Wanted

It took me two years to get round to watching this one. I didn’t really have any anticipation for it or any desire to rush out and watch it. I found myself pressing the record button on the remote after reading it’s synopsis a couple years down the line figuring it’d be an easy watch after a busy weekend or something. Well, most of my uninformed preconceptions of this film were backed up by what I saw, an utterly ridiculous over the top combo of forgettable action scenes and a totally flawed story line. The first thing I want to mention, James McAvoy. I thought he played well, but I hated his character. The guy deserved everything shitty going on in his life. So he was in a job he hated, his girlfriend was cheating on him with his alleged best friend, although the film doesn’t show us any signs of a close friendship between him and his buddy, he was just a guy he works with. Apparently he doesn’t really care about anything in his life, he’s a confused unhappy dude in his late twenties and I cannot see how an audience is meant to identify with such an annoying character, he’s a fucking loser with little desire to pull his finger out and fix things. I think the only people that could avoid being distracted by this character are those who couldn’t give a crap about whether they like him or not and just want to watch explosions, average CGI driven action scenes and Angelina Jolie. Which to be honest seem to be the movies strong points as far as what ‘Wanted’ wanted to achieve.

Repo Men

Not to be confused with the 1984 Emilio Estevez flick. That was Repo Man and was about repossessing cars, but in this one the story focuses on two people in the repossession business, hence the name Repo Men, but these guys don’t repossess cars, they repossess Organs. Not the musical kind, the human kind, although the organs aren’t actually human organs, they’re artificial human organs! Sound crazy! This is the year 2025 man, the world has gone completely bat shit crazy according to this movie.

Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker both work for a corporation called ‘the union’. They have weird little tattoos on their necks of the company’s logo. The Union has perfected the design and manufacture of artificial human organs. They sell them from their outlets to people in desperate need of hearts, lungs, livers, pancreas’ etc. They’re very expensive, there’s a scene near the beginning with a guy being sold a pancreas, $600,000 dollars, at something like 23% APR (I can’t remember over how many years, but still). However there’s a huge catch, you have 3 months, and if you fail to make a payment after 3 months the repo men will come and take your organ back. Simple!

Command Performance

When people that can’t play drums try to play drums whether in real life, on film or whatever but you can’t hear what they’re doing (you can only see them play), you can usually tell they can’t play for shit. I think it’s pretty obvious if you look closely. I was shocked to find when this movie kicked off that Mr Lundgren can clearly play drums. Having looked this movie up on IMDB apparently Dolph is a drummer in real life. That’s Wicked, I didn’t know that. But, I could tell from watching him play in this movie, that he had a natural posture and actually was co-ordinating his body to play something that could pass as a drum beat.

That’s right, Dolph Lundgren is the drummer in a rock band in this one. He must be the oldest member of the band, but he plays without his shirt and in a pair of aviator sunglasses and looks as cool as fuck!

Command Performance basically rehashes the Die Hard formula but does it in a way where it doesn’t really matter, there are enough subtle differences and the movie is entertaining enough that you just go with it and enjoy it.

Felon

This movie directed by Rick Roman Waugh, a stuntman on Tango & Cash, Universal Soldier, True Romance, Hard Target, Last Action Hero, The Last Of the Mohicans, Lethal Weapon 2, They Live, Ghost Dad(?).....Just to name a few. So with a pretty neat script, a camera or 2, a prison set, Val Kilmer & Stephen Dorff. This fella has crafted a decent prison movie.

Stephen Dorff plays a mid 30’s family man, he has a young son, a caring wife, a nice house; he’s just secured a business loan to expand his construction business. Set up nicely for something real shitty to happen, and for sure it does. He hears an intruder in his house one night and takes a baseball bat and chases the guy off, but once the robber is in retreat, Dorff takes a swing right to the back of the melon, knocks the robber down and kills him instantly. This is quite a heavy moment from a character point of view, my only complaint with this particular part was the actual impact between the baseball bat and the head wasn’t hard enough in a filmatic sense, they should’ve used a bigger and louder sound effect, and cut it in a way to really show blistering impact, it was a a little weak, but the guy is lying dead on the floor and Dorff stands their crapping himself.