After a good year for the comic movies last year with Iron Man, Dark Knight and Incredible Hulk all showing what can be done when a comic movie sticks to the source material. We get arguably amongst you comic fan boys the most popular anti-hero getting his very own movie. Hugh Jackman made this role his own the mixed X-men trilogy playing the role right on the money so a full length feature focusing on him should get the nerves tingling. So with that the fightrunner team gathered for our weekly assualt on the Vue cinema in Aberdeen.
And on paper things look good we see the early days of wolverine and his brother sabertooth some 145 years ago and then through some intriguing shots we see them fighting in all the major conflicts of the past century until present day where they are employed by the mysterious General Stryker to join a band of mercs who also posses special abilities. During a mission in Nigeria Wolverine has a crisis of conscience and retreats to a simple life as a lumberjack in Canada living out a wholesome life with a school teacher. Sabertooth then murders his girlfriend and Wolverine agrees to take part in the Weapon X programme with Stryker to get his revenge, it is here that he gets his Adamantium skeleton and wolverine as we know and love him is born.
On paper it all sounds good and for the first 15 minutes things look promising as the band of mercs including Ryan Reynolds as one of my comic book faves Deadpool (or the character who will become him later) and Reynolds nails this role and at the start i had very high hopes but then the film goes awry. The plot just becomes a very disorganised mess punctated by some decent fight scenes and dodgy CGI. The whole movie feels rushed and the makers were 50/50 on wether to keep true to the comics or try the best please everyone route and keep clear from the source.
Point in case is the later appearance of Deadpool or what the writers have made Deadpool into and this is not Deadpool in anyway. The whole appeal of this character was the “merc with a mouth” and in the opening Reynolds hits it perfectly but at the end Deapool can’t talk. What the fuck? Its like spider-man with no webs, superman no lasers from his eyes, hulk not smashing you get the picture. Now I’m not fan boy and will allow movie makers a little licence when bringing a comic character from the page to screen but to fundamentally change such a popular character in such a way is a crime.
Another sticking point is the very crap CGI employed at times like the scene where wolverine is checking out his new claws in a bathroom looks just shite. I have no idea why they didn’t just use prop claws as they would have done the job. But like i say there is some entertaining action and an array of marvel characters are ticked of the list but it feels like that they are trying to satisfy the comic book spotters in the audience. But this film is way of the mark for casual and hardcore viewer alike as the plot twists that come just don’t shock or excite. But the movie gains some points with the Fightrunner team for a brief Patrick Stewart cameo.
Seeing as there was no films about Zombie Nazi’s left at the old blockbuster store, Inferno and myself decided to rent a more mainstream, but still blokey film. I had only heard good things about this movie and I was pretty optimistic.
The plot: Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA agent who is trying to be closer to his daughter as she grows into a young woman. The pressures of his old lifestyle has already broken his marriage and his daughter now lives with her cunt of a mother who has shacked up with some old rich dude that keeps trying to buy her affection. Mills realises that he has to make up for all the time he was away on missions as his daughter was growing up, when she asks if she can travel in Europe for a few weeks with a friend, he is reluctant but realises that he may loose her if he doesn’t allow her to grow up.
Turns out this was a bad idea, as she is only in France a few hours when her friend and her are kidnapped by Albanian pimps. She is on the phone to her father as it happens and he talks to one of the abductors, vowing to use his CIA skills to track them down and kill them all. When he arrives in France, it doesn’t take him long to start putting clues together and soon he is on to there case. Cue the onslaught of uber violence as he beats, shoots, explodes and brutally tortures his way through the European underworld in order to locate his beloved daughter.
Neeson is outstanding in this movie. To be honest, he has made a living out of playing stony faced serious types and you know what? He does it here again… but he does it so well that you just have to love him for it. He is about 55 now, but he still comes across as a pretty fit dude. You can honestly believe that he can handle himself as you are presented with him taking on an entire crack house full of Albanian scum bags and handing them the beat down of the millennium.
The violence is pretty extreme, not overly gory, just you can see the rage inside Nessons character as he desperately tries to get his daughter back. It soon becomes apparent that he will stop at nothing to achieve this. One scene in particular conveys this, he tortures a man by ramming two 6 inch nails into his thigh bones, then attaches them to the house mains via crocodile clips…. OOCHAAA!!! Also heads get smashed in car doors, a dude gets a broken bottle stabbed into his chest, another gets a fire extinguisher rammed off his face 8 or 9 times and more people get chopped in the throat than I care to remember.
This movie is dark and violent, but I still think that most women will still enjoy it, as every moment in this film, you can see the love that Neesons character has for his daughter. You know that although he is being a brutal monster at times, it is all spawned for that love that can never be broken. Have to say it again, Neeson is unbelievably good in this!!!
Dark, broody, violent, intelegent film making, that is a relief after this years wishy washy cinema realises.
Verdict: 9/10
Let it TAKE your attention to the darker side of life.
Well as you can all tell, everyone here at Fightrunner HQ is a HUGE fan of the Marvel comic book hero The Punisher. Since we showed you the awesomely violent trailer for his latest movie incarnation “Punisher Warzone, we have all been waiting for it with baited breath. So when i saw it was out last weekend, I nearly pissed in my pants with excitement… Only to be bitterly disappointed in the fact that my local Cinema in Aberdeen wasn’t showing it for fuck know what reason!!!!
So what did I do? Well I did the only sane thing I could do… me and Inferno saddled up our horses (Mazda 6) and headed south to the nearest cinema, approx 55 miles away… I know its sad but we just needed our violence fix, and we needed it bad!
Punisher: Warzone doesn’t exactly follow on from his last incarnation played by Thomas Jane. This time the gun toting vigilante’s boots are filled by Ray Stevenson of Rome fame.
As a mob boss celebrates his 100th birthday in style, surrounded by all his underworld crones, the Punisher sees this as a perfect opportunity to clear the cities troubles out once and for all. He kicks of the party by decapitating the 100 year old Don before stirring up a shit storm in an almighty gun fight. This battle leaves a huge gap in the underworld which is soon filled by one Billy the Bute, so old Frank Castle decides he deserves some punishment… no scratch that gunishment too. After taking his crew apart, he bungs Billy into a glass recycler (big whirley churney up machine) but soon his rampage is cut short as he relises that one of the despatched henchmen was in fact an undercover FBI agent.
Now torn with the guilt of what he has done, Frank decides to give up the Punisher game, not for long though (yeah you saw that coming didn’t you?). It would seem the whurley machine didn’t finish off Billy and now hes back in town with his face all stitched up, calling himself “Jigsaw” and stirring up trouble. Time for the Punisher to get back into action!!!!
Sorry that went on for a bit really…. I was really really looking forward to this, especially after I heard he kills over 250 people in it and 30 of them in the first 10 mins. But to be honest it didn’t quite “be all it could be”! For sure all the violence was there… I mean fuck me was it there, I would go into all the gruesome killings but it would just spoil it for you really! But the film just didn’t live up to the comics for me. It was a mishmash of all the Marvel Max (adult editions) comics written by Garth Ennis… but the script just seemed rushed. I feel if they had just kept to one of the original brilliant stories this movie really could have been the action film of 2009.
One thing I will say, this truly is more of a Punisher movie than the Thomas Jane one, who incidentally didn’t want to make this one due to the level of violence involved, I mean what the fuck??? Its the Punisher… try reading the comic dude, he doesn’t go about getting people to sign petitions or something. I loved the cheesey 80’s version staring Dolf Lungren, but still this movie has more bite and Stevenson suits the part far more than the other two. He looks more the part and his style is certainly more that of Castle himself.
For me it was still a bloody good watch, in the same way that I can enjoy mindless violence films of the 80’s, I can enjoy this. That’s all it was made for, and before you say it ladies… this film was made by a woman!!! Ha, stick that in your pipe and smoke it bitch!!!!
Verdict: 7/10
If you like guns and grousome deaths, this is the movie for you… if not you should be PUNISHED!!!
Time for a movie that is ingrained in the DNA of every member of the fightrunner team, Total Recall. As you know we all have a soft spot for the mighty Austrian Oak round these parts and when this classic popped up on my TV screen a few weeks ago I realised we had never given it the TLC that it deserves. So, being the moral crusader for justice that I am I have decided to give this piece the treatment it deserves.
Storywise, you should all know this one off by heart and if hear anyone say that they have never watched it I can only conclude three things:
1.) You’re a girl
2.) You’re gay
3.) You’re clinically insane.
So for these three groups I will explain the plot. In the near future Arnie plays Douglas Quaid a construction worker who is haunted by dreams of mars and a mysterious woman that appears in said dreams. Upon visiting a clinic that transplants memories of vacations direct into the human mind, it triggers repressed memories of a previous life on Mars. Being chased by a mysterious team of heavies he runs to Mars to find out his true indemnity and gets wound up in a plot of rebellion against a dictator and a battle to provide free air for the inhabitants of the Mars colony.
Simple but effective as this is essentially one very long chase movie jam packed with that OTT violence violence we have come to expect from both the lead actor and director (Paul Verhoeven). And way too many cool fights, explosions, car chases and gun fights to mention. This is just simply a reminder of why the 80’s was the decade of the action movie as the action is comes thick and fast with non of the irony that seems to fill up modern day actioners. Memorable lines ? way too many here and I bet you have heard them all one minor sticking point may be the absence of ‘I’ll be back’ from the Schwarz. In short there is way too much good stuff packed into the running time for me to mention but one stand out would be the subway chase with Arnie using a dead body as a bullet shield and the literal disarming of Michael Ironsides head goon. One thing overlooked in this movie is the special effects which still hold up to this day and overall this movie hasn’t aged badly.
What you have here is a perfect merging of director and star with the ideal script, a true Action/Sci-Fi classic.
We have all seen the trailer for this and it caused quite a stir in the old FIGHTRUNNER office… The trailer seems crisply directed and action packed, much like the game. So I figured it may break the run of crappy game to movie spin offs.
The movie follows the story of a widowed cop, Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg). He came home one night to find crazed junkies in his house and his wife and baby daughter murdered in their beds. Three years later and Payne is working the long forgotten cold cases in the police department basement, endlessly trawling through unsolved crime files in order to make a link with the one person that got away from his wife’s murder. As things begin to unravel, Payne gets framed for the death of his ex partner and the sister of a Russian crime boss… then he begins to use his own style of detective work in order to get to the root of the whole plot.
To be honest, the film looked like an action packed block buster but that is not really the case. It is seriously slow to get going… there is barely any action in the first 40 mins of the film. The trailer seems to have pieced together all the best shot out scenes in the movie, leaving us with the impression that it is gonna be a bulletathon… when in actual fact, the movie is far more concerned with driving the plot and keeping you guessing.
That’s not to say that its bad. the cinematography is amazing and the plot and scrip seem to have had a lot of time spent on them.. but I just cant help but think if they had thrown in a few more gun fights in the first half of the movie then this really could have been a classic. It just feels like a bit of a drag and your kind of like… “come on, just fucking shoot someone… ANYONE!!!”.
However, when the action does eventually decide to show its face it comes thick and it comes hard! The scene where the swat try to take him down in an office block is amazingly well done. Max runs along firing his 9mm as the cops let loose with fully automatic gunfire, hitting everything glass in the northern hemisphere but somehow missing him. And the slow-mo, jumping back, shotgun blasting is particularly cool. But in all fairness it just feels like it’s lacking something, and the action comes too late to fully redeem itself.
For me, Wahlberg just doesn’t look like the Max Payne from the games enough, hes too round faced and not as manic as the original. But I easily forgave him for it as he plays the tortured soul with a badge very well indeed. Just a shame he doesn’t get to crack a few more sculls!
Verdict: 6.5/10 Probably wait for the DVD release!
Better than most game to movie adaptations, just a Payne that it doesn’t give you more bang for your buck! (Yeah I know, it’s like I am not even trying anymore isn’t it?)
I decided to watch this flick tonight as there was not much else on and as I’m away on holiday cannot count on my to watch pile or *cough* independent Internet sources for something to watch. I went into this with very low expectations as it had Jason Statham in it. I am not saying Jason Statham is a bad actor but his name has been attached to some god awful movies. But as long as everyone goes into this with low expectations then you won’t be disappointed.
This movie is action, pure and simple. Plot holes, cliches and improbability reign supreme. But fuck it is fun. Daft, Corny, Predictable but still fun. And these days it is good to see an action movie not take itself too seriously and just get one with entertaining. Plot is paper thin but easy enough the titular transporter (frank) carries out jobs for the crime underworld no questions asked. He then gets a job where he needs to transport a 50kg bag which turns out to be a hostage. His conscience gets the better of him and he discovers that his package is in fact a hot Asian chick (Why are my packages always just wrong deliveries from amazon?). Needless to say he falls for her and then gets involved in some shady illegal immigrant malarkey leading to more fights, guns and chases.
There you have it plain and simple, a plot just flimsy enough to allow for some action and on that simple premise it delivers. The fights are great Mr Statham taking on 20 people at a time and also the main character that flies planes, drives trucks can do pretty much anything that the situation needs him to do. there is no real point in discussing the rest of the cast as they are just there to move the action along with a bit of exposition. The leading lady does not have much to do in this but as eye candy she does the job but surely a few more skimpy outfits would not have been out of the question ?. This review may seem short on detail but so is the movie, don’t question it just sit back and relax for this is proper bloke’s movie explosions, chases, guns, fights, slo-mo jumping a plenty what more could you want?.
(well the main lady in a bikini/underwear for say 50% of the movie obviously)
Rating: 6/10 (misses out on 7 becuase we don’t see enough flesh from our leading lady)
This film reminds me of the Jean Claude Van Damme action packed movie ‘Cyborg’; A hard nut protecting a young girl of great importance.
Good to see Vin getting back to action movies again, rather than hamming it up for Disney.
To say that i was nervous about this is an understatement , the memory of Ang Lee’s disappointment way too fresh in the mind for my liking. But this is not a sequel as such or a reboot i would say its more like HULK 1.5 retaining some of the story from the previous but introducing fresh actors and some much needed pace and action to proceedings.
The Plot has been trimmed of the excess the dogged the first Hulk with Bruce Banner now being played by Edward Norton living in exile down in Brazil but a chance accident alerts the army to his presence and Banner goes on a trek to New York to find an elusive cure for his anger problems with the army chasing him all the way. An Elite marine Blonsky (Tim Roth) becomes obsessed with the hulk and takes a serum to able him to fight the Hulk one on one but an overdose of serum leads to him becoming the Abomination and thus setting up the finale fight on the streets of New York.
The set action in this movie is well staged and the final battle does not disappoint but the best battle in the movie is a full scale army assault on the Hulk at a college campus. As well as action there is a good bit of humor injected into the proceedings and plenty of in-jokes referring to the Hulks problems with trousers. Also to watch out for is a very funny take on the don’t make me angry line.
The serious parts of the movie do not feel forced and flow very well with Liv Tyler doing a great turn as the love interest. Edward Norton thankfully nails Bruce Banner and gets it right from the start as a desperate man who wants to change what he is but ultimatelyhas to accept it. William Hurt is as dependable as ever as an estranged father and army general torn between his job and love of his daughter. Tim Roth does the job as Blonsky/Abomination decently and never really gives the oomph you feel an actor of his ability could
Overall this another fine superhero movie from Marvel’s new production studio and is a more serious and mature alternative to the bright and breezy thrills of Iron Man and it fits its expandable trousers with ease. I am only knocking points of as the soundtrack whilst decent could have pushed this movie to the top of the comic hero pile alongside iron man.
Rating 8/10 – A fine and welcome return for the Hulk,more of the same please Marvel
Fumihiko Sori was the producer on Appleseed and the character animator for James Cameron’s Titanic. Now he has a go at directing himself and the results are nothing less than breath-taking.
After Japan withdraws from the UN, refusing to heed new cyborg laws, they become an enigma. Clouding their country from satellites and spies with the most complex technologies, no-one has been in or out for ten years.
Until… a Japanese diplomat organises a meeting with politicians from the UN states and promptly replaces them with identical cyborgs. Undetectable with even the most thorough of scanners.
The American military, acting outwith orders, send in an elite team of soldiers to bring down the Japansese cloaking device from within. Among that team is the titular character Vexille.
What she finds there is incomprehensible. I don’t want to spoil it for you because it is the biggest revelation of the movie.
She teams up with some of the locals to usurp the megalomaniac president and his cyborg armies before they conquer the world.
The storyline to this film may be lacking in any emotional substance (there’s a brief love triangle, but it’s given short shrift), but that’s not what you’ll watch this for anyway. You’ll watch this to be dazzled by the advancements in animation technology. And it’s all here.
Watching this is like playing the most advanced Final Fantasy game. You’re constantly left gaping in awe at the amazing graphics. The best comes near the end with the large ‘Fangs’(Monsters made of metallic junk) piling through the desert. There is such intricate 3-D detail in them that you half-expect them to jump out the screen.
I’d love to watch this on HD. In fact, I think I’d be willing to buy an HD system just for this movie.
There are a lot of similarities to the film Appleseed, which clearly influences it, but the images are much sharper and clearer here.
Verdict 8/10
Visually stunning, but the story’s lacking.
When I first saw the trailer for Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, depicting Scots as savage cannibals, I thought this film looks crap. Then I thought, this film looks a bit racist. Well… It isn’t racist.
Doomsday charts the outbreak of a virus in Glasgow and the subsequent quarantine of Scotland. Locking the healthy people in with the infected by rebuilding Hadrien’s wall.
In the midst of this a young child is saved and carried off by soldiers, leaving her grieving mother behind.
Fast forward 25 years and the child is grown up. She’s a highly trained cop or soldier(It isn’t clear) with an attitude; Eden Sinclair, played here by Rhona Mitra.
When the virus is found in London the government plan another qauarantine, but there may still be hope. Survivors have been spotted by satellites in Scotland. If Eden can lead a team into Scotland and find a cure within 48 hours, they may be able to prevent an outbreak.
Tasked with finding Doctor Kane(Malcolm McDowell), who they think found a cure, they head over the wall.
The locals aren’t too friendly. They’re more likely to eat you than shake you by the hand. A group of Neo-punks led by Sol(Craig Conway) take the team prisoner and begin cooking them one by one. Eden manages to escape along with another native prisoner.
The native leads her and her quickly dwindling team to Kane’s medieval castle. There, the once great Doctor, has made himself a bloodthirsty King. He watches over Eden as she fights in a gladitorial bout.
Doomsday never really finds its own voice, but, rather, jumps from one diluted movie reference to another. The first act is clearly influenced by Aliens and Escape from New York. The second by all three Mad Max films. The third act is more like V for Vendetta and Equilibrium. It’s a shame that these influences shine brighter than the original plot points because it would have a better film otherwise.
The acting is poor. Ever since Keira Knightly tried to sound tough in Pirates of the Carribean, I’ve been convinced that posh English accents and tough talk don’t mix. The last line of this film is supposed to inspire fear and awe, but Eden’s too busy chewing on her marbles.
McDowell and Bob Hoskins are painfully underused. Even overshadowed by the Blair/Brown government characters.
The one stand out actor was Craig Conway. He was brilliant as the over the top Sol. He was the evil villain you couldn’t help but love.
Another clever bit was the use of music. Fine young Cannibals blares out as the savages start to cook Sean Pertwee.
If Marshall had toned down his obvious love for the movies that influenced him, this would be a great follow-up to the brilliant ‘The Descent’ and ‘Dog Soldiers’.
Verdict 5/10.
A mixture of parts that never become a whole.
The Transporter
