Free Fire

I'm picking a side, and that side is justice. While Free Fire has accumulated mixed reviews to say the least, those who are against it have called it a bore. To those reviewers, I ask them what movie where they watching? For Free Fire is anything but boring and it is an affront to justice to think so. I can only guess that they were surprised by the different take on the Mexican stand off from today's big movie hits. Ben Wheatley does not have a constant barrage of bullets being fired with high action explosions or the big hail fire finally. It is much subtler and character based. Now these characters don't get much development as people but they are funny, crazy people to begin with. One of the great character actors of our time, Sharlto Copley leads the group with a quasi-Austrian accent that you can't really pin down where he is from. He is a shift gun dealer always looking out for himself and trying to push what he can get away with. Arnie Hammer play a refreshing comical intermediary/bodyguard who thinks everyone should relax more because he's high. Cillian Murphy plays an IRA gun procurer with a no nonsense attitude but manages to bring a bunch with him. Brie Larson rounds out the top four with an interesting performance as an intermediary who brought the two groups together. There are sarcastic quips galore and that might be where many of the other critics got bored but as sarcasm is a part of life for me I adored it. Whenever you begin to get bored with petty bickering a fresh fire fight breaks out or a new monkey wrench is thrown into the mix. The whole ordeal is the right amount of high tension and breaks in the action to give the audience the ability to fully comprehend what is happening. And it is no small feat for the director to make the audience actually care about the wellbeing of any of these characters as they are all despicable criminals only trying to get what's best for them. As the tension rises and the audience becomes more invested in the characters each one gets their just deserts. And that is true justice. 2 1/2 stars out of 4.

Fate of the Furious

Good bye Rock, hello Dwayne Johnson. The man has finally arrived. No longer can it be said that the days of true movie stardom are behind us because Johnson has somehow tapped into the reservoirs of old and burst on the scene as the next big thing. While you might be asking, but he already is a movie star and he already was the highest paid actor in Hollywood for 2016, you would be right. My answer to you is less, he did all those things, but not until Fate of the Furious has he shown his true potential of elevating every scene he is in to good, borderline great movie making. And that is an increasingly more difficult task to do with the ridiculous excess of the Fast and the Furious franchise. The single sequence that is cringeworthy that has been discussed ad nauseam is the interaction between Johnson and Jason Statham discussing their pasts, threatening each other and then laughing and accepting one another. This is the dilemma that the Fast series keeps running into of terrible dialogue and over the top action sequences. If you remove Johnson from the film it is an absolute dumpster fire of trash but with him he elevates it to the third best in the series. The sheer ridiculousness of the film is getting more and more difficult to accept and based on the US box office take, it appears that people may finally be wising up to it. Since Furious 4 they simply have been trying to one up the last movie and they finally may have one upped to far for even the most diehard fans. Don't get me wrong, the film will make over a billion dollars and there will be a ninth, but maybe now the critics and fans are wising up to what they are actually watching. Cars and explosions. By the standard of movie definition, the critics should hate this franchise just like they hate everything that Michael Bay comes up, with which they should. Somehow Vin Diesel has been bullet proof when it comes to his precious car universe. Hopefully we are finally seeing some chinks in the armor.

Fate of the Furious has the Gang fighting against themselves when Cipher (Charlize Theron) randomly shows up at the beginning of the film and shows Dom (Vin Diesel) some information that will motivate him to completely betray his entire 'family' that they have spent the last 6 films (Tokyo Drift excluded) building towards you never turn your back on family. The main question I have at this point is what the heck kind of skills does this team of car racers have that no one else in the world have? They keep getting pulled into these amazing, world ending scenarios and all they can do is drive cars really fast. When did Tej Parker (Ludicrous) become this ultimate hacker able to defeat the world’s most dangerous hacker? The only member of the team that actually has their talents introduced and explained is Ramesy (Nathalie Emmanuel) and that’s only because she created the 'God's Eye' program and was introduced in the last film. Everyone else just picks up these amazing talents whenever the plot needs them to. And the plot needs them to pull things out of thin air a lot. Since when could thousands of cars be hacked and then driven and inserted with autopilots, creating a drone car army? Or be able to do anything with a nuclear football without all the codes from the different people that MOVIES THEMSELVES have taught us they need? Or anyone be able to hack into a NUCLEAR SUBMARINE and drive it remotely? Or completely remove the nuclear fallout from detonated nuclear missiles by simply removing an electronic chip? That uranium doesn't just go away. And all of this is made actually entertaining by the charm and charisma or Dwayne Johnson. Whenever he is not on screen or in the background, the film is laughable and boring. The main lesson here is that Johnson was right to beef with Diesel over screen time because he absolutely save this film from being a clunker. 2 ½ pipes out of 4.