TheRetroCritic

The Fast And The Furious franchise got its 8th instalment this year with The Fate Of The Furious , another action-packed, star-studded rollercoaster ride which promised an even bigger scale, crazier set-pieces, a new intimidating villain and some unexpected twists and turns.  The film opens with a street race, something that helped make this franchise popular early on, as Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) makes a point by racing someone in a juiced-up relic that's slowly falling apart. It's corny and completely ridiculous but it's a welcome homage to those films' relatively humble beginnings. This is as sensible as it gets in this movie, believe it or not, as the plot that soon unfolds only gets sillier and sillier. The Fast And The Furious movies have made a point to attempt to jump the shark higher and higher each time and it's somehow paid off with audiences flocking to each new instalment. Series veteran Vin Diesel plays a villain of sorts in this one as ev

Uwe Boll directs this loose video game-to-movie adaptation of the Dungeon Siege series, spending a whopping $60M on it making it the director's most expensive flop to date. The film stars Jason Statham as a farmer amusingly called "Farmer" whose farm, along with most of the kingdom, is one day invaded by demonic knights controlled by sorcerer Gallian (Ray Liotta) who is working with the King's (played by Burt Reynolds) slimy nephew Duke Fallow (an over-the-top Matthew Lillard) in an attempt to overthrow King Konreid. Farmer joins forces with his friend Norick (Ron Perlman) to try and save his wife and child and get to the bottom of this whole mess using his trusty boomerang. Don't ask. While the film boasts some decent visual effects here and there, its ambitions of emulating the Lord Of The Rings trilogy (John Rhys-Davies even has a role) falls resoundingly short as, not only is the story needlessly convoluted and really not all that interesting but th

The first Crank movie may have looked, at first glance, like just another run-of-the-mill Jason Statham actioner but it turned out to be something quite different: a high-octane pastiche poking fun at the action genre through a purposely far-fetched concept and an endearing willingness to go all out no matter what logic dictates. It was fresh, it was new, it was original. ... Sequel, anyone? Oh sure you'd have thought that Jason Statham crashing down into a car after falling out of a helicopter would have confirmed the end of that franchise but not so! For one thing, Statham bounced off the car so right there, here's a film with similar rules to those old Road Runner cartoons so anything's possible at this point. Crank 2: High Voltage picks up right where the first movie left off as the Chinese, who are still evil apparently, literally scrape Statham off the ground and proceed to replace his heart with some plastic doodad. Just for the f*** of it. Or, actually,

It's Sly time again as I put myself through The Expendables 3 . Had to be done.

What is The Expendables about, really? As a franchise, I mean. It's about a bunch of old badass dudes doing badass stuff, killing bad guys in ridiculous ways, overkills aplenty, the whole thing peppered with bad one-liners and people overcompensating for several things with oversized weapons. It's not exactly rocket science, but it doesn't need to be: it works. And yet... Somehow, in between the actually not too bad The Expendables 2 and this one, it seems that the franchise's maestro, Sylvester Stallone, has forgotten what the hell this whole thing was about in the first place. After a silly opening action sequence, we find ourselves in yet another silly action sequence except that, at the end of that one, a member of the "crew" is badly injured by Mel Gibson's villain. Something for which I blame Stallone's Barney Ross entirely, by the way, since he completely ruined the entire mission and put everyone at risk by yelling the bad guy

Well, The Expendables 3 finally has a trailer. Of sorts. Ok, it's kinda lame but at least we learn two things: 1/ It's the third film. 2/ All these peeps are in it: Shame you can't really see any of them properly and that one of them is missing (probably Kelsey Grammer?) but here's hoping that the next trailer gives us a little more than an awkward mass catwalk and some whistling. To be continued...

Back in 2001, when The Matrix was still all the rage and "the One" was still Keanu Reeves, there was another "One". Jet Li, that is, in a little film called, quite simply: The One . Directed by James Wong, mostly known for his work on the Fast & Furious franchise, The One was originally meant to star The Rock (yes, when he was still known as The Rock) but, since he was busy working on The Scorpion King , Jet Li was soon cast in the main role. One year post- Romeo Must Die , Li was starting to build a solid US portfolio movie-wise and starred in this goofy sci-fi actioner also starring Jason Statham. The film introduces the idea of a multiverse, basically the existence of multiple parallel universes. In a Highlander -esque twist, if one was to kill every single version of himself throughout the universes, he would gain all their energy and, that way, become some kind of super-powerful being. Which is why Yulaw, evil Jet Li, travels from dimension to dimen