My Christmas present to myself was a viewing of Rocky Balboa, in a packed theater of stadium seating. Yep, Sly Stallone can still fill a theater. The movie is pretty much what you’d expect: ESPN runs a virtual boxing match of Rocky (from back in the day) against the current champ Mason “The Line” Dixon. Popular chatter builds up, the old Rocky re-registers for his license, and we have a heavily-billed bout of “Will vs. Skill”.

The one disappointment I had was that the remixed “Eye of the Tiger” soundtrack featured at the end of the trailer was all but absent.

Meh.

Not a bad movie by itself:

• High-stakes gambling. Favorite line: Bond: This is for you. (Throws $1M chip as tip to dealer.) Dealer: Thank you very much, sir.
• Assassin who needs two more hits to get promoted. Hit men have corporate ladders, too.
• Fewer in-your-face blatantly-obvious advertisements for Smirnoff, Heineken, BMW, Omega, etc. Or maybe I just didn’t notice this time around. Or maybe sponsors weren’t sure about Daniel Craig.
• Car chases, hand-to-hand, gun-to-gun, and nailgun-to-gun combat are all there and all good, but nothing we haven’t already seen in ten years of Rambo and Lethal Weapon.

But, not a great James Bond movie:

• No gadgets. I understand that this movie is a prequel of sorts, but the gadget-guy does make an appearance, so therefore should have bestowed gadgets.
• Not a full harem of Bond girls. There’s supposed to be a “good” Bond girl and a “bad” Bond girl. We only get a single tragically flawed villainness who might actually be good deep deep down inside.
• No absurd “wow” intro scene. Yes, Bond is not yet a 00 agent, but it doesn’t mean he can’t engage in some fancy spywork. I’m thinking Pierce Brosnan at the beginning of Goldeneye, shooting up some terrorist location, then riding a motorcycle off a cliff sans parachute to dive after and pilot away the only plane out of Dodge. There is a nice parkour chase scene, but it’s more an example of the movie simply following a trend than it is of the movie breaking any kind of new cinematic ground.
• No diabolical villain with dreams of world domination and a grandiose plan-revealing monologue. Just some math geek who likes to play poker and play the stock market. He has some kind of messed-up nasty-looking eye, but that doesn’t quite cut it for “diabolical villain”. Crispin Glover looked more sinister in Charlie’s Angels.
• Daniel Craig doesn’t really strike me as a suave James Bond spy. International hard-core hitman? Definitely. Spy who finesses the wetwork and doesn’t wrinkle his tie? No. This movie could have very easily been retitled as The Transporter 4.

Honestly, if you saw this photo, would you think this was a James Bond movie, let alone a shot of James Bond himself?

This movie (I haven’t seen Infernal Affairs yet) brings me back to Boston.

Authentic Boston:

• Matt Damon and Marky Mark Wahlberg dropping their R’s for that Beantown accent.
• China Pearl.
• Massachusetts State House. I couldn’t figure out exactly where Matt Damon’s apartment was supposed to be. Beacon Hill?
• Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge.

Not Authentic Boston:

• Leonardo DiCaprio not holding his Boston accent through the whole movie.

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?

Equilibrium is set in a post-apocalyptic future where all citizens are required to take regular doses of the emotion-suppressing drug “Prozium”, in the belief that suppressing emotion will suppress conflict and thus avoid any future horrific wars.

The premise (art) sounds pretty good: Christian Bale plays John Preston, a law-enforcing Prozium-popping Cleric First-Class trained in the deadly art of gun kata, and spends lots of ammunition in the pursuit of peace for all.

I prepared myself for some hot 1-on-30 action, but my life instead unfortunately imitated the wrong part of the art. Equilibrium is a double-dose of Prozium. The lack of a story hinders more than helps this movie (even for one of this genre, where one doesn’t want a story to get in the way of the action). The monotonic Christian Bale is more snooze-inducing than stoic; even his record-setting 118 kills cannot save this movie.

The second import from Tony Jaa (Ong Bak) features the stuntman doing all his own spectacular stunts sans wires, computer graphics, camera tricks, acting, drama, and plot.

There is less parkour to enjoy than in the first movie, mostly because it seems like the movie producers decided to drop all pretense of a plot, and thus of any motivation for any chase scenes, and just skip straight to the video-game fight scenes.

There are more nods to other movies:

• We get to follow Jaa fight his way up a building in an extended, single-cut, 10-or-so-minute scene, Hard Boiled-style.
• He fights opponents of varying fighting styles: capoeira, swordsman, big dudes, and whip-wielding dominatrix (Bloodsport, Quest, Game of Death, just about any martial-arts film).
• He takes down a whole room of suit-wearing Agent Smith wannabes, Neo-style.

One never watches these movies for plot, but other inconsistencies still made the movie almost laughable to watch. In particular, the movie felt very much like watching someone play a video game, propelling Tony Jaa from one contrived fight scene to the next. Even more video-game like are the inconsistencies where after defeating one foe and turning to address the next opponent in turn (of course), the body of the first foe somehow disappears, Double Dragon style, to make room for the next fight.

As a side note, the Thai title Tom Yum Goong is the name of a spicy soup dish, which actually does have relevance to the movie (no spoiler; you’ll understand after you watch).

No surprises here; a Michael Mann TV show gets the Michael Mann movie treatment, except not as well as in Heat. The atmosphere and music soundtrack are all there, but the tension is missing, probably because Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell can’t really be compared to Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro (can anyone?). Gong Li makes the trip West only to be reduced to a role of broken-English eye candy. Perhaps surprisingly, Colin Farrell does a much better job acting out a gravelly-voiced Crockett than Oscar-winning Jamie Foxx does acting out Tubbs.

The story is what kills this movie. Bank robbers with huge guns? Ho-hum: just walk up to the bad guy and let the bullets bounce off. Natural disasters? Yawn: fly around town and save everyone. What remains would be a story involving extra-terrestrial villains, and Hollywood just won’t go for that (too geekily sci-fi for mainstream consumption).

Knowing all that, everyone knows the plot will inevitably involve:

• Lois Lane: there will be some kind of romantic interest story, and
• The villain: will get his (or her) hands on some Kryptonite. The story will have some inspiring ironic twist that even Superman needs help from normal humans every once in awhile.

Spider-Man remains by far the gold standard for movie adaptations of comic book material.

In the gratuitously-Orwellian not-too-distant rotoscoped future, “Substance D” is a very popular street drug that causes its users to develop split personalities. Fred (Keanu Reeves), an undercover Orange County narcotics officer and a Substance D addict, investigates Bob, a suspected high-up-the-food-chain dealer — his other self.

This film does not delve into the clichéd gangsta-bling-bling high-rolling lifestyle of a Southern-Californian drug kingpin; it instead explores the social aspects of drug addiction — the day-to-day life of a group of junkies, and the undercover officer planted amongst them.

	Body count: one junkie.
	Handguns: one, fired by high junkies in their backyard. No drive-bys (is this really Los Angeles?) or dramatic drug-kingpin takedowns.
	Assault rifles: one insignificant cameo appearance by LAPD SWAT.
	Dialogue: the lack of gunfights, car chases, explosions, and gangsta-bling-bling has to get evened out somehow …

The movie appears to be a typical cops-and-gangsters movie at first glance, but after careful critical viewing, one realizes that it is more of a parkour movie in the vein of many Jackie Chan movies. There are of course fisticuffs and gunplay, but the highlight of this movie are the numerous chase scenes on foot where the protagonists elude their pursuers with slick urban gymnastics. There are many obvious influences from Jackie Chan’s many movies:

• Leito climbs up a drain pipe up the side of a building (like Jackie Chan in Rush Hour).
• An unarmed Damien fights off gun-wielding thugs while handcuffed to a steering wheel (like Jackie Chan in Rush Hour).
• Damien and Leito have to rescue a little girl (Leito’s little sister Lola) who is chained to a rocket (like Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in … Rush Hour).
• There is an impossibly-huge “boss monster” thug at the end, just like in all Jackie Chan movies.
• Well-dressed thugs. Despite the fact that B-13 has no schools, police, or any other kind of civilized infrastructure, every thug somehow manages to have the latest and coolest threads. Where do they do their shopping?

Not taken from Jackie Chan movies:

• R rating: drug use, wanton murder and violence.
• No out-takes at the end after the credits.
• French gangsta rap.

Ian McKellen is back for another installment of Harrison Bergeron rhetoric. The cast is diluted with the introduction of many many more of the comic book characters. But in the end, I simply enjoyed the movie for what it was: a movie to start off the summer blockbuster season.

	Body count: high. Plenty of humans and mutants will not be around for a sequel (if there is one).
	Explosions, cars: 2-for-1 special! Pyro gives us lots of exploding cars.
	Eerie rhetoric from Auschwitz survivor Magneto about anti-mutanism.