Sylvester Stallone back in stir, this time as a professional jailbreaker hired by penal institutions to go undercover and test the impregnability of maximum security prisons. The implausibility of the opening escape is made clear in a flashback. Sly is assigned a different institution to crack, and the moment fellow …
Elite mercenaries Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, and Sylvester Stallone are joined by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Megan Fox, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Jacob Scipio, Levy Tran, and Andy Garcia. Armed with every weapon they can get their hands on and the skills to use them, The Expendables are …
Adolescent action fantasy from senior citizen Sylvester Stallone: an elite team of mercenaries descend upon the stock bad guys on the mythical island of Vilena for a chopped-up orgy of carnage. The star, director, and co-writer surrounds himself with younger-generation men of action, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Steve Austin, Randy …
Simon West hasn’t printed one watchable frame of film since setting the bar high with his debut feature, the uproarious Con Air. When it came time to reassemble the dirty half-dozen or so (plus JCVD and Chuck Norris), West’s uncolored staging was just the touch needed to give flight to …
For a little while at the outset, you may find reason to smile: Wesley Snipes is very nearly charming as a newly sprung compatriot for senior super-soldier Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone, in frequent and extended closeup). When fellow Expendable Dolph Lundgren asks what he was in for, Snipes deadpans, "Tax …
A purgative for Vietnam veterans' feelings of rejection. Jack Starrett is back in the same role — sadistic law officer — in which he used to aggravate whole gangs of Hell's Angels into tearing apart peaceful small towns; here he gets the same results by aggravating only a single ex-Green …
Muscle-bound, knuckleheaded remake of the 1971 British film by Mike Hodges: an old story (mobster in search of answers in the mysterious death of his brother), muddily plotted and modishly styled, with an overdose of semi-hallucinatory visual tricks. Michael Caine, the original Carter, is on hand in a small role …
A match between Rocky Balboa and the Raging Bull would have set box offices ablaze were it 1983, but back then, Robert “The Greatest Actor of His Generation” De Niro was too big to spar with a cauliflower-eared Rambonehead like Sylvester Stallone. With three decades and countless flops under their …
In the middle of a holiday moviegoing season fraught with yarns of slavery, childhood mortality, cancer, senility, and an AIDS panacea as a cash cow, it’s amazing how refreshing a cheesy exploitation film can sound. Taking sole screenwriting credit, Sylvester Stallone lumps together shreds of his past glories to form …
The resemblance of Part I to the original Rocky is sharpened by there being a Part II. (And this time, John G. Avildsen gets to direct the sequel himself, instead of being replaced by, say, Ralph Macchio or Pat Morita as he was by Sylvester Stallone.) The most attractive parts …
Model prisoner vs. malformed warden. Some rugged action, subverted by unmanly supplications for pity. The cast (except, principally, Donald Sutherland's warden, trained at the Kafka School of Penology, with further studies at the De Sade Management Institute) is solid. An especially eye-catching turn by Tom Sizemore as the hero's toady …
The promotional campaign was predictably geared to suggest a spinoff of American Graffiti, which does a disservice to this humble, frugal re-creation of Brooklyn, late-1950s. Indulging in much less wing-flapping and crowing, it is not at all guaranteed to appeal to the same crowd. The first feature of Stephen Verona …
Depressingly low-ambition action film about a muscle-bound DEA agent on the trail of revenge for the cross-fire murder of his wife. Or more realistically, about Vin Diesel on the trail of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, take your pick. (The bass tones and the …
Kids' stuff by way of Marvel Comics. It has some amusing notions: that aliens from space are just another species of immigrant, gainfully employed all across the country in human shells (some of the more recognizable ones: Sylvester Stallone, Anthony Robbins, Dionne Warwick); that they are closely monitored by a …
A contrast is started to be set up between the methods needed to combat New York street crime and methods needed to combat political terrorism, but this is never carried through to any illuminating degree. You could easily lose some of your respect for Wolfgar, the lone-wolf terrorist, when his …