Rodent's Reviews

I think Porky's Revenge is a fun movie even after you factor out the enormous amount of bare assed men you see in it. I might review it myself then.

Robin Of Loxley is an English Nobelman captured in Jerusalem on Richard The Lionheart's Third Crusade. During a daring escape, he frees his friend Peter and a Moor known as Azeem and they make their way out o fthe prison. After Peter is killed, Robin makes a vow, to return to England and protect Peter's sister Marian.

On their return to the Homeland however, Robin realises that things are very different to how he remembers them.
His Father has been accused of Devil Worship and has been murdered, and the Loxley land has been taken by the Sheriff Of Nottingham as a forfeit.

To end this siege of tyranny by the Sheriff, Robin begins to steal back what rightfully belongs to the People and ends up branded as an outlaw... but more peril is around the corner when it appears that Nottingham is after stealing one more thing from England...

... King Richard's Throne.



One of the best written and most fun of the many Robin Hood incarnations is brought to the screen.
Thieves is often seen as a favourite of chick flick lovers, but it's actually a rip roaring adventure filled with some incredibly exciting cinema, funny visuals and dialogue and is packed with some incredibly well written humour and realistic tones.

For a start, the film may well be highly inaccurate historically, but it never tries to be something it isn't.
It's fun, tongue in cheek at times and is a knowing romantic fantasy that occasionally throws itself back to the olde swashbuckling films of years gone by.

Which is probably the best way to describe the overall look and feel of the film, a swashbuckler.


The humour is also reality based. The overal chemistry on screen between the actors lifts the humour too and some of it is laugh out loud, though mostly it's cleverly incorporated into the action and dialogue.
The other thing is the screenplay and script. It's immensely clever. It takes a lot of the olde tales of Robin Hood, tweeks them a little then throws the whole lot into a very well written backstory of love, vengeance and revenge.

The screenplay also pretty irregular. Most films are broken into three parts, or three acts... Thieves, if you look closely, is broken into four pieces. It gives the film a brilliant longevity and epic feel that is rarely seen in any other film going.

Another thing are the visuals... the film contains a pile of iconic and recognisable set pieces and a ton of highly realised scenes that have since become regarded as classic.


Now, the acting...

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is an absolutely perfect piece of casting as Maid Marian. Her slight and prim persona shines through wonderfully and Mastrantonio has an immensely engaging and wise character about her.
Morgan Freeman stands out too as Robin's stalwart pal Azeem. Freeman was nominated for best screen duo alongside Costner but should really have won awards for best actor. He's incredibly likeable and full of mystery at times too. His overall chemistry with anyone on sscreen with him is also brilliant.

Alan Rickman is another incredible role. Rickman made my Top 40 Villains list. He hams it up incredibly and has such a massive camp and theatrical air about him that it makes the unpredictable side of the character even more fun. He's also incredibly funny, especially when he loses his temper.

Now, Costner as Robin Hood is a bit of a chalk and cheese issue. The acting and overall character of Costner is perfect for the role. He's fun, funny, highly engaging and is filled with incredible charisma... sadly though, the accent lets it all down. Costner decided just to use his normal accent... now, it does kinda work... but an American Robin Hood just feels a bit strange when everyone else has English voices.

Backup comes from Christian Slater (also sporting an American accent) as Will Scarlet, Geraldin McEwan as Mortiana The Witch and Michael Wincott as Guy Of Gisborne.
Nick Brimble makes a show as Little John too... out of the rest of the background actors, Brimble really shines, especially alonside Costner.



The action though is really what the film builds for. The third act is immensely exciting and well choreographed and makes for some of the most iconic visual action to date.
There's a number of action set pieces running throughout too that keep the audience fixed to the screen and it's all used to enhance the story rather than just for thrills. It's also well choreographed throughout rather than having all expense saved for the finale.

__________________

Hmmm....details about the year of release, the director and the cast, as well as 'notes' which provide some 'trivia' for the film? This layout all seems strangely familiar but I can't place it!


Anyway good effort on the review. It was in my mind that I loved this film but I hadn't seen it since I was quite young. Revisited it a few years back and found it rather naff! But a rather enjoyable kind of naff. Will need to give it another watch

__________________

Lol! I'm working on it... the new look will probably change a little as time goes on, like with the older look. My first few reviews were pretty short and had little to them but they progressed as I went on...

Hopefully the new look will do the same as I get more used to adding a few details and pictures and stuff.

Cheers for reading and all the +reps though everyone!!

Your reviews look exhausting to write up. You really spend a lot of time on all of this. Anyway, the new style of your reviews looks cleaner and I see you've added more pictures.

You kidding me?! This boy's a slacker compared to some of the long-winded reviews I churn out!

LAPD SWAT Jack Travern and Harry Temple are thrown into a desperate situation when an old foe appears on the scene and wires a bus with explosives...

If the bus goes 50mph, the bomb is armed... if the bus then drops below 50mph, the bomb will explode.

Jack and Harry must find a way to get on the speeding bus, disarm the bomb, catch the maniac and save the poor members of the public who are trapped on board the vehical.

One of the most realised action films of the 1990s brings newly Christened action star Keanu Reeves into a world of excitement and thrills...

Speed is by far one of the most inspired and modern classic action films to date. With the many influences it draws on, the writers have pieced together a relatively linear script in the first two acts, then twisted the whole thing around for the third... never letting up with the tension and humour at all throughout the running time.

What makes the film work, is that it never takes itself seriously all the time... it combines hints of comic style action and stunts with some relatively serious thrills and spills and a story that holds up well against standard no-brainer actioners.

Basically it's a clever balancing act of brainless popcorn action fun filled with humour and funny dialogue and more serious storytelling with the occasional sombre scenes and mildly disturbing cinema too.



The acting is also bang on.
Keanu Reeves absolutely shines. He was born for the role. He plays the more serious tones really well too and never lets the audience get bored while the more quieter scenes are playing out. His charisma and chemistry with all on screen with him is top notch too.

Sandra Bullock also shines as Annie. Bullock seems to be having an absolute whale of a time, especially after an accident sees her become the driver of the bus. She also holds the more serious and scarier scenes exceptionally well.
Out of all of Bullock's other films, this one is my favourite... she's lots of fun.

Dennis Hopper though as maniac Howard Payne is a standout role. As usual with Hopper, he's taken a well written and fleshed out character and lifted it brilliantly from the page. He's also not seen a great deal but the viewer never forgets that he's there, always in the background. He's that good.

Backup comes from Jeff Daniels, Joe Morton and Alan Ruck makes a nice show as a guy who's out of his depth.



The action and effects are also incredibly exciting... and most of it, gladly, is practical.
Keanu Reeves also performed most of his own stunts too, which adds a real authenticity to the explosions and the leaping from moving car to moving car.
The choreography is also completely shameless... the filmmakers have combined elements of realistic stuff with more fantastical action, all of which are again practical, and it gives the film a completely different feel to other actioners.

















Annie Porter and her new boyfriend Alex Shaw are having problems... she's just found out he has lied to her about his job, he is in the LAPD SWAT but had lied to her because of the stories she told him about the problems she had with Jack Travern.

He offers to make amends by taking her on a romantic Cruise around the Caribbean...

... unbenkown to them, John Geiger is aboard the ship and he plans on robbing the ship of its cargo of Jewellery... and to add more peril, he's laced the decks of the ship with explosives...

It's up to Alex and Annie to stop the maniac and get on with their romantic break.

What an awful movie.
Speed 2 is not just cashed in, it's cheap, cheesie, full of terrible action sequences and is filled to the brim with wooden acting and badly written dialogue.

Sadly, it's just trying to live up to the superior original.
It's also easy to see why Keanu Reeves turned down an offer to return.
Which may be why it doesn't work on many other levels, there's little for the audience to care for with the rewritten characters.

The filmmakers have tried very hard to give the film an air that's recognisable, but it falls flat with the cashed in script and screenplay.
The overall exposition is pretty dull and uninteresting too. You just don't care about what's going on.
The story is also boring and much of a muchness. A guy who is threatening to detonate bombs while stealing jewellery. Yawn.



The acting is awful too.
Sandra Bullock returns as Annie... and even Bullock herself has been quoted as hating the film, wishing she'd never made it.
Willem Dafoe is also off form. He's hardly threatening, has little charisma and seem to be wondering why he's in the film.

Jason Patric is also miscast. I love Patric, he's one of my favourite actors, but here in a rewritten Keanu role, he just completely dies. He's wooden, out of his depth in the action and has very little likeability.

Temuera Morrison makes a show too... put it this way, any film with Morrison on the cast list is bound to be a Razzie winner.



Which brings me to the overall action and effects.
They're cheap, badly choreographed and the handful of computer effects are badly rendered and hold little excitement when they're used to 'enhance' the more exciting cinema.


There's not really much else I can say about Speed 2 without resaying more and more about how crap it is.

Gotta love Speed. Seen it a good few times now over the years and still awesome. Still never seen the sequel. Not expecting a great film but will watch it one day purely out of curiousity.

Speed was good. Speed 2 was awful. Speed was one of those movies where the ending was nice and they should have just left it alone.

__________________
You are no Vader. You are just a child in a mask.

Dr Susan McAlester is a scientist on a floating research facility called Aquatica.

I like Deep Blue Sea. Of course I do, it's a movie where sharks eat people. :p I didn't mind LL Cool J. His character was cheesy, but I like a little cheese with these types of movies. My main complaint is that the tension should of been built up a little more through out the whole movie.

When a meteor lands in Linda Rosa, California, Dr Clayton Forrester who is on vacation there, takes it upon himself to investigate.
At first the whole town is excited by the incident, but go on their way and think nothing more of it... leaving three men by the meteor pit to make sure the burning ball of rock doesn't start any forest fires.

But a few hours later, when the town is having a gathering at the town hall, something sinister emerges from the meteor...



A product of its time... WOTW combines lashings of naive dialogue and cheesie explanatory speeches and captions, experimental storytelling that could almost pass a intentional tongue in cheek humour (though it isn't intentional) with some immensely clever and cutting edge special effects.

One special thing about the 1953 film is the atmosphere that is built over the first two acts.
It manages very succesfully to go from an almost drama like feel to what could only be described as an atmospheric horror... it's cleverly done.

The main thing that lets it down, as I mentioned above, is the unintentional humour involved in the dialogue... some of the acting is also unintentionally funny in places too.

Another let down is the overall changes from thebook to screen. Like with the other WOTW (Spielberg's) review I made on page 6 of this thread, there's little in common with Wells' short novel masterpiece.
It's understandable though for a 1953 film, budget and technology constraints and all that, but they could at least have made something colser to the source material.
There are a couple of plot points that are taken from the book, just not very many really.



Which brings me to the acting.
Gene Barry as Dr Forrester is by far the best on show and to be honest, he's actually really good in the role. A rewritten Narrator, but Barry is incredibly likeable and he actually manages to take the poor script and make it believeable...

Ann Robinson plays the worried faced Sylvia, a love interest for Dr Forrester. Her role really is just that, something for Forrester to protect and pout over. She tends to be completely out of her depth 99% of the time too. Well, she is a woman facing a man's world after all. At one point she even loses it and needs to be shaken and shouted at by Barry...

The rest of the cast are pretty wooden though. They give a very close performance between them all, they're all consistently wooden, so at least they all tried hard to make Gene Barry look good



The effects and hints of action though are really the standout piece of film making though.
Dated by today's standard, but for the timeare extremely exciting. Some of the effects though do hold up today, especially the flying machines themselves.
There's also a number of scenes containing gunfire and explosions on behalf of the armed forces involved in the story. It's all handled pretty well too.

Some of the effects and sound, and some of the visual action is also iconic and has become regarded as classic since though. I agree too, there are lashings of well choreographed and well realised scenes and set pieces throughout.
The general acting though throughout the action is a bit dull though and some of the reactions of the cast and extras to what is happening is questionable.

Another special for the 190th... quite a long one this, so bear with me...

I can't deal with it right now. Tobey Maguire is Spiderman.

Have you not seen it?

I didn't like it at first as I said but after a rewatch and watching it with my head in place rather than just thinking about Raimi's version, I've found it a really good film.

The 95% rating I gave is the same rating as I gave Spider Man 2 as well. Spidery 1 I only gave 85%...

Amazing is a pretty darn good flick.

I wanted another Spiderman with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. No, I have not seen the new one. Like I said, I can't deal with it right now.

Glad to see you got so much out of Amazing Spidey, Rodent. Also found it a very enjoyable film and I think my review was very much along the same lines. Of course mine was done ages ago so this is old news now!

I loved that movie !

I absolutely love The Amazing Spider-Man. It honestly made the other films look like they were shot by an amateur (I like 1, I really like 2, I kinda can't stand 3). Definitely the better of the bunch in terms of acting, story, and effects.