Two Arkansas boys discover a wanted man (Matthew McConaughey) hiding out on an island who needs their help to find his girlfriend and escape a small army of bounty hunters. There’s a resounding echo of Shane here, with McConaughey putting in another fine performance after his career-turning appearances in Magic Mike and Killer Joe last year. (Welcome back, Matthew!)
Brad Pitt admirably carries this big-budget zombie apocalypse flick that has more in common with Outbreak or Contagion than it does your standard zombie fare — don’t expect blood and gore, horror fans. Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) succeeds in ratcheting up the tension with a script (based very loosely on Max Brooks’ book) that is essentially one dramatic escape sequence after another.
I haven’t wanted to walk out of a movie I paid for in a long, long time, but I damn near walked out of this one. “Man of Steel” is ridiculously awful. At best (if I weren’t a Superman fan), it’d be “Transformers 4”, another busily boring, loud, emotionally bankrupt piece of nauseating, over-indulgent, digital miasma. But if you are a Superman fan, this film is downright offensive and insulting.
It takes a while for Sam Raimi’s Wizard of Oz prequel to pull its shit together and make you care a little about what’s happening, but the final act’s (digital) pyrotechnics and displays of combative sorcery help pull the movie just barely into the safe zone. The casting leaves something to be desired. James Franco, whom I normally like, is surprisingly bland in a role where he desperately needs to carry the film. He gets better as the film goes, finally reaching his stride as Oz the Great and Powerful makes his thundering debut to the citizens of the Emerald City.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the first two Iron Man movies. A little snarky Robert Downy Jr. goes a long way with me. I like him better when he’s part of an ensemble (like in The Avengers). So while it may be faint praise, I did enjoy this third film in the series most of all.
If you wanted to remake William Lustig’s 1980 slasher cornerstone with an abundance of point-of-view shots, you probably couldn’t do a better a job than Franck Khalfoun did with this remake. Maniac is beautiful and imaginative, photographed almost entirely from the killer’s (Elijah Wood’s) point of view. You really only see him in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. On one hand, the conceit is clever and cool, but on the other hand, it ends up being what I’m paying attention to — not the thin storyline or the operatic depiction of its psychologically scarred central character. I think less would have been more where the back story is concerned, and I’m not sure the perpetual POV tactic is the best way to tell this story.
