21 Jump Street Review

21 Jump Street admits from the start, in a nicely timed and very meta joke, that it's really just an attempt to mine the past for nostalgia and ideas-- in this case, adapting a somewhat beloved 80s TV show about undercover cops in high school. But while that might have been Sony's goal when they set up the movie with star and producer Jonah Hill, the movie itself is more of an excuse to combine a surprisingly touching buddy story with wild, absurdist comedy from the directors who also brought you Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Unpredictable and very silly but with real emotional stakes, 21 Jump Streetmakes up for a shaggy script with a wily, endearing energy that feels like anything but a tired retread.

The movie contains a lot of pleasant surprises, but none bigger than the performance from Channing Tatum, known until now as a hunky but dull romance and action star. He showed a glimmer of comedic potential in Ron Howard's The Dilemma, but it's nothing compared to what he brings to 21 Jump Street as Jenko, the former high school burnout who, as a

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

I wish that director Brad Peyton’s Journey 2: The Mysterious Island had been an amazing adventure film. I also wish that it was so remarkably terrible that it managed to become entertaining. Instead, the movie is set firmly in the middle, neither good nor bad, but also instantly forgettable.

Picking up a while after the events of Journey To The Center of the Earth, the story begins with Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson) living the life of a rebel, breaking into local satellite facilities and running from the cops on his motorcycle. While he’s partially doing it to act out against his mother’s new boyfriend, Hank (Dwayne Johnson, who steps in for Brendan Fraser in the sequel),

Underwolrd Review

Underworld is not a vampire movie or a werewolf movie. It is rather, a hyper-stylized sci-fi/action movie that just happens to have vampires and werewolves in it. Horror freaks step off. This is a good movie, but it isn't your movie. 

Underworld exists in a washed out reality, where vampires and werewolves roam the earth, just under mankind's radar. Once allies, for centuries now they've waged a secret war on one another, a war the vampires have all but won. The film opens with a dark and beautiful shot of Selene (Kate Beckinsale, looking as spectacularly sexy as anyone could ever possibly look) perched like an eagle atop a building on a rainy city night. She's hunting werewolves (they call them lykens or something but who cares about that) and she's good at her job. She leaps from the building to land on the street, several hundred feet below... and hits hard. That's one of many little bits of coolness that Director Len Wisemen has worked into his film. Vampires don't fly, but they can

Ghost Rider : Spirit Of Vengeance

Nicolas Cage is the cursed Johnny Blaze again in GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, and the movie is kind of cursed as well, in the sense that while it’s better than you might expect, it’s not as good as you might hope.

The “better than you might expect” part involves the fact that this sequel was hidden from critics prior to its release today, and also to the fact that it’s more fun than the first GHOST RIDER. That has a lot to do with the fact that Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the maniacs behind the CRANK

films, were in the director’s chairs this time—or in the case of Neveldine, at least, flying around on wires and zooming along on rollerblades to get their usual crazy shots. Perhaps it was the restrictions involved in working with a couple of monoliths like Sony Pictures and Marvel, though, or the fact that they had to deliver a PG-13 movie, but the two never get to go as insane as they did when they were CRANK-ing things up, and they were bound by a pretty formula storyline as well.Hiding out somewhere in Eastern Europe and trying to keep his Ghost Rider persona at bay, Johnny is approached