Cranky T-Rex's Blog

You'd think the death of lead cast member Paul Walker and the touching sendoff his character was given in Furious 7 would've stopped the Fast and Furious franchise cold, but that one made all the money and Vin Diesel always imagined a trilogy of 7,8,9, so here we are with The Fate of the Furious . It's pretty impressive for any franchise to get to their 8th movie like this, but considering how hard it is to make one great movie much less eight, it hasn't always been a smooth ride (no pun intended.) The first one is essentially a great remake of Point Break , only with drag racing instead of surfing. The second and third ones are universally panned for their lack of Vin Diesel (and also for being terrible in general.) Diesel and Walker got back together for the fourth one that, despite some pretty awful CGI, more or less put the series back on track. Fast Five is the stand out of course, since it's an incredibly fun heist movie that brought in the additional...

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...

I'm high on believin' that you're in love with me. Of all the trailers I've seen this year, the one for Guardians of the Galaxy was by far the most intriguing. It had an incredibly irreverent tone that’s sorely lacking around Hollywood lately and used a clever bit of self-deprecation to introduce a group of Marvel characters about which I knew very little. I couldn't help but wonder whether or not the entire movie would be as amusing as the trailer or if that was just a really great bit of marketing. I was pleased to discover that irreverence permeates the entire movie, and it’s the comedic flair that saves it from being another Green Lantern . Like that film, Guardians seeks to establish too much too quickly, and so it’s stuffed to the gills with exposition, much of which is incredibly redundant. I don’t think I heard the name "Gamora" come up without a reminder that she is the “adopted daughter” of Thanos, for example. It also changes location...