Ryan Reynolds

6 Underground

/ / Home Video
  • Title: 6 Underground
  • IMDb: link

6 Underground movie reviewEven for a Michael Bay film, 6 Underground is a dumb action flick which isn’t much more than problematic story used to tie together a series of impressive action sequences. Despite these limitations, the film offers some basic dumb fun largely due to a cast better than its source material and several lengthy stunts including parkour, magnets, car chases, guns, explosions, and lots of dead bodies.

Our heroes are a no-name team brought together by billionaire turned would-be savior (Ryan Reynolds) who operates a private group hoping to do good in the world by performing coup d’etat (apparently under the nose of every intelligence organization on the planet). His team includes a spy (Mélanie Laurent), hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), acrobatic thief (Ben Hardy), doctor (Adria Arjona), driver (Dave Franco), and sniper (Corey Hawkins).

The group’s mission, what we’re told is the first of many, after a botched opening mission that left one of them dead, involves taking down a foreign head of state (Lior Raz) and replacing the dictator with his more moderate brother (Payman Maadi).

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Hobbs & Shaw

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
  • IMDb: link

Hobbs & Shaw movie reviewThe Fast & Furious franchise has produced a series of films over the past two decades that range from fairly okay (Fast Five and Tokyo Drift) to largely forgettable (see everything else). Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw may not have a lot going for it but it does have Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham who take their bickering to the next level when forced to work together on a joint CIA and MI6 assignment (despite neither one working for either agency).

The plot steals more than a little from M:I-2 when an agent (Vanessa Kirby) injects a deadly virus into herself rather than let it fall into the hands of terrorists. Hobbs is tapped to find the agent, who our suped-up super-villain (Idris Elba) and his super-secret villainous organization have framed for the theft and deaths of her team. Ryan Reynolds gets a fun, if largely unnecessary, cameo to bring the hero onboard. Shaw‘s motivations are far more personal.

The film offers plenty of chase sequences but far less muscle cars and heists than the usual Fast & Furious flick. In fact, other the the forced family theme shoved down the audience’s throat at every turn, Hobbs & Shaw feels like a rather purposeful departure from the franchise which spawned it.

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Pokémon Detective Pikachu

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Pokémon Detective Pikachu –
  • IMDb: link

Pokémon Detective Pikachu movie reviewDespite having no connection to Pokémon, I really wanted to like Pokémon Detective Pikachu which casts Ryan Reynolds as the voice of a talking Pikachu only he can understand. The cute creature, who apparently no one ever thought to name, is the Pokémon partner to missing Police Detective Harry Goodman. Despite its amnesia, the Pokémon convinces the estranged son (Justice Smith) of its partner that the Pokémon can uncover the truth of what happened to Harry.

The world created by director Rob Letterman and his team is visually stimulating which makes it all more confounding that the script is so bland and uninteresting. How can a movie that looks this good be so boring? Even Reynolds, whose toned-down PG wisecracks and adorable furry on-screen visage, can’t save the film from a convoluted murder mystery that never leads anywhere interesting (other than a complete rip-off of the climax of Tim Buron’s Batman). Fans of the franchise happy just to see the character on the big screen may be able to overlook the project’s many flaws, but for the rest of us it’s hard to see Pokémon Detective Pikachu as anything more than an uninspired mess of untapped potential.

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Deadpool 2

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Deadpool 2
  • IMDb: link

Deadpool 2 movie reviewThe Rob Liefeld joke was a nice touch. Following the success of 2016’s Deadpool, most of the core cast (including Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, and Leslie Uggams) return for the sequel featuring more X-Men, more violence, and more irreverent humor from the Merc with a Mouth. Deadpool 2 is quite a bit of fun, although its more complicated plot and larger cast of characters doesn’t always serve the film’s best interests.

Following another crazy opening, the film gets more serious than you would expect before Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) stumbles through prison, a stint as an X-Men trainee, and finally puts his own team together. X-Force Assemble!

Throwing out most of his character’s backstory, the film introduces Cable (Josh Brolin) as a time traveler with murderous intent. Of the other new faces, the lucky Domino (Zazie Beetz) is the real stand-out, Julian Dennison works well as the mutant in crisis who is a the center of several different plot threads, there’s a surprise villain (who I won’t ruin here), and Shioli Kutsuna is fun as an underutilized Yukio.

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The Hitman’s Bodyguard

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Hitman’s Bodyguard
  • IMDb: link

The Hitman's Bodyguard movie reviewWhen searching for something, anything, positive to say about a bad movie you can almost always fall back on “Well, at least it was in focus.” Sadly, I can’t even offer that most basic of compliments to The Hitman’s Bodyguard in which any strong ambient light destroys the focus of the shot, highlighting characters in a fuzzy glow while blurring out the entire background in a bizarrely amateurish manner.

Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson star in an uninspired buddy comedy about a once-proud bodyguard and his newest client, a man who has attempted to kill him on numerous occasions, who he needs to deliver in time to testify against a bland movie villain (Gary Oldman) for reasons that only makes sense in a script where things explode for no reason whatsoever.

Although there are some minor chuckles to be had (mostly from the pair adlibbing), and one strong chase sequence around the canals of Amsterdam, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is an uninspired mess featuring two actors screaming at each other for the better part of two hours.

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