Cranky T-Rex's Blog

It's tough taking fliers on movies like The Hitman's Bodyguard that don't have pre-existing history backing them up, which is why so many movies today are sequels or comic book adaptations or reboots.  With those you at least have some idea of what you're getting, with all these other one-offs, you're basically just going on whatever they put in a trailer, and half the time the trailers turn out to be a problem anyway because they're either incredibly deceptive or they spoil the whole movie. That is of course assuming you even see the trailer since the trailers for these movies tend to get buried under the latest big thing from Marvel or DC/Warner Bros. So it's tough to build any kind of hype or momentum for these kinds of one-off action flicks, but despite all that, in this case it was indeed a trailer that got me into the theater. Seeing Ryan Reynolds and Sam Jackson's back-and-forth in the first trailer for this piqued my interest, even though th...

It's not often you get a sequel 11 years after the last movie, especially if that last movie was itself a sequel nobody particularly wanted and that turned out to be absolutely awful. Yet, we have xXx: Return of Xander Cage anyway. Though I'm sure it was intentional way back when that people might confuse xXx for some kind of porn thing, it was actually just a sort of mishmash between James Bond and the X-games.  When the first xXx movie came out, Extreme Sports had become a pretty big fad, and Hollywood is always looking for something good to cash in on, so they created a movie wherein your typical 00 was just too stuffy and uptight to tango with the hardcore adrenaline junky criminals of the 21st century. So, to combat the new threat, Sam Jackson had to go find somebody a little more edgy.  Enter Vin Diesel, a world-famous anarchistic rebel with a penchant for crazy stunts and fur coats. That original movie was pretty fun overall, but it really didn't have t...

One of these things is not like the other. RoboCop continues the tradition of rebooting franchises and not giving us the common courtesy of some form of subtitle so that we can differentiate between the new one and the old one. Seems like filmmakers hope that by sticking to the original name they can completely overwrite the original so that nobody remembers how much better it was. Fortunately, in this version Alex Murphy becomes a black cyborg with a single organic white hand so I can refer to him as RoboJackson and anyone who’s old enough to remember the 80s will get the joke. RoboJackson is about everything except this Alex Murphy guy who gets turned into a cyborg and the family that has to live with that new reality. It’s about drones, corporate greed, businesses in bed with government, modern news coverage, and did I mention drones? It’s like the filmmakers saw all the wonderful satire of the original film and felt like if they didn't stuff this one full of social co...