The Game (1997)

The movie starts off with a long (ish) home video and then we are introduced to Michael Douglas who plays Nicholas Van Orton who is an financier who doesn’t seem to have a particularly nice life. He almost reminds me of a tone down version of Gordon Gekko. In the film, he gets given a birthday present from him odd brother. He signs up to CRS which just screams wacko. After we are introduced to Nicholas and his brother the story spends a fair amount of time showing that CRS don’t seem the full ticket. The main question is just what is CRS offering and to be honest it’s a good question and it’s made even more intriguing because it Michael Douglas that its happening to. It’s not long until the story starts to unravel and the moment it goes weird is when Nicholas goes home and comes across the doll, then the TV starts talking to him. Things get even stranger when he encounters a waitress and after coming across a bloke on the floor the movie descends into a bit of a far fetched idea and whilst watching it I was thinking that it resembled North by Northwest a bit in that it stretches credibility a bit.

The film does have a strange curiosity to it as the question to what the game is. Things seem to be getting out of hand before the mad scene involves Nicholas and the house has been painted with ultra-violet paint and weird loud music.  When Conrad (Sean Penn) comes back into the story after appearing and leaving at the beginning, he seems somewhat more hysterical. He is very untrusting when he finds a glove compartment full of CRS keys. This leads to a nice scene between Penn and Douglas when they talk about stuff that has happened in their past.  After a good scene with Douglas being trapped in a taxi after it goes in the sea. When Douglas and the cops go to the CRS headquarters it has magically disappeared, that much was obvious.

What isn’t as obvious is what happens when Nicholas goes to see Christine. After smashing up the camera they had in the smoke detector, a bunch of men with guns come at then and attack them. It’s a great scene. After Christine tries to tell Nicholas whats going on there is a nice twist where we find out that Sam is in the con with CRS. All of a sudden Nicholas is dumped in the middle of mexico and spends several minutes getting back home where he finds his home is to be sold and it’s at this point he tracks down his ex-wife. The story climax’s with Nicholas shooting his brother by accident and in shock jumps off the top of a building and somehow manages to land on a pre-prepared crashmat. When he lands he discovers that his brother did this as a birthday present and he is in fact very much alive. Now if that were me then I wouldn’t just hug him, I would scream and shout at him and walk straight out. Nicholas acts like its just a small prank. The film easily falls apart when you start to think of the different scenarios that could have happened like if Nicholas had jumped off a different side of the building or if he’d hit something on the way down or even if he had shot his brother in the head instead of the chest.

The movie has two faces in it that are familiar to me. The first being Armin Mueller-Stahl (Anson Baer) and the second is Peter Donat (Sam Sutherland) who I know from the X-Files as Fox Mulder’s dad. Sean Penn is quite good and despite not being a big fan of the painfully indulgent actor I can’t deny that he wasn’t mesmerising on screen. Douglas is always good and he was especially good in this. As the lead female actor in the movie, Deborah Kara Unger was ok as Christine. She has a bit of an attitude to begin with but when she returns then she seems to have changed a bit.

This being a David Fincher film it was always good and Michael Douglas and Sean Penn carry the film well. You have to leave your senses at the door before seeing this because if you start to apply logic to this film then it becomes an absurd film but if your willing to look past this then it’s a perfectly fine film that flags a bit in the middle but picks up to a thrilling conclusion.

The Skeptic (2009)

I was a bit of a Sceptic watching the Skeptic. Mainly because it had Tom Arnold in it. Sorry I had to get that gag out of the way. According to IMDB, this film is also called The Haunting of Bryan Becket but The Skeptic sounds better.  

 

The story tells of Bryan Becket who at the beginning of the film finds out that his aunt has died. first reaction when he finds out his aunt died was that he inherits the house thus making him instantly unlikeable. It’s hard to believe that he a) is married and b) has a child. After the funeral he and Tom Arnold go and visit the house and he decides that due to his marriage troubles he is going to stay and sort things out. 

 

When Sully is having what seems like a fit, at first I thought he was pretending to have a fit but in a good twist he was actually unwell. Normally this would have been a joke but it seemed to be the first indication that this wasn’t going to be your typical middle of the road movie. 

 

When he realises that he doesn’t own the house he goes to some institute that his aunt  left the house to and after a bit of waffle we find out that his aunt believes that the house is haunted. I like that he is threatening to contest the will believing that the sleep lab trying to dupe an old woman and manipulate her but in reality it is Bryan that is doing it. 

 

What’s quite interesting is that it doesn’t go weird straight away but takes the time to build things up. The bit where Tom Arnold makes Bryan jump was quite a shocking moment. By the halfway point the shocks start to come more frequently before stopping again. Tom Arnold is easily the best thing in this (never thought I would admit that). Whenever he was on screen I was enjoying the movie but whenever he wasn’t on then I started to lose interest. 

 

The death of Bryan’s mother is used as a reason why Bryan is so sceptic. The wife and kid are bought back in after a while and it seems like they are bought it because the writer needs something fresh to keep the story going.  

 

Zoe Saladna (Cassie) is probably the next big name in this after Arnold. She is perhaps best know for appearing the most recent Star Trek movies. She starts off in the institute as a patient who seems a bit volatile and then disappears for a while before returning by forcing her way into the house. It’s at this point it seems to go even slower and its at this point that I started to give up as it seemed to go from being something spooky to just an episode of Dr Phil or something like that. There’s an awful lot of shouting and screaming from other rooms throughout this film. Robert Prosky also appears as Father Wymond and Prosky has one of those faces that you instantly recognise. He has played roles in Mrs Doubtfire (1993), Miracle of 34th Street (1995) and Gremlins 2 (1990). He died shortly after this film was finished and it’s a perfectly fine performance and he does get some good scenes.  

 

The film picks up in the final act when Bryan goes back in the house thinking that Cassie is in there. The film ends with him falling down the stairs looking into a room that seem to lead to a place that made him smile then it ends. It’s definitely a strange movie and ends all of a sudden. It’s a film that has its moments and its not the worse film that I have seen but I cant deny that it wasn’t what I was expecting. 

House (2008)

Film starts off with a couple. The husband shoots the wife in a house that is instantly weird. It has an interesting opening scene which is quite fun. This film’s big name is Michael Madsen and its odd that he gets first billing because he’s not in 80% of the movie. After the initial scene we then get to meet another couple (Jack and Stephanie) where the wife is doing her nails. The husband is very irritable and unlikeable. He’s a writer and she’s also annoying and a singer. They seem made for each other.


Michael Madsen plays the local law enforcement and its clear its not his greatest role. He appears in quite a sinister ay before returning towards the end like the one that they should have trusted all along. This doesn’t last long as its revealed that he is the tin man. Whilst it might be his greatest role he’s still the best thing in it. Though only just as Leslie Easterbrook comes a close second after playing Betty who seems to scream weird.

After driving down a path they hit something which flatten the tyres but they come across another car that has had the same thing happen to them. The couple don’t seem to get along and after walking to try and find help they then come across the house. They meet the couple who are the owners of the other car that they saw. They don’t meet any staff. But they suddenly appear after the lightning appears. It’s clear that they are all strange but in different ways. Pete is equally strange and more amusing than anything. Stewart is the head of the house and looks like he’s not got a sense of humour.

It’s at this stage of the movie that we start to learn why the couples are there and like always in these films its not coincidence. We learn that Jack and Stephanie lost a child called Melissa who fell through the ice. Jack still blames Stephanie. There is a moment when Stephanie tries to leave but a figure is stopping them. He is trying to get into the house and it scares Betty and her family. There a good moment where Stephanie is a cupboard and water seeps in and the floor freezes and she gets pulled through it. We learn that the girl in the red coat is the Stephanie and her hubbys child (Melissa) who after they neglected her went out and dies falling through the ice.

The man is the Tin Man and he only comes after those that need to be punished. He wants one person too die before the others would be freed. This is what is used to try and create some drama.

The other bloke’s story is that whilst out shooting he kills his dad. It’s at this moment that it becomes clear that he is a little unhinged and is actually a reason to be interested by the character. Leslie’s story is rather more grim than the other as we learn that she was abused by her uncle and she killed him. It’s at this moment she shows a bit of mental instability which made the character slighty more interesting. As they haven’t killed each other its down to the tin man to try and push them into doing it. Its quite a good scene but by this point I had lost track of what was going on. It seemed to be pulling in so many different directions that it was hard to keep up.

The final shot is of Michael Madsen looking at the ambulance chuckling to himself with the rest of the family observing from the windows. It’s another film where after escaping the danger its clear that the meance is just going to do this to someone else all over again. It isn’t a great film if I’m honest but it was much better than I was expecting. It seemed like it was going to be one film and then it turns out to be something else. There was something about this movie that seemed to work quite well and unlike House Hunting it didn’t overstay its welcome and ended at just the right time.

Man at Steel (2013)

Now the last time that I saw a Superman film was back in 2006 when we all had to endure ‘Superman Returns’ which was only redeemed by Kevin Spacey as Lex Luther. Apart from that it was a complete dogs dinner. Some have said it was more due to the writing than anything else and whilst there might some truth to it the fact remains that it was a bit of a let down. I’ve never been as big a fan of Superman as other maybe for no particular reason but I was quite excited about this one because it was been produced by Christopher Nolan who was behind the Batman films and that is one of things that is clear in the movie.

The casting was one of the things that made this movie so good. Henry Cavill isn’t a name that I was that aware of and I think it was a better bit of casting than Brandon Roth was. I thought he was a more believeable Clark Kent and what I liked about this version of Kent was that how he seemed to be lost and not in a normal job and yet by the end of it he was a reporter at the Daily Planet. Another bit of good casting is that of Amy Adams who played Lois Lane. I thought that a problem from ‘Superman Returns’ is that Kate Bosworth was terrible and just seemed like a whiny reporter and I could believe that she was a journalist, now with Amy Adams I found that she was a really good Lois Lane and whilst there were a few iffy moments I looked over it.

Russell Crowe was very good and I was glad when he kept popping up every so often because he was very good as Jor-El. I’ve thought that when Russell Crowe was good he was Maximus and when he was bad he was very bad. Thankully he wasn’t quite as good as he was in Gladiator but he was very close to being that good. Michael Shannon is an intense yet very good actor. I’m fan of his based purely on his involvement in Boardwalk Empire and as General Zod he continued to impress. I thought that the goatie was a bit of a mistake but apart from that I thought that General Zod was an effective baddie.

It’s clear that this is the first in a reboot because this film does what Batman Begins does and that is the set up the backstory. There was a lot of Krypton in the early stages of the story and I liked how it good it looked because it seemed to give Superman something to miss. The story sees General Zod trying to terror-form Earth into the new Krypton and if I am honest then I cant say that I think it’s a bad plan. Ok humanity would be wiped out by Michael Shannon’s Zod basically scares you into wanting to help them.

The first half is the Christopher Nolan part because its all about set up and trying to create the background to Zod, Jor-El and Superman and then the second half is Zack Snyder because there is a lot of smashing into buildings and being a blockbuster and to be honest they blended in well and I never really noticed a shift in tone and thought that it all worked. As this film is part of the Justice League movie we get the Lexcorp logo on the truck and apparently the Bruce Wayne logo on the satalite (which I didn’t see). Like the Avengers movie it seems like there are links to this Justice League movie but it doesn’t strangle the film and its only noticeable if you were really looking for it.

I enjoyed Man of Steel far more than I thought I would. I thought that like the Batman films it was a nice mixture of realism and geeky comic books. When we get Man of Steel 2 I hope that it continues in the same vain because if it does then this will be another Batman franchise for Warner Bros and that can only be a good thing for Superman fans. The biggest compliment I can pay to this film is that for a non-Superman fan, I enjoyed being in the company of Superman and long may it continue.

House Hunting (2013)

The film has quite a clever premise that hell is other people. Sadly that’s about as clever as it gets. The film starts with a woman clearly distressed running through the woods. We are introduced to two families. The first is the Hays family. They are a bit dysfunctional family, there is Susan (the stepmom) who doesn’t get on with the daughter (Emmy) and the father trying to keep the peace. Then there is the Thomson’s. In this family the Dad isn’t exactly getting on with his son. The dad is an idiot from start to finish he is an idiot. It seems that they suffered a bereavement as the mom sees someone who is apparently her daughter though she isn’t really there.


Just as the Hays are leaving they come across the woman that we saw at the beginning. Both families are connected by a weird guy in a funny hat (not funny ha ha but funny weird). He convinces them to go and look at the house. When they try and leave they keep finding themselves at the house. As this starts in daylight there is the obligatory wasting of time until its get dark. The woman doesn’t have a tongue so can only communicate by making a noise. The character is given a name called Hanna played by Rebekah Kennedy who is easily the best thing in the entire movie.

At one point the dads don’t trust each other, the moms start bonding and the youngsters start getting broody. Well the guy is the girl seems to be not as interested. The film then leaps forward by a month (for no clear reason) and they are still there and they still look around trying to find a way out and the seven cans of stew are still there.

Why doesn’t someone watch the cupboard with the stew to see who puts it there?

There is a kid who appears in the window and we find out that the guy in the weird hat killed him.

As the story progresses there is a jigsaw and every so often they find bits of it. After a long time it shows the daughter in the picture of the house but when the son looks at it then she has disappeared.

It’s not long before they start to turn on each other and through the early stages of their imprisonment there are various sharp objects that flash in front of the camera to make us aware of something. However these never seem to actually become part of the story, its like they pick on this idea and then give up on it.

There are a lot of things that don’t make sense in this film such as why they don’t smash the box that speak every morning or why they don’t give the girl with no tongue a pen and paper to write things down and especially after a month.

The mommy Thomson is the first to die. Her death seems to fuel the fire of distrust between the two dads.

There is a scene where we see what the son did in recently which involved a hit and run. This definably proves he was an arsehole and it’s the start for him as he goes slowly downhill. He impales himself on a twig and to be honest after trying to rape Emmy and also with what we learnt about his hit and run I thought he deserved it. Even after being impaled he was still lying to his dad and this just got a bit frustrating for me.

It’s easy to see it coming but basically the families are pitted against each other. That is fundamentally the problem with the film because normally I cant see these things coming but it was like setting flares off at these moments because if you couldn’t see them coming then you just weren’t trying. The psycho dad ties up the other family and tries to get help. Seems like an odd way to help people but anyway this is an odd film.

After the daughter does the walking backwards thing, the psycho dad tries it. There are moments when they have been doing it for so long that they then get to a moment and turn around thus meaning that they erase what they have done. This is another moment that makes the heart sink. Whilst the psycho dad is out the son goes into a ‘seizure’ and the phone starts to ring. The son was being strangled by the girl that he ran over. This leads to him confessing to his psycho dad and the dad is about to set the others free before the mom plants an axe in his back. The woman seems to be the mother of the weird man in a hat and the boy.

Susan is made to look like she has stolen the food which causes the dad to kill her. This is just after the stepmom confess to killing the daughter’s mom and made it look like suicide. The dad has now gone psycho. But not in a convincing way because instead of being in fear, I found it to be quite boring and just thought it was another silly thing that was wrong with the film.

The daughter is encountered by a new family that seems to be looking at the house and it seems to be starting the whole cycle. The last shot is of her tongue being cut and that was something else that was obvious and as I said earlier, I don’t normally pick up on these things.

The story starts to get frustrating as there are fundamental problems with the whole story. It gets a bit interesting when there are no cans in the pantry as it seems like their time is running out. The main problem with the film is that It drags on and on and on and it feels like it was going so slow that it was almost standing still. At nearly two and a half hours its an interesting idea that is drawn out. It could easily have been cut in half to make it a really good film.

Rating - 3/10 (I'm being very generous)

Robocop 3 (1993)

The third Robocop movie is one of those that I have always heard as being a terrible film. To start with it doenst feature Peter Weller as Robocop and it seems to centre on an irritating kid. The film is noticeably different as it doesn’t have any of the blood and violence that the previous two. There is a long time before Robocop actually makes an appearance. When he does it’s a silly moment because he comes in a car and drives the car off a building and manages to land it next to the action


It seems like Robert John Burke sounds an awful like Sylvester Stallone which is an unfortunate side effect. Though face-wise he does look a bit like Paul Weller which is probably the only thing they got right when they cast him. To be honest it was always going to be a hard job in trying to follow in the footsteps of someone who made the role famous. A bit like when someone becomes the new Doctor Who or James Bond.

There are some ludircrous moment when they strap a jetpack onto him. God knows why but there must be toys with Robocop and a jetpack. It gets thrown off him when we first seem him with it but then it gets bought back at the end when he doesn’t have the use of his legs. When he comes out with it on and its just a stupid moment which shows that even the writers had given up by this point in the script stage. Sadly there are several ludicrous moments as Robocop goes against a ninja. Even in that scene there is no darkness like there was when Robocop got butchered in the first movie.

The scientist is awful. She doesn’t pull it of and everytime she was on screen I just thought that she wasn’t a scientist and just seemed to be there to add a bit of glamour.

In the first Robocop movie, Murphy was up against a group of thugs and in the second one it was him against a massive evil Robocop. Here, Murphy is against a Ninja.

When the guy turns out to be a traitor to the rebels I wasn’t really that bothered as I had no interest in any of the characters and just found them bland and boring.

The plot (which is being generous) is all over the place. I couldn’t actually tell you what it was about because I couldn’t follow it and when the film is like that then you know the film isn’t up to scratch.

There is a moment where the gun is being shot and it seems to stay exactly in the same which was just stupid.

Watch your language there are children about pretty much sums up the problems with this movie as it seems aimed directly at kids more than adults which was the case in the previous two films.

Johnny Rehab is a fake cartoon that gets advertised before a news programme and it’s a silly moment which emphasis’ the kid targetness of the movie.

Throughout the movie the kid is irritating and doesn’t seem to achieve anything except for trying to humanise Robocop for the kiddies.

There are some memorable people in this as there is Bradley Whitford who I know from ‘The West Wing’ and then there is Cch Pounder who appeared in an episode of ‘The X-Files’ and appeared in other shows such as ‘The Shield’. When these two appeared on screen I was interested and when they left it then I found being bored by the whole sorry excuse of a movie. Then there is the chap from Men In Black who plays the President of OCP and he does seem to be a bit comical.

Sergeant I have no idea is a good character who’s best moment comes when he throws his badge on the floor which leads to a nice little moment of all the other cops doing the same.

One of the few characters to return in this movie is Nancy Allen who quite surprisingly gets killed around the half way point of the movie. That was a mistake as far as I was concerned because she was one of the few good things in the movie.

I don’t know what the point of this movie. I don’t know why it exists because it serves no purpose what so ever. If anything it didn’t feel like a Robocop movie as it doesn’t have any drama, any excitement or any of the dark tone that was running through the previous films.

Is this movie worse than Godfather Part 3? I don’t think so because at least there are a few moments where its watchable. Mainly the bits with Al Pacino but that’s the only thing that makes it better than Robocop 3. This has no redeeming qualities to it and it’s a complete and utter waste of time from start to finish. There is no plot, no characters that are of any interest and to cap it all there is a stupid moment where Robocop is driving a pink Cadillac. It’s the stupid cherry on the stupid cake.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

I saw Wall Street recently and whilst it was good it was something that was screaming 1980’s. Fast forward 23 years and the morals of Wall Street (the real Wall Street) are just as important as they were back in 1987. With the economical meltdown around the world, it seemed like this probably wasn’t going to have the same punch that Wall Street 1 had. At the beginning of the film Gekko is released from prison and a limo comes out and he thinks its his but its for someone else.

Carey Mulligan and Shia LaBeouf (the charisma vacuum) are a couple. Mulligan plays Winnie Gekko who has an estranged relationship with Gordon.  I found her performance to be very good and she does her best when acting againt LaBeouf. Shia LeBeouf is an actor that I really find annoying. In pretty much everything I’ve seen him in, all I can think is ‘how did he become the star he is when all he does it suck the charisma and energy out of the room?’. I didn’t see that changing in this movie.  His inability as an actor really shows when he has a scene with Michael Douglas because compared to Douglas, LaBeouf looks like he should be in an amateur production of something.

Susan Sarandon makes a surprise appearance and she is really unhinged in this movie. She makes a few appearances and they were great because they added some much needed energy into a film that was otherwise lacking the sort of stuff you would want from this sort of film. Josh Brolin is very good here. He’s utterly unlikeable  as Bretton James and everytime he’s on screen you get a reaction which is that you hope he gets his comeuppance. After appearing in the first few moments of the film, its nearly half an hour before Michael Douglas preoperly appears in the film. Everytime that Michael Douglas is on screen I find myself interested in what’s going on because he is the one that gets all the great speeches and the film comes alive when he is about. When he’s off screen I kind of lose interest. Frank Lagella is a great piece of casting as Louis Zabel. Everytime he was on screen I was enjoying the film. He’s an actor that does wel in whatever he’s in. His death was a surprise and a shame really.

Despite looking a lot better than the 1987 original, Wall Street doesn’t feel like it should. It feels like we’re being lectured at and nothing really get addressed that we don’t already know or have seen in reality. Douglas seems to be shielded for a large amount of this movie and its probably the reason why I don’t rate this as highly as the original.