Month: July 2016

Blu-ray Review – Escape Plan (2013)

Reviews

Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is a professional escape artist who has spent most of his days in prison. Not for committing serious crimes, he’s in there to exploit their flaws and escape! Breslin is the key part of a crack team that are hired out by private security firms to test the security of their prisons.

When en route to his next assignment, Breslin is abducted and transported to a private ultra-high security prison, known as “The Tomb”. What’s different about this prison compared Breslins normal bread and butter? This prison has been designed as “escape proof” thanks to all of Breslin’s research. With nowhere to run, he now finds himself at the mercy of the highly dangerous inmates. Amongst the inmates is Gil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) a political detainee who harbours the only known whereabouts of a highly sought after criminal. Together they forge an alliance and work on hatching the ultimate escape plan!

Stallone and Schwarzenegger team together in the ultimate prison break out movie, which wants you think it’s a really, really smart movie – but in actuality, it’s a pretty decent prison movie. Ok, that sounds negative, but it’s not; Escape Plan is a good film starring two of Hollywood’s biggest action stars; yes they’re getting pretty old now, but with a good story they can pull off a fun, fanciful story.

But, the Special Features on the Blu-ray claim that this is the movie to end all movies! A story a pure as the driven snow, a film where you won’t know what’s coming next! Although you’ll figure out one of the main plot twists just under a hour into the film, it’s obvious Sly, stop telling us it isn’t. I understand that they’re promoting the film, but it seems as if they were shooting for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay – it’s a near-futuristic prison movie! This isn’t a three hour French film about lesbians!

For this film not being as action packed as Stallone’s prior films it was still fun seeing Vinnie Jones pop up as the head of security figure for the faceless security guards, and you know that Stallone is going to have fisticuffs with ole’ Vinnie at some point! Other notable cast members include Jim Caviezal as the head honcho of the state of the art high-risk prison and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as the tech support for Stallone’s A-Team, along with Amy Ryan aka Holly from ‘The Office‘ (US).

The film runs just under two hours, which is a tad long, but the banter between Stallone and Scharzenegger keeps it light and when Stallone brings the science to life it is quite entertaining.

Special Features include three featurettes; one focusing on the making of the movie (AKA the best story since sliced bread!), “Clash of the Titans” with cast and crew commenting on the collaboration between Stallone/Scharzenegger and one last feature focusing on the history of high security prisons. Other than that we’re given an audio commentary from the director Mikael Håfström and writer Miles Chapman as well as near ten minutes worth of deletes scenes.

3/5

Blu-ray Review – Cinema Paradiso (1988)

Reviews

Set in Sicily, Italy, Cinema Paradiso details the life story of a young boy, Toto and his unique relationship with Alfredo, the projectionist at his local cinema. The story spans over many years covering Toto’s life as a child, a young adult and finally as an adult returning home after 30 years.

My review of this film may come across as biased, but this film is wonderful! I had never heard of this film until I received the 25th Anniversary edition from Arrow Films and after skimming the plot, I knew then that I would love it. Two years ago I took up a second job, volunteering as a projectionist at my local cinema, so seeing Alfredo working in the projection booth was a delight to watch; his speech about his sense of achievement when he hears a packed house roar and laugh, I knew exactly what he was saying.

The film has many wonderful elements to it; the small village and all of its wonderful characters, we see into the lives of a crazed homeless man who believes he owns the town square or the relationship between the upper-class woman and the blue collar worker. With the story flashing back and forth from Toto’s childhood to his present day we are delightfully reunited with these characters regularly throughout the film.

The working relationship between Toto and Alfredo is the film’s main accomplishment, on the accompanying documentary the duo are referred to as “The Bear and the Mouse”, very fitting. Alfredo teaches tricks of the projection trade to Toto in one of the most smile inducing scenes between the two; when the cinema turns away a large crowd from the overcrowded cinema, Alfredo shows Toto a wonderful trick by reflecting the light from the projector, sending a second projection of the film onto the village’s square. This could possibly be the Oscar award winning moment of the film, a scene filled with so much joy suddenly turning to turmoil at a moment’s notice.

This review is based upon the Cinema Paradiso 25th Anniversary Remastered Edition Blu-ray released from Arrow Films. The set includes the newly restored print taken from the original camera negative. It also gives you both versions, the 124 minute Cannes Festival theatrical version and the 170 minute Director’s Cut. We’re also treated to some interviews with the director and cast in extras such as “Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Dream of Sicily Documentary” and “A Bear and a Mouse in Paradise Documentary”.

Overall, it’s a wonderful film and great extras to match it! It’s a buy from me!

5/5

DVD Review – Assault On Wall Street (2013)

Reviews

Assault On Wall Street depicts the story of Jim Baxford (‘Prison Break‘ star, Dominic Purcell), an ex-military man. He’s adapted to life back home working in security, he’s got some coffee shop drinking buddies, a nice little home and a loving wife, Rosie (Erin Karpluk). Rosie is overcoming a fatal brain tumour and is now hoping to start planning a family with Jim. However, the radical medical treatments that Rosie needed exceeded the limit of the couple’s medical insurance.

Jim looks to cash in his war pension which he put in the stock market; his broker admits they lost the money in a bad investment. Seeking advice from a high price attorney about getting his money back, he has to borrow a further $10,000 before the attorney will help. Surprise, surprise the attorney can’t help him, and events unfold further pushing the once happy husband to a man over the edge. Wait, let me rephrase that, a man over the edge with an assault rifle in his closet!

Uwe Boll the man, the monster, behind several movie adaptations of ’90s PlayStation games (House Of The Dead, Alone In The Dark) directs the story of a man driven over the edge by the fat cats of Wall Street. So my question is, why is this film such a slow burner? The film runs near 100 minutes, but Dominic’s character doesn’t bring out the heavy artillery until the last half hour of the movie. You have to sit for an hour and watch this man get his life ruined in all directions, to be honest I would imagine that most of you would rather just kill yourselves 45 minutes in.

You could almost describe this movie as star studded; it’s filled to the brim with stars from yesteryear. You’ll be delighted to see the likes of Edward Furlong, John Heard, Keith David, Eric Roberts and Clint Howard haven’t all washed up dead somewhere after escaping the gusty jaws of Sharknado.

There are zero Special Features on the DVD but the film itself is decent enough, probably a higher standard for Uwe Boll compared to some of the other films he’s churned out over the years. Want my honest opinion? Wait until it is streaming online or, as they said in the old days, wait until it’s on the telly. It’s not worth getting burned with a purchase.

2/5

Blu-ray Review – Delivery Man (2013)

Reviews

Delivery Man is a film starring Vince Vaughn which is the remake of the French-Canadian movie Starbuck, which is based on a book! Sounds like it has more substance than the standard Vaughn outing? Lets find out.

David Wozniak (Vaughn) is the average American Joe, working as a delivery man for his family butcher. His girlfriend Emma is pregnant and he’s also being shaken down for $80,000 from loan sharks. When returning home one day he’s confronted by a lawyer who is representing a sperm bank who informs him that the donations he clocked in over his college days have gone on to father over 500 children. 142 of those children have come together with a class action lawsuit to reveal the identity of Starbuck, the alias David used when donating. He’s presented with the profiles of the 142 children he’s fathered and goes on a journey to look into their lives and finds himself acting as their guardian angel.

Vince Vaughn plays Vince Vaughn once again, but hell the story is actually rather good! It’s heart-warming and funny, the several young adults we’re introduced to playing Vaughn’s children make the film surprisingly more interesting. When it comes to the cast, Vaughn has a strong supporting crew including Chris Pratt (‘Parks And Recreation‘), Cobie Smulders (Avengers Assemble) and everyone’s favourite drunken uncle, Bobby Moynihan (‘Saturday Night Live‘). Pratt knocks it out the park as bumbling sidekick lawyer/ father of four wild children. Smulders isn’t focused on enough for my liking and ends up easily forgettable until the last ten minutes.

For the Blu-ray we’re given two sets of Special Features, one consists of cast interviews and a Blooper Reel that is pretty amusing. The other feature is just a deleted a scene. So it’s surprisingly slim pickings for this release. This is the type of content you would expect on the DVD, being grateful to the dying platform. It’s a shame really.

The film is a surprise, it’s better than the standard Wedding Crashers type comedy, yet the extra content lets it down.

4/5

DVD Review – Squatters (2014)

Reviews

Squatters tells the tale of two tramps, Kelly (Gabriella Wilde) and Jonas (Thomas Dekker). They spend their nights sleeping on the beach and their days stealing food to survive. Jonas discovers that a wealthy couple are going on holiday leaving their luxurious beachside home unattended to. The pair break into the home and assume the couple’s wealthy lifestyle of expensive booze, fast cars and fat wads of cash. Kelly becomes familiar with the family by falling down a rabbit hole when watching their home movies whilst Jonas looks to make the most of this opportunity and starts selling off anything valuable he can get his grubby hands on. But suddenly their new lifestyle comes to a screening halt when the couple return home early from their vacation.

Director Martin Weisz (The Hills Have Eyes 2) delivers a lacklustre tale of drifters getting a taste of the good life. My expectations of this film were looking for a more sinister tone to the film, I expected the drifters to be more like most movie drifters, evil creepy bastards! But these two are more needy emo types, the worst kind.

Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss will comes across as the only noteworthy star appearing in this direct-to-DVD feature. He comes across as the quirky, too cool for school dad. Hell, his character even loves Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. To be honest one of my highlights of the film was when the film stopped and they showed up a couple minutes of The Kid playing in a cinema.

The film runs for 106 minutes and it feels overlong, at one point in the second act I thought they had just completely forgotten about Thomas Dekker’s character. Unfortunately we then get a ‘gritty’ subplot where Jonas gets into trouble with a camp Jason Statham style cross-dressing mobster.

Squatters is a strange film, well, it’s strange calling this a “film”; stuff happens, it goes in strange directions and hell it decides to get overly violent for no reason really!

DVD Special Features? Don’t be silly! This is a direct-to-DVD, be lucky that we got previews of other movies.

1/5

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