There have been three Johnny English movies, starting with the original in 2003, this film in 2011 and Johnny English Strikes Back in 2018. They all star Rowan Atkinson from Mr. Bean and Blackadder fame. None of these movies have achieved any form of critical fame, but they’ve been popular around the world due to their slapstick and silly humor. Consider them like a Leslie Nielsen comedy film but with a little more intelligence.
Johnny has lost his chance at knighthood and is studying to be a monk when his new boss Pamela Thornton (Gillian Anderson, who played a similar role in The Spy Who Dumped Me) brings him back.
Rosamund Pike plays Kate Sumner, a behavioural psychologist who brings back Johnny’s repressed memories, which leads him to remember the evil spy organization Vortex, led by MI7 turncoat Simon Ambrose (Dominick West). Actually, the whole movie is spent trying to determine who is on Johnny’s side, who is trying to kill the Queen and who is in Vortex.
Interestingly enough, Atkinson and Pike made their theatrical movie debuts in Bond films, with Atkinson appearing in the Sean Connery led Never Say Never Again and Pike in Die Another Day. That’s also the very same golf course from Goldfinger in this movie.
Johnny’s sidekick Agent Tucker is played by Daniel Kaluuya, who has gone on to some measure of fame from the movie Get Out.
This is a fun movie if you feel like shutting your mind off and making fun of the Eurospy genre.
Nobody is demanding the Snyder cut for this, his most revealing film, a total exploration of the id that presents a dual world of women battling against, well, something while they’re also being abused in what we’re to assume is the more real of the two fake worlds. But throughout, it just looks like you’re watching someone else play a video game and that’s about as exciting as watching someone play a video game.
Yes, in this world, girls that are being used in a brothel and kept in an insane asylum prove their worth as women by jumping out of planes and battling robots while wearing fetish outfits. Surely it all means something, but it totally doesn’t.
Snyder said, “How can I make a film that can have action sequences in it that aren’t limited by the physical realities that normal people are limited by, but still have the story make sense so it’s not, and I don’t mean to be mean, like a bullshit thing like Ultraviolet or something like that.”
Dude, you should be so lucky as to make something as incoherent as Ultraviolet.
Despite the film being as CGI as it gets, every one of the actresses spent twelve weeks training to get ready for it. That’s right — six hours a day, five days a week, learning martial arts, how to deadlift 250 pounds, shoot firearms and look cool pole dancing, because, well, Zack Snyder.
This would have made a much better Fox Force Five origin story than a movie, trust me.
On one hand, Snyder has said that it’s all about “fetishistic and personal” while he’s also said that it’s a critique of the way that geek culture objectifies women. By, you guessed it, objectifying women. Sure, they have big guns and swords, but they’re missing that most crucial of all weapons: actual empowerment.
Let me try and make sense of this all.
At some point in the 60’s, Babydoll (Emily Browning, The Uninvited) is placed in a Vermont mental institution by her stepfather, who has probably killed her mother and assaulted her sister. To add to that, he pays the asylum’s Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac, way before he was Poe Dameron) to lobotomize her.
Babydoll then escapes into a world where she’s a sex slave for Jones, who is now her pimp. She’s joined by Amber (Jamie Chung, the most successful Real World cast member), Blondie (singer Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone, The Neon Demon) and her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Dr. Gorski, who is the main doctor in the first world, is now the girl’s dance instructor and is played by Carla Gugino (she was also in Snyder’s Watchmen). Also — Babydolls virginity is about to be sold to a client played by Jon Hamm, which is totally how real life and prostitution looks and works.
But wait! There’s another world where Scott Glenn shouts cliches at the girls while they battle giant Japanese samurai robots, dragons and a steampunk version of World War I.
The story ends with Glenn’s character somehow coming into our world and the heroine getting lobotomized and nearly assaulted, which is some kind of paradise in one of these three worlds, I guess. But again, it’s totally not.
It looks really cool though. Which is kind of Snyder’s stock in trade. I have no idea who this is for, other than developmentally challenged men who can’t get the women in the film, so they objectify them. It’s kind of like the guys who defend and white knight girls that they pay $20 to see in their underwear on Patreon or onlyfans when guys demand they show more nudity. No one is friends here and this is all just a transaction. In the same way, this film says nothing, is nothing and desperately wants to be something — yet is as lofty as the cover versions of much better songs that it employs in some grasp for something, anything.
So this whole month is about flops. And this movie, well, it made $82 million worldwide against its $35 million production budget, so that’s anything more than a flop. But it’s also John Singleton’s last movie — a career that had the promise of Boyz n the Hood ended with a vehicle for the werewolf boy from Twilight. Then again, he also made Four Brothers and 2 Fast 2 Furious, so maybe I’m being too generous to his promise.
Maybe I’m just upset because Abduction is the limpest of limp action movies and has the balls to be set in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Then again, most of it was shot in Hampton and Mount Lebanon, two neighborhoods rich with privileged folks who look down on our town’s yinzer soul. None of this will mean anything to you if didn’t grow up within earshot of the voice of Myron Cope, but Taylor Lautner is exactly the kind of kid who hung out at South Hills Village or Ross Park before his dad’s pals from the country club got him a cushy job so he could ogle and harass the interns, always a step ahead of you because there is no middle class here.
Ah, maybe I’m being hard on Taylor. After all, he was a wolf boy. And here, he plays a kid with Jason Isaacs and Maria Bello as his adoptive parents and a kindly Sigourney Weaver as a therapist who maybe isn’t all that kindly, but lives in one of those wacky houses you always stare up at Mt. Washington and wonder — who lives there?
Soon, his kinda sorta parents are dead, his house has been blown up real good and Alfred Molina is trying to kill him. What’s there to do but fall in love with Phil Collins’ daughter and try and find your real dad, only to discover that he’s Dylan McDermott or Dermot Mulroney?
Michael Nyqvist, who played Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl With…films, is also in this. Perhaps this is out American take on these spy thrillers, where instead of sexy and fashion-forward Lisbeth Salander, we get young Taylor rocking out his best American Eagle duds?
This movie got the kind of reviews that I can only dream of making, with one claiming that Bert from Sesame Street had more range than Taylor and the fact that an actual abduction would be preferable to watching this film.
Abduction and Lautner won the Teen Choice Awards for Choice Action Movie and Choice Action Actor. Meanwhile, the man who was once Jacob Black lost his bid to win a Razzie to Adam Sandler, who had the year actors like Cash Flagg could only dream about, as in 2011 he made Jack and Jill and Just Go With It.
If you want to hear exactly how much I hate this movie — and didn’t get the gist from reading the above words — then you should listen to our podcast where I basically went off on the movie for nearly an hour.
Great tagline: The family did not survive. But the recordings did.
Good premise: The movie is based on actual found footage that documents the horrifying experiences of a family that moved into the infamous haunted house.
Bad news: It’s made by The Asylum.
Found footage, meet Amityville. Amityville, meet found footage.
You two place nice.
The Benson family decides to move into 112 Ocean Avenue, no matter what the rest of the known world knows. As soon as they decide to close on the house, their realtor drops dead in the driveway. The next week, a mover falls down the steps and dies. But hey — once you’re all moved in, who cares about little things like that?
Even when their daughter Melanie begins to speak to John Matthew DeFeo, no one thinks, “Maybe we should just rent a townhouse instead.”
Lead actor Jason Odell Williams graduated from the Actor’s Studio in New York and has written and produced several of his own plays. And yet, here he is, stuck in a found footage Amityville movie, a prospect that seems more dire than bugs attacking priests and blood dripping down the wall.
In the original Amityville film, an entire room would mysteriously appear. In The Amityville Haunting, it’s a mysterious landline telephone. There’s some message in that, I figure.
After one movie — 2008’s The Escapist — Rupert Wyatt was picked to direct this blockbuster remake. It did pretty well, but his career took a bit of a hit this year when the film Captive State kind of disappeared.
This is more a remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes than the original film, as a brain repair technique gives advanced intelligence to a chimpanzee named Caesar, who leads an ape uprising.
Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist at the San Francisco biotech company Gen-Sys. Thanks to the viral-based drug ALZ-112 — which is being tested on chimpanzees — he’s close to finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which his father (John Lithgow) suffers from.
One of the chimps in testing — Bright Eyes, named for Taylor’s nickname in the original film — goes wild in her cage and is put down, but they learn that she just gave birth to a son who is named Caesar. He’s inherited his mother’s intelligence as he’s been exposed to the drug inside the womb.
While the drug helps his father for some time, he becomes resistant to it. A neighbor attacks the dad while he’s confused and Caesar defends him, earning him a trip to the San Bruno Primate Shelter where he’s bullied by a chimp named Rocket and Dodge Landon (Tom Felton, who was Draco in the Harry Potter movies), the abusive head guard whose father (Brian Cox) manages the animal preserve.
As Caesar rises to the top of the primates, finally freeing the apes at the shelter and the San Francisco Zoo. Soon, he has run into the forest and a chance at freedom.
Andy Serkis is pretty amazing as Caesar and the effects are great. I prefer the original films, but it seems like enough people enjoyed this to lead to two sequels.
Also known as A Christmas Puppy, this is yet another movie yawned forth from the hellscape of movies that are made by David DeCoteau. If you watched A Talking Cat!?! and were like, hey — I’d like him to make a Christmas movie, well, you already have Santa’s Summer House. But then if you want more, what kind of monster are you?
This is the first of DeCoteau’s Christmas movies, set in the same mansion where his homoerotic 1313 movie series is set.
Riley is charged with giving the Christmas Spirit to a family, so he does some breaking and entering and all manner of shenanigans ensue. There’s also a Christmas Spirit who wears a toga like she’s Vanna White in Goddess of Love who throws fortune cookies at Riley whenever he needs help.
Alexandra Paul — yes, the virgin Connie Swail from Dragnet — is in this, as is Maureen McCormick — yes, Marcia Brady — and Judy Landers — yes, Ms. Xenobia from Dr. Alien — as the voice of Chompie the dog.
While this movie was originally called A Christmas Puppy, the dog doesn’t show up until the end and really doesn’t have much to do with the film. That’s probably why the title was changed, because I could see lots of kids being sat down in front of this as a babysitter over the holidays and their poor soft skulls having to contend with the pure ridiculousness that is a David DeCoteau movie.
You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime. May the Lord be merciful to your soul.
DAY 3. SPORTS AND FITNESS: All pain, no gain. A workout watch out!
For this year’s challenge, I’ve wanted to avoid the expected and find movies that nobody is really talking about. Plus, each movie could never have been posted before to our site. That means that movies like Death Spa and Killer Workout were verboten.
The Japanese LOVE baseball, perhaps more than their American counterparts. Their love, however, is filtered through their own lens, which means that their edited American games take out everything between pitches. That means that a game that takes us 3 hours or more to watch can take but minutes. Keep that in mind and you’ll understand how a movie like Deddoboru came to be.
The film starts with young Jubeh Yakyu playing a game of catch with his father, who asks him to throw him his best pitch. This is a horrible time for Jubeh to discover he has superpowers, as the resulting throw ignites Earth and blows his dad up real good.
As a result, Jubeh becomes a juvenile delinquent and hero of the teenagers of Japan, doing things like killing fifty people a week and throwing TV sets at people. He’s sent to the Pterodactyl Juvenile Reformatory, a place where his adopted brother was once a prisoner before his death.
Chief warden Ishihara — not-so-coincidentally the granddaughter of a Nazi collaborator — is in charge of the prison baseball league and knows that the team will finally have a chance if Jubeh is on their team. Also: her butler looks exactly like Klaus Nomi, a fact that is called out in the film.
Director Yudai Yamaguchi knows of strange baseball. He also directed 2003’s Jigoku Koshien (Hell Stadium), or as it’s known in the West, Battlefield Baseball. The hero of that film was also named Jubeh, but this is less of a straight sequel than just another movie about deadly baseball.
Tak Sakaguchi, who plays Jubeh, is pretty much acting like the Japanese Man With No Name in this, constantly smoking and looking cool while he does so. Literally, he has the superpower — in addition to being able to throw father-murdering fastballs — to generate a cancer stick whenever he needs it.
Should you watch it? Does the prospect of a giant robot covered with swastikas and evil prisoner women battling a superpowered Asian Clint Eastwood fill you with glee? Because if it not, anata ni wa kokoro ga arimasen, as the Japanese say.
In The FP, disputes between rival gangs are settled by playing Beat-Beat Revelation, a dancing video game similar to Dance Dance Revolution. The 248 and the 245 are battling to control the FP — Frazier Park — and lessons must be learned.
This all comes from the minds of Brandon and Jason Trost. Brandon has gone on to do cinematography for Crank: High Voltage, Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, while Jason has created the film series All Superheroes Must Die and the film Wet and Reckless. He’s really blind in his right eye — or is trying to be fashionable — which is why he’s always wearing an eyepatch.
The film begins with L Dubba E, the leader of the 245 gang, murdering BTRO, the leader of the 248 gang. As a result, his brother JTRO (Jason Trost) leaves the FP behind to become a lumberjack.
A year later, L Dubba E has taken over the FP and is holding back all the booze, which is leading to an increase in meth usage and homelessness. KCDC (Art Hsu, who is also in Crank: High Voltage), another 248 member, brings our hero back home, where he reunites with Stacy, an ex-girlfriend who is now sleeping with the enemy.
Can JTRO rise to the level of his brother? Will Stacy stop having sex with the main bad guy and realize she loves our hero? Will people bring guns to a dance off?
If you’ve ever played video games, you’ll probably enjoy this more than most people. Jason Trost came up with the idea in his teens when he noticed people treating Dance Dance Revolution like an intense battle. The dialogue was inspired by Def Jam: Fight for NY, which makes absolute and total sense.
Best of all, James Remar is in the film as the narrator. He met the brothers when their dad worked on Mortal Kombat Annihilation‘s effects team.
This is the kind of film that you’re either going to fall in love with instantly — like I did — or think it’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen. Imagine Mad Max with dance-offs and you’ll get the idea.
Frank Coraci has made a living doing films with Adam Sandler (The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy, Click) and Kevin James (Here Comes the Boom and this movie). Sandler and James helped write this take on the “only one man can hear animals” trope and here we are — with me being a completist that needs to see every Stallone movie.
Griffin Keyes (James) proposes to Stephanie (Leslie Bibb), who rejects him because he’s a zookeeper. His heart is broken and five years pass before he runs into her again. Griffin’s brother Dave offers him a job at his car dealership and tries to get them back together, but obviously, our hero loves animals. And they love him so much that they decide to break the code and speak directly to him.
The central issue that this film gets wrong is that zoo vet Kate (Rosario Dawson), who he uses to get Stephanie jealous, is a million times beyond her in coolness and hotness levels.
Humans that appear include Joe Rogan as Stephanie’s boyfriend, Ken Jeong as a reptile house workers, Donnie Wahlberg as an evil zookeeper, and James’ real-life wife Steffiana de la Cruz.
Let us speak of the animals. Bernie the Gorilla was played by Tom Woodruff, Jr., the Academy Award-winning effects master of. Death Becomes Her and voiced by Nick Nolte. Crystal the Monkey plays Donald the Tufted Capuchin with Sandler providing the voice. Stallone is in here as Joe the Lion, alongside Judd Apatow as an elephant, Cher as Joe the Lion’s wife Janet, Jon Favreau as Jermo the bear, Faizon Love as another bear, Maya Rudolph as a giraffe, Bas Rutten (!) as a wolf, Don Rickles as a bullfrog, Jim Breuer as a crow and Richie Minervini as an ostrich.
It’s exactly the kind of movie you think it is. If you hate puerile junk with talking animals, you’re going to hate it. Perhaps by the context clues you’ve guessed my stance.
Before Aquaman, Jason Momoa was almost another franchise star with this 2011 reimagining of Conan. Directed by Marcus Naspiel (who was also behind the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th) and narrated by Morgan Freeman, it failed at the box office and had mostly negative reviews. That’s never stopped us from loving a movie before, so let’s check it out.
Conan is the son of Corin (Ron Perlman!), who is the chief of the Cimmerians and also a tough dad who doesn’t think his son is ready to hold a sword, despite him beheading several enemies. There’s also this Mask of Acheron that needs put back together, something that big bad Khaler Zym needs to bring his wife back to life. His troops attack Corin’s people, killing everyone but Conan.
Fast forward to Conan’s days as a pirate, where he meets Ela-Shan , a thief and together they embark on a journey to destroy Zym. Conan disfigured Lucius, one of the guards, as a child and goes further now. They learn that Zym seeks Tamara, a descendant of the sorcerers of Acheron, whose death will unleash the mask.
Bob Sapp, who was a major pro wrestling, MMA and pop culture star in Japan plays Ukafa, the leader of Zym’s soldiers.
Zym and his daughter, Marique (an unrecognizable Rose McGowan who spent six hours a day in makeup for the role) attack a monastery, but Tamara runs away and is saved by Conan. For the rest of the film, Conan fights off many attempts on her life before saving her and recovering the sword that was taken from his father.
This was also made before Momoa became a big star on Game of Thrones. Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all asked to play Conan’s father, yet refused.
This film felt like a video game cut scene for nearly two hours to me. It’s glossy and filled with CGI, with a huge budget compared to any Conan film that ever came before. Yet it just didn’t have the feel that I was looking for. Perhaps you’ll feel differently.
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