Bronson (2008)

You Don’t Want to be Trapped Inside With Me, Sunshine.

The impetus for today’s movie started before it was officially requested by my friend Ajla.  It originally started with my friend Jordan, around the time that the cast for the Dark Knight Rises was being released.  When Tom Hardy was announced as Bane, I was quick to criticize.  I am a critic, after all.  But it was entirely based on his appearance in Inception.  This was the only time I had seen him, and the guy was not physically impressive enough to play Bane.  By this point, I’ve seen Hardy in Warrior, so I would know better, but that was the only experience I had with him at that time.  But Jordan was quick to educate me, telling me to look up pictures of him in one of his earlier movies.  He was right; dude was totally buff in this movie, and I could see him playing a real-life version of Bane.  Later, Ajla requested that I watch the movie, so I decided I would give it a go.  But then I got completely terrified of the movie, not because of the subject matter of the U.K.’s “most violent prisoner”, but because the movie was directed by the director of one of my most hated movies in recent history: Drive.  Let’s see how it went as I review Bronson, co-written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, co-written by Brock Norman Smith, and starring Tom Hardy, Matt King, James Lance, Amanda Burton, Kelly Adams, Juliet Oldfield, Jonathan Phillips, and Mark Powley.

This movie is the story of England’s most violent prisoner, Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy), who later changed his name to Charles Bronson.  He was apparently a man who always wanted to be famous.  Being unable to sing, act, or write profoundly beautiful reviews, he takes to doing what he does best: robbing post offices and randomly beating the living shit out of people.  This delivers the expected result of landing him in prison, where he sets about being the most violent in there.  Occasionally he gets out, but he doesn’t seem too fond of not being in prison, so he does something to get back in.  That’s pretty much it.

This movie was okay, but it suffered from the problems that I expected it to.  The story was fine enough, but not much more than a biopic of a man’s life story.  The biggest problem I had was what I expected from this director: pretentious artsy fartsy crap.  I just want to slap Nicolas Winding Refn in the face and say, “Tell a story normally!”  I don’t need this guy’s story spread out with scenes of him on a stage talking about what we just watched.  I saw what we just watched!  I understand that some people love this artsy crap, but it just gets on my nerves.  It feels like an unnecessary distraction to me, especially when they were also perfectly comfortable just having Bronson talk to us directly, without the forced stage show parts.  If you have narration that he can’t just do in voice over, I’m okay with you just having Bronson explain it to me himself.  Refn also apparently felt that this movie was an appropriate place for his shitty, electronica, 80’s music that he beat me over the head with in Drive, and I still hate the hell out of that annoying shit.  But there were things about this movie that allowed me to like it much more than Drive.  None of them could be attributed to Refn though.  The story could be attributed mostly to the real Charles Bronson and not as much to the people that chronicled it and called it a movie.  He lived a pretty interesting and violent life, which makes parts of the movie worth watching.

Another thing that makes this movie entirely watchable is Tom Hardy.  I have not seen this guy even do a “good” performances yet.  He does “fantastic” at the very lowest.  He was great in Inception, fantastic in Warrior, and actually made Bane an interesting character.  And if you like this guy, like great acting, and just really want to see Bane’s dick, this movie is for you.  Tom Hardy disappears into this character.  It’s nothing like I’ve ever seen him do before, and is probably a lot like the real Michael Peterson, but I really don’t know what he’s like.  He’s absolutely fantastic in this movie.  As for everyone else … I didn’t really notice them.  It’s Peterson’s story, and definitely the Tom Hardy show, and everyone else was minor and forgettable, though not through any real fault of their own.

Bronson is a movie that caused me mixed feelings.  I liked the story of the movie, but I also don’t think a whole lot of respect goes to the chronicling of a life story.  I don’t give history books credit for their writing abilities either.  I still find myself profoundly irritated by everything Nicolas Refn brings to cinema, but Tom Hardy redeems as much as he can with his fantastic performance.  I think I would tell you guys that this movie is worth a watch.  If you’re like me, you’ll think parts of the movie are interesting enough, but at least Tom Hardy was great.  If you’re like so many people I’ve argued with about Drive, you might love this movie.  I say it’s way better than Drive, but I also hate Drive.  Plus, you can stream it on Netflix.  Bronson gets “Magic?  You just pissed on a gypsy in the middle of fucking nowhere” out of “You shouldn’t mess with boys what are bigger than you.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

There’s a Storm Coming, Mr. Wayne.

I went into each of the new Batman movies with some degree of trepidation.  The first movie suffered from the reputation left by the previous movie, and the second movie suffered from the high standard set by one of the actors in the Tim Burton version.  Going into the third Batman by Christopher Nolan, I did my very best to keep my expectations low, but I could feel myself losing that fight the second a plan was made to see it.  That’s when it was becoming real.  But I still had the nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that there was no possible way this movie could be better than the Dark Knight.  The Dark Knight may be my favorite comic book movie ever, tied with Avengers and Watchmen.  If this movie trounced its predecessor, then I would need to write a review naming a new movie as my undisputed favorite comic book movie of all time.  Am I about to do that?  Let’s find out in my review of The Dark Knight Rises, written by Jonathan Nolan, co-written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Josh Pence, Juno Temple, Nestor Carbonell, Matthew Modine, Alon Abutbul, and Cillian Murphy.

Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, Gotham City has reached a relative state of peace due to the Dent Act and the efforts of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman).  So peaceful has Gotham become that the savior of Gotham, the vigilante known as Batman (Christian Bale) has disappeared into seclusion that he breaks only to have conversations with his butler Alfred (Michael Caine), and to get robbed by a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway).  But Selina stole more than Bruce Wayne’s mother’s necklace; she also stole his fingerprints … and a congressional representative.  She sells the prints to a criminal named Bane (Tom Hardy) who uses them to bankrupt Bruce Wayne.  While investigating the sewers, Commissioner Gordon also gets shot by Bane’s men, but is rescued by a cop named Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), but a speech Gordon had in his jacket falls into Bane’s hands, revealing to him the truth about the cover-up of Harvey Dent’s crimes.  Gotham City needs Batman again, but does he have it in him to defeat this new foe and stop his terrorist plot?

This time I was right.  The Dark Knight Rises was not able to come close to the legacy left by The Dark Knight.  I’m in no way trying to say that this movie was bad, but it had a whole lot to live up to and it wasn’t able to.  That being said, Dark Knight Rises was a really good movie, and really strong in a lot of ways, but my three favorite comic book movies are resting comfortably on their thrones.  I think the story was what got on my nerves a little bit.  Though it was good, there were just too many things that just didn’t make sense to me.  Take, for instance, when Selina Kyle steals Bruce Wayne’s car early on in the movie.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but Bruce Wayne is the most famous person in Gotham, yet the valet doesn’t realize that he’s not married and that he left his really expensive vehicle by himself, so he just gives the keys to any lady holding a ticket claiming to be his wife?  So that dude’s fired.  There were plenty of things that I loved though.  One such occasion was when Selina Kyle disappeared when Batman turned around and he said, “So that’s what that feels like.”  Without spoiling it, I was also very happy to see that they used the most famous thing from the comic book storyline of Bane in this movie.  I don’t know the Batman universe that well, but the one thing I knew that Bane did happened, and I loved it.  There’s also a great deal of emotion in this movie, and I don’t think they’ve really done that successfully in the previous movies.  But I really liked the last thing Batman says to Commissioner Gordon in the movie, and a few of the things Alfred said to Bruce during the last half of the movie almost brought me to tears.  I will say that I did not like the ending of the movie, but I’ll go into more detail in the next paragraph.

I know that doesn’t sound like I had that many complaints about the story of the movie, but the reason I left some out was that they contain spoilers.  The first non-spoiler I would give you is about spoilers, but I would recommend you not check IMDb before watching this movie.  Just looking at the credits for this movie spoiled something that could have potentially been a huge surprise near the end of the movie.  Maybe two things, depending on how asinine and descriptive the posters get with the character names.  But here’s the rest of them ::SPOILER ALERT::  The huge thing it spoiled for me was that Talia al Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, was in the movie.  That’s not revealed until the last 15 minutes of the movie!  But, when I went in knowing she was in the movie, it was pretty easy to figure out who she was and who the trigger person was going to be.  One of the big problems I had was with Batman in the prison.  He tried to escape the prison around three times before he realized that he needed to make the jump without the rope holding him back.  Friendboss Josh realized that when the first person tried to make that jump.  How is he smarter than the World’s Greatest Detective?  I regarded the ending of the movie as a total “fuck you” as well.  Batman dies … or does he?!  No.  The problem with this is that it really didn’t make any sense.  If Batman wanted a vacation, he doesn’t need to fake his death, and certainly not to the people he’s closest to.  He let Alfred, Lucius, Gordon, Blake, and Selina Kyle all think that he was dead for a good long time before they either figured it out on their own or ran into him on vacation with Kyle in Italy.  It did have a bit of an emotional impact on me as a viewer though, but it was mostly anger.  Knowing this was Nolan’s last Batman movie, I had entertained the possibility that he might kill off Batman, but you can’t just do that.  Batman’s almost a century old; you can’t just come in and kill him.  Then, when I saw him in the café at the end, I just wondered why the fuck that little misdirection was necessary.  There were some good spoilers as well.  I thought it was total genius how Bane’s mercenaries used the army against the people of Gotham by making them keep the people of Gotham in town because they would set off the bomb if even one person made it across the bridge.  I also thought it would’ve been an awesome reveal if I didn’t already know it was coming (Fuck you, IMDb!) to find out that Talia was the kid in the prison and Ra’s was the mercenary being talked about in the story.  I got goosebumps when they showed the scene from the first movie that tied into it.  ::END SPOILERS::

I enjoyed all of the performances in this movie, but there certainly wasn’t anything on the level of Heath Ledger.  I know it’s an unfair comparison, but it’s also necessary.  Christian Bale did a great job in the movie.  He wasn’t really the same Bruce Wayne we’d seen before as he was dealing with a lot of emotions in this movie.  In the beginning of the movie, he’s in seclusion and his guilt at the death of Rachel is still wearing on him, and it’s only getting worse with him turning it inward as he doesn’t have the distraction of being Batman anymore.  But that was part of the problems I had with the movie: there was not enough Batman!  He’s not Batman for a large part of the movie, and the first time he becomes Batman he just doesn’t seem that into it anymore.  He’s back in form near the end of the movie, but I was getting bummed out about it by then.  Tom Hardy did a great job in this movie as well, and I’ll avoid the Joker comparison to give him the credit he deserves.  This is the Bane they needed to make in the movie.  One of the biggest problems I had with Bane’s appearance in Batman and Robin was that they seemed only interested in recreating the character’s look.  Yeah, he’s a big brutish looking guy wearing a mask, but he’s not some mindless goon.  Bane had a genius-level intellect in comic books, but that movie makes him unable to string two words together.  This movie does Bane justice.  Tom Hardy makes him completely intelligent and intimidating.  They also had a good reason for him to wear the mask, which I was wondering how they’d pull off when they didn’t want to take the Venom angle from the comic books.  Anne Hathaway also did a pretty good job as Selina Kyle, but I can’t say that I think her role required all that much out of her than being fuckin’ hot.  She did that part of it with gusto, but also gave a pretty good performance.  I probably would’ve preferred that they had a few hundred more scenes of her riding Batman’s motorcycle wearing skintight leather from behind though.  Her character created some questions for me, though.  The main one was how Bruce could still be moping over Maggie Gyllenhaal 8 years after her death when he just met Anne Hathaway.  I’d be over it pretty gundamned quickly.  I also really liked the look of her “Catwoman” costume (though she’s never referred to that way as far as I know).  And not just because it was skintight on Anne Hathaway’s body either.  I liked that it felt really reminiscent of the Catwoman costume from the Adam West days, but they made it better by making it so she wasn’t intentionally wearing cat ears, it just looked like she was when her goggles were pushed back onto her head.  On another note, I understand that Catwoman is very agile and flexible and everything, but was it actually necessary for her to kick the lever on the window washing scaffold at one point in the movie?  It was above her head and you could’ve just pulled it with your hands.  Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

I’m sure it’s hard to tell from the review I just wrote, but I did really like The Dark Knight Rises.  It was a great movie and did not lessen the average quality of the trilogy in the least, but not much can live up to the legacy left by The Dark Knight.  The story was fantastic, but had some problems that hindered its overall quality, but all of the performances were fantastic and made me so happy that someone finally did Bane justice so we can stop using Batman and Robin as a character reference for him.  I had some problems with the movie, but I had absolutely no problem seeing it in theater.  It was totally worth it.  I’m happy I saw it, I’m in love with the trilogy in total, and I can’t wait to buy it on BluRay.  The Dark Knight Rises gets “You made some mistakes, Miss Kyle” out of “The Batman has to come back.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Warrior (2011)

How Much Abuse Can One Man Take?

I felt like it was necessary to put off today’s review for as long as possible after the Rocky reviews went up.  This is a movie I’ve been thinking about seeing for a long time, but never really gotten around to it.  And it’s also a movie about underdog fighters trying to do something big.  That being the case, six Rocky movies were enough in one span of time.  I was able to mix it up for the two reviews that separated this movie from Rocky with a romantic comedy and a really old movie, but I’ve had the disk sitting here from RedBox for a couple of days already and didn’t want to keep getting charged for it, so today is the day for my review of Warrior, written by Anthony Tambakis, directed by Gavin O’Connor, and starring Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Morrison, Vanessa Martinez, Frank Grillo, Kevin Dunn, Bryan Callen, Kurt Angle, Erik Apple, Nate Marquardt, and Anthony Johnson.

AWOL US Marine Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy), though he tends to go by Tommy Riordan, returns home to visit his father, Paddy (Nick Nolte), to get him to train him for a winner-takes-all mixed martial arts tournament called Sparta, the winner of which takes home 5 million dollars.  Tommy wants this money to provide for the family of a friend of his that died in the Marine Corps.  Paddy’s older son, Brendan Conlon (Joel Edgerton), works as a physics teacher but, because of money troubles, he does small time fights on the side.  A bruise on his face gets him suspended from teaching, which is certainly not helping his money troubles.  Though his wife Tess (Jennifer Morrison) is against it, Brendan starts training to participate in Sparta so that the prize money can help him keep his house.

This movie is the Rocky for this generation, or at least it should be.  And hopefully that doesn’t mean they’ll dilute it with too many sequels of questionable quality.  This is a movie that women may avoid as they seem to do with Rocky, but that’s probably because they are making a very incorrect assumption about what this movie is.  Yes, it’s got MMA in it, but the real story is about a broken family somehow repairing itself through punches to the face.  Let’s focus first on the story that should be the reason you watch this.  Tommy’s side of the story is all about slowly unraveling his troubled past and how he deserted the Marines, saved the lives of a bunch of other marines, and the troubles he had with his family.  Brendan was dealing with his financial troubles, his career problems, his disapproving wife, and his family troubles.  Paddy is tying together the two sons who hate his guts.  It’s so well-written and so emotional.  The climax is so satisfying and emotional that I actually got a little choked up for it.  I would say that the beginning of the story is a little drawn out and doesn’t have a lot happening so that could’ve been shaved down a bit to benefit the story.  And I probably would’ve liked to have a little something more after the ending to wrap everything up with Tommy’s desertion problems, but it was still really good.  This is an MMA movie though, and the fights are pretty spectacular.  The first thing I appreciate about this is that I think boxing has lost a lot of its steam since the Rocky days.  I’ve never been that big of a fan of boxing, but I am all about MMA, and this movie does not disappoint.  Though it’s often to a lesser extent, MMA can suffer the same problems as boxing when the fights are moving too slow because the fighters aren’t willing to advance.  In a movie, you don’t have to worry about that.  All of the fights in this movie were intense and exciting.  One of the very first matches was Tommy absolutely embarrassing an experienced but douchey fighter.  He whoops that ass!  Tommy’s style was mostly wrestling and striking, and he won all of his fights with ease and brutality.  Brendan took more of a beating, but always won with some great submission moves.  I really liked his fight with Kurt Angle because Kurt was playing a Russian named Koba who was a force to be reckoned with, and it reminded me of the Rocky vs. Drago fight from Rocky IV.  One problem I had (without spoiling anything) was that there is no way a match would be allowed to continue when one of the fighters has a noticeably dislocated shoulder.  They would’ve stopped that shit and called the other guy the winner.

All of the performances in this movie were superb.  Joel Edgerton gave a very real and grounded performance.  It annoyed me that so many people doubted him because they thought of him only as a physics teacher and ignored the fact that he used to be in the UFC.  But in a world where the UFC actually exists, why are these guys not aware of Rich Franklin?  He used to be a teacher!  Tom Hardy’s performance was not openly emotional, but you could see that he was semi-constantly dealing with some inner turmoil.  And his fights were the most awesome for me to watch, though I do like a good submissions game.  I will say as well that I thought I couldn’t be more excited to see Dark Knight Rises, but now that I’ve seen this guy in this movie, I’m even more excited to see what he does with Bane.  Nick Nolte was fantastic in this movie.  He knew that he had fucked up royally in the past, but had gotten sober and wanted nothing more than for his sons to forgive him.  You feel really bad for him for the bulk of the movie.  If I had to say there was a bad performance in this movie, it would definitely be those douche ass announcers at the Sparta tournament.  When they were first fighting, the announcers said that both of the brothers were going to lose.  After they won, they warmed up to Tommy and kept saying Brendan was going to lose.  Maybe you two should just shut the hell up.  You’re no Miss Cleo.

I had a feeling I would like Warrior when I was going into it, but I didn’t really know that I would love it.  It’s the Rocky of this generation!  A fantastic and exciting fight story, but with a very good emotional storyline that should make even people that don’t like MMA love this movie.  I definitely recommend this movie, and with no caveats.  Everyone should love this movie.  You can probably still find it from a RedBox if you’re unsure, but I will probably be purchasing it post haste.  Warrior gets “I think I liked you better when you were a drunk” out of “C’mon, it’s not as bad as it looks.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.