The Next Three Days (2010)

In this American remake of Pour Elle (Anything for Her), Russell Crowe plays a college professor who decides to break his wife, convicted of murder, out of jail and luckily for him, he has what feels like an eternity - the film's two hours and thirty-three minute runtime - to do it and it turns out to be a rather simple matter of cutting a phone line and doing a letter switcheroo, so turn off your brains and content yourself with the college professor's reality free of inconvenient details.

★★★☆☆

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F/X: Murder By Illusion (1986)

Two things - Crocodile Dundee (another 1986 movie release with an Australian lead) and a nonsensical, inexplicably punctuated title - probably detracted from F/X: Murder By Illusion's success in the box office, and revisiting it today reveals a good concept stretched by middling action sequences into a way-overlong movie-with-a-tv-budget, but as a kid I loved this Mission: Impossible-lite, Now You See Me crime-magic story, about Hollywood special effects man Rollie Tyler (Australia's own Bryan Brown) hired by the Justice Department to fake the murder of a mobster in the Witness Protection program.

★★★☆☆

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Rambo: First Blood

The first half offers up terrific action as a Green Beret keeps a step ahead of a redneck sheriff and his team out for blood, but once things leave the forest and media scrums, Trautman, and multiple response agencies still can't bring the situation under control, still can't prevent it crescendoeing into the total annihilation of a small town, things seem, even to fans of unrestrained action, a bit out of hand.

★★★☆☆

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