Immediately forgettable, American Assassin features a fridged girlfriend, Middle Eastern antagonists, a badass white man who’s right every time he disobeys orders, and the implicit approval of extrajudicial killings when done for America.
Bending both mind and flesh, Videodrome plays like an obsessive personality getting caught up in the underground war between two cults of TV wizards in a tense thriller that taught me once and for all that James Woods is not John de Lancie.
Despite tepid acting from the lead, this attempt at a psychic thriller may be worth watching to understand all the references to Scanners-style head explosions and to see David Cronenberg’s early work, with just a flirt with body horror.
Robert Sheehan and David Tennant nail their roles in this thriller (lacking only a denouement), Tennant the calm psychopath he perfected in Jessica Jones, and Sheehan the heart-of-gold thief who delights by making the moral decision every time.
Director Lynne Ramsay, aided by masterful cinematography and acting, gives us this amazing, quiet film of a shattered man trying to save himself through saving trafficked girls, all displayed with perfect, brutal humanity.
Van Damme needs to step away from action movies, and especially action movies with fridged women, pistols that out-shoot rifles, threats without tension, and meaningless twists like this one.
The Gentlemen is a well-produced film that fails to make us care about the characters, the framing device, the poorly-foreshadowed twist, the nonsensical solution to said twist, or Guy Ritchie’s excuse for the rampant in-character racism.