Category: Action/Adventure

REVIEW: Predators [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man” Sometimes you have to be dropped on an alien planet with a bunch of amoral killers to finally discover what it means to be human. The sentiment may be cheesy, but for some reason it works in the reboot/sequel hybrid Predators. I haven’t seen the first two installments, knowing only that Predator is supposedly a classic of the genre and Predator 2 good for a laugh at Danny Glover. After watching both Alien vs. Predator flicks, however, I wouldn’t say…

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REVIEW: Stargate [1994]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m here in case you succeed” Could anyone have fathomed Stargate spawning a legion of television series and huge cult sci-fi following back in 1994? It came from writer/director Roland Emmerich after all, a man that had a German language feature and four in English, all ill received, behind him. Who knew he’d one day become the guy for big budget Hollywood end-of-the-world scenarios? Well at least a tag team partner of Captain Destruction Michael Bay. My first thought when sitting down to view this modern day classic—at the behest…

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REVIEW: The Last Airbender [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“You stand alone; that was always your weakness” Ok, The Happening was a piece of crap. There’s no denying this fact, so get on with your lives and forget Marky Mark ever attempted to be a science teacher. Many think that wasn’t M. Night Shyamalan’s first misstep, though, people have fallen away from his work since The Village—a movie I am proud to call one of my all-time favorite cinematic artworks of style, tone, and emotion. Perhaps audiences got spoiled and pigeonholed the man into a spot he could never…

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REVIEW: Toy Story 3 [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Let’s go see how much we’re going for on eBay” After ten cherished films filled with heart, soul, and comedy, Pixar finally made their first cash grab. That fact is not necessarily a bad thing since anything they touch, no matter how forced a project it may be, is still pure gold, if not certified platinum. But, when I left the theatre after viewing Toy Story 3, I couldn’t shake the feeling that even though I laughed hard, the resonating warmth of humanity and spirit was lacking. The film’s end…

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REVIEW: Toy Story 2 [1999]

Jared Mobarak

“I can’t look. Can someone cover my eyes?” The stigma associated with sequels is that they always attempt to either go bigger or rehash what was already done. Both variations are usually set-ups for failure, sacrificing story for more bells and whistles or boring the audience with a slightly reworked alternate version, a watered down facsimile of the brilliant original. So, after Pixar produced just one other film post-Toy Story—the charmingly entertaining A Bug’s Life—the news that number three would be Toy Story 2 became an opportunity for everyone to…

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REVIEW: Toy Story [1995]

Jared Mobarak

“Ages three and up! It’s on my box!” It’s hard to believe that, with Toy Story 3 coming out soon, it has been fifteen years since the original film. Back in 1995, Toy Story ushered in an animation renaissance for not only Disney, but also the medium as a whole. Pixar Studios had created something that changed the game forever, spawning countless other computer-graphic studios to follow suit and never fully reach the potential consistently exceeded by the Mouse House’s little buddy. Starting as a small-scale studio inside the Lucasfilm…

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REVIEW: Iron Man 2 [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“We don’t all run on batteries, Tony” The first Iron Man was a breath of fresh air when it came out in 2008. That was the year The Dark Knight showed audiences how morosely ambitious a comic book story could be, as well as arriving after the more serious tales of humanity X-Men and Spider-Man, amongst others, had. Sure there were the couple blips on the radar called Fantastic Four, but those were merely campy and pulpy because the story wasn’t strong enough to be anything else. It was the…

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REVIEW: Robin Hood [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“We are men of the hood, merry at your expense” I’ll start this out with the truth: Robin Hood is not Robin Hood—and that’s not a bad thing. You’ll catch on very early once you realize the name Robin Longstride for Russell Crowe’s lead character isn’t an artistic change because it rolls easier off the tongue. No, the Loxley moniker does also exist; only it’s attached to King Richard’s right hand man, neck deep in the Crusades’ final hoorah. Throw in the fact The Lionheart himself dies within the first…

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REVIEW: Kick-Ass [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m just a Dick in a wetsuit” Can I get away with using a film’s one word hyphenate title as it’s succinct description? Frankly I don’t care what your answer is to that question because, no joke, Kick-Ass kicked ass. This is the epitome of comic book brought to reality. What the new wave of graphic novels contains is ultra-violence, witty banter, and stories that are more than just good guy versus bad. People look to Dark Knight as what a comic based film should be, but on further review,…

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BNFF10 REVIEW: The Crimson Mask [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Puppets don’t have the strength to pull their own strings” Originally conceived as two short stories, one about a boxer and the other a banker, writer/director Elias Plagianos decided to combine both tales into The Crimson Mask, making its Western New York debut at the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival. After realizing short films have little to no chance of making back the money put forth, he saw how the two ideas rested on the same general Faustian principle of selling one’s soul for a hastily thought out scheme for success.…

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REVIEW: The Losers [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“Go Petunias” The world has been inundated with comic book adaptations this past decade, so new entries need to have something special to set them apart from the rest. Vertigo’s The Losers had a premise that made it appealing for a feature film treatment—a group of five ex-military covert-ops soldiers turned fugitives after being framed for a botched job in Bolivia, killing twenty-five innocent children, attempt to reenter America and clear their names. Sounds a lot like “The A-Team” to me, but I wasn’t going to let that get me…

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