Full Release: Movies

The Losers

With Kick-Ass on top of the box office, we’re poised to see how a less traditional comic book adaptation (i.e. no dudes in tights) will do with The Losers. If that’s not your cup of tea, there’s certainly many other movies vying for your hard-earned eleven dollars plus popcorn this week, and I’m here to tell you about all of them. Well, maybe not all of them, but the ones that matter.

The Losers – The Vertigo comic that this ensemble action flick is based on is a balls-out winner, packed with clever situations and constantly ratcheting tension. When members of an elite Special Forces unit are betrayed during a mission and left for dead, they embark on a freight train path of vengeance to find the mysterious man who ordered their death. This looks like a great, old-school actioner with none of the ludicrous gimmicks that movies like this think they need – just strong characters, awesome set pieces and a simple story you can get behind. Watch the trailer.

Best Worst Movie – A budget documentary about Troll 2, universally regarded as one of the most horrifically bad films of the 1990s. The cast and crew, riding a wave of nostalgia and kitsch, tour the country screening the flick to appreciative fans of The Room and the like, but quickly find that it’s not as easy as it looks to be a cult classic. Watch the trailer.

The Back-Up Plan – Hey guys, Jennifer Lopez movie! It seems like J-Lo kicks out a film every two years or so, seemingly out of nowhere, and nobody I know seems to give a crap. She’s like Tyler Perry with a nicer ass. This is yet another rom-com where Miss Lopez plays a single woman desperate for kids who opts for artificial insemination. On the day she gets the turkey baster, she meets what could be the Man Of Her Dreams. Gasp! What a situation! How will our spunky Latina heroine prevail?

The Good, The Bad And The WeirdHeavy.com writer Chris Sims caught this at last week’s Actionfest and came back raving about this quirky Korean western. Set in the deserts of Manchuria during the 30s, three criminals meet on a train and engage in a balls-out chase to recover a map that may hold the key to the country’s future. The set pieces in this are supposed to be flawless sequences of beautifully-conceptualized mayhem, and that’s what I like. Watch the trailer.

Paper Man – So Ryan Reynolds is getting a lot of practice for his upcoming role as Green Lantern – first as Deadpool in Wolverine: Origins and then as “Captain Excellent,” an imaginary crusader in this quirky indie comedy that also stars Jeff Daniels and Emma Stone from Zombieland. Somehow I doubt Captain Excellent will be saving the universe anytime soon.