Jim Caviezel

You know not to expect something deep and meaningful when a movie stars Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and indeed this is pretty much what we expect: a slick thriller that's utterly preposterous but not quite stupid. But the premise has a certain idiotic charm to it, and there are just enough clever touches to keep our brains engaged.

Stallone plays brilliant security expert Breslin, whose job entails being thrown into maximum-security prisons so he can find the weakness in the system. Clearly unbothered by being beaten and brutalised by guards and inmates, Breslin is backed up by a support crew (Ryan and Jackson) and his business partner (D'Onofrio) back in the office. But now the CIA wants Breslin to check out its new top-secret enemy combatant lock-down. To do this, Breslin must go off the grid. And when he realises that the evil warden Hobbes (Caviezel) isn't playing ball, he teams up with brilliant scientist inmate Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) to, yes, plan an escape.

As the story develops we get the feeling that the screenwriters sat around thinking of ways they could make this prison increasingly impossible to believe. Indeed, one mid-film twist is so incredible that it actually makes us admire the writers' audacity. Arthouse director Halstrom gleefully indulges in all of this silliness, keeping the imagery sharp and cool while name-checking pretty much every cliche of both prison and heist movies. There's even a bit of political context in the way a private contractor is abusing the system to profit from the War on Terror.

Continue reading: Escape Plan Review

It's safe to say that your enjoyment of the film is bound by this same rule. Dyed-in-the-wool film critics like myself have been down this road once or twice before, and the enormous leap of faith it takes to convince oneself that, deep down, even "bad" people are good makes me want to reach for my DVD of A Clockwork Orange.

Continue reading: Pay It Forward Review

The latest big screen adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo" has such a conspicuously clean Hollywood ending that, even though I've never read the book, I was suspicious and went online to bone up a little before writing this review.

Sure enough, even the central act of revenge that motivates this classic tale of obstinate, meticulous reprisal has been unduly rewritten to make for a cinematic and action-packed climax. The hero has been acquitted of his less honorable acts, the fates of characters have been drastically altered (those that haven't been dropped completely, that is), and comic relief has been shoehorned into the story so crudely you can almost see the impatient studio suit tapping his foot on the set and saying, "Can't this be funnier?"

Yet even with these gross departures, this "Count" has such a flavorful, popcorn-literature air about it that at its worst it still recalls the best of Golden Era swashbuckler flicks.

Continue reading: The Count Of Monte Cristo Review

Good ideas are rare in Hollywood. But rarer still is the tendency to leave a good idea alone.

If a movie is smart enough to rely only on its good idea, the result is almost always a decent film, from "Speed" to "Dark City" and "Memento."

"The Final Cut" represents the opposite tendency, to tinker with something until it's dead. Here is a terrific idea: in the future, parents will have the option to purchase a "Zoe chip" that will be implanted in their unborn child. From the moment of their birth, the chip records everything as the person sees it. After their death, a "cutter" takes the hours, days, and years worth of footage and assembles it into a two-hour film that, more or less, sums up the person's life. (Fortunately for the cutters, people's memories are recorded in Cinemascope and Dolby Surround sound.)

Continue reading: THE FINAL CUT Review

Beyond Jesus's inner circle of Disciples, relatives and Mary Magdalene, there's barely a single sympathetic character in the entirety of devoted director Mel Gibson's passion project "The Passion of The Christ."

Pontius Pilate, the tyrannical Roman governor on whose word the crucifixion went forward, gets a pass as a conflicted guy who was just doing his job -- killing Jesus to prevent a rebellion from a mob of frenzied Jews angry over his perceived as blasphemous preachings. Pilate's wife Claudia is a convert and therefore shown in a good light. There's a Jewish girl who tries to give Jesus water as he carries the cross on which he'll die through the streets of Jerusalem and a peasant father who has a religious epiphany by helping the now beaten bloody Jesus carry said cross.

Aside from a few people crying as Jesus is dragged past them, that's about it. Everyone else in this film seems to be a villain -- be they Roman guards who laugh maniacally (like James Bond movie henchmen) while whipping Jesus until his shredded skin looks like bloody, lumpy oatmeal, or be they Jewish hoards whipped into a frenzy by temple leaders, or be they the viciously evangelical rabbis themselves, whose spiteful rhetoric against his "heresy" sounds an awful lot like what still to this day comes from behind some pulpits and political podiums.

Continue reading: The Passion Of The Christ Review