"Accomplishments"At home: Bigger in almost every way, Extraction 2 outdoes its tight little precursor and sets up Chris Hemworth's mercenary extraction expert Tyler Rake as a noteworthy franchise. The action is of an even higher level, with an absurdly long unbroken shot that can't even be compared to the original's. There are more locations involved, and the stakes are more personal (or at least, less internal), as Rake and his team rescue a family with connections to his own from a Georgian crime family. The twist? What if one of the kids was conflicted about which side he was on? Some closure for Rake as well, something the more procedural first film could only hint at. My big take-away from Extraction was that Golshifteh Farahani was great as Tyler's partner-in-merc, Nik Khan, and I wanted to see more of her. By the second film, she's fully participating in action scenes on an equal footing with Rake, so yeah, definitely, give me more.
I thought that the second time I saw Déjà Vu, years after its release, I'd have a better reaction to it, and I did. But enough to bump up its rating for me? Afraid not. I can excuse paradoxes not quite making sense, and often have. But is this hard or rubber time? Make up your mind, or at least, cover the miracle with dialog, the same way there's a lot of discussion on the ethics of time travel in the second act (to the point of being cabbage head scenes where the audience might feel talked down to). Tony Scott was always going to deliver a slick-looking film, but it's a better detective story - with Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer extremely smart and likeable - so once the science fiction aspect kicks off, I almost resent the intrusion. This would have been a fine CCTV vs. terrorism without it, almost more modern than what we got. Then again, there's that cool sequence where Denzel is chasing a car that's four days in the past in today's traffic, and I'm reminded of something Christopher Nolan might have put together, or better yet, China Miéville's The City & The City. And then back to pretty standard action tropes and a wonky - some are right to say creepy - romance. I'm really on the fence about this one. But hey, I spotted tiny Elle Fanning dropping that doll into the water, so there's that.
I remember mocking Volcano when trailers were running on TV for showing lava seeping out of the ground, like, that's NOT a volcano. Well, there IS an actual volcano in it, but this is also a movie where the citizens of Los Angeles don't know the word "magma", so... I'm not sure the film makers have either, as the science is out to lunch on this one, but once the absurd set-up is done, we get to the pretty engaging business of figuring out a city might actually deal with such a situation. If Volcano succeeds, it's largely due to its magnetic cast. Tommy Lee Jones is dependable as the dad caught between having to resolve the situation and get back to his daughter (a teenage Gavy Hoffmann motivated by disaster movie tropes to wander where she shouldn't, but she gets a dose of her own medicine when a smaller kid does the same on her watch). Seismologist Anne Heche. Don Cheadle. Jacqueline Kim and Keith David who deserved more to do... The effects are good, except those weird reverse shots which make no sense. Interesting as well how news coverage is used throughout, not just as inserts or stuff on screens, but as soundtrack. It gives Volcano an immediate, ripped from the headlines feel. However, I can't fathom the anti-racism/classism message they have running under this (ha!) - feels so tacked on. I'm reminded of the ending of Starship Troopers ("They're afraid!"), which was PARODY.
From the number of similar plot points, MegaFault - tragically Brittany Murphy's last film - lives in the shadow of Volcano. In this case, it's an absurd travelling earthquake that cracks the USA in half, and what points it scores are for the bonkers ideas it throws at us, even if The Asylum's special effects are pretty ropy. But I can accept that when other elements are strong. But they are not. I'm trying real hard not to make a joke about the film's fault here, but it is very shoddily put together. At times, it's like different people wrote and directed scenes at different times without consulting each other, and shots don't match their reverse angle, and the characters will often say a thing is happening/going to happen, but the movie decides otherwise. I'll give you one crazy example that I still can't explain: At one point, the dad and daughter are hitching a ride in a truck which catches on fire and he must get out of the cab and unhook it. The little girl twice shouts "MOMMY!!!!" at him, despite Brittany being nowhere near this scene and the subtitles dutifully telling us she's actually shouting "DADDY!!!". Like, wow. It certainly doesn't help matters that a field in Iowa plays most states between Virginia and Colorado, while isolated disasters in other locales look like they were pulled from other Asylum movies (but no one cares enough to have tracked this on the internet, so I don't have confirmation. But what really gets me is how underpopulated this world is, with Brittany apparently the only earthquake expert in the world - even her mentor defaults to her expertise, looking baffled - and the military is always picking her up so she can tell them what to do, even if she's at the butt end of nowhere (sorry Kansas, not that the distances in this movie make ANY sense). One to watch with company so you can make jeering comments.
The Rock is a search and rescue helicopter pilot trying to find and rescue his family when California suffers a series of record-breaking earthquakes in San Andreas, a very competent destruction porn actioner by Brad Peyton, who would follow up with Rampage (which I feel was more directly aimed at ME). Ray Gaines (Johnson) really puts the lie to his early comment that he just "goes where they send [him] by focusing only on his ex-wife and daughter, but that's the trope - family reconnects through surviving disaster movie. And while Gaines can do anything in a vehicle (he's not fussy), a good chunk of the movie is given over to Alexandra Daddario as the daughter Blake who, as daddy's little girl, knows all the survival tricks and helps a couple of hapless boys get through it. (Don't know if I believe she's the Rock's kid, but she certainly could share some genetic material with mom Carla Gugino (yes, please). Paul Giamatti is out there as a seismologist who predicts the quakes, but never interacts with the heroes (interesting subversion of the trope, I don't mind it). This is a movie with wildly unbelievable coincidences, but it's fine because the action scenes and relentless calamities mean this is to be enjoyed on a roller coaster level. Are we sure this isn't happening in the Fast and Furious verse?
If The Hurricane Heist had been a heist movie taking place during a disaster movie, I think that would have been a better premise. But the thieves aren't our heroes, even if the theft of 600 million in old money set to be shredded feels like the kind of victimless crime heists thrive on. Instead this is Die Hard in a class-5 hurricane, and that's not necessarily a bad place to start. Our heroes are really a meteorologist with a Bat-tank, his loser brother (both orphaned in a hurricane) and Maggie Grace (Taken) sounding and styled like Charleze Theron as an ATF officer looking for redemption. An international cast of mostly unknowns, doing all sorts of weird Southern accents. You think, cinematic disaster in the making, right? But no, it's actually pretty enjoyable. The physics are dodgy, but the way the weatherman uses the hurricane to fight the bad guys is gonzo in latter-day Fast and Furious way (Rob Cohen directed the original F&F, before it was actually crazy and fun, but he seems to have learned from later films). Lots of twists, unusual character-building scenes, and neat action, so I'm giving this a "dumb fun" rating.
When you start watching Juggernaut, you think the title refers to the size of the Britannic (not the Titanic, we swear!), but no, it's the pseudonym of the bomber who rigs it to blow. You also think you're in a disaster movie with a prestige British cast, but no, it's really more of a bomb squad procedural. So it doesn't scratch the itch I thought it would, but it did scratch an itch of mine. Richard Harris plays a cool, fatalistic bomb expert trying to avert a disaster at sea, and he's great, but we've also got Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Omar Sharif, Julian Glover, and tons of recognizable faces besides (I'm always happy to see Clifton James can play something other than Sheriff Pepper). It's more disaster film in the MAKING and how to (hopefully) PREVENT that disaster, than the proper thing, which is fine, and the suspense works. However, I do feel at the end that we needed more closure with the cast members introduced to give a face to the possible victims and people on shore working on the problem remotely. It's like they were forgotten in the climax and my investment in their lives was wasted.
What would you do if the world ended at midnight tonight? Don McKellar writes, directs and stars in Last Night, where a cast of Torontonians deploy various strategies, perhaps even yours. It's a dark, downbeat, dramatic comedy, but I do think it IS a comedy, preying on awkward moments and the absurdity of the situation. The cast is pretty great who's who of late 90s Canadian actors - Sandra Oh (wonderful as the woman desperate to get home before the end comes), Callum Keith Rennie (who wants to go out with a bang, if you know what I mena), Sarah Polley, Geneviève Bujold, Arsinée Khanjian, David freaking Cronenberg - and you of course know how I love sci-fi done with a shoestring and an indie spirit. Whatever ups and downs we suffer through this relatively quiet take on the apocalypse, that final moment is really quite beautiful and is what stays with me. So what would *I* do? I have to admit I'm more of a McKellar type even if others' strategies are perhaps more appealing.
So a secret international tribunal has built a supermax prison in the Antarctic for big name terrorists in New Alcatraz, which sounds a lot more interesting than what really happens, namely earning its AKA title, Boa, as a giant CG snake is awakened from the ice and starts to eat people without so much as a by your leave. The convicts are eventually freed to help the personnel (and a husband-wife team of paleontologists consulting) out of here before a planet returns to get everyone. And even that could have been exciting, but it's really very, ah, bo(a)ring. A big part of the problem is the late 90s-early 2000s cheap CG (there is no worse era for it), which looks blurry much of the time, and like a video game of the era when it's sharp. It's never visceral (in the way a simple practical snake's head to do the bites might have been), and makes for a boring creature in a creature feature (the one "Though shalt not" for the genre). More than that, the screenplay keeps forgetting characters for the length of an act, undermining your investment in any of them. On one side, Dean Cain, on the inmate's Mark Sheppard (ah, finally someone I can lay my hopes on, and he accounts for the single star I'm giving the flick). There's a hacker who never gets to hack before he's eaten. There's a terrible subplot about Cain wanting his wife to abandon her career and have a baby, which I was sure would lead to a dreadful message of yes, that's what she should do, but nah, there's absolutely no resolution so it's pointless. They basically ignore any point of interest they've seeded.
In the very small niche that is Australian giant warthog horror movies, there's very little to my mind that can beat Razorback and guess what, Boar doesn't. But that doesn't mean it's not a good time. The monster, a wild pig the size of a truck with an inexplicably large appetite and just as confounding stealth mode, is mostly practical, which makes the CG shots more believable. It's very gory too (well, that's what boars do, they GORE). But the creature feature stuff is fairly standard stuff when all is said and done. Where the movie actually shines is in its cast of characters. There are some trouble spots: The obnoxious boyfriend who needs to die much sooner than he does, the lame stepdad... But generally? What a fun group. I was often wanting this to be a straight comedy about a small town in the bush, focusing on the bar, or the two old hunters, or the gigantic Nathan Jones welcoming his family back to the farm. Good dialog, surprisingly believable reactions to the death and carnage, yeah, too bad these folks were trapped in a horror film.
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