Sorry, What to Watch took a turkey day break as last week was really light on new product worth mentioning. This week? Pretty much the same but we don’t want you to miss us too badly. Here’s five recent Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming releases that may have caught your attention on new release shelves lately, ranked in the order we’d add them to our holiday wish list.
Jason Statham
Dull ‘Homefront’ Can’t Get Action into an Action Movie
Submitted by PatrickMcD on November 27, 2013 - 5:22am Rating: 2.5/5.0 |
CHICAGO – Sylvester Stallone is a difficult man to comprehend, unless if doing a thesis on male menopause. The one time screenwriter of gritty soul pictures like “Rocky,” “Paradise Alley” and “First Blood” is spending his later years pumping out undistinguished boom-boom pictures like “Homefront.”
Jason Statham Shows Range on Road to ‘Redemption’
Submitted by BrianTT on June 28, 2013 - 9:51am Rating: 3.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – Stephen Knight, the writer of brilliant scripts for “Eastern Promises” & “Dirty Pretty Things,” makes his directorial debut with “Redemption,” opening today in limited release, starring Jason Statham in a role that proves that he has more dramatic range than he’s usually asked to display.
Jason Statham Steers Convoluted Tale as ‘Parker’
Submitted by PatrickMcD on January 25, 2013 - 5:15pmRating: 3.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – The Jason Statham “character” has served the actor well through a substantial action movie career. But as situations to fit his stoic British kick-ass persona start to drift away, Statham is left with messy narratives like in his new film “Parker,” co-starring Jennifer Lopez.
Sylvester Stallone in Formulaic ‘The Expendables 2’
Submitted by PatrickMcD on August 18, 2012 - 6:16amRating: 3.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – Face it, it is fun to see the major action stars of the 1980s, ‘90s and now – Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger – together again for “The Expendables 2.” Why the hell can’t anyone write a decent story for them?
Jason Statham in Highly Charged, Metaphoric ‘Safe’
Submitted by PatrickMcD on April 27, 2012 - 7:16pm Rating: 3.5/5.0 |
CHICAGO – There is an underlying smokiness to the ultra-violent “Safe” that is worth exploring. By creating a triangle of doom between the Chinese mob (the Triads), the Russian mob and the corrupt New York City Police Department, it’s just a small leap to apply the same function between the countries they represent. Action star Jason Statham puts it all together.
‘Killer Elite’ Mistakes Cliché For Action
Submitted by BrianTT on September 23, 2011 - 8:15am Rating: 1.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – “Killer Elite” is an exhausting, nonsensical, illogical, loud collection of action clichés masquerading as a modern action film. It features characters less three-dimensional than most cartoons doing and saying things that are only done and said in movies. Bad movies. Really bad movies.
Jason Statham in ‘The Mechanic’ is a Mindless Repeat of All Prior Gun-Toting Slayers
Submitted by HollywoodChicago.com on January 28, 2011 - 2:28pmRating: 2.5/5.0 |
CHICAGO – It wouldn’t be a Jason Statham film if in it he was just fixing cars. In “The Mechanic,” his profession is fixing people. And by fixing, like “The Transporter” he’s again cracking skulls.
Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham Are Halfway in ‘The Expendables’
Submitted by PatrickMcD on August 13, 2010 - 5:57amRating: 2.5/5.0 |
CHICAGO – Seeing them all together was fun. Enduring some macho joshing, even in the form of stiff dialogue, was tolerable. But doing a bad, boring action movie with Sylvester Stallone trying to prop up his “legacy” was sadly too much to bear. Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger are among “The Expendables.”
In Purely Exploiting Gratuitous Violence, Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Death Race’ Remake Kills All Comedic Value
Submitted by HollywoodChicago.com on August 22, 2008 - 1:23pm Rating: 2.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – While 2008’s “Death Race” makes no secret about being a remake of 1975’s “Death Race 2000” with David Carradine as the title character Frankenstein and Sylvester Stallone as his archrival Machine Gun Joe Viterbo, what’s perhaps less obvious but still clear is how the film steals from others.
Filled With Political Blackmail, ‘The Bank Job’ Pays Dividends
Submitted by HollywoodChicago.com on March 7, 2008 - 12:25pm
CHICAGO – Done properly, the classic heist or caper film is a welcomed genre of suspense-filled locations, stereotyped experts and the big cash payoff. Based in speculative part on the true story of a robbery in a vital London safety deposit vault, “The Bank Job” adds the spice of political intrigue as an underlying factor to the actual crime.
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