Max Payne is one of those fairly pleasant movies that’ll require your brain to be partially malfunctioning to enjoy fully, but once you’ve had a couple vodka stingers or something similar, you’ll definitely be in a frame of mind to enjoy it.  After all, it takes a kind of brain damage to fully appreciate the bringing together of Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges and Ludacris, which if you’re playing Celebrity Bingo qualifies as a Royal Sampler.

See, Max Payne is one of those hard-boiled gumshoes that…oh, wait.  No. I’m thinking Humphrey Bogart.  Max Payne is a barely contained sociopath. And the reason why Max Payne is a barely contained sociopath is because his wife and baby were killed one fine day by drug addicts.  This left Max to pick up the pieces of his shattered life and use them to cut open the throats of pretty much every criminal that so much as wanders into frame.  As he progresses through this gigantic killing spree that will wind up bankrupting New York from the sheer number of lawsuits it’ll be facing, he’ll discover conspiracy in the hallowed halls of corporate power, extending even into his own department.

I remember my jaw dropping, slightly, when I found out Mila Kunis was in this—my exact words were, “My God, is that MILA KUNIS?”—because she is not who I think of when I think of action heroine.  Thankfully, she’s also not what the director thought of as an action heroine either because she’s not in this wreck for more than like ten minutes or so.

And someone needs to get Mark Wahlberg back into an acting class, hasta pronto, because his Max Payne will go about blasting the first thing he sees at literally any opportunity, and his facial expression will not even change when he does so. That may be the creepiest part of a movie where people on a regular basis hallucinate dark angels flying around and snatching them up and carving them into teeny bits.  Seriously, Mark—you want to change facial expression when you’re blasting those gangbangers with twelve-gauge buckshot fury?  Maybe arch an eyebrow or quirk the upper lip, something to show that the TAKING OF HUMAN LIVES ON A GRAND SCALE is registering in that hunk of dryer lint you laughingly call a soul?

That’s the creepiest part, by far.  The second creepiest part is how anyone accounts for the “valkyries” being hallucinations when they’re actually seen pulling people out of windows and cutting them into teensy bits.  The biggest problem with that, of course, is no one does.  This is why the bit of brain damage comes in handy, because then you won’t notice these teensy-tinsy gaping plotholes and will instead look at the monsters and gasp over how COOL they look.

Because they really DO look cool.

And that’s Max Payne in a nutshell.  It LOOKS cool.  It SOUNDS cool.  And if you’ve got a mild case of brain damage to ignore the massive structural failure that is a plorline, you’ll probably even find it cool.  And you’ll probably even be happy to note, that based on the ending, a sequel is almost certainly guaranteed.

Meanwhile the rest of us will go watch movies that don’t require a baseball bat to enjoy.

I’ve got to hand it to Shia LaBeouf–the guy’s really stretching his acting chops and trying to seize the high ground of action herodom right out of the gate.  There’s no doubt he’s definitely come a long way from playing a wrongly accused juvenile delinquent back in Holes.  And his recent stint in Eagle Eye is a great way to get that status on lockdown.

The plot here is actually pretty complex.  A government program selects a man whose Air Force brother has recently died and pairs him with a young mother whose child is at risk to carry out a super-secret government program.  As we follow our duo through the course of the movie, we’ll find out steadily more about each, and about the government program they find themselves roped into working for.  By the end, the entire government of the United States will be at risk.
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This one’s for you, Heath.  Rest in peace.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Heath Ledger did take home the posthumous Oscar for Best Actor for his handling of his last role, The Joker in The Dark Knight.

Thus, I’m going to tackle that movie today, just so you all know how good this one was.

Seriously, if you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t know what’s stopping you. It’s entirely too good to pass up on.  Basically, we’re still in Gotham City, with Harvey Dent on his meteoric rise to power, The Joker out to take his place as Gotham’s Clown Prince of Crime, and the Batman out to settle everybody’s hash who even so much as considers returning a library book late.  Indeed, the Joker’s convinced that Gotham deserves a better class of criminal, and he’s out to provide it, starting from the very beginning in an extremely well-orchestrated bank robbery scene.  The rest of the movie is the Joker’s mad attempt to do…well…something (if Alfred is to be believed he’s just one of those guys who wants to watch the world burn) and the Batman’s almost equally mad attempt to stop him.

I have to hand it to The Dark Knight almost immediately.  This movie is unbelievable.  It is, easily, the best Batman installment I’ve ever seen.  Yes, after Batman Returns the whole franchise started a slow collapse into sludgy campdom, but Batman Begins gave it a whole new life.  It elevated the series from bad comic book to true action movie.  And The Dark Knight is the result of that new life.  It’s produced the best Batman (Christian Bale) and a whole lot of other bests, too…including the best Joker.

Say what you will about Jack Nicholson.  I’m not going to fault Jack.  But the plain and simple is, Jack WAS the best Joker.  WAS…until Ledger just destroyed it.  The first time I saw Ledger’s Joker do the Pencil Trick I just LOST IT.  My jaw actually dropped.  I mean literally and actually FELL OPEN.  I’m glad I wasn’t drinking a Coke at the time or it would’ve wound up all down the front of my shirt.  It was crazy.

When you’ve got the best Batman, the best Joker, the best script–a script so tautly plotted and packed with clever twists that it’s ALMOST difficult to follow, but only almost–you’ve got no choice but to call it the best in the series.  It brings together so many quality, powerful, disparate elements that make it sheer lunacy on a whole-wheat bun.  And it’s not just the choice performances turned in by the leads, either.  It’s amazing, the kinds of great acting jobs were brought to this.  The set design, the prop design, the music…it’s amazing.  Watching the Batman hangglide around in the middle of Singapore was just eye-popping.

At this point I must sound like a fanboy raving ceaselessly, but in all honesty, I have no choice but to.  I enjoyed this movie too much to say anything less.  I’m even having difficulty trying to pick out downsides, because I just outright enjoyed this.  Were there problems?  I can’t mention any, really.  If there were they were so small they just coasted on by while I stared goggle-eyed at the impressive proceedings going on in front of me.

If you have even a vague enjoyment for action movies, if you love a dramatic touch, if you like an occasional comic book, then you must–MUST–see this movie.  It’s just too much fun to pass up.

Well, folks, we’re neck deep in February.  And if you’re living in the Northern Hemisphere that means you too are neck deep in cold and snow and slush and general icy foulness as far as you can see.  It’s times like these you wish you had a nice warm-weather romp to get the chill out of the air and out of your bones, so why not try a movie?

When the cold starts getting to me–and let’s face it, a couple months living in the deep freeze can get to just about anybody–one of my personal favorites of late is a recent Matthew McConaughey title called Fool’s Gold.

Sure, it’s a bit simplistic as movies go.  Basically, a loser and his very recently exed wife are hunting for a legendary Spanish fortune known as the Queen’s Dowry, a massive stockpile of gold and assorted precious stones in various sizes and configurations worth about half a billion dollars.  Naturally, he’s not the only one in the hunt for it, as a homicidal rapper who owns a nearby island is also looking for it and he’s hired some serious characters to make sure he gets his.  It’s a race to the finish to see who can unearth a slice of history, and a pile of loot to go with it.

If you’re thinking this sounds a bit like that Paul Walker / Jessica Alba wreckage Into the Blue, well, you’re right.  The substantial difference here is that Fool’s Gold takes itself much less seriously than Into the Blue did, and includes plenty of humor to cut its dramatic tension.

And there will be plenty of both.  Lots of comedy, both subtle and “hurr hurr he got kicked in the junk” humor, is present throughout the movie.  Also, plenty of dramatic tension in the form of intrateam squabbling and various family crises will abound.

Oh, sure…the plot is simplistic, and it’ll often drag you along through leaps of logic as a whole bunch of mismatched individuals come together to go hunting for treasure.  Even the laws of physics will work against Fool’s Gold at some points.  But in terms of just feeling good, well, there’s not a whole lot of movies that quite do it like this one.  And that’s a surprise to say.

This one, before getting the video release, was put out back in February of 2008.  Just last year, in fact–guess they saw it coming before anyone else did.  There’s just not much better cure for feeling cold and feeling blue than watching pretty people tear around a pretty tropical island searching for pretty jewelry.  This is likely why Confessions of a Shopaholic came out when it did.

Fool’s Gold is brain candy, pure and simple.  If you’re willing to overlook some pretty nasty plot holes and just imagine yourself on that tropical island hunting for gold for a while, you’ll walk away feeling pretty good afterward.  If you insist on coherence and logical plotlines, however, then you won’t have any fun on this cheesy little ride and you’ll probably walk away wishing you’d watched Slumdog Millionaire again or something.

You’ve really got to hand it to Jason Statham.  The guy is practically a video game character in his own right–look at some of his recent roles.  He was a hitman in Crank who had to jump from adrenaline rush to adrenaline rush in order to keep his heart from collapsing under the influence of some weird Chinese nerve drug.  Then he shows up in In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which actually WAS a video game before Uwe Boll got his hands on it and turned it into, well, another Uwe Boll film.

And then he shows up in Death Race, the remake of the original–which might well have been the first ever video game movie (Death Race actually was a video game at one point–I remember playing it in an old arcade).

This time, Statham plays a down-on-his-luck steelworker whose mill just shut down (shades of the current economy, huh?).  He goes home for the night, expecting a simple, safe night in with his wife and newborn daughter when it all goes horribly wrong.  Statham ends up in prison, framed for his wife’s murder, and offered a terrible choice.  Either he can spend his life in prison–which may not be that long–or he can join the Death Race circuit, a sort of gladiatorial stock car race in which prisoner drivers race heavily armed cars to the death.  Statham signs onto the Death Race circuit, racing as legendary driver Frankenstein, a man so disfigured by his numerous crashes that he needs to wear a mask.  Throughout the movie, we follow the Death Race circuit through a three-stage race (shown on pay-per-view for the ridiculous price of ninety-nine dollars a circuit or two hundred fifty dollars for all three) as Statham discovers that the race has plenty of secrets, and almost none of them good.

With a plot like that, we all have a pretty good idea that this isn’t going to be an Oscar contender.  Nor will it make a lot of sense.  Rest assured there will be several good plot holes going on here, and more than a few headscratching moments as racers you’ve never seen before suddenly die on the race track.  And though Oscar wouldn’t spit on this movie if it were soaked in its own high-test racing fuel and set on fire, you can take it to the bank that this will be at the very least a fun movie.  Plenty of blood and fire and explosions and attractive women in a supporting capacity say that this is eventually going to show up on Spike in an extremely edited fashion.  And the commercials leading up to its release will be absolutely nuts.

And that’s most of what you can say about Death Race–it’s big, it’s loud, it’s violent, and it’s crazy.  Jason Statham turns in a solid performance once again, and his supporting cast is no slouch in its own right.  In fact, there’s very little wrong with the movie.  It was made for a couple hours of shutting your brain off and watching stuff go vroom and stuff go boom.

You will probably enjoy it, as long as you don’t look too far under the hood.

The third trailer for Transporter 3, starring Jason Statham, has plenty of information about the movie.  The one liners are pretty clever – “Little late for warning me. Don’t you think?” 

Transporter 3 hits theaters November 26, 2008!

This trailer is fast and furious, great shots and stunts. Fast and Furious stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordana Brewster.  Hold on to your seats and enjoy the show.

This giveaway will satisfy your action movie fix. “Invisible Target” is action and more action.  As a Hong Kong produced movie “Invisible Target” is huge, fast, action-packed, adrenaline jumping, kicking with explosives.

Action junkies want this in the DVD library.  The prize is two-disc ultimate edition. Simply post your name and I draw the winner on Tuesday, June 17th.

Good luck!