Tags: Spy vs. Spy
Skyfall in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up*
The fact-based premise is almost enough to sell
Argo by itself.
Argo opens and closes as a tense political spy caper, but it’s also an affectionate send-up of the movie-making process. The old advice to writers to “write what you know” is applicable to movies about movies, from
Singin’ in the Rain to
The Artist, and few subjects inspire Hollywood — or appeal to movie fans and film critics — more reliably than Hollywood itself.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Brad Bird’s
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is so preposterously entertaining that it makes watching other recent Hollywood action spectacles feel like work. What in the last few years even compares to it?
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Here’s my 30-second take on
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Visuals aside,
Cars 2 is the first Pixar film ever (or at least since
A Bug’s Life) that could one could easily imagine as a DreamWorks film—circa
Shark Tale perhaps, with its punningly fishified analog of the human world. Or, with its frenetic action and gimmickry,
Cars 2 bears some resemblance to a Blue Sky Studios cartoon (circa
Robots, say, or
Rio, with its world culture flavor). In a word, not only is
Cars 2 mediocre, it doesn’t even feel like mediocre Pixar.
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B- |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Salt is tasty in moderation, though you wouldn’t want to make it a big part of your diet.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
Little things like plot holes and leaps in logic shouldn’t matter that much when a movie like this is working. Watching Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in
Charade is a lot of fun even if you’re not completely sure afterward exactly what happened. If
True Lies works for you, it’s because of how Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis sell it, not because the story makes so much sense. When you find yourself nit-picking plot points and character motivations, it’s a sign the movie isn’t working.
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B- |
*** |
-1|
Adults
Ferocious car chases, rooftop pursuits, brutal combat sequences, elegantly choreographed stunts, a parade of exotic locations…
Quantum does all this, with credible panache. Just don’t expect to care like you did in
Casino.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Adults
With
The Bourne Ultimatum the eponymous hero has accomplished something rare indeed: Jason Bourne has gone the distance for three straight films. With
The Bourne Identity and
The Bourne Supremacy,
The Bourne Ultimatum seals the achievement of a rare action franchise for thinking adults, combining gripping entertainment with an undercurrent of moral seriousness.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
As he did with
The Untouchables, in
Mission: Impossible De Palma borrows the marquee value of an earlier franchise as a pretext for a series of loosely strung-together set pieces, highlighted by a single dazzling sequence that’s better than the rest of the movie put together.
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C+ |
**½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
Despite its flaws,
M:I‑III is competent, disposable entertainment. There’s nothing here that really grabs you like the first film’s CIA break-in, but it doesn’t leave a sour taste like Woo’s
M:I‑II. Even so, in the post-007 world of Jason Bourne, that may not be enough.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has come a long way since he was fished out of the ocean with a pair of bullet holes in his body and even bigger holes in his memory. His past is still a blank, mostly, but he’s finally fully in command of his devastating training and skills as a CIA black-ops agent. These days, when he kicks into high gear, it’s by design, not reflex.
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D |
*½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Unfortunately, while this sequel is the least morally problematic of Muniz’s three big-screen outings, it’s also far and away the lamest, lacking utterly its predecessors’ fitful humor and excitement. When the high point of your movie involves a Queen Elizabeth lookalike getting down to a youth-orchestra Euro-pop version of Edwin Starr’s "War," something has gone disastrously wrong.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Buster Keaton’s most popular vehicle in his
own day, and said to be Keaton’s favorite of his own films,
The Navigator isn’t as sophisticated and satisfying as his
best work (e.g.,
The General), but it’s still brilliant
slapstick comedy, with a rousing third act and a slam-bang
climax.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
The suit is in fact the Tactical Uniform Experiment (TUX), a
high-tech weapons system that acts directly on the user’s nervous
system, instantly enabling Jimmy — who, unlike most of Jackie’s
characters, has no special skills of his own — to dance like Fred
Astaire, climb walls and ceilings like Spider-Man,
and, of course, fight like Jackie Chan.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
One of Bob Hope’s best comic-thriller
vehicles,
My Favorite Blonde benefits from its
semi-serious spy-thriller ambiance, tolerably cogent plot,
scene-stealing penguin, and above all one of the more human, less
caricatured, less one-dimensionally narcissistic characters in
Hope’s movie
oeuvre.
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C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
If Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over were consistent, that
protest would become Juni’s mantra, repeated every thirty seconds
or so from that point on until the end of the film. Then again,
if Spy Kids 3-D were consistent — about anything at all — it might actually start making some kind of sense.
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C- |
** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
In the original Spy Kids, dashing spy parents Gregorio
and Ingrid Cortez (Antonio Banderas and Carla Guigino) exchanged
the glamorous world of espionage for the even greater adventure
of raising a family. Their children Carmen and Juni (Alexa Vega
and Daryl Sabara) weren’t actually "Spy Kids" — a term that in
the movie actually applied to a line of robotic child warriors
designed by the only somewhat sinister Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming) — but became entangled in their parents’ exotic former life when
the latter were captured by Floop’s forces.
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A |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The press kit calls it "James Bond for kids," but this
over-the-top fantasy romp might be more accurately described as a
family-friendly
True Lies: The Next Generation, or even a
married-with-children
Austin Powers — all with
Willy
Wonka-style wonkiness and inspired set design straight out of
Dr. Seuss.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Not that I’ve anything against cats. But there’s a particular
breed of cat fancier who looks down at dogs precisely for
qualities like their obedience, loyalty, and desire to please,
explicitly preferring the fierce independence and proud
impassiveness associated with cats. I wonder whether this kind of
cat appreciation isn’t often rooted in a misguided human ideal — whether such people don’t prefer cats because they themselves
like the idea of being remote and independent.
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C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Welcome to our second annual Spring Frankie Muniz Morally Problematic
Spy Kids Rip-Off Movie, featuring hilarious hijinks offending each year against a different one of the Ten Commandments.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Wilson, a capable comic force in his own right, gets laughs
too, but for the most part he’s content to play the laid-back
straight man setting up Murphy’s punchlines. There’s an early
scene in which, discussing their working relationship, Wilson
uses a Harlem Globetrotters analogy to argue that he, the
professional spy, should be team leader Meadowlark Lemon, and
Murphy, a boxing champ, should be Fred "Curly" Neal, Meadowlark’s
sidekick. Murphy, of course, ridicules this suggestion; and,
whatever the ultimate relationship of their characters, which of
the actors is Meadowlark and which is Curly is never in
dispute.
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C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
The first hour works quite a bit better than the second hour,
in part because there is a second hour. The setup: When
CIA agent Kevin Pope (Rock) is murdered in the middle of an
important undercover operation involving the black-market sale of
a miniature thermonuclear device, Pope’s CIA mentor Gaylord Oakes
(Hopkins) must convince the sellers that Pope (or rather his
undercover persona) is still alive. To do this, Oakes must turn
to — you guessed it — Pope’s long-lost twin brother.
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A- |
***½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Like the memory-impaired antihero of
Memento, the protagonist of Doug Liman’s
The Bourne Identity (and a trilogy of Robert Ludlum novels before that) has no choice but to trust himself even though he can’t be sure he’s a trustworthy individual. Perhaps his honorable aspirations themselves are a good sign. Certainly the amazing abilities and instincts that suddenly surface when needed are clues to who and what he is. Jason may not know much, but he’s pretty sure he’s something out of the ordinary.
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B- |
*** |
-2|
Adults
“It’s kind of difficult to explain,” CIA operative
Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) hedges with a wry smile. It may be the
most straightforward piece of information anyone gets from him in the
entire film.
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D+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
This second
Mission: Impossible film has almost as little to do with the 1996 blockbuster original as the latter had with the classic TV series whose name it happened to share.
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