A review requested by Chere Evans, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! The word “weird” is among the vaguest and therefore least useful terms in art criticism. It is […]
Before I go on and on about how Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is such a good example of the transporting cinematic power of unbridled spectacle, so profoundly, importantly great at creating a brand new world for our eyeballs to soak up and our brains to play in, that it almost completely […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: if we are being strict with words, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is closer to the […]
It is called Taken 3. Not Tak3n. I can’t express how disappointed that fact makes me, and if I were able to, it would probably just make you suspect that I had some severe emotional problems. So anyway, the grand finale that isn’t to a trilogy that wasn’t supposed to be, and who among us […]
To begin with, Lucy is dumb as all hell. It’s quite impossible to lose sight of that fact. It’s easily the dumbest movie of the summer of 2014, and there was a Transformers picture and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the running for that title, so y’know, it’s not a little achievement. If Lucy is […]
Ask me three months ago, and I’d have said it was no surprise at all that Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit would be the best action movie starring Kevin Costner to be released in the first quarter of 2014. Ask me right after I saw Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and I’d have said it was a […]
If Taken 2 had merely been exactly what it looks like – a carbon-copy retread of 2008’s Taken, the film with which Liam Neeson ushered in his very unexpected late-career reinvention as a savagely effective action star – that would have already raised its share of questions, like “okay, why?” Not that studios ever both […]
Maybe I was just in a really good mood when I saw it. But I found Taken to be an absolutely great movie. It is unquestionably a trashy action movie of no particular aesthetic merit, a shallow pleasure at best. But oh, how very pleasurable it is. The movie stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, […]
The Luc Besson-produced The Transporter and its sequel Transporter 2 are by all means dumb action movies, according to any reasonable definition of “dumb” that I can imagine. But they are both a great deal of fun also, and I do not deny having a certain affection for dumb fun. Particularly in the case of […]
Luc Besson is usually a pretty decent box office draw amongst the art house crowd in this country, which leaves me wondering why it took a year and a half for us to get Angel-A, purportedly his final live-action movie (which I’ll believe when he’s dead, and not a moment sooner), during which time the […]
Sometime around 1998, Luc Besson kind of stopped being a filmmaker and turned into a brand name. It was that year that he wrote and produced Taxi, the first significant and successful “Luc Besson film” that he didn’t also direct. Now he writes three or four films a year, and produces several more, making him […]
