Reviews & features: Action
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Fast & Furious 6
17 May 2013
If you like your stunts outrageous and your plot soapy and undemanding, this won't disappoint
For a franchise with simple tastes – gleaming cars, well-oiled muscles and bikini babes – the Fast & Furious series has always been ultra-willing to re-tune its engines. This time, we’re in London – a first – and the gang, led by Vin Diesel’s Dom…
The Liability
10 May 2013
Tim Roth and Jack O'Connell pair up for a seemingly familiar hitman film
You may get struck by déjà vu watching The Liability, the third feature film by former cinematographer Craig Viveiros. A story of a taciturn hitman and his callow assistant starring Tim Roth, it sounds suspiciously like a remake of Stephen Frears’ 1984…
Deadfall
10 May 2013
Contrived thriller from the director of The Counterfeiters
Stefan Ruzowitzky’s concentration camp drama The Counterfeiters won him an Oscar and promised to spring the Austrian director through the ranks of directorial talent. Strangely, it’s taken him five years to make his English language debut, and despite a…
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10 May 2013
Car-based thriller starring Paul Walker neither fast nor furious enough
Having made his name with souped-up vehicular antics in the Fast and Furious franchise, there’s a small smirk to be had when Paul Walker’s Michael Woods lands in Johannesburg and finds himself mistakenly saddled with a sedentary rental minivan. Fans of…
Dragon
30 Apr 2013
Fast-moving martial arts flick with dazzling action scenes
A welcome entry to the martial arts genre, Peter Chan's Dragon is a fast-moving action thriller that has the brains to match its brawn. Set in the Yunnan province in China in 1917, the film picks up as peaceful handyman Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen) is forced…
Top 5 superhero romances
30 Apr 2013
Iron Man 3's Tony Stark and Pepper Pots are but the latest in a long-line of superhero sweethearts
Warning: may contain spoilers!
Iron Man 3
24 Apr 2013
Director Shane Black recovers from a lacklustre second instalment with wit and subversion
The third instalment in Marvel’s Iron Man franchise has its work cut out in both bettering its own relatively lame sequel and following the massive success of The Avengers. Thanks to director Shane Black (who also co-wrote the script with Drew Pearce)…
Evil Dead II, Stitches, The Man With the Iron Fists - DVD & Blu-ray round-up April 2013
18 Apr 2013
A selection of the best (and worst) horror and action movies released this month
Time for another trip into the darker recesses of the DVD release schedule. With a remake about to hit the cinema it’s prime time to revisit Evil Dead II (Studio Canal) ●●●●●, and it’s still an absolute classic. It’s the archetypal ‘cabin in the woods…
Olympus Has Fallen
18 Apr 2013
The Gerard-Butler starring action flick is a derivative throwback to straightforward action movies
Will anyone welcome Kim Jong-Un’s flirtation with nuclear apocalypse? Well, Gerard Butler might, as the new Dear Leader has provided the mother of PR gifts to this piece of action-disaster cinematic imperialism. Butler plays Mike Banning, head of the…
Oblivion
10 Apr 2013
Tom Cruise's latest sci-fi outing is visually splendid but features overfamiliar plotting
His first sci-fi since Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, there is a queasy sense of familiarity with Tom Cruise’s new film, Oblivion. It hardly helps that his character, a cocky blue-collar repairman, is named Jack Harper – which sounds uncannily…
All Things to All Men
28 Mar 2013
Formulaic cops and robbers thriller starring Gabriel Byrne and Rufus Sewell
The opening minutes of All Things to All Men suggest that something interesting could be in the offing. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ says a gun dealer as stony-faced thief Riley (Toby Stephens) concludes their transaction. ‘Just like old times,’ says…
GI Joe: Retaliation (3D)
27 Mar 2013
The Bruce Willis and Dwayne Johnson-starring sequel is a pleasantly surprising improvement
If GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra represented the brain-dead summer blockbuster at its absolute worst, then the marked improvement of belated follow-up GI Joe: Retaliation is a pleasant surprise. Jon M Chu’s sequel abandons the effects-heavy, charisma-free…
Stolen
25 Mar 2013
Nicolas Cage's reunion with Con Air director Simon West is disappointingly lacking in tension
What with Nicolas Cage's recent output conforming rigidly to the law of diminishing returns, it was with hopeful optimism that some fans regarded the name Simon West on the poster for Stolen. West's directorial debut was a little film called Con Air…
Trance
22 Mar 2013
Vibrant, genre-subverting thriller contains trio of assured performances
Director Danny Boyle has a flair for making vibrant, zeitgeist-capturing films about characters in extreme situations ultimately overcoming the odds – whether it’s an Edinburgh heroin addict in Trainspotting, a teenaged Mumbai orphan accused of cheating…
Jack the Giant Slayer
19 Mar 2013
Bryan Singer's adaptation is a decent enough storybook yarn, if a little too earnest
Judging by the early word from the US, where this blockbuster fairytale has performed poorly at the box office, you’d think it was a flop of gigantic proportions. It may not be on a par with director Bryan Singer’s X-Men films, but Jack the Giant Slayer…
Parker
8 Mar 2013
Lax plotting lets down this crime caper starring Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez
If there’s one thing to be gleaned from the late Donald E Westlake’s hard-boiled Parker novels (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark) and the movies inspired by them, it’s that there’s no honour among thieves. Parker is a career criminal with a…
Oz the Great and Powerful
8 Mar 2013
An action-packed spectacle of a prequel, starring James Franco, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis
This prequel to The Wizard of Oz might have been little more than an expensive special effects extravaganza were it not in the hands of a director with as distinctive a visual style and flair for knockabout comedy as Sam Raimi. As with Tim Burton’s…
Fire with Fire
4 Mar 2013
Dull action revenge flick starring Bruce Willis and Josh Duhamel
Oh, Josh Duhamel – is there nothing you can do? In between contributing nothing much to each instalment of the Transformers series, he has popped up in low-to-middling romantic ventures like Safe Haven and New Year’s Eve. He even joined the cast of this…
Aftershock
28 Feb 2013
Eli Roth co-writes and stars in this grisly disaster movie
Aftershock was probably the biggest film of the FrightFest weekend, mainly because star/co-writer/horror icon Eli Roth was in the house for the screening (along with director Nicolás López and co-star Lorenza Izzo), a real coup for the festival. The…
Gangs of Wasseypur (Part 2)
26 Feb 2013
Highly entertaining second part of the vibrant Bollywood gangster drama
The second half of Anurag Kashyap’s Hindi gangster epic picks up immediately where its predecessor ended; with the marketplace murder of Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee) by a gang of masked motorcyclists. Despite his initial reluctance, Sardar’s son Faizal…
Welcome to the Punch
26 Feb 2013
James McAvoy and Andrea Riseborough star in this showy action flick from the director of Shifty
There is something distinctly hypocritical and pernicious about the way this homegrown thriller gestures towards a moral stance on gun violence, only to itself locate firearms as not only an absolutely critical element in effective policing, but also…
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
25 Feb 2013
Unsatisfying horror, comedy and action combo starring Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is the dunderheaded English-language debut of Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola (best known for highly entertaining Nazi zom-com Dead Snow). Despite a promisingly (and characteristically) daft concept it's a film that lacks…
A Good Day To Die Hard
14 Feb 2013
Disappointing addition to the Die Hard franchise starring Bruce Willis and Jai Courtney
From wretched title to poorly conceived premise, A Good Day To Die Hard is a dispiriting exercise in franchise flogging which should never have seen the light of day. Based on a script by Skip Woods and directed by John Moore (of Max Payne and The Omen…
The Thieves
13 Feb 2013
Patchy Korean heist flick with an overly large cast but some impressive action set-pieces
Korean writer/director Choi Dong-Hoon follows up previous efforts The Big Swindle and Tazza: The High Rollers with another crime caper aiming to be the Eastern equivalent of Ocean’s Eleven. Unfortunately, The Thieves comes in rather below those slick…
Reign of Assassins
11 Feb 2013
Deft martial art flick starring Michelle Yeoh and produced by John Woo
The worldwide sensation of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon seemed to promise that the martial arts styling of the ‘wuxia’ would spawn an internationally popular sub-genre. But after an initial flurry including House of Flying Daggers and Hero…
