BEFORE: Perhaps I should have watched this film on Memorial Day, since it's about ex-CIA agents - that's a lot like veterans, right? Maybe I'm stretching a point. Linking from "The American", George Clooney was also in "Burn After Reading" with John Malkovich (last seen in "Jonah Hex").
I don't know if I mentioned it, but while we were upstate last week, we took a tour of the C.I.A. - that's the Culinary Institute of America, not the one depicted in this film. It's easy to distinguish them, one is a clandestine organization that produces highly skilled professionals who do important work, and the other one works for the U.S. government.
THE PLOT: When his peaceful life is threatened by a high-tech assassin, former black-ops agent Frank Moses reassembles his old team in a last ditch effort to survive and uncover his assailants.
AFTER: This one shares a lot of its DNA with "The Losers" and "The A-Team" - all three films were released in 2010, and feature a group of mercenaries/soldiers who are targeted or framed by their own superiors, and have to devise an elaborate plan to clear their names and save their own lives. So, yeah, it's a bit formulaic - mix in some cool stunts and a big dash of humor, and you've something that will entertain the masses.
I did not know that this film, like "The Losers", is also based on a comic-book property, one I apparently don't read. My guess is that after the Spider-Man and X-Men movies hit big, nearly every comic-book property got optioned as a film - everything from "Kick-Ass" to "30 Days of Night" and even "Ghost World" got turned into a movie. I think we're still riding that wave, and the success of "The Avengers" is only going to turn it into a tsunami.
I think this film was the most fun of the three - it gave me the most enjoyment, anyway. Some tricks that I've seen before (all three films happen to feature shoot-outs in shipyards among those giant storage containers) but this film also had quite a few new ones. And it had more heart than the others, which now just sort of feel like soulless shoot 'em ups by comparison.
Sequel, please. Or even a prequel, set in the 1980's. I'm not picky.
NITPICK POINT: Here the C.I.A. is depicted as an agency that's so big and mysterious, that not only are there shadow groups working within it, but the agents don't seem to know their agency's own history. Why have a records room at all, if most of the agents don't access it for information, or even know that it exists. Anyway, wouldn't all the C.I.A. records be computerized now, not in outdated paper folders, so its own people could, you know, look things up? For an intelligence agency, this doesn't seem very intelligent. Still, it did get around the old bugaboo of having someone sneak into an organization's headquarters to download the needed information to a disk or a flash-drive, which we've all seen too many times before.
NITPICK POINT #2: This was already covered by the Mythbusters, and involves the result of shooting a pistol at an already-fired rocket. So I defer to Jamie + Adam.
Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Nancy Drew"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "The Sum of All Fears"), Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren (last seen in "The Madness of King George"), Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "W."), Karl Urban, Rebecca Pidgeon, Brian Cox (last seen in "Rob Roy"), Julian McMahon (last seen in "Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer"), with cameos from James Remar (last seen in "X-Men: First Class"), Ernest Borgnine (last heard in "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2").
RATING: 7 out of 10 pension checks
No comments:
Post a Comment