Taken 2 is set a year later, and deals with the consequences of the first film’s bloody rampage. On a hillside in Albania, a funeral’s taking place for the people Mills slaughtered back in France. One of them is Murad (Rade Serbedzija), the father of a luckless goon who Mills had electrocuted in a Paris basement. “The man who has brought us such pain and suffering,” seethes Murad, “we’ll find him....
3.5 Frayed The centerpiece of this week’s episode is a long-awaited werewolf-on-werewolf brawl featuring pretty much every character involved in the show this season. The set-up is a little convoluted, but the pay-off is pretty spectacular. Shot in a moody combination of darkness and blinding white light streaming in from all available windows, the fascinating snippets of combat we see told via flashback sequences are good appetisers for the episode’s big brawl....
Such is the case with first-time writer-director Vaughn Stein’s Terminal, a heavily stylized piece of hyper noir about a waitress/stripper/budding contract killer named Annie (Robbie) and the web of snarling hard cases she finds herself ensnared in. All crimson-red lipstick and a Cheshire grin as wide as the one in the Lewis Carroll story she’s always quoting, Robbie appears the very personification of what we imagine a femme fatale to be, and like the camera and men in her life, it is all too easy to follow her into the dark place....
For me, along with Chuck the show that stood out last year from the US new TV productions was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Why? Well the scripts developed a interesting plotline, even working within the constraints of John Connors survival. Then there were some excellent acting performances, and the action moved things along at a brisk pace. The production, like many others, suffered from the writers strike and ended just as it was really getting good....
The latest Sarah Connor Chronicles gifted us a gem of smart storytelling this week, and took the story in an entirely unexpected direction. The events as portrayed by the entire Terminator franchise are serious stuff, with most of humanity destined to be wiped out by a technology they can’t control. So grim that it would be easy for the show to take itself and the characters far too seriously. In an early scene John, Sarah and Cameron attend a ‘Family Therapist’, following a clue left in an earlier episode....
2.14 Bodyguard Of Lies After focusing a great deal on Jasper’s slow decline into mad vengeance over the last couple of weeks, we take a break from Mount Weather’s 44 remaining kids, instead following Bellamy as he attempts to eliminate the threat of the acid fog before Clarke, Octavia and the rest descend. It’s kind of weird to have Jasper and Monty hurried off into a secret hiding place after spending so much time with them recently, but I can assume that the two-parter will feature all groups coming together, so I can wait....
The Affair Season 3 Episode 6 A lot of The Affair’s sixth episode this season is about the pressure of second chances—whether they’re a real thing or just lies that we tell ourselves as we accept our consolation prizes. Late in the episode Noah runs into an old acquaintance at Gunther’s hardware store and Noah learns that he’s married to the girl who would never give the guy a second glance in high school....
The film jumps straight to the point, opening with a frank interview with Armstrong in 2013, mere hours after his Oprah appearance during which he admitted to doping and cheating throughout his entire career. “I didn’t live a lot of lies”, explains the visibly dejected former hero, “but I lived one big one”. Even after being stripped of all titles and publically shamed, Armstrong remains an enigma. Watching him retell his life-story with new-found honesty is a rare treat to behold, with the contrast between his more solemn modern self and the enthusiastic younger version throwing up some big emotional moments....
Thanks to Archie Comics’ latest value-priced paperback compilation those on the fence between the spoiled brunette and nice-but-wacky blonde won’t have to render their final decision just quite yet. Like the previous three “best of” books Archie has released during the last few years, this latest volume spans seven decades over the course of 400 odd pages. As such, it gives readers a glimpse at how Betty and Veronica have evolved across the decades–for better and worse....
11.2 The Retraction Reaction When The Big Bang Theory first began many moons ago, science was a much bigger part of the show. As the series progressed and new cast members were added, the characters started to mirror the real-world tendency for people to focus less on work as we grow older and more on relationships and families. But while that shift for the most part worked in the show’s favour, it’s a shame we can’t have both....
Bad films, on the other hand, are only as irksome when it comes to how bored they leave you feeling. Bad films don’t offend or excite – they don’t leave you feeling much of anything. That’s their crime, they fail to move you in any direction and add nothing to your life but time wasted. Despite the critical mauling it’s received, then, this is not a terrible film. There are good intentions here buried underneath the cringe-worthy commerce and shoddy storytelling....
The Exorcist Season 2 Episode 2 The Exorcist, season 2, episode 2, “Safe As House Houses,” is held together by red tape. There’s a social worker on an island off of Seattle taking notes on blind kids walking planks over ghosts. A tribunal in Rome, right above the Office of Exorcisms, is dong the paperwork on an insubordinate cleric. And there is a pissed off cop who cuts through the red tape to kick the shit out of a pair of closed-mouthed priests....
I’d argue that there remain few people out there who remain as invested in The Expendables franchise as this particular writer, with the heady mix of nostalgia and ultra-violence providing some sublimely over the top entertainment. What’s more, it taps directly into the 80s action movie fantasy line up, that many of us dreamt of seeing back in the day. However, when Stallone shrewdly pioneered the unique concept behind The Expendables, one of the core ingredients and draws for its targeted demographic was the gloriously over the top splatter that accompanied every bullet – it was, after all, how he successfully managed to bring Rambo back to the big screen....
1.3 All The Lost Children That Marlott has so much to pick through, so many pieces to puzzle over, is what’s bringing Chronicles’ mystery thriller aspects to pulsing life as the main suspects are lined up. Could the Hervey siblings be so charitably-minded that they’d take to corpse mutilation to make a point about the dangers of the coming Anatomy Act? Maybe. Are surgeons like Sir William Chester, part of a medical community excited by the Galvanism movement, this eager to act out the plot of Frankenstein for real?...
This review contains spoilers. In this adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, director Reed Morano makes the nation of Gilead—the radically oppressive social experiment that’s replaced modern-day America—every bit as threatening as a haunted house or serial killer’s lair. Something monstrous lurks around every corner. Armed guards. Spies. Public executions. Absolute annihilation of personhood. Due to a marked dip in birth rates, procreation is everything in Gilead. Gay men and doctors who perform abortions are strung up in the streets alongside other enemies of the state....
How do you take a show whose serendipitous timing made it the most prescient thing on television last year, and improve it without falling prey to the sophomore slump? If the first season was largely seen as a too-real depiction of our possible future, The Handmaid’s Tale season two is a portrait of our present. The second season of Hulu’s award-winning The Handmaid’s Tale takes us to a place that is all at once darker, and much closer to home....
As I have mentioned, football has always been a mystery to me and this lack of a certain ‘blokeness’ gene is something I share with Moss who, to get on with the internal postman, finds a website that proves a bluffer’s guide to football. With a random football fact generator, he manages to pass himself off as a sage of football knowledge. However, things get a little out of hand as both Roy and Moss use their newfound powers and social acceptance to blend in with a new set of mates, and things go from bad to worse as a few healthy drinks turns to dull afternoons on the terraces and a fantastically funny conclusion with some very unorthodox snogging....
While fixing a computer on the 7th Floor of Denholm industries, which is for some reason exclusively populated by young and attractive women, Roy overhears the plight of a colleague of one of these nubile young things. Her brother is afflicted with ‘boss-eye’, a problematic (and unfunny) condition. So with the aforementioned attractive-young-thing trying to find a way to help, the idea of a calendar is suggested, with all the girls on the 7th floor doing a sexy shoot to raise money....
Being a fan of Brooker and not being a fan of reality TV, I eagerly anticipated a great big gory blast of cathartic carnage in the Big Brother house and was not in the least bit disappointed. It would take something outstandingly sinister and subversive to make me switch on empty airtime filler like Big Brother, and there’d have to be the promise that the unbearable, attention-seeking participants would do more than just bitch and moan about each other and act like inane egomaniacs....
Seeing my baby’s cot (I’m so glad the nightmare doesn’t detail the actual birth), I rush forward, look down and discover I’ve spawned an utter abomination. Gazing upon the horror, I’m compelled to hysterically cry out, “What have you done to it!? What have you done to its eyes?!” Hyperventilating at this point, I turn to Bob and reply, “What are you talking about?! My eyes are normal! What have you done to him?...
