversation.
• An extremely-unconvincing performance from my formerly-favorite gangster/criminal Vinnie Jones. They give him a bow and arrow, for Chrissake! Bow and arrow for John Rambo: yes. Bow and arrow for Vinnie Jones: no.
• Some side-plot involving the FBI trying to get to the bottom of this “illegal internet crime.”

After the low-brow art, we went to some high-brow art. The Yerba Buena Gardens had a free outdoor jazz concert where we picnicked for lunch, after which we went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for more free art:

May is “Museums on Us” month, sponsored by Bank of America: your ID and BofA ATM card grant you free admission to participating museums around the country. The SF MOMA was showing a Picasso exhibit where we were moved by Picasso’s avant-garde Cubism, his unbridled genius on full canvas display, still rendering people speechless almost 35 years after his death.

The FBI can be counted on to be a source of moderation in this world. They helped wreck what would have been a straightforwardly-fun movie, but they also made an appearance in what was threatening to be a plain-jane visit to the snoozeum. Today, I learned that the FBI “had interest in Picasso and his activities in relation to various subversive groups.”

Another comic-book (well, graphic-novel) movie adaptation, The 300 features lots of stylized shots, and lots of nudity and dudity. For a while I considered being disappointed in the lack of war-scene variety, but then decided against it. There just aren’t too many different things to do when your army is tasked with simply holding a narrow mountain pass against invaders. So rather than lower my opinion, I simply decided to lower my expectations (after the fact).

Ghost Rider is extremely light on story, which really can’t be helped. There is too much to be covered and still leave room for a real story with a movie’s time constraints. Ghost Rider isn’t as ingrained into the social psyche as Spider-Man, Superman, or Batman, to enable to script writers to skip the backstory in favor of the real story.

What remains is something of a cross between American Chopper, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Transformers: we get to watch a really cool motorcycle transform into something even cooler, with Eva Mendes in tow as the female lead. Sadly, Eva Mendes is not as hot as the flaming Hellcycle, which wins the on-screen eye-candy battle hands down; she was better in 2 Fast 2 Furious.