JUNE CONTINUED…
Ocean’s Thirteen
Few excuses for lazy filmmaking are as ineffective as, “But doesn’t the cast look like they’re having fun?” And few things are as insufferable as a bunch of buddy actors sleepwalking their way through another vanity picture.
On the plus side, it can’t be worse than “Ocean’s 12.”
Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer
“Spider-Man” aside, superhero movies are on pretty shaky ground. If critics and jaded audiences found it so easy to disparage the Man of Steel in last year’s disappointing “Superman Returns,” what hope does the thing have? The Silver Surfer is a pretty bizarre character, his dated ‘60s name (Norrin Radd) notwithstanding, and villains like Galactus are what we want to see superhero teams team up to whale on, so hopefully this will an improvement over the first “F4.” Especially if there’s any truth to that rumor of an Invisible Woman-Scarlet Witch-Black Cat hot tub scene.
DOA: Dead or Alive
There are several types of video game movies: those that adhere fairly strictly to the plot of the game itself (“Silent Hill,” “Mortal Kombat”); those that use the game’s basic premise, but deviate pretty far from the actual events (“Doom,” “Resident Evil”); and there are those that might as well be titled “I Bought the Rights to This Game and Now I’m Doing Whatever the Holy Hell I Feel Like” (anything Uwe Boll ever made).
To that first group we can add “Dead or Alive,” which at least has the decency to be a game about hot bikini chicks beating people up and playing volleyball and not dark elves or some such silly s**t.
Evan Almighty
Steve Carrell is still a hot property, making Universal’s decision to replace Jim Carrey seem positively prescient. Still, Evan’s production costs are rumored to be approaching $200 million, and if audiences get wise to the fact that they’re being spoon-fed yet another dose of Christian propaganda so soon after “The Reaping,” they’re likely to…oh, who the hell am I kidding, they’ll just go see it anyway.
Live Free or Die Hard
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: this is truly a great country we live in that allows our elderly acting professionals to return to the action genre that made them famous. Last year Sly Stallone wowed us by going toe-to-toe with a guy 40 years his junior – which is as close to science fiction as Stallone’s likely to get following “Judge Dredd” – while next year Harrison Ford returns to limp across the big screen in “Indiana Jones and the Kids who Won’t Get Off His Lawn.” Right now, we’ve got a freshly shorn John McClane.
June is through, so let’s see what July has for us in Part Five of Film Threat’s 2007 Summer Movie Preview>>>
