Verdict: ☆☆☆☆ –

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) has got a lot to learn about women. Being the number one covert operative in the world throughout most of your career can have that sort of impact on one’s retirement, and Frank is feeling the heat from his now girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), who wants adventure more than ever now that she’s had a taste of it!

But Frank has other ideas in mind. He’s retired, and loves shopping at Costco, and buying things for their house… and generally playing Suzie Homemaker. This doesn’t strike well with Sarah, who flat out tells him their relationship is getting stale! Luckily for her (but not so lucky for the world), a Wiki document has leaked on the internet about an insanely nightmarish weapon, even worse than a nuclear device… portable, untraceable and Numero Uno on every arms dealer’s shopping list since the document leak.

Oh, did I mention the document referenced Frank and old buddy Marvin (John Malkovich) as involved in its origins? Suddenly the two of them are right smack in the US Government’s spotlight again, not to mention MI6.

Everything you enjoyed about the first movie, you’ll enjoy about this one. No one believes these “old people” still got it until they come face to face with ’em and find out that R etired E xtremely D angerous actually means something. With even cooler stunts, jet setting around the world in an unbelievably crazy quest to get to this mysterious device first, Frank’s gotten a little sloppy now that he’s been distracted by keeping Sarah safe and meeting ex-girlfriend agents from the old days, and his brothers/sisters in arms don’t mince words in making it known.

This was a fun flick, as action packed as the first one, with twists and turns as complex as Paris, London and Russian streets can provide! Heck, just watching Bruce Willis try and be romantic is hilarious in itself! You’ll find yourself jet setting and sipping wine and feeling for that gun under the cushion until the credits roll.

Verdict: Hahahahaha! (wipes tear) Oh, you were serious?

Well, this movie starts with Air Force One flying over the Bermuda Triangle and goes downhill from there. The President (John Savage) has long hair and jokes around about both the Bermuda Triangle and his long hair… and that’s pretty much the first minute of the movie. A freak storm suddenly comes out of nowhere and lightning strikes one engine. Apparently, a random flight attendant is in charge and knows more about modern avionics than anyone because she immediately screams, “We need to evacuate you now Mr. President!” Because, you know, one lightning hit is apparently all Air Force One can withstand. Secret Service and top brass generals leap to the random flight attendant’s demand and scramble the President to an underwater escape pod. Instead of just diverting the plane to Florida at an altitude that would suffice gliding right in, Air Force One maintains current course and altitude which means the President has to visit Davy Jones’ Locker in a capsule that has a crush depth of 25,000 feet, enough food for seven days and a .45 caliber pistol with 100 rounds of ammunition.

I’m not making this up!

Air Force one completely explodes from that one lightning strike on the engine and the escape pod jettisons, but not before the President shouts to everyone “Save yourselves!” It was right about here that I realized I had two full minutes invested in this movie. But this is what you pay me for, right? Seeing these movies so you don’t have to!

Enter our heroes, an elite soldiering force of kids who look like they got their fatigues at The Gap walking slowly and proudly off a helicopter that just landed on a random Navy ship. After the deck is hosed down with official nautical garbledygook and militaryish twaddlespeak, laced with a few “Yes sirs!” our boyscout heroes are off to rescue the President from the unmerciful depths.

The ship’s skipper, Admiral Linda Hansen (a rather rough looking Linda Hamilton) who has experience fighting terminators and shit, calls the shots. I will give her this, when first meeting our high school glee club heroes, she gives them a once over as if she’s about to burst into laughter. I don’t think I could have held the laughter back, so I admire her for that. Give that woman an award or something!

She is in charge of the mission to bring the President back, but not before several mile-high tentacles surface and position themselves around each ship present and accounted for. Keep in mind, we’re still in the Bermuda Triangle here. Enter Dr. Zimmer (a bearded Jamie Kennedy… wait. Jamie Kennedy?? Seriously??) a biologist who is aboard the flagship for some reason and even has his own lab. You’ll be able to tell who he is, he’s the one who starts chattering in scientific jargon and can almost immediately identify the tentacles as “tube worms, but with a very extravagant embodiment that seem to possess some sort of bio-electric genesis which is contrary to any of the species in its respective phylum.”

To which the admiral shoots him the look you see in the picture above. I’m not kidding, I screen-shot this just so you can see her expression! It’s like, “Wtf?”

Yeah, I would have looked at him about that way too.

This entire movie is a baked July-deposited cowpie slathered with extra thick, government cheese topped military jargon that would make even the most gung ho marine remove his cover and scratch his head in confusion. If your eyes just glazed over with that last sentence, my eyes literally glazed over throughout most of this flick… which actually helped blur the atrocious movie makeup everyone had on. The blur, oddly, made it more realistic.

If you’re still reading this, 1) I applaud you because you have more patience than I do and 2) the plot so far is that the President’s still at the bottom of the ocean (I can’t believe I just typed that) and there are giant indestructible bio-electric genesii tubeworms blocking the way to him.

If you’re looking for a rompy, barely acted, half assed attempt at a movie andSharktopus Vs. Dinocroc isn’t available, aaaand it’s raining outside, aaaaaaaaand you have no vacuuming to do… this might be your movie.

Verdict: * * * 1/2 – –

Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is a college kid who looks and acts smart, but loves to party and has a real creep for a boyfriend. Not just a creep who looks at other girls’ boobs, but the kind of creep who is a courier for extremely powerful drug lords and wears Stetson cowboy hats made in Taiwan. Yeah, that kind of creep.

Sorry, didn’t mean to throw that Stetson made in Taiwan thing at you. That may have been a little strong. Seriously though, he makes it a point to tell her his Stetson is made in Taiwan, so… he’s creepy. Where was I? Oh yes!

Anyway, being creepy, he lures Lucy into delivering this particular shipment of drugs for him and we sit there for almost ten full minutes while they argue about it. All this time, the scene Lucy, her creepy boyfriend and his Stetson are chewing up are punctuated by scenes from the Serengeti with big cats stalking prey, as if the writer/director (Luc Besson, The Fifth Element, The Transporter) pretty much thought the audience would be entirely too stupid to see what was happening here. Lucy is being stalked by predators (her creepy boyfriend, his Stetson, and the powerful drug lord). Okay, we get that.

Then suddenly I start to see, as Lucy goes along with the drop off and the shizzle really hits the fan, what Luc Besson was trying to do. Much like The Fifth Element and practically everything else he’s ever done, he has injected a very sophisticated rhythm into the movie that creates a 3D perspective from a 2D screen.

Now, just so you know, there are no real spoilers in this review. Everything that happens in the movie, you’ve already seen from the trailer. You know what happens to Lucy. The deal goes south, they need her to deliver the baggie of a brand new synthetic drug to the United States and the only way to get it through customs is to sew it into her abdomen. Unfortunately, word of this didn’t reach a couple of thugs who work for the drug lord and one of them beats her up because she wouldn’t let him rape her. The baggie leaks inside her and WHOOSH! Off goes her brain into orbit towards Godlike power.

This is all inside the first half hour of the movie. After that, things really take off and you’re left pretty much breathless when the credits roll. There is a subtle philosophical idea that this movie is riding on, brought to you by Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman), that asks, “Are humans more concerned with ‘having’ than with ‘being’?” All throughout this movie, everyone wants something. Everyone is trying to get something. Bad guys want their drugs back. Cops want the bad guys. Everyone wants to shoot guns because guns make them feel powerful. Prof. Norman wants to know what Lucy knows but isn’t sure the human race is ready for that knowledge.

But is that such a bad thing that we’re more concerned with having than being? People are wrapped up in their own individual worlds, each world containing everything they think about and feel emotionally, and yet they never do see beyond that world. We cannot (at this time) walk in another man’s shoes, so to speak. All the while Lucy ascends beyond quantum physics and sees all these individual worlds as One World moving in an infinity of different directions, all measured by time. As she sees them, she can control them and she basically spends 24 hours ascending from human to “beyond” as her brain capacity is gradually activated more and more.

Lucy is an idea about ascending to the next level of evolution… really fast. What would actually happen if we expand our minds and open up our worlds? Will this happen eventually? Could we, as limited consciousness individuals, really see that we are each One with All? Could we see beyond the labels and illusion and see that we simply… are?

With action and philosophy combined, Luc Besson brings what I would consider a beautifully done piece of art to a world in which it would be most attractive. He blends action and violence with thought and by the time the credits roll, you’re both wired and deeply composed at the same time! I think this flick would have been better done with a much younger lead actress, however. ScarJo is awesome, but a little old to be the naive party “kid” she was supposed to playing. That said, I thought this one was really well done!

Verdict: * * * * –

When I first watched HTTYD, I thought at first it was just another goofy animated movie. I mean, c’mon… a scrawny kid with a nasaly, Canadian accent the son of a mighty viking chief? But as the movie played on, I started really enjoying it. The movie didn’t take itself seriously, and even the nasaly Canadian kid made fun of his own character. I liked the sequences, the way the story unfolded, the tension of the dragons and the struggles of man verses beast in almost every fashion. The action was incredible and the humor had me laughing out loud.

When I first heard that HTTYD2 was coming out, I cringed because I thought it was just another goofy animated sequel that Walmart would have in its $5 bin in six months, sitting right next to Fern Gully 2; A Financial Rescue Attempt. But as this movie played on, I ascended from liking the characters to truly fall in love with them!

Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and Astrid (America Ferrera) are coming into their own and Chief Stoic (Gerard Butler), along with his right hand man Gobber (Craig Ferguson), is trying to train his son how to be the next chief of the vikings in Berk. But Hiccup was never one to go along with rules and as he and Astrid stumble across an enormous dragon army controlled by the fearsome, mysterious man Drago, it opens up a whole new world of dragon-wrangling for our young hero.

I won’t give much more away, suffice it to say that comparing the first HTTYD to its sequel is like comparing a bottle of Budweiser to an entire twenty four pack of Budweiser! The bottle of Bud will do ya in a pinch and tastes great (less filling!) but the suitcase will bring your friends to the party and everyone will enjoy themselves so much more!

I do realize that describing children’s animated movies with melodramatic alcohol references may not win me over at my daughter’s school or get me invited to community little league games. I’m sure I’ll deal with that while I’m hanging out with friends drinking a suitcase and watching this movie again. But for now, I just added HTTYD2 to my Amazon wish list and tagged it as the highest priority!

If you liked the first movie, you’ll love the second movie! I don’t consider it a sequel at all, really… but a second part to one big story. Apart, they’re wonderfully done little adventures, but together, they make for one beautiful, fulfilling epic that you’ll walk away from with your fists in the air going “Yeah!”

Verdict: 1 out of 5 stars

I heard from a friend who loves Jenny Slate (Saturday Night Live) that this movie was really fun and engaging… and that it’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime! Woohooo! Win – win! Rotten Tomatoes shows a 90% fresh rating!

I made it about forty minutes in before I started writing this and another ten before I turned it off. Afterwards, I had to watch a Southpark episode to keep from drinking a fifth of Jack, drunk-texting my ex’s all at once and crying myself to sleep.

Oddly enough, this is where they begin their romance. My wife finally got up and left the room while I was typing this up and I just hit the “Stop” button.

If you like Jenny Slate’s humor on SNL, this may be something you’ll enjoy. Maybe I’m just not getting it. But I felt this one lacked direction as if the director filmed without a script and just decided to go with whatever.

Verdict: * – – – –

First of all, there are some minor spoilers in this review. If you want to go into it completely unknowing of any plot devices, read no further!

I wanted to like this movie. Seriously, I did. The trailers looked awesome, and a couple of buddies said it was really good. So I figured it was a thinking man’s hitlist movie or something. Really good, to me, equaled great visuals and great plot!

Plus, if it wasn’t one of the signs in the back of the Bible already, it ought to be: Keanu Reeves showed some emotion! I know, I know. You don’t believe me, but in this movie he really does present a depth of emotion that astonished me. I mean, he smiled. He actually smiled! I didn’t even know he had teeth!

This movie started out pretty good. A gripping opening scene. Lots of metaphorical visuals and color. Meaningful balance of subject and placement. Everything you see in the first twenty minutes seems to mean something, so that when you see this movie twice, you are pretty sure you’ll see something different.

Then I saw Allstate’s Mayhem (Dean Winters) who played the unnecessary role of being the only American Accented member of the Russian mob and that’s where the movie sort of stopped asking me to think so hard. The movie started to follow a connect the dots pattern… and not just any connect the dots pattern; the one that looks like a snow man before you even start.

John Wick (Reeves), an emotionally vulnerable, retired ex-badass who just lost his wife (a small bit by Bridget Moynahan), gets his ass kicked old school by three Russian thugs who want his sweet ride for a quick chop shop yoink. And just to prove how ultimately small certain parts of their anatomy manly they are, they kill his puppy, given to him by his recently deceased wife.

Unfortunately, the kids work for the Russian mob… one is even the mob boss’s son… the same mob that contracted John Wick before he retired; the same mob who are now pissing their pants in fear because that weasel, loudmouthed, eff – up of a son robbed and puppy snuffed the wrong badass.

Now, me… being most certainly not a badass, I would have just called the humane society and filed a report. I’m pretty sure no one wants to yoink my Smartcar for a chop shop job. But Keanu’s a badass, so he has standards. Thus, he (probably) donated to the humane society, then went after the kid who killed his puppy with vindictive counterinsurgency that would make Navy Seals whimper.

Of course, the kids don’t care who John Wick is or that he used to be the baddest ass on the badass block. They wear shiny suits and are surrounded by bikini babes and have guns and shit. And despite all the older Russian mobsters warning them that they should be frightened, they continue to boast and brag and party their little parts of their anatomy butts off, come what may. This, of course, just makes us scream for their death sentences because weasel, loudmouthed, eff – up kids wearing shiny suits, surrounded by bikini babes need their heads rolled down a lane or two and John Wick is the man wearing the bowling shoes that’ll do it.

What I don’t like about movies like this is that it’s beyond my comprehension for a mob boss to protect his weasel, shiny suited, loudmouthed, bikini babe surrounded, gun toting eff – up of a son to the point where the boss’s entire unabbreviated empire and army of perfectly respectable mobsters is brought down, especially if he’s fully aware from the beginning John Wick can accomplish it. My first thought was,”Here! Take my weasel, loudmouthed, eff – up son for killing your puppy and leave us be!”

I know I’m in the minority on this, and I really wanted to like this movie. What I thought might be a thinking man’s hitlist movie turned out to be a rather unthinking action chain of events. And that’s cool, I like some flicks that ask you to check your thinking cap at the door… I enjoyed Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Pacific Rim, for goodness sake! But I just didn’t connect with John Wick. Keanu has some depth of emotion, I’ll give him that and want to see more of it. Unfortunately, all the other characters without exception are splashing around in the shallow end. The action was good, but man! The dialog seemed to be scrawled out on toilet paper in the bathroom of a 24/7 Shit n’ Git, and I just couldn’t connect.

Verdict: * * * ½ – –

What happens when you cross a group of big, bad, bearded egotistical men running an international prostitution ring with arrogant smiles on their faces and bigger guns than body parts… with one man who has a good heart, a hidden history, lots of patience, love for good people and skills that rival some superheroes?

Pretty much what you think happens.

Ever since Glory, Denzel has been the grounding force in every movie he’s starred in, no matter what character he plays. Good guy, bad guy, guy down on his luck… when you see Denzel, you know everything’s going to be alright.

The Equalizer is no exception. And once again the talented direction of Antoine Fuqua takes what may appear to be a simple story and squeezes the most amazing detail from it from the opening scene to closing credits. Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is a simple man, patient with an undercurrent of fathomless sorrow, who takes OCD to the next level. One day, he witnesses a heinous assault happening to a Russian-owned prostitute he just met named Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz). Teri is at the end of her rope, daring to dream but knowing those dreams will never come true. Then she’s put in the hospital by her Russian pimp and Robert can no longer look the other way.

There are times when a bad thing happens and you can’t ignore it, and you get restless knowing what you have to do. What follows are sleepless nights making the decision to do the right thing or to look the other way. For some, looking the other way is the only way to survive. But for very few, there is no decision… there’s only response. Especially if they’re the only person who can do anything about it.

You are what you are and this world brings to you what you are meant to deal with, and so Robert wanders through his extraordinarily organized life working in a hardware store and straightens things up around him. This is what any mild mannered superhero does. And yet Robert doesn’t really know it, he’s just doing what he feels is right. So I would consider this a superhero movie. Lives are saved, renewed, helped along the way by someone who is able to help against extraordinary odds, yet remains hidden in the shadows as if he didn’t even exist.

The Equalizer is a superhero movie for regular folks, for those who live in inner city areas and are just trying to do the right thing. Once in a while, a superhero appears and helps out quietly, then lets you live your life the way you were meant to. Superheroes appear where you least expect them to, and save the world one person at a time.

Right now, I’m willing to bet you, yes you reading this post, are a superhero to someone. You may not know it yet, you’ve just been doing what you thought was right. That, my friend, is how we change the world! One person at a time.

Verdict: * 1/2 – – –

Okay, so… I’m as much a believer in the afterlife and near death experiences as the next spiritual person. My daughter is also, being a chip off the ol’ block and she has been begging me to rent this one for her for weeks. It being a PG-13, I figured it was not an issue, even when it heavily deals with the concept of death and what happens afterwards. Her mother and I passed on it, not really interested because we’re not really into young adult flicks, so she watched it on our laptop. But then we noticed after she watched it that she was really passive. If you know our daughter, you know that the word passive isn’t even in her thesaurus app, so this was a strange new experience for us. She didn’t eat much at dinner and for for the entire rest of the evening and next morning, she was completely bummed out.

So I figured I’d check this movie out myself the next day, to try and find out what about it that ruined her evening so maybe I could help bring her back from her depression. I hit play and was immediately hit with a normal family doing normal family things. Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz), the teenage daughter of the family and the movie’s lead actress begins the story with an ominous voice over that pretty much explained why I felt like setting something on fire by the time the end credits rolled. She said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.

Okay, that makes sense to me. Depressing, but that makes sense. She is a concert cellist who meets local rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley) and they totally dig on each other. The cello is her absolute passion. Rock and roll is his. They get together somehow, but their different lifestyles totally don’t click. Somehow, they keep forcing this romance on us when every teenager I have ever met would have called it quits after the first date. Every time they looked at each other, I reminisced about the time I was drawn and quartered, then dragged over broken glass by watching the romantic scene between Padme and Annakin in Star Wars: Ep 3.

The one saving grace about this flick was the characterization of Mia’s parents (cheerily played by Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard). These two are a blast in every single scene they chewed up and spit out and I found myself laughing out loud in some places just from their dialogue alone! It’s really too bad there are so few scenes because <BAM!> she and her entire family are in a car wreck on a snowy road outside of town and Mia finds herself standing barefoot in the afterlife next to her broken body.

[Alert! Alert! Spoilers Ahead! AaOooooooGah! AaOooooooGah!]

If you would like to remain completely surprised, read no further! You’ve been warned! Don’t worry though, I won’t give away anything really important and you probably won’t care anyway once you watch it. Just sayin’.

This entire flick is basically Mia’s life flashing before her eyes. One hour and forty six minutes of near death experienceness. Her entire family is dead and there are some relative (literally) tear-jerkerishly, rip-your-guts-out moments in some places. But for the most part I got kind of bored with the flashback scenes that focused almost entirely on Mia spending about a year and a half during high school with Adam, accompanied by subtle acoustic soundtracks like Ben Howard’s Promise, and watching her parents just be normal (albeit out-of-place hilarious) parents.

If Mia had lived a crazier life, if she’d operated somewhat in-the-moment instead of planning everything… heck, if she’d even had a friggin’ sense of humor, it might have been more entertaining. But as it was, her completely normal, vanilla flavored teenage life was completely normal and vanilla flavored and I found myself drifting off about a third of the way through it. Especially because I’m the father of an admittedly crazier, never-plans-anything, totally-lives-in-the-moment daughter with an incredible sense of humor.

The fact is, Mia was actually getting annoying about halfway through it. Mia is (was) all about herself. Everyone tried to make her happy in life. Her parents tried to give her everything she wanted but she moped about life not being fair. Adam, despite his hard upbringing and the pain he has gone through, was the nicest guy and totally went out of his way to do things she wanted to do while trying to succeed with the band, but she moped about how different their lives were. When Adam got signed to a record label, she was miffed that he was at a celebration party and moped that he didn’t pay more attention to her. When she auditioned for Juilliard and totally knocked it out of the park, he told her they should celebrate and she moped, asking him why he never wrote a song about her.

Eesh. High maintenance much? I was actually hoping this romance of theirs would just end so we could get back to the point of the story. The more exciting parts of the movie are when her spirit is running around the hospital screaming about how much she wants her old mopey life back. And just when you think Yes! She’s finally going to let it go and just pass on and she’s about to walk down that tunnel of light… something pulls her back and here comes another relentless flashback. Gah!

By this time, I wanted to tear my own eyes out and pour lighter fluid over them. When the credits rolled I was literally gritting my teeth, rocking back and forth in a fetal position and I didn’t even hit Stop on the remote. I just ejected the DVD and snapped it angrily back into the case. 

Oh my God. I don’t say this too often, but this is literally an hour and forty six minutes I will never get back and when my own life flashes before my eyes after I pass on, I just hope I can fast forward through this part of it!

Just a side note… before I even get started… Jason Bateman has always looked like a kid to me. Always, even if he’s about five years older than I am. I love the kindness in his eyes, the innocent youth that is always there. I have always enjoyed this guy on screen and look forward to many more movies with him in it. I just needed to get that out of the way.

Oh! Another side note… A huge HighFiveDownLowTooSlow to Doug and the gang here at Movie Madness for allowing me to blather all over this site about movies and a giant thank you to you <yes, you!> for intensely examining casually reading somewhat scanning vaguely thumbing my reviews and editorials here! I love you more than you can possibly know. No seriously, look out your window. That’s me across the street in the van.

Okay, where was I? Oh yes, we were talking about a review here, weren’t we? Sorry. I love family get togethers. In real life and in the movies. Love them! I have literally fallen in love with movies that have this idea in mind. I love seeing siblings reluctantly fly in from all over the world, usually meeting up at their parents’ upper class New England home during Fall or Christmas, to be there for a particular reason they all must address. Usually it’s for the funeral of a family member, which is ironic but also gives the story a strong thread to keep it on track until the credits roll.

Strong memories of past laughter and pain mixing with different personalities and experiences, all the siblings’ spouses meeting each other (some for the first time), getting to know each other, hearing the stories, sharing the love and communing in fellowship with the interesting brothers and sisters who share the same name. It’s always fun for me to mix these ingredients up and see what comes out of the oven.

Movies like this can be hard to make. There have been some horrible movies made this way. The Family Stone was so far off the mark, that I figured this genre of stories was finally over and I lost all hope in family movies for Hollywood these days, but no. Along comes TIWILY and I’ve fallen in love all over again.

Judd Altman (Jason Bateman) loves his wife, Quinn. He just doesn’t really pay much attention, when suddenly he finds out she’s cheating on him. The look in his eyes broke my heart, ripped it all to pieces and threw it out a plate glass window into traffic. It hit so hard and so fast that I hardly had time to recover before his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) calls him in tears and tells him that, <Bam!> their dad is dead.

Something happened to me that hasn’t happened before: I found myself actually crying before the opening credits even splashed across the screen in a movie. Never happened before.

You read that right. This all happens before you even see what movie this is! This is not a spoiler alert because it doesn’t spoil anything. The movie hasn’t even started yet! Fortunately, it being Jason Bateman and Tina Fey, they somehow take these tragedies and twist them with laughs and, this time, something happens to me that hasn’t happened in a long time: I’m laughing while I’m crying!

Okay, now the opening credits roll. I wiped my eyes, still giggling.

The long and the short of it is that the family’s Dad had a final request before dying that all his children hold a seven day “Sit Shiva” <~ Gotta be careful saying that one! And so, all the brothers and sisters who really don’t have much in common and haven’t spoken in years get together and have to deal with each other, all while dealing with the complications that they have forged for themselves in life.

I won’t give anything else away, because after the first seven minutes (in which I had already determined this movie is being added to my DVD shelf) the movie really takes off. This is one of the most disfunctional families I have ever seen, and yet, they remind me of every family with multiple brothers and sisters that I’ve ever met. It’s amazing how down to earth this story is, and how well those who read the scripts bring it to life.

Love shows both its sides in this story, the darker side and the lighter side. The love of a family and the love of others around it supporting them and you feel it’s such a safe place to be because you know that this family is always there for each other, accepting each other’s limits and pushing each other’s boundaries as only brothers and sisters can. You see the best and worst in people throughout these seven days, you laugh, you cry and in the end you are completely smitten.

As family friend Penny (Rose Byrne) says to Judd when he talks about the complications in his life: “Cut yourself some slack. Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.”

I very much agree.

Verdict: ★★ 1/2

Firstly, please… for the love of all that’s sacred… leave your toddlers with a sitter when you go see a PG-13 movie. Is that so hard to do? I have another option for you. It’s a little extreme. I don’t mean to offend anyone but you could always wait for the DVD! I know. I know! I maaaay have crossed a line suggesting that, but c’mon people. Cowboy up. There were two toddlers in the theater (two different sets of parents).Fuuuuuuuuu…!

Okay, where was I? (huffs) On with the review…
Michael Bay apparently lives in a world where every woman alive is barely legal, has tan legs, walks around with BFFs and wears the latest sexy Beverly Hills fashion while they look seductively at boys. That’s what almost every woman in this movie is portraying. Bay makes Transformer movies for adult men who’s inner teenage boys just hit puberty and it works because these movies do very well at the box office. Well, I mean, T1 did phenomenally well. T2 should never have existed. T3: Dark Side of the Moon kicked all kinds of ass due in large part to Leonard Nimoy’s involvement and now we have T3: Age of Extinction, a rather squirmworthy fourth installment of the Transformer canon.

Optimus Prime has gotten tired of starring in Michael Bay movies humans. The US Government and their politics, black ops, backwards morals and blind sheeple as its citizenry have even gotten the best of this patriotic leader, and the human race can kiss his gigantic blue mechanical ass. Apparently, because of the attack on Chicago in the third installment, ‘muricans have declared war on all transfomers and Optimus has taken a hell of a beating. There are special black operation CIA transformer hunters who do nothing but track down and kill Decepticons and Autobots alike swiftly and harshly. Add to that a strange just arrived transformer named Lockdown who’s history those of us that aren’t up to date on the comics, know anything about. He just appears with a big, city sized ship and walks around menacingly looking for Optimus to add to his “collection” of other caged transformers of repute.

Enter Mark Wahlberg, an oddly cast electronics nerd/engineer/inventor who’s built like a mack truck and who also builds robot dogs from scrap and electronic whirlygigs that do nothing special at all. His 17 year old daughter who wears cut offs with less fabric than French bikinis, even calls him a loser. He can’t pay bills, borrows money from friends and has no social skills. When out of the blue he runs across an old, beat up, bullet ridden, mortar shelled truck cab and takes it home to part it out for cash. He lights it up with a car battery and it suddenly transforms into a rather dazed and confused Optimus.

Wahlberg was a strange casting choice here. I love Marky Mark. He’s bad ass in just about anything he does, but in this one, he constantly flips from in yo’ face with a baseball bat to running and screaming like a little girl when the shit hits the fan, back to in yo’ face with an alien gun. Not really knowing if he’s supposed to be a nerdy inventor or a special forces warrior, he fights in some scenes and in other scenes he runs around like a chicken with his head cut off and it just doesn’t look right. I will say I liked Wahlberg a lot better than I liked LaBeouf. Shia LaBeouf’s consistent hollering out pages from a legal encyclopedia and never shutting up was a little grating on my nerves and there are times when I wished he’d just die off so I can watch the Transformers just kick each other’s asses instead. Wahlberg is always a more grounded force in his movies and this one was no exception, even if the movie was scattered as it was.

Wahlberg aside, this movie is brimming with talent. John Goodman is the voice for Hound, an extremely “Murican” military transformer who speaks and acts like a gung-ho WWII soldier. Ken Wantanabe voices Drift, a peaceful samurai transformer. Kelsey Grammar plays an especially paranoid “agent” who relentlessly tracks down and destroys transformers “for God and Country”. Nicola Peltz plays Wahlberg’s daughter, who never takes her heels off in the Texas desert or in the middle of robot battlefields. And finally, Stanley effing Tucci, one of my all time favorite actors, takes John Turturro’s place as comic relief and he fills that role as only Stanley effing Tucci can! He’s serious in some places and hilariously wigs out in other places and he never makes it unbelievable. I love that guy.

A word about sidekicks… stick with one, will ya Mike Bay? A comedy sidekick is cool, so long as the jokes work with the movie. They didn’t. I mean, seriously… a surfer dude (complete with surfboard on the roof of his Mini Cooper) in Texas? And having him suddenly replaced with a more serious side kick with no comedy at all makes the movie drag its tailfin in the dirt before takeoff.

All that said, this movie did kind of work, sort of… in a roundabout way. The action was incredible, but honestly it was the same action as the first movie: robots rolling around on asphalt in slow motion, shouting and shooting giant guns throughout city streets with people screaming and running in all directions. It was just better CGI, that’s all. I thought I saw scenes from the first movie in this one, but don’t quote me.

Tell ya what. Just watch the first movie again and re-run the final action sequence an additional 20 minutes and you’ll pretty much have this movie. The story was smart… ish, but maybe it was too smart… ish for me because, amidst the French bikini cut offs, the constant robots fighting and explosions, I was lost the entire time about what was going on. Optimus is pissed off the entire time, random hottie in cut offs is leaning over something, black ops guys are chasing someone, ‘nother random hottie in cut offs is checking the mail, Optimus is pissed off and fighting something, two random hotties in cut offs or short skirts are walking together down a sidewalk, summersaulting transformers are shooting guns, black ops guys are chasing someone else, ‘nother random hottie in cut offs is smiling and leaning over something…

There were more female legs than robots in this movie and that’s saying something! All in all, I’d say save your money and watch this one on HBO if you want to keep up with the movie canon. Not really worth the price of admission though.