Movie Review: The Mechanic
There’s no denying that Jason Statham and Ben Foster have all the skills and machismo to play a pair of hyper-skilled, cool-headed assassins.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Daily Tar Heel's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
46 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
There’s no denying that Jason Statham and Ben Foster have all the skills and machismo to play a pair of hyper-skilled, cool-headed assassins.
Seth Rogen has spent his career playing affable schlubs stuck in states of perpetual childhood, so co-writing and starring in a superhero film is quite a change for him. Unfortunately, Rogen’s inability to abandon his stoned man-child persona makes “The Green Hornet” an incredibly uneven experience.
Nicolas Cage has never chosen movie roles with the gravitas of an Oscar-winner, but in what can only be excused as a desperate attempt to finance his notoriously lavish lifestyle, “Season of the Witch” emerges as the low water-mark of the acclaimed actor’s career and prompts the question of whether the tide is going out for good.
When telling the story of a rock ‘n’ roll icon, it can be easy to focus only on the mythos of their legendary exploits and ground-breaking music. “Nowhere Boy” takes a different road in its presentation of John Lennon’s early years, mostly ignoring the celebrity and instead centering on the impressionable and fragile young man in his youth.
In a culture so obsessed with a certain vampire saga, the mention of a vampiric love story immediately conjures up images of effete, glittering blood suckers. Thankfully, “Let Me In” is firmly grounded in old-school vampire lore, creating a much more convincing and chilling cinematic experience than its blockbuster cousin.
As kids, we’re always told to ignore the hurtful things others say. But whoever came up with the saying “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” has never seen a high school rumor mill as complex and vicious as in “Easy A.” When unnoticed and clean-cut student Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is overheard in a bathroom telling her friend a false story about losing her virginity in a one-night stand, it quickly becomes the talk of the school.
The history of film adaptations of video games is notoriously spotty, and the “Resident Evil” franchise has never been an exception. “Resident Evil: Afterlife” continues the trend and raises the question of how a series so devoid of creativity can lumber on for four installments, as seemingly unkillable as its undead antagonists.
Machete
Superhero movies have gotten a lot more developed — from the complicated morality issues of “Batman” and the complex personality of Tony Stark in “Iron Man.” “Kick-Ass” tries to take things back to the basics, with its tale of one kid with nothing but a mask and a mission.Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a completely average high school student.
Hollywood has produced countless films about the trials and tribulations of marriage and child-rearing. “Date Night” is the latest, and while it has its moments of excitement, it mostly emulates the drab and routine-dominated marriage it depicts.Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are a married couple in their early forties.
In “The Last Song,” Miley Cyrus’s Ronnie Miller is a gifted musician who’s been accepted to Juilliard. That’s right: this is the kind of film where the girl who brought us “Party in the U.S.A.” can go to one of the most prestigious musical institutions in the country.Despite her talents, Ronnie is a rebellious teen with a troubled past. We know this because she has a nose stud and wears black boots while walking on the beach. Her mother has sent Ronnie and her brother to stay with their estranged father (Greg Kinnear) for the summer at his beachside house. As the three try to rekindle their relationship, Ronnie meets the perpetually shirtless local heartthrob Will (Liam Hemsworth), and the two fall for each other.The actors in this execrable movie deliver every line as if it’s being read straight from the script, almost to the point that you worry they will accidentally read the blocking. And while the relationships in teen romance films rarely resemble reality, Will’s courtship of Ronnie is particularly laughable. It’s a montage of glances of smoldering intensity, bad pop songs and Will’s grin, which is so toothy it would make Jimmy Carter flinch.
Artificial organs are copies of the originals, so it’s fitting for the plot of “Repo Men” to center around them. A replica of dozens of previous action movies, it’s like a heart that beats because it has to, not because it really wants to.In the future, the world’s economy has crumbled, but the market for expensive, high-tech replacement organs is thriving. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker star as Remy and Jake, a pair of Union men, repossession agents who hunt down those who have failed to pay for their organs and reclaim the company’s products. However, Remy has a literal change of heart when an on-the-job accident leaves him with his own unaffordable metallic transplant.The movie starts off promisingly enough, with a quick pace and an excellent balance between violence and dark humor. The setup of people buying organs for which they can never pay is an untapped source of social and economic commentary amidst the gunplay and carnage.
“The Bourne Ultimatum,” director Paul Greengrass and actor Matt Damon’s last pairing, was undoubtedly one of the best action-thrillers in recent memory. Now, the duo teams up once again for “Green Zone,” which unfortunately has all the twists and turns of “Bourne” but with a lot less payoff. Named for the supposedly secured zone in Baghdad, the film follows Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon), who leads a squad tasked with finding chemical weapon sites in Iraq. Despite intelligence from a high-level informant, each site is suspiciously empty, leading Miller to suspect the source may not exist. Teaming up with a like-minded CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson), the pair sets out to uncover the truth and shoot a lot of people in the process.Greengrass’s trademark shaky camera effects work well in “Green Zone,” giving the action scenes a sense of immediacy, as if they were the latest battle footage on the news. He brings the chaos and confusion of the tumultuous beginning of the war to life, with plenty of different interwoven plot elements to keep viewers on their toes. However, there is no reward for sitting through all the disorder. “Green Zone” is ultimately just another clichéd government conspiracy flick, complete with a stock corrupt federal official (Greg Kinnear). It may make valid points about intelligence failures and bad military strategy, but it’s tough to be serious amid action-oriented foot chases and gun battles.“Green Zone” is a movie with a serious identity crisis. Presented first as a war film, it tries too hard to be a political drama and never finds a middle ground. Instead it prefers to stay within the boundaries of its own “green zone” and try to pass itself off as a simple action movie.
The Oscars are always incredibly difficult to predict, as personal preferences give way to the more likely Academy favorites. This year, Dive gives you both sides of the story with our picks for who should win and also for the nominee who will actually take home the Oscar Sunday.BEST PICTUREShould Win: “Up In The Air”
Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) is a demigod, but thanks to a rule prohibiting the gods from seeing their half-human offspring, he doesn’t know. His latent Herculean abilities only come to the forefront when he’s falsely accused of stealing Zeus’s lightning, which could ignite a war between the gods. He’s then trundled off to a camp for the bastard children of deities, who seem to have a “hit-it-and-quit-it” mentality when it comes to humans.
As Leonardo DiCaprio’s Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels arrives at the gates of Ashecliffe mental hospital in the opening minutes of “Shutter Island,” he observes tense guards following a rigid protocol, and says to the warden, “You act like insanity is catchin’.”
Dive Verdict: 2 of 5 Stars
Diversions verdict: .5 of 5 stars
It’s easy to dismiss a shoddy romantic comedy as harmless fluff that was never really meant to be critically appraised. But after watching “When in Rome” I’ve concluded this one may kill only slightly fewer brain cells than an eight ball of coke. When workaholic Beth (Kristen Bell) goes to Rome for her sister’s wedding, she takes several coins from the fountain of love, causing the men whose coins she stole to fall madly in love with her. She is then pursued back to New York by her suitors, including an amorous Italian artist, a vapid male model, and Danny DeVito. Director Mark Steven Johnson seems aware that his film’s lifeless plot won’t hold up under scrutiny and he hurtles through the story at breakneck speed, not bothering with luxuries like back story, character names, and acting. The bits set in Rome are particularly laughable; all Italians sound like the Mario Brothers and the wedding scene looks like it was cribbed from an Olive Garden commercial. When the movie finally slows its pace at the end, the lack of chemistry between Beth and her beau Nick (Josh Duhamel) is apparent. Their “true love” consists of half-hearted witty banter, clichéd statements about choosing love over work, and Beth’s eerie death rictus grin. They are neither a convincing nor compelling couple. Beth is a self-centered ditz and Nick is a lovelorn fool whose relentless attempts at wooing could also be construed as stalking. As I entered the theater, I saw the tagline for “When in Rome” read “Did you ever wish for the impossible?”, and looking back, I guess I did. I wished for a good film.
Dive verdict: 1 of 5 stars