Silent Night (2023) - Movie Review

John Woo, the action filmmaker that just about every other action film or even parodies of every other action film over the past forty years owes some artistic debt to, has returned to Hollywood. While his work State-side never really managed to reach the artistic heights of his heyday, as memetic as films like Face/Off and even Mission: Impossible 2 have become, I’m still calling this a moment of potential celebration because… well, it makes the most sense why 2023 would be the year that he would come back. In the same time frame that John Wick, a franchise that simply wouldn’t exist without John Woo’s iconic approach to action thrills, reached its creative apex with Chapter 4, getting more of that grandeur direct from the source is quite the offer.

The Suicide Squad (2021) - Movie Review

I appear to be one of the few people who is still willing to say a good thing about David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (and without endlessly pleading for a #AyerCut to make it “good”). Yeah, it’s definitely flawed and more than a little messy, but on the strength of the characters, I had a lot of fun with it. However, if anyone was going to give that concept a second try, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone better suited for it than James Gunn. He’s already proven his worth with elevating lower-tier comic book characters with his work on the Guardians Of The Galaxy, and for a team on a similar moral standing, he should know how to deal with the material. And I gotta say, even as an apologist for the 2016 film, this honestly blows it out of the water.

Run All Night (2015) - Movie Review

Even though I have been carrying on with this compulsive list-of-every-movie-I-see-each-year gig since 2012, I’ve only been taking it… seriously(?) for a few months now with this review blog. The short time I have been doing this makes me think that, quite frankly, Liam Neeson needs to slow the hell down because I have covered three of his films in that time. That, combined with the numerous films he has been in since Taken hit it big, makes me really regret feeling burn-out over the Oscar season pics because I am really starting to grow bored of Neeson’s brand of action fodder. Not to say that he’s bad or anything, as he’s more than capable of playing the hero in these films, but he doesn’t really bring anything special to the mix with his presence. Put him next to someone like Jason Statham, who has not one but two films coming out very soon, and that lack of an USP becomes even more blatant.  So, best we can hope for is that the production around him is solid enough… but do we get that this time around? Time for Neeson no. 4: This is Run All Night.