First Trailer for FLATLINERS Re-Make

Another confession when it comes to another new trailer for a re-make of an old movie: I've never seen the original. In this particular instance, we're talking about the 1990 Joel Schumacher film, Flatliners, that starred Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland, and Julia Roberts. Honestly, I'd heard of the film before, but never enough to make me feel the need to seek it out. This seems both a positive and negative for the re-make as this clearly wasn't a property Sony Pictures imagined might profit from brand recognition, but rather could be a genuine effort on the part of director Niels Arden Oplev (the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and writer Ben Ripley (Source Code) to "re-imagine" the material and bring it into the modern day. To this effect, it seems this new film won't necessarily be as much of a re-make (all the characters will technically be new characters) as it will be a progression of how far science has come since that first film was released. This is an interesting enough approach and the team involved, including a strong cast that is headed by Ellen Page, seems credible enough to pull something off that might end up being legitimately engaging. By the same virtue of public perception though, this new Flatliners could just as well be written off as unnecessary and disappear from cinemas come September without so much as a peep. It will undoubtedly be one worth watching as it seems reviews and pre-release buzz will ultimately decide the fate of this one-especially if it ends up being any good and people react to it in ways that provide positive word of mouth. On a final note, Sony wasn't completely ignorant to the nostalgia factor that is fueling so many Hollywood decisions at the moment and have enlisted Sutherland for a role in this new film, but have confirmed he will not be reprising his role as Nelson from the original. Flatliners also stars Nina Dobrev, Kiersey Clemons, Diego Luna, James Norton, and opens on September 29th, 2017.

xXx: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE Review

It is with great pleasure that I report xXx: Return of Xander Cage is as dumb and ridiculous as it should be. First and foremost I guess it is important to state that there was no need for this third outing in the xXx series, but as with so many franchises these days we get a lot of what we didn't think we needed, but that they're going to give to us anyways. It makes sense given the whole "brand recognition" line of thinking within the studio system at the moment, but while many of the fruits of this line of thinking yield final products as pointless and joyless as expected given their inherently unwarranted status it is nice that every once in a while such thinking yields something as fun and self-aware as xXx: Return of Xander Cage. It has been fifteen years since Vin Diesel took on the mantle of a James Bond figure via the X-Games in what was no doubt intended to be a spiritual successor of sorts to the original The Fast and the Furious as Diesel re-teamed with director Rob Cohen for xXx the year after The Fast and the Furious became a surprise smash. Like he did initially with the Fast franchise, Diesel opted not to return for the xXx sequel in 2005, State of the Union, which picked up Ice Cube as Darius Stone to fill Diesel's Xander Cage's spot in the xXx program with it being reported Cage died in Bora Bora a few years after the events of the original film. And now, as he did with Fast in 2009, Diesel has returned to a franchise he started and then abandoned after efforts outside such franchises haven't worked out as well as the actor/producer/social media champion likely hoped they would. It's hard to blame the guy as he approaches the age of fifty this summer and undoubtedly understands he won't be able to make such movies (or such money) for much longer. The persona Diesel pulled off as Cage at thirty-five already feels somewhat strained here-especially in scenes engineered to make Diesel look like the baddest dude on the planet-but director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye) and his editors keep things moving along at such a quick pace and with so much energy it's difficult to get caught up on any one detail. It also doesn't hurt that F. Scott Frazier's (The Numbers Station) screenplay layers in multiple team members to take some of the pressure off Diesel carrying this entire thing on his aging shoulders while simultaneously becoming another casualty of the Avengers effect where it's now more lucrative and enticing to have a team of xXx-er's rather than a sole ambassador of bad ass.     

Teaser Trailer for xXx: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE Starring Vin Diesel

Confession time: I've never seen 2005's xXx: State of the Union. Do I need to? Because I really don't care to and yet, part of me is excited to see Vin Diesel return to the role he originated in 2002 in the wake of the original The Fast and the Furious' success. Diesel was all kinds of set to be the next big action star after he completely dominated that 2001 street racing Rob Cohen movie and no doubt secured the paycheck for Chronicles of Riddick soon after, but was also the guy who would churn out another Rob Cohen picture before deciding not to return for 2 Fast 2 Furious in '03. While we may have been upset with Mr. Diesel at the time for letting his new found BFF Brian go off to Miami alone and reunite with Tyrese it would all work out in the end. Deciding to make xXx rather than a second Fast & Furious film is certainly proving helpful now as the actor is having his cake and eating it too. Not only is he secured by at least three more F&F films, but he is now bringing back those one-off's that he also didn't commit to sequels to (see the aforementioned State of the Union) in order to fill in the paycheck gaps between F&F films. I don't want to sound too negative as the actor is part of the insanely solid cast of the much anticipated Ang Lee film, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, that will surely be an Oscar contender this fall, but was there really any need for another entry into what will be a fifteen year old property by the time this new movie arrives in theaters? No, but like I said-I'm not as opposed as I might have been once upon a time. The original xXx was a fine enough action flick that capitalized on the cheesy guilty pleasures of the genre at that point in time and while I don't remember much of the movie something in me hopes this new film will play in that same tone of not being overly self-aware or serious, but rather just a good time in the moment that we won't remember a few hours later. xXx: Return of Xander Cage also stars Samuel L. Jackson, Ruby Rose, Nina Dobrev, Toni Collette, Donnie Yen, Tony Jaa, Deepika Padukone, Rory McCann, and opens on January 20th, 2017.

THE FINAL GIRLS Review

The Final Girls is one of those movies people who love movies could likely watch over and over again. I say this because I've watched it twice already and enjoyed it even more the second time around. Everything about the film is calculated to perfection when considering the genre it is both lampooning and writing a love letter to. Here, writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller use this self-aware technique not to make fun of the actions of their own movie, but more to examine the staples of nostalgia and how what eventually become these staples begin as innocent, unintentional marks of the decade from which a movie is born. We're unaware of the tropes being created by the countless super hero blockbusters of our current cinematic landscape, but in twenty years there is no doubt the twenty-somethings will find a strange comfort in movies that attempt to recreate the tone and energy of what we can't see in front of us right now. It's an interesting experiment and one that pays off in spades for a certain type of audience member. Lucky for me, I feel a part of the generation that will get the most out of this take on the slasher film that was born out of the 80's horror boom. There are two kinds of spoofs, ones where the characters and genre trappings are exaggerated for mere comical effect and then the ones that mean to point out the aspects that, while admittedly being horrible, also make the characters and genre so endearing. What The Final Girls clearly intends to do is show us why these 80's films about teens dying horribly gruesome deaths have become so endearing to the current generation. The answer is we find a kind of solace in the likes of Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Leatherface and Michael Myers that wasn't available in the elaborate mind of Jigsaw or the allusive Paranormal Activity villains. It's an atmosphere that feels foreign to the smart phone era and is a reminder of what the world was like when we were innocent while still appealing to our now adult nature with it's horror aspects. The Final Girls capitalizes on each of these components to play perfectly into everything a certain set of audience members need to feel fully enraptured not only in the events taking place in the film, but our own thought processes about such films.

LET'S BE COPS Review

Movies such as Let's Be Cops live or die by the chemistry of the two leading actors and there is no debate that Jake Johnson and Damon Wayans Jr. like being around one another. Throughout the entirety of this feature they look like they had some serious fun making this movie together, but only so much of that comes through in the final product. As the saying goes: if the film were half as fun to watch as they seemed to have making it we might have been in for something that rivaled the recent success of the Jump Street series, but it doesn't. What this actually feels like while watching it is just a large amount of incompetence. It has a lazily constructed plot centered around an incohesive way of telling its story with even lazier comedy that comes purely from the improvisations and tones in which Johnson and Wayans deliver their dialogue and gyrate their bodies. If we really want to break it down though, Let's Be Cops is about as sub-par in the buddy cop genre as one can get. With both of the Jump Street movies there is the hook of the boys going undercover at high school and college which is always interesting (they try to do that here with the gimmick of not actually being cops, but again, it just seems more idiotic than funny), in Bad Boys there is a real sense of responsibility and peril to go along with the palpable chemistry (not to mention the pure R-rated Bayhem of the second one) and the same could be said for any of the Lethal Weapons. The pairing of personas such as Mel Gibson and Danny Glover was a hook in itself, but putting them in a legit action movie with character at the forefront only meant better results than expected. Let's Be Cops is a comedy though and one that wants to play on the archetypes of the aforementioned films while riding the coat tails of the Jump Street movies in hopes they too take off. Why they couldn't have found a different premise to execute the chumminess of Johnson and Wayans over, I don't know, but as it is I can only hope we don't get any sequels to this steaming mess of a movie.