The Mean Season (1985)

Based on a book by John Katzenbach called In The Heat of The Summer, the dull The Mean Season should have capitalised on Florida's oppressive Summer, but everyone in it — Kurt Russell's journalist, a camera-toting colleague, his boss, and a detective played by a very young Andy Garcia — remains fresh despite running around after a serial killer - and Mariel Hemingway's love interest at one point even leaves Kurt a message written in a fogged up car window - and in the same way, the serial killer himself, a taunter of the public via the phone on Malcolm's news desk and a presence that really should sweep through with menace and ravage the community, never actually takes a compelling shape.

★★☆☆☆

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Black Rain (1989)

Ridley Scott's occasionally brutally violent buddy cop action movie takes Michael Douglas' cop Nick Conklin (a Martin Riggs type - he even sports the mullet) and his more even-tempered partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia) to Osaka to handover a yakuza criminal to the Japanese authorities, and while it is plainly and simply inconceivable to think these loose cannons would be permitted to carry on their rogue Lethal Weapon-style antics during the Japanese police investigation into counterfeiting that they become privy to, and harder to imagine even a hothead like Conklin putting himself in so much danger by wilfully headbutting and kinghitting yakuza crime figures over the course of his illegitimate, non-jurisdictional, "unwanted tag-along" police work, the movie manages to be an engaging clash-of-cultures action thriller and does achieve an occasional ring of cultural authenticity during all the nonsense, filmed as it is on location in Japan and populated with Japanese supporting actors, Ken Takakura, Yasaku Matsuda, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Shigeru Koyama. 

★★★☆☆

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Passengers (2016)

** SPOILER ALERT **

A ripper sci-fi premise (a man's hibernation chamber malfunctions and he wakes up on a spaceship 90 years ahead of schedule) offers the potential to explore lives off-course and the human response to the abject loneliness of deep space isolation, but instead a glossy Hollywood romance takes place, only to be squandered by two things - plotting as full of holes as the breached hull of a spaceship, and the last-minute introduction of a "come back alive" machine.

★★☆☆☆

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