My Review: Deadfall (4/10)

"What would home look like? I don't know. A farmhouse in the valley, I guess, like the one we grew up in, Liza and I."

Academy Award winning director for his foreign film The Counterfeiters, Stefan Ruzowitzky, now brings us an American crime thriller dealing with dysfunctional families. It seems to be an odd choice for a director who had so much success back in Austria considering this is an average B-film that doesn't introduce anything new or unique to the genre. Deadfall never manages to deliver the thrills that it promises either and has a rather unsatisfying ending. At times it felt like a film that was trying to be something else, but it never quite figured out what it wanted to be and ended up only scratching the surface of the dysfunctional family drama it was so desperately tying to explore. Perhaps it suffered from trying to add several subplots and intertwine them together towards the climactic end, but ultimately Deadfall felt like your average crime thriller with a strong ensemble cast, but a poor and unimaginative script. Deadfall never quite delivers the thrills and the characters are underdeveloped turning this film into a messy ordeal. As much as I wanted to enjoy this, I couldn't find anything redeeming about it, and not even the beautiful Olivia Wilde shines here. It's a dull film that tries to be more important than it really is with way too many subplots and overlapping themes that are barely explored.

The screenplay was written by Zach Dean centering on two siblings, Addison (Eric Bana) and Liza (Olivia Wilde), who are heading towards the Canadian border after having pulled of a casino heist. We never see the actual heist take place since the film opens with them already in route to the border when all of a sudden in the midst of a blizzard their vehicle crashes into a deer. Addison is forced to kill the patrolman and decides to split up with Liza and meet up later as the police will be after him. On another note, we are introduced to a former boxer named Jay (Charlie Hunnam) who is being released from prison. The first thing Jay does is call his mother June (Sissy Spacek) who lives in a farmhouse near the spot where Addison and Liza crashed. She invites Jay over for Thanksgiving dinner despite the fact that he's been estranged with his father Chet (Kris Kristofferson). Along the way, Jay finds Liza nearly freezing to death near the highway and he decides to give her a lift. Addison on the other hand is being hunted by Sheriff Becker (Treat Williams) and his men who are closing in on the trail of blood he's left behind. Becker's daughter, Hannah (Kate Mara), whose also an officer is ordered to stay in the station and out of trouble. As the characters are all introduced it becomes inevitable to realize that they are all going to intersect somewhere along the way.

Despite the talented ensemble cast, the script is so poorly written that there is not much they can do to prevent their characters from becoming cardboard cutouts. Even the always reliable and legendary actors such as Kris Kristofferson and Sissy Spacek can't do anything to save this film. Hunnam and Wilde have a very poorly developed romantic subplot that felt extremely rushed. Bana didn't really look too menacing as the villain and at times his character felt cartoonish. The dysfunctional family elements that this film tries to explore never really gets anywhere and they all seem too cliche. The male characters are seen as tough while the females are forgiving and patient. The western showdown near the end wasn't engaging either and everything about this film felt ordinary despite the different themes they were trying to blend together. It never digs under the surface of those elements it's trying to introduce and that's why the film feels so dull and empty. Deadfall is not the important and smart thriller it's trying to be.

My Review: Pacific Rim (5/10)

"Today we are canceling the Apocalypse!"

Pacific Rim is without a doubt Guillermo del Toro's biggest blockbuster movie and visually it doesn't disappoint. The main issue I had with this film had to do with its story and character development. I really didn't care for any of these characters and thought that the performances were pretty weak as well. The film relies entirely on the great visuals and awesome action scenes. This is what the Transformers action scenes should have looked like because the action scenes were great and the editing was done real smoothly (unlike in the Transformers franchise where there is so much editing during the action sequences that it is hard to follow). Fans of monster movies will really enjoy Pacific Rim because del Toro knows his craft, but if you are looking for a great storyline then you will be left disappointed like I was. Guillermo del Toro pays homage to those giant monster movies the Japanese started making several decades ago and it is sort of a love letter to them. Pacific Rim is visually stylish and it has some great monster and robot sequences, but there is hardly no humanity in this film despite it trying to with all the flashbacks and neural bridges mind blending scenes. It tries to illustrate the point of having humanity teaming up together to defeat these monsters, but I really didn't feel it and that is one of the main reasons why I didn't like this film. Despite the cool action scenes I felt the movie was dragging too much and it got more and more tedious as it moved on. I was disappointed with Pacific Rim and would much rather watch Hellboy over this.

Mankind has always looked to the stars for possible life forms, but what they didn't know was that it would come from the deep ocean. Monstrous creatures named Kaijus came through a portal from the bottom of the ocean and began destroying everything that was on their path. In order to stop them humans had to build these giant robots known as Jaegers. The Jaegers are controlled from within by two pilots who have their minds connected through a neural bridge; one pilot controls the left hemisphere of the robot and the other the right. The Jaegers are highly successful at first as they defeat the Kaijus and the pilots become the new superheroes, but as the years go by these Kaijus begin to adapt and come out even stronger than before. The Jaegers are beginning to be defeated and humanity is forced to build giant walls to try to keep these creatures away. However Marshall Stacker (Idris Elba) knows that the walls won't hold so he decides to create a resistance with four powerful Jaegers. He calls upon a former pilot named Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) to team up with rookie Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). Along with another group of pilots these four Jaegers remain humanity's last hope for survival. Charlie Day and Burn Gornman play two scientists who are studying a way to counterattack the Kaijus. 

The lead performances from Hunnam and Kikuchi are pretty weak for an action movie. I really never felt chemistry between them and was disappointed with their performances. Idris Elba is a great actor, but I never felt connected to his character either. The rest of the pilots didn't have a backstory or anything that allowed us to care for them either. The two scientist were mostly added for comedic relief and I wasn't very impressed. My favorite performance came from Ron Perlman (Hellboy), an underground lord who trafficked dead Kaiju body parts. He had a very small role, but I thought those scenes were the most interesting ones of the movie. I liked the action scenes, but they get tiresome after a while and I needed to care more for the characters in order to enjoy this more. Pacific Rim is just too ridiculous and it suffers from a weak screenplay. It is a very noisy film with no character development whatsoever. Pacific Rim is one of Guillermo del Toro's weakest films to date (along with Pan's Labyrinth which is way overrated).