Bird on a Wire (1990)

Mel Gibson's mullet and wild-eyed "loose cannon" routine feels self-conscious and tired here - after Lethal Weapon 1 and 2 - but he and Goldie Hawn generate chemistry together, and occasional laughs, as former lovers fleeing killers from his pre-witness protection life, and helping bind the wafer-thin plot, action and comedy together into a palatable something is the Neville Brothers' easy-listening cover of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire.

★★★☆☆

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Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

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Cold Sweat (1971)

In this adaptation of a Richard Mathieson novella, (also the basis of an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents) Charles Bronson's Joe Martin must protect his wife and daughter from a criminal gang he used to drive for - they've come back into Joe's life seeking redress for a wrong they feel Joe committed against them.

★★★☆☆

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Death Wish (1974)

For one brief moment, Charles Bronson's Dr Paul Kersey - an architect whose wife is killed and daughter raped by gangbangers (one of them a young and lanky Jeff Goldblum) - steps out onto a NYC rooftop and surveys the city from above, and this vigilante may as well be in Gothan in a mask and cape, or, come to think of it, perhaps he's more like Victor Zsasz because it's a pretty unpleasant, unrewarding, socially troubling revenge he metes out.

★★★☆☆

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The Amateur (2025)

Run-of-the-mill rogue agent stuff not made any more engaging - in fact, it is all rendered a bit daft - by the fact Rami Malek's hero is a hastily trained amateur - a data geek working deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters who takes it upon his pasty little self to track down and kill the terrorists responsible for killing his wife, in outlandish ways that are laughable given the smug way he glibly enacts these logically impossible booby traps.

★★☆☆☆

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In The Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

Patriot Games also pitted an IRA terrorist against a hero who makes the mistake of killing the terrorist's brother, but this movie transports the story to an unlikely setting, a tiny coastal village of Ireland where it can be hard for viewers to believe that the two parties - Liam Neeson's brother-killing hero Finbar Murphy and Kerry Condon as the terrorist and sister of the man killed -  don't immediately find each other and have it out; the unbelievable delay is to allow the movie to build to a melodramatic - and a little out-of-place in a small Irish village - John Woo finale where the town suddenly has the population density amd proportions of a major city.

★★★☆☆

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The Fall Guy (2024)

As battle-scarred stuntman Col Seavers, Ryan Gosling does his gormless The Nice Guys schtick that he is so good at, and with terrific chemistry between him and Emily Blunt's Jody Moreno - she's the lead actress of a film-in-production that Seavers is working on - this romantic comedy action blockbuster overcomes its middle-stretch of ennui (during a stunt sequence set in Sydney, Australia, the film starts to feel like it has no place to go) and becomes, ultimately, utterly charming.

★★★★☆ 

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Last Suspect (2023)

A laughable cliche of a high-powered, ultra-successful criminal lawyer - she never loses a case - and a laughable cliche of a loose-wire cop - the sort who shoots first and shows no respect to the station chief - team up in a watchable but patently absurd thriller that grows increasingly ridiculous as it goes on - the lawyer's daughter is kidnapped for an unusual ransom, with the lawyer coerced into reinvestigating and solving a murder before the young man found guilty of the crime is sentenced.

★★☆☆☆

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

These Mission Impossible movies have steadily become more bombastic with agents like Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt - old now, his old experienced eyes staring out from under a peculiarly manicured lawn of hair and through impossibly youthful skin - now uttering lines like, "We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close--and those we never meet" - eye roll - but the set-pieces showcasing 'those' stunts and offering visions of near-future tech, plus an entertaining sequence on the Oreint Express and a pretty good snarling, gnashing new villain played by Pom Klementieff, are enough to keep you watching, just not with as much excitement as when you watched episodes 1, 4, 5 and 6.

★★★☆☆

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Moonfall (2022)

Mercifully skipping the usual disaster-movie preamble of ignored scientists and warnings spilling from dot matrix printers, Moonfall gets to collapsing cities and lunar chaos within minutes, but its brisk, comic-book style only makes it slightly less exhausting than it would otherwise be.

★★☆☆☆

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Anna (2019)

I think what Luc Besson intended was another slick, smart, minimally-plotted sexy violent spy thriller like 'La Femme Nikita' and its American remake 'The Assassin' with Bridget Fonda, but 'Anna' is a far cry from those movies with its woeful acting, laughable casting, terrible editing that makes the fisticuff action look like tai chi. and a story told via choppy-changey timehops that you know are just an attempt to try to disguise how wafer-thin and ridiculous the story is (a globe-trotting supermodel-slash-spy brings the KGB and the CIA together with a kiss each).

★☆☆☆☆

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American Ultra (2015)

This is a charmless blend of stoner comedy and one of those "dormant sleeper-agent wakes up" action movies of the Jason Bourne and The Long Kiss Goodnight sort, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart as an uncharismatic Bill-and-Ted pair of small-town America stoners who one day find themselves thrust headlong into a CIA conspiracy inspired by the MKUltra experiments of the 50s and 60s.

★☆☆☆☆

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Toy Soldiers (1991)

Die Hard in 1988 launched a genre - the non-War, modern and corporate The Great Escape - and was followed by a rush of similar action adventures centred on an everyman hero taking on a team of hostage-takers from within a hostage situation, this one taking place in a private boys school where Sean Austin plays a rebellious teenaged "John McClane" leading a schoolyard group of  fellow "prisoners" who plot their escape under the watch of machine-gun wielding "Germans", and it is corny, teenage, 90s-cult film fun.

★★★☆☆

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Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)

D&D, that role-playing game enjoyed by unwashed geeks sitting for days at a table talking about charisma points and elvin lore, is adapted in this movie with Chris Pine - charming as always - playing the roguish leader of a misfit band of thieves who must traverse wild monster-strewn landscapes collecting magical items to help them overcome some wizards hellbent on fantasy-world domination, and it is a funny and fresh adventure, and you do not need to be a fantasy-loving unwashed geek to thoroughly enjoy it.

★★★★☆

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The King's Man (2021)

Are there people in the world, really, who weren't immediately repelled by this series' titles' shifting, changing spacing and punctuation, who in fact watched and so enjoyed the tiresome teenage-boysy action of the first two cartoons they thought what was needed, yawn, was a wartime period backstory that awkwardly combines Saving Private Ryan-style solemn battlefield war history with high-camp devil-may-care superhero derringdo?

★★☆☆☆

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

There are three minor issues to contend with watching this fifth and final Harrison Ford-led Indiana Jones adventure: one, the Uncanny Valley effect of Ford's de-aged face floating through the lengthy opening sequence; two, a plot development at the end that derails the whole movie (but only until one brief line of dialogue so glibly uttered you could miss it puts the minecart back on the track); and three, a moribund and frankly preposterous "go on without me, leave me here" moment at the end; but other than that, this is as good as Indiana Jones gets: a fun, fast, funny family blockbuster action adventure.

★★★★★

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Black Adam (2022)

The acting's a bit wonky in this one, not just from the kid (but from the kid in particular) and it features a bunch of cheap-working superheroes collectively called the Justice Society that most audience members won't know or care about (the group includes a particularly unhelpful 'swirling wind' girl and her sidekick, a lumbering dope who grows to giant size but can't think of anything to do with this skill to help out), but check it out: the tone adopted is interesting, Dwayne Johnson's title antihero behaves in a most unsuperherolike fashion, mercilessly killing bad guys in a cgi fury, and it is also interesting to think about how this fits with other episodes of the so far mostly lugubrious DC Universe series of movies.

★★★☆☆

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In The Line Of Fire (1990)

What I like about Wolfgang Petersen's action thriller is how human it is, about an assassin (John Malkovich) determined to kill the President: Clint Eastwood's security guy fulfills his action hero duties, hanging from the edge of buildings and leaping into the path of bullets, but all the while he grizzles like the old man he is, has clumsy sexual encounters, gets sick, crankily dismisses the psychological games his quarry plays, and generally stays down-to-earth, which is refreshing given all the other bionically- and super-power-enhanced heroes saturating our cinemas.

★★★★☆

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Bullet Train (2022)

It is supposed to be a bit of Tarantino-esque fun, this adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's book about five assassins aboard the same fast train in Japan, but there's something sad about it: not even Tarantino does Tarantino very well, lately; Brad Pitt in the lead role certainly doesn't manage a young and edgy "Tyler Durden" anymore; and by casting him and other non-Japanese actors in an American adaptation of the Japanese story set in Japan, the action movie inadvertently becomes a message film, with the message - the destructive influence of foreigners upon Japanese society - front and centre, an inescapable part of every crescendoing action scene, yet completely ignored.

★★☆☆☆

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Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness (2022)

Given the empty hero-versus-villain plots and interchangeable cgi-action sequences of all these movies, Marvel seems to believe simply striking upon different skins and tones, for example giving Thor IV an 80s-rock theme or setting Venom in a noirish San Francisco or making it horror-lite or nanosized or snart-arsed is the best way to perpetuate its exponentially-growing raft of superhero movies and in the hands of director Sam Raimi, this sequel to Doctor Strange is certainly a unique look horror-lite Marvel entry with a very Carrie-like witch, oodles of risen-dead bad guys and evil souls reincarnate and so is perhaps for a slightly older than usual Marvel viewer....say ten.

★★★☆☆

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