The Bricklayer (2023)

If action movies are anything to go by, the CIA (and any facsimile thereof) is like the WWE in the early-to-mid 90s (then WWF) — everybody seems to have a job doing something else (well, not everybody, but you get the idea); if they're not beekeepers, they’re bricklayers.   Incidentally, The Bricklayer was certainly made with...

Road House (2024)

No one ever called the original Road House a thinking man’s action flick, but they might now thanks to this dumbed-down remake. Think about that for a second. Think about what it entails to dumb down fucking Road House — and somehow they did it; a lot of people get socked in the face in...

Argylle (2024)

Argylle opens with an action sequence set in “Greece.” I think that country is much bigger and a lot less computer-generated, but it doesn’t matter; what we’re looking at is not real but an excerpt from Elly Conway’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) latest spy novel, which she’s reading at a book launch.  Actually, it does matter....

Lights Out (2024)

Lights Out is proof that the rules of Fight Club have become the unthinking man’s Three Laws of Robotics. This action flick, however, reaches deeper than David Fincher’s fascist opus, going all the way back to early-90s Van Damme — more specifically, Lionheart and Nowhere to Run (territory previously retreaded by Blood and Bone 15...

Prepare to Die (2023)

Prepare to Die is the weirdest reimagining of The Wizard of Oz I’ve ever seen. Instead of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow we have a Mexican martial artist, an African American former drug runner, a cowardly Native American, and a knife-throwing white girl. And instead of the Wicked Witch of the...

Freelance (2023)

Freelance is not without its merits. It does some things well, and it does well not to do some other things. For starters, it is set in a fictional Latin American country where people actually speak Spanish (unlike, say, Without Men, which also featured Christian Slater). On a related note, the filmmakers deserve praise for...

Silent Night (2023)

A part of me expected more from John Woo’s “return to Hollywood;” the rest of me wondered, ‘why’? Sure, Face/Off is one of the great action films, and I have fond memories of Hard Target and Broken Arrow (although I’m probably remembering better than they actually are), but a return to form Silent Night couldn’t have been...

Operation Black Ops (2023)

You can tell right from the title that Operation Black Ops writer/director Jamaal Burden didn’t think things through. Was he really not aware that ‘ops’ stands for ‘operations’? Or did he deliberately set out to make the Manos: The Hands of Fate of paramilitary action movies? I find it hard to believe that a single...

Falcon Rising (2014)

Falcon Rising is a textbook example of counting your chickens before they hatch. Touted as the first installment of a new action franchise that was going to “produce 1-2 movies a year,” it was dead on arrival, and it’s easy to see why it never got past the opening salvo.  John Chapman (Michael Jai White)...