Movie sequels are a dicey proposition for the most part.  There are only a few rare exceptions where the sequels outshine the original movie and most of the time the sequels are pale imitations of the original.  For this list though, we’re going to take a look at some sequels that,while they maybe don’t live up to their originator, get way too much criticism and shit  from people and are worth a second look if you’ve decided to write them off.

6. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Before Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out, Temple of Doom was considered the black sheep of the Indiana Jones franchise.  I think a lot of people were thrown off by the movie’s darker tone, lack of Nazis and a slightly less noble Dr. Jones (He’s more interested in artifacts for personal and monetary gain in Temple of Doom).  Temple of Doom has some amazing action sequences including the famous mine cart chase, the finale on the rope bridge and the opening chase through Shanghai.  There’s also such memorable scenes as the disgusting feast at Pankot Palace (featuring everyone’s favorite dessert, chilled monkey brains) and the heart ripping sacrifice scene you saw above.  I will admit that Willie Scott is an absolutely horrible character, especially after Raiders set the bar ridiculously high for Indy’s love interests with Marion but her awfulness is balanced out by Short Round and one of the best villains with Mola Ram.  The artifact MacGuffin is kind of lame as well but Temple of Doom is still an excellent action/adventure (and it also helped establish the PG-13 rating because of it’s violence).

5. Robocop 2

I think every action fan would agree that Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop is one of the all time classics with it’s fantastic mix of satire, horrific violence and Peter Weller’s awesomely dead pan bad assery.  The sequel was helmed by another fantastic director, The Empire Strikes Back’s Irvin Kirshner and continued the first movies warped sense of humor and violence.  Robocop 2 continues the adventures of cyborg cop Alex Murphy as he and his partner, Anne Lewis, are trying to stop the spread of deadly new drug Nuke and the main supplier of it, Cain.  Kurtwood Smith was one of the all time greatest villains in the original as Clarence Boddicker and Robocop 2 can’t match that but they do have one of the go to guys for creepy villains, Tom Noonan as Cain, and he’s fantastic.  Cain sees himself as some sort of religious figure and has a bizarre entourage including a 10 year old kid as one of his enforcers.  The commercials from the first movie make their return as well, including one for sunscreen for nuclear blasts.  One of my favorite scenes from Robocop 2 is probably when Murphy is reprogrammed after OCP has a focus group and he turns into an ultra politically correct do gooder in the vein of the future cops from Demolition Man.  The one thing that doesn’t hold up as well now is the stop motion for the literal Robocop 2 when *spoilers* Cain’s brain is placed into a new, heavily armed OCP project.  The final battle features extended stop motion that is kind of jarring and shoddy looking by today’s standards.  It’s still well worth a watch if you’re a fan of the original Robocop.

4. Gremlins 2: The New Batch

The original Gremlins is easily in the top 5 of the Steven Spielberg produced movies of the 80′s and has joined movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon as one of the best unconventional Christmas movies. Gremlins 2: The New Batch turns everything about the original up to 11 and is, at it’s most extreme, like a live action Looney Tunes cartoon.  There’s so much going on that some of it doesn’t work but more of it does work.  The movie takes a cue from the aforementioned Die Hard by taking place entirely in a futuristic skyscraper called Clamp Tower, built and run by billionaire Daniel Clamp.  Our hero from the first movie, Billy Peltzer, works in the art department of Clamp Tower while his girlfriend Kate Beringer works as a tour guide.  The tower features TV studios, a cafeteria and a science lab, which is where Mogwai Gizmo comes back into Billy’s life as he’s found by a pair of twin scientists out looking for specimens.  Just some of the awesome stuff going on in Gremlins 2 is Christopher Lee as an evil mad scientist, tons of new gremlins including a spider, bat, lady and the Brain Gremlin, voiced by Tony Randall, and Gizmo getting pushed too far and becoming Rambo.  The movie is also filled with tons of meta humor, which is probably not everyone’s cup of tea but I’m a fan of.  There’s an entire scene where characters make fun of the plot holes from the original and the movie “stops” in the middle because Gremlins get into the projection booth but fortunately Hulk Hogan is there to get the movie restarted.  If you’re a fan of the original and don’t mind poking fun at some of it’s dumber aspects, Gremlins 2 is worth a rewatch.

3. Ghostbusters 2

Ghostbusters is one of the most beloved movies of all time so obviously the sequel could never live up to the original but everything you love about the Ghostbusters is pretty much intact for the sequel. Five years after the first movie, the guys have all drifted off to do their own thing after being sued by city and state agencies for property damage following the Gozer incident. Ray runs an occult bookstore and helps Winston perform at birthday parties, Egon works at a laboratory and Peter hosts the public access show “World of the Psychic”. The guys get back together when their old friend Dana Barrett comes looking for their help after her son Oscar’s carriage rolls into traffic by itself. The Ghostbusters eventually discover that there’s a river of evil slime flowing below New York City that can cause paranormal activity and that there’s a possessed painting at the Manhattan Museum of Art of Viggo The Carpathian, who wants to use Dana’s son as a vessel to be resurrected. There’s a fantastic ghost busting scene in the beginning where the guys are in court and have to capture a pair of ghosts who got the electric chair and a fantastic montage of the effects of the slime, culminating in the Titanic finally arriving in New York Harbor, and the evil team of Viggo and Dr. Janosz Poha is great with some classic Ghostbusters lines like “He is Viggo, you are like the buzzing of flies to him!”. The slime stuff is maybe too heavily focused on as the guys disappointingly replace their classic proton packs for slime guns for most of the movie and it’s pretty vague how the slime is connected to Viggo but otherwise it’s still a hilarious movie.

2. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

With the recent release of the Jurassic Park trilogy, I’ve heard a number of people just spew vitriol at the sequels, which 3 probably deserves but The Lost World most certainly doesn’t warrant.  I don’t know if people wanted Alan Grant to still be the hero or there’s some backlash against everything Vince Vaughn but The Lost World still has tons of great stuff going on and doesn’t dumb things down to the levels Jurassic Park 3 devolved the series down to.  Ian Malcolm, after recovering from his injuries from the first movie, is shanghaied by John Hammond into leading a research team to “Site B” of Jurassic Park, Isla Sorna, where the dinosaurs were actually born and raised before being transferred to the park.  The dinosaurs are now roaming wild on the island and Hammond wants to document them so he can lead an effort to conserve the island and fight Ingen’s attempts to exploit it.  There’s a bunch of new dinosaurs introduced in the movie, most notably the Compys, most of which are probably best featured in the awesome round up scene featured above.  I also love the late Pete Postlethwaite’s role as Roland Tembo, who is, dare I say, more bad ass than the first films resident bad ass, Robert Muldoon.  Tembo manages to actually take down the male T-Rex with a tranquilizer gun and then just walks off.   The attack on the trailer by the Rexes is also a great sequence and has a classic Spielberg tension scene where Julianne Moore’s character, Sarah Harding, is trying to slowly move off a slowly spidering window.  There are a number of scenes that are completely worthy of criticism like Malcolm’s daughter Kelly using gymnastics to kill a raptor and the finale of the T-Rex’s rampage through San Diego goes kind of overboard and probably keeps the movie going longer than it should have.  There’s also not as much of the Raptors as I would like, although the scene with them in tall grass murdering the remaining Ingen hunters is pretty awesome.  Jeff Goldblum’s Malcolm is slightly more restrained than in the first movie but still manages to unleash a number of fantastic one liners and even Julianne Moore is suprisingly tolerable.  I think expectations were just set way too high for this one following one of the greatest movies ever made.

1. Mission Impossible III

Mission Impossible III is a victim, I think, of awful timing. It came out right at the height of Tom Cruise’s descent into insanity and that probably turned off most people who were unable to divorce Tom Cruise from Ethan Hunt. If you are one of the people who did that, do yourself a favor and give MI3 a second look, as it’s one of the best action movies of the past decade. JJ Abrams made his film debut with MI3 and what a debut it was.  In MI3, the Impossible Mission Force’s Ethan Hunt is forced to steal a bioweapon called “the Rabbit’s Foot” for psychotic villain Owen Davian, who has kidnapped Ethan’s wife.  MI veteran Ving Rhames returns with Maggie Q and John Rhys Myers round out Ethan’s team.  Unfortunately Anthony Hopkins doesn’t return as the head(?) of the IMF but Laurence Fishburne steps up to that role.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman is absolutely frightening as Owen Davian and is easily the best Mission Impossible villain.  There’s a ton of great action sequences including an attack on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge by a Predator drone, the IMF team’s kidnapping of Davian in Vatican City (with mandatory MI face mask technology) and an early movie attempt to rescue captured IMF agent Keri Russell that features Ving Rhames setting up a number of remote turrets to level the bad guys inside and ends with a nerve wracking helicopter chase through a bunch of power generating windmills.  Most people will probably pick the original Mission Impossible as their favorite of the series but MI3 is my favorite hands down (It might be Ghost Protocol if it’s half as awesome as the trailers make it seem).

This summer has been jam packed with superhero movies, 2 absolutely fantastic Marvel movies in Thor and X-Men: First Class and one completely mediocre DC movie in Green Lantern.  The bar was set incredibly high but Captain America performs a super soldier serum powered jump over the bar and crushes it with it’s shield as it is easily one of the best movies of the summer and the best superhero movie of the year.

Captain America tells the origin story of Steve Rogers, a 90 pound weakling who desperately wants to join the fight in Europe during World War II.  He catches the eye of German ex-patriot Dr. Abraham Erskine, who offers him the chance to join a secret project that transforms him into Captain America.  He’s quickly thrown into action to combat the world dominating threat of Hydra and Johann Schmidt aka The Red Skull.

Marvel continues their knack for great casting as Chris Evans is great as Steve Rogers.  It’s nice after suffering through Green Lantern and Ryan Reynolds’ unrelenting assholeness to have a hero that is actually heroic and a good person.  Evans does a great job of conveying 90 pound Steve’s desperation to serve his country and when he finally gets to start to kick Hydra ass, you’re fully behind him.  Speaking of 90 pound Steve, we saw it in the trailer but the special effects for making Chris Evans a shrimp are absolutely incredible.  It’s pretty seamless and you actually start to forget that they digitally mapped Evans’ face onto a CG (?) body.  Hugo Weaving, one of the greatest villain actors ever, delivers another great villain role as Red Skull and the makeup/CG to transform his head was top notch.  An unexpected but welcome source of comic relief was Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel Chester Phillips, who’s constantly taking the piss out of Steve.  The rest of the cast isn’t as well known but are all pretty great in their roles from Hayley Atwell as a surprisingly bad ass Peggy Carter, Sebastian Stan as Steve Rogers’ best friend Bucky Barnes and Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, who shows us where Tony got his cocky showmanship and technological know how from.

Being a protege of Steven Spielberg and directing The Rocketeer, Joe Johnston is no stranger to the action/adventure genre and he goes whole hog with Captain America, combining elements from Indiana Jones, James Bond and WW2 movies into one of the most fun and exciting movies of the year.  There is tons of great, old school Indiana Jones style action sequences and Bond like scenes of Red Skull plotting his world domination with the help of a certain Asgardian artifact.  One of the aspects of Captain America that Johnston perfectly nailed was his fighting style with the shield.  Every time Cap threw it, it looked and felt great.  One of my only nitpicks of Captain America would be that I would have liked to have spent more time with Cap and the Howling Commandos.   There is a montage of them blowing up Hydra bases but I would have liked to have gotten to know the members a little better and there’s definitely some other parts you could have cut down to get more screen time with the Commandos (the propaganda/musical number sequence comes to mind).  There was also a slight problem of abruptness in the movie, whether scenes ended a little too soon or events just sort of happened, I’m thinking specifically of the “death” of Bucky, which, if you’re a Cap fan you were expecting, but it sort of came out of nowhere and didn’t really have much impact.

Captain America also does a great job of combining the aesthetics of World War II and the 40′s with the crazy technology of Hydra.  I love that every vehicle has some sort of rocket engine and there are some wonderfully inventive airplanes and tanks in the movie.  The look of the Hydra troops is also really cool and Cap’s costume looks amazing as well, probably the second best looking suit in the Marvel movieverse behind Iron Man.

If you’ve been enjoying the Marvel movies so far, Captain America is easily a must watch as it’s probably only beaten by the original Iron Man.  It’s amazing that Cap has had two absolutely atrocious attempts at breaking onto the big screen when this movie seems effortless in the amount of great action, humor and special effects it brings.  Even if you think you’ve had enough superheroes for the summer, Captain America will not disappoint and it’s definitely one of my favorite movies of the summer, if not the year.  The Avengers (which is teased so awesomely in the post credits trailer *Homer drooling noise*) cannot get here soon enough.

5 out 5

On this week’s show: Zach, Chris and Joe talk about Indiana Jones, crazy Leonardo DiCaprio accents, heroin addicted dolphins, Macho Man, Super 8, Green Lantern: Emerald Knights and more.

• Show and Tell: Zach and Chris saw Super 8, Joe didn’t watch anything, Chris also saw Se7en and Zach watched Macho Madness, LA Confidential and Green Lantern: Emerald Knights
• News: Roland Emmerich offered the Asteroids movie, Killer Elite with Statham, Robert De Niro and Clive Owen coming out in September, Leonardo DiCaprio likely the villain of Django Unchained and King Kong getting remade again.  Also the New Release Round Up.
• Special Feature: It was the 30th Anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark this past weekend so the guys talk about everything Indy related (except for a certain fourth movie that may or may not exist).

We want to hear your comments, feedback and, most importantly, suggestions for discussion topics. Send them all to contact@everythingaction.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to us in the iTunes music store (just do a search for Everything Actioncast in the store) and follow us on twitter @evaction and on Facebook (search on Facebook for our Everything Action group).

John Rhys-Davies

Born: May 5, 1944

Number of Roles: 206

Best Known for Playing: Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade, Gimli in Lord of the Rings, Arturo on Sliders

First Appearance: Gareth in Crossroads (1964)

Most Recent Appearance: Senator Crenshaw in Ferocious Planet (2011)

Notable Roles:

• Grimshank on Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire
• Sangimel in Fire & Ice
• Murdoch in Anaconda III and Anacondas: Trail of Blood
• Merick in In The Name of the King
• Captain Randolph in Chupacabra Terror
• King Fastrad in Dragon Storm
• Commander Hammerstock-Smythe in The Medallion
• Anthony Bricklin in Sabertooth
• Leonardo Da Vinci on Star Trek: Voyager
• Macbeth on Gargoyles
• Agent Michael Malone on The Untouchables
• Gen. James Taggert in Wing Commander III
• Challenger in The Lost World
• General Pushkin in The Living Daylights

Fun Facts:

• Was allergic to the prosthetics used to transform him into Gimli and could only wear it every third day, it burned the skin out from under his eyes the first time he wore it.
• Actually the tallest of the Lord of the Rings actors, even though he plays a dwarf.
• He and Sean Connery have played two of the same characters, Richard the Lionheart and Michael Malone, they appeared together in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

If you didn’t know, this past weekend was the 30th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Because of that, I don’t think there’s a better man to highlight in this week’s Musical Montage than the composer who brought us the iconic Indiana Jones theme among countless other classic movie themes, John Williams.

Indiana Jones Theme

Jurassic Park Theme

E.T. Theme

Superman Theme

Hedwig’s Theme (Harry Potter)

Jaws Main Theme

Close Encounters of the Third Kind Theme

Home Alone Theme

Imperial March

Star Wars Theme

Duel of the Fates

Battle of the Heroes

Name: Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr.

Occupation: Archaeologist/College Professor

Family: Dr. Henry Jones Jr. (Father)

Allies: Marcus Brody, Sallah, Marion Ravenwood, Short Round, Willie Scott, Kazim and the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, Mutt Williams, Harold Oxley

Enemies: Rene Belloq, Nazis, Toht, Mola Ram and the Thuggee, Walter Donovan, Dr. Elsa Schneider, George McHale, Dr. Irina Spalko, Commies

Weapons of Choice: .45 ACP Smith & Wesson, Whip

Body Count: At least 19

Memorable Quote: “It belongs in a museum!!”

See Indy in Action:

As we’ve mentioned before, Star Wars has been one of the best breeding grounds for fan films and one making the rounds this week on the internet is the fantastic animated short “The Solo Adventures”.  Taking place shortly before A New Hope, the short fills in the details of what happened to the cargo that Han Solo lost which resulted in Jabba the Hutt putting a bounty on his head.  There’s fantastic voice work in the short as well from John Armstrong, who actually played Indiana Jones in the recent Wii game.  Check it out below and there’s also a 3D version on Vimeo.

If you’re a movie nerd then the answer is probably yes. In the newest issue of Toyfare (and I believe also mentioned on Slashfilm and The Totally Rad Show) a ridiculous amount of classic and cult movies came out in the year 1984.  Take a look and see if you agree.

• Ghostbusters
• Beverly Hills Cop
• Gremlins
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
• The Karate Kid
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
• The Last Starfighter
• The Muppets Take Manhattan
• The Neverending Story
• Nightmare on Elm Street
• Police Academy
• Red Dawn
• Revenge of the Nerds
• Sixteen Candles
• Starman
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
• The Terminator
• This is Spinal Tap
• Toxic Avenger

All those plus the birth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Macintosh and the Marvel Secret War, that’s tough to beat.  If you have any memories of 1984 (and please share since I was -2 at the time) or if you think there’s a year that beats it let us know.