Bruce Willis and Henry Cavill star as father and son in the upcoming action thriller, The Cold Light of Day.  Cavill stars as a Wall Street trader who is on vacation with his family in Madrid.  He goes into town for supplies and comes back to the family’s boat to find them all gone and signs of foul play all over.  He soon learns that his father is actually a CIA agent and his family was kidnapped by people who believe that Bruce Willis’ character stole a valuable briefcase.  Sigourney Weaver co-stars as a fellow CIA agent who may or not be corrupt.  It seems very similar to Abducted with Taylor Lautner (Sigourney Weaver even co-starred in that movie) but hopefully with actors who can actually, you know, act, that it will be a decent action movie.  Check out the trailer below and the movie is out in April.

Contraband is a movie that is perfectly suited for a January release, because any other time it would be way out it’s league.  It’s a by the numbers heist movie that takes itself too seriously and ultimately just warrants a “meh” in response.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Chris Faraday, a master smuggler who retired to raise a family and start a legitimate business of installing home security systems.  His wife’s brother Andy (Caleb Jones), follows in Chris’ smuggling footsteps but blows a job for a vicious drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi) and Chris is forced to reenter the smuggling world to bail Andy out and protect his family.

People either love or hate Mark Wahlberg and Contraband is not going to help change anybody’s opinion one way or the other.  He does is usual thing of being either confused or pissed off or both but he’s still one of the better current action stars.  Kate Beckinsale has basically nothing to do except get constantly threatened by Giovanni Ribisi and his goons.  Speaking of Ribisi, he is off in a completely different galaxy of acting, adopting what, I guess, is supposed to be a Cajun accent, as the movie is set in New Orleans but it’s so over the top it’s laughable and if the movie had a sense of humor, maybe they would have played it up more and it would have worked.  JK Simmons, as the captain of the ship Mark Wahlberg and crew are using to smuggle stuff, also seems to be adopting a Cajun accent but it’s almost too subtle, something you don’t normally associate with JK Simmons.  Ben Foster is seemingly going to be the comedic relief but then they establish that he’s a recovering alcoholic and he doesn’t even go on the heist with Wahlberg.

Contraband suffers doubly from being such a cliche of the heist genre.  On the one hand, you can basically predict the plot if you’ve seen any similar movies; something will go wrong that forces the crew to change the plan, one of the crew is a traitor, the crew narrowly avoids getting caught numerous times and the crew employs some sort of clever device to hide their ill gotten gain from the authorities.  It’s heist movie 101 although it is a little interesting to see what goes into smuggling things as opposed to just a straight up bank heist (although it’s apparently the easiest thing in the world to get onto the crew of a cargo ship with a conveniently assembled crew of fellow smugglers).  The one thing that Contraband should have taken from every other heist movie is the sense of fun with all the crazy members of the crew.  None of Mark Wahlberg’s crew stand out in anyway and they seem interchangeable as none of them seem to have any special skills.  In other heist movies you would have “the explosives guy”, “the driver”, “the muscle”, etc.

The other major problem with Contraband is that it’s just kind of boring.  There’s one action set piece in the middle of the movie but it seems to have been an afterthought when the director realized that they needed something so that they could sell it as an action movie.  All of the smuggling and heist stuff is all straight forward and not very interesting and there’s not even a final confrontation/fight that you would expect between Wahlberg and Ribisi.  There’s a kind of interesting dilemna that occurs between Kate Beckinsale and Ben Foster that, at first, seems like a ballsy decision but they quickly backpedal and the whole subplot fizzles out (Spoilers if you’re curious: Ben Foster thinks he murdered Kate Beckinsale by knocking into a bathroom sink but she survives, although unconscious, and Foster tries to hide her “body” at a construction site where they are pouring concrete).  The twists of how the guys pull of the heist are also pretty lame and they don’t even show how they did it.

If you’re a Mark Wahlberg fan, Contraband might be worth a rent but for everyone else, there are better heist movies out there, including Wahlberg’s own Italian Job.

2.5 out of 5

Contraband seemingly continued the January tradition of solid action movies by bringing in $24.1 million and winning the weekend.  It was one of the better Mark Wahlberg openings and was one of the best January action openings, only getting beaten by Taken.  It didn’t have as crazy an opening as the re-release of The Lion King but, minus whatever costs it takes to convert the movie to 3D, it’s still basically all profit and $18.2 million is pretty solid for a 20+ year old movie.  Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol moved down another slot down to third with $11.5 million.  Joyful Noise took the fourth place spot with $11.3 million which was an OK opening and better than last year’s January music movie, Country Strong, although that movie’s downer tone probably didn’t help.  Sherlock Holmes 2 rounded out the top 5.  Fans of schadenfreude were eagerly anticipating the certain massive drop off of The Devil Inside after it’s toxic word of mouth last weekend and it didn’t disappoint, dropping almost 77% from last weekend and plummeting to sixth place.  It’s the 19th biggest drop off ever but it still made 46x it’s budget so, unfortunately, expect more shitty found footage horror movies in the future.  The only other big movement was from The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep, which went wide over the weekend and took tenth place with $5.4 million.

Hulu put a bunch of new movies up for the new year and one of them is Robert Rodriguez’s dead on adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City comics.  Featuring an ensemble cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Elijah Wood, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson and many more, the movies follows a bunch of characters in interweaving stories as they try and survive the crime ridden streets of Sin City (not to be confused with Las Vegas).  The movie manages to match the stylish black and white of the comics with jarring flashes of color.  Check out the whole movie below.

Coming out in February of next year is Act of Valor, which is looking to differentiate itself from other action/war movies by featuring actual Navy SEALs “acting” in it.  The movie follows a group of Seals as they get a mission to rescue a captured CIA agent and also try to take out the terrorist group responsible.  The action seems like will be pretty good as there’s “real NAVY SEALs tactics” involved and there’s a couple of cool bits, like catching the guy in the water after sniping him but I hate the music choice for the trailer, which makes it seem like one of those weird Christian movies like Courageous or Fireproof.  Hopefully it’s nothing like that but we’ll have to wait and see.  You can check out the trailer below.

The latest from Luc Besson’s production house Europa is the sci fi action movie “Lock-Out”.  Lock-Out stars Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace and Peter Stormare and borrows plot elements from The Chronicles of Riddick, Escape From New York and Taken as Guy Pearce is a prisoner who is offered a chance at freedom if he can rescue the president’s daughter from a space prison that has been taken over by the inmates.  Peter Stormare is the warden of the prison and Maggie Grace, once again, has gotten herself kidnapped.  I really like Guy Pearce’s cocky assholeness in the trailer as he’s getting worked over by one of Stormare’s goons and the montage at the end makes it seem like it could be a good B-level actioner.  The movie will be out in April of next year and you can check out the trailer below.

Jason Statham, the finest current purveyor of action, is back with his first offering for 2012, Safe.  Statham plays Luke Wright, a former elite agent, rescues a young Chinese girl from some shady looking characters and discovers that she has memorized some sort of code that is making her the target of the Chinese and Russian mafias, as well as corrupt NYPD officers (fortunately she’s not a horribly offensive autistic stereotype like the kid in Mercury Rising).  It looks like typically solid Jason Statham action with Chris Sarandon, Anson Mount, James Hong and Reggie Lee co-starring.  The movie is out in March of next year and you can check out the trailer below.

Coming in February of next year is Safe House, starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds.  Denzel plays a rogue CIA agent who is captured a sent to a secure location for holding, of which Reynolds is the caretaker.  When a group of armed men storm the location, Reynolds must take Denzel with him on the run and, since it’s the CIA, conspiracies and back stabbings will probably ensue.  Anytime Denzel is in bad ass mode I’m on board and he looks like he’s going to be awesome in this one.  Reynolds looks like he’s not going to be a complete douchebag, so that’s a plus as well.  The supporting cast includes Vera Fermiga and Brendan Gleeson.  Overall, it looks like a solid action movie.  Check out the trailer below.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an Everything Action Theater entry but, man, do we have a doosy right here.  Cool As Ice was the first (and last) starring vehicle for one Vanilla Ice, who stars as Johnny, leader of a motorcycle gang who roll into a small town where Johnny becomes infatuated with the WASPy Kathy.  Unfortunately, Kathy’s father is in witness protection after he ratted out a couple of his fellow police officers for corruption but a local news report about Kathy’s achievements cause the corrupt cops to come looking for revenge.  There’s way too many awesomely bad scenes to list, from Ice trying to impress Kathy by jumping his cycle in front of her horse, almost killing her, to Ice’s classic line of “Drop that Zero and get with the Hero”.  If there was a hall of fame for awesomely bad, cheesy movies, Cool as Ice would be one of the first inaugurated.  Check out the whole crazy thing below, courtesy of Hulu.

Recently making it’s way to Blu Ray, Cobra is a beloved second tier Stallone movie that features one of the weirdest montages in action movie history.  Stallone plays super cop Marion Cobretti, who is on the hunt for a vicious killer called “The Night Stalker”.  While Cobra and his partner hunt the streets, Bridgette Nielsen is introduced as a supermodel who is modeling with robots for some reason.  The song that is accompanies the scene is the wonderfully cheesy, “Angel of the City” by Robert Tepper, who previously contributed another classic Stallone montage song with “No Easy Way Out” from Rocky IV.

There’s this weird problem that Marvel seems to have had with some of their characters who should be the easiest to translate into movies being some of the worst.  Punisher, just a bad ass guy who fucks up criminals, has had tons of problems and Ghost Rider, a flame headed demon vigilante who fucks up criminals, had a pretty terrible first outing at the cinema as well.  Well, in a genius move, Marvel has just decided to let Crank directors Neveldine & Taylor just go ape shit with a Ghost Rider sequel and it looks pretty damn awesome.  Nicolas Cage is back starring as Johnny Blaze, who becomes the Ghost Rider when evil is around.  The updated effects for Ghost Rider look great and the action seems like it’s going to the typical balls to wall action that Neveldine/Taylor have been perfecting since Crank.  I could have cared less about Ghost Rider before this trailer but now, I’m actually pretty excited.  You must watch the trailer below and the movie is out this February.

Name: Conan

Occupation: Barbarian adventurer

Family: Father and Mother (Killed by Scythian warriors led by Thulsa Doom)

Allies: Valeria, Subotai, Akiro, Zula, Malak, Princess Jehna

Enemies: Thulsa Doom and the Snake Cult, Rexor, Thoth-Amon, Queen Taramis, Dagoth, Bombaata, Togra

Weapon(s) of Choice: Atlantean Broadsword, Battle Axe, Daggers, Spears

Body Count: unknown

Memorable Quote: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of the women!”

See Conan in Action:

Steven Soderbergh is infecting theaters this fall with Contagion but next year he is directing is first full on action movie with Haywire.  Following the Bourne formula, Haywire is the first movie role for American Gladiator/MMA fighter Gina Carano and she stars as Special Force operative Mallory Kane who is betrayed by the government contractors she works for and sets out on a mission for revenge.  The rest of the cast is insane with the likes of Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum and Antonio Banderas.  Acting wise is still a question but it looks like Carano will definitely be able to nail the stunt portion of the movie.  The movie is out next January and you can check out the trailer below.

Another Comic Con trailer is out, this one for Andrew Niccol’s “In Time”.  Niccol has previously directed Lord of War and Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show and The Terminal.  His latest is a sci fi action thriller that stars Justin Timberlake as a man who lives in a world where people only age until the age of 25.  At 25, you have to work for more time, which is the main currency instead of money.  Timberlake’s character runs into a guy in a bar (White Collar’s Matt Bomer) who has somehow gotten hundreds of years of life and transfers them to Timberlake.  With his new wealth, Timberlake moves up into the rich section of the city but quickly becomes a target of corrupt cops.  The movie has a pretty interesting concept but hopefully the movie explains it a little more clearly than the trailer does.  The movie co-stars Cillian Murphy, Amanda Seyfried, Alex Pettyfer, Olivia Wilde and Johnny Galecki and is out in October.

Despite the awesomeness of JCVD, Jean Claude hasn’t had as stellar a comeback as that movie would have suggested he was going to have. The best thing he’s done since that movie was probably Universal Soldier: Regeneration. We’re excited to see what he’s doing in Expendables 2 but that’s next year. This year, JCVD is starring in Assassination Games with Scott Adkins, coming out surprisingly soon (July 29).  The movie stars the action stars as rival assassins who have to team up to take down a corrupt DEA agent that was responsible for Scott Adkins’ brother’s death.  It doesn’t look like anything too spectacular but Scott Adkins is a great stuntman and it’s always nice to see JCVD kicking ass.  Check out the trailer below.

Debuting at Sundance last year and coming out fairly soon is the heist comedy Flypaper, starring Patrick Dempsey.  From the writers of The Hangover and the director of The Lion King, Flypaper finds a bank held hostage by two vastly different groups, some redneck brothers who want to rob the ATMs and a heavily armed crew who want to break into the vault.  Patrick Dempsey becomes the de facto leader of the hostages and suggests that both groups of criminals can get what they want and then leave.  The movie looks pretty good and has a great supporting cast featuring Rob Huebel, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeffrey Tambor and Ashley Judd.  The movie is coming out in limited release on July 15th and On Demand a few weeks before that.  Check out the trailer below.

Our beloved and guiding light, Commando, has to grace pretty much every feature we have on Everything Action and it’s a great choice to highlight on Musical Montage as it features an extremely unique and bad ass score by James Horner and also, one of the most awesomely cheesy power ballad end credits songs in movie history.

This summer has been off to a great start with back to back blockbusters in Fast Five and Thor.  This weekend’s big release, Priest, feels like it should have been released back in January or February.  It looks good, has some decent action but everything else is pretty mediocre.

Priest follows an unnamed priest (Paul Bettany) who forsakes his vows to go on a mission to rescue his niece from a resurgence of vampires.  During an opening animated sequence (easily one of the highlights of the movie as it’s animated by Samurai Jack/Clone Wars animator Gennedy Tartakovsky), it’s explained that for centuries, mankind and vampires have been waging a war and that the tide was finally turned when the Priests were trained and unleashed.  The vampires were placed onto reservations and the war was thought to be over.  The plot is nothing original and the whole movie feels like a mix of a bunch of other movies like Blade Runner, Equilibrium, Book of Eli and Blade.

Paul Bettany is one of those actors where it’s almost impossible to hate him, even when he’s in horrible movies.  He gives a pretty good “quiet bad ass” performance in Priest and he’s becoming a pretty good action star.  I would love to see what he can do with an action movie with a much better director/script/plot.   Karl Urban plays the unnamed bad guy who is a former Priest but is transformed into the first human vampire by the vampire queen.  It seems like Urban is going to be a hilariously insane bad guy, but he’s not in the movie enough to truly become unhinged and chew scenery.  Rounding out the cast are master thespians Maggie Q and Cam Gigandet, although this is probably the latter’s best performance (which isn’t saying much when your major credits are “asshole in Twilight” and “asshole in Never Back Down”).

If you’ve seen the trailers for Priest, you probably expect Bettany to be constantly killing vampires with a wide assortment of religious themed weapons.  In reality, there’s only 2, 2 1/2 action sequences in the whole movie, which is kind of unacceptable for a big Summer blockbuster.  Most of the movie is Paul Bettany brooding and he and Cam Gigandet following the vampire trail and arguing about whether Bettany will kill his niece if she’s infected (FYI, he definitely will).  When the action does kick in, it’ s good, but nothing spectacular, relying mostly on flashy slow motion and the Priests’ Jedi like powers.  Another thing that hinders the action, especially with a movie about vampires, is that it’s PG-13.  I think the movie could have been much more fun if they had gone crazy with the gore, a la Blade, but instead the action is kind of neutered.  Even if they had made the vampires bleed a different color so they could have gotten away with more would have made a difference.

One of the main selling points of Priest is it’s 3D and I will admit that it is one of the better looking 3D movies I’ve seen.  Everything has a nice sense of depth and it seems like they took their time with the conversion, unlike say Clash of the Titans or Last Airbender.  I also like the look of the futuristic city where the movie starts out.  Since the church has become the source of power there are propaganda posters, crosses and confessionals everywhere.  There’s also a constant rain of ash and it’s extremely dark and gloomy.  I also think the vampire design is pretty interesting with them pretty much being weird cave animals with no eyes.

Overall, I would say Priest is a pass in theaters unless you’re a superfan of 3D (matinee only though) but might be worth a watch on DVD or it’s inevitable debut on Netflix Instant Watch.  It’s definitely not up to the standards that have been established for this Summer’s blockbuster season. Hopefully Paul Bettany can find a better action project in the future because he’s fun to watch and definitely has some action chops.

2.5 out of 5

Lee Arenberg

Born: July 18, 1962

Number of Roles: 103

Best Known for Playing: Sleazy, weasely types

First Appearance: Joey on The Underachievers (1987)

Most Recent Appearance: Razer’s Driver on The Cape (2011)

Notable Roles

• Pintel in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies
• Ambassador Gral on Star Trek: Enterprise
• Dr. Moyer on Scrubs
• Joey the Ride Operator on CSI
• Lester Squigman on Walker, Texas Ranger
• Bobby G. on Action
• Mike Moffit on Seinfeld
• Major Domo on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
• Djeng in Waterworld
• Daimon Bak and Prak on Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Marty Slash on Tales from the Crypt

Fun Facts

• Attended high school with Robert Downey Jr, Sean Penn and Emilio Estevez
• Enjoys golf, cooking, blues harmonica and video games

http://youtu.be/B1NMmAdFx4M

After seeing the amazingly edited trailers and the prospect of Zack Snyder’s first foray into an original movie, everyone was excited to see just what the hell Sucker Punch was going to be.  Disappointingly, it turned into a movie with amazing action sequences but in every other respect, it’s pretty terrible.

The “plot”, ostensibly, is that “Babydoll” is committed to an insane asylum by her evil stepfather after she accidentally kills her sister trying to kill him.  Stepdad pays off one of the orderlies to forge some signatures so that Babydoll will get a lobotomy in five days when the brain surgeon comes.  Babydoll meets some of the other girls and plans an escape which requires four items they will have to steal from around the hospital.  However, the plot is muddled by the fact that Babydoll imagines the hospital as a burlesque club and further imagines that whenever she dances, she goes to these fantastical battlegrounds.   Unlike say, Inception, which was brilliantly edited so that you could easily keep track of where the characters were, Sucker Punch is incoherent and inconsistant about what’s real and what’s not (obviously the crazy battlegrounds aren’t real).

Speaking of the battlegrounds, the real positive aspect of the movie is the action sequences.  Babydoll and crew fight their way through a WWI battlefield where the Germans have reanimated their dead soldiers into steampunk cyborgs, a siege of a medieval castle which houses a pair of dragons and a futuristic train that is carrying a bomb guarded by robots.  The special effects during these sequences are amazing and the detail of the battlefields is incredible.  These sequences are a crazy mish mash of what seems like every video game, anime and comic book that Zack Snyder has read and crammed into this movie.  You’ll see a giant mech fight in the aforementioned steampunk cyborgs, A dragon chase a B-12 bomber and giant samurai wielding mini guns, it’s insane but awesome.  The action also features plenty of Zack Snyder’s trademark slow motion, which I enjoy because it makes certain things seem more visceral, but I can also see if you are annoyed by it.  The battle field sequences are far too short however and they also feel like video game levels, the only thing they’re missing is an announcer or pop saying “Stage 1 Complete”.

When the girls aren’t engaging in insane commando missions however, the movie comes to a screeching halt as the lack of acting talent, plot or even characterization leads to excruciatingly long scenes of girls crying while terrible cover versions of cult rock songs play.  Snyder seems to think that to have emotional depth, you have to have your characters constantly breaking down at the slightest things, which also undermines the “girls kicking ass” empowerment that Snyder says he was trying to provide with the movie.  All the girls are pretty much there to look hot and/or be a stereotype with the only exception possibly being Abbie Cornish as Sweet Pea, who is the only character is who is given a shred of character development and history.  I did enjoy a brief cameo from Jon Hamm and also Scott Glenn as the girls sort of “dream commander/mentor”

I think the main problem with Sucker Punch though, is that, in it’s efforts to be a clever, alternate reality mind bender, it renders all it’s crazy burlesque drama and fantastical fantasy action completely worthless when you stop and realize that this is a) happening all in Babydoll’s head and b) is to pick pocket a few common objects for the girls escape.  For instance, the girls are attacking a train to get a bomb code named “Kitchen Knife” which is in reality, an actual kitchen knife that the girls are trying to steal from the disgusting hospital cook who is distracting by Babydoll’s dancing.  I don’t even know if Babydoll actually dances to distract people in “reality” since the whole dancing thing is like level 2 of her dream world.  Basically, the whole thing kind of falls apart if you stop and think about it and it has a fairly standard “twist” at the end that was original when the Twilight Zone did it 50 years ago.

I think what happened is, with no restraints, Zack Snyder just want crazy with all the visual aspects of the movie and things like plot and characters sort of became an afterthought.  It’s definitely my least favorite Zack Snyder movie (Well I haven’t seen Legend of the Guardians), even behind the extremely flawed Watchmen, but hopefully he’s able to learn from this and come back better than ever with Superman and whatever else comes down the pipe.

2 out of 5