Shitty Movie Sundays: Lockout (2012)

The Luc Besson action grist mill turns them out like few others. Objective quality is hit and miss, but the movies he produces are flashy, in the same way the McDonald’s in Times Square is flashy. They enjoy a proximity to top tier glamor and glitz, but, in the end, it’s just fast food.

From 2012 comes Lockout, a film that so resembles Escape from New York that Besson and company were successfully sued for plagiarism. Co-directors and co-writers James Mather and Steve Saint Leger (Besson was also credited with a writing and story credit) might have been done dirty by that lawsuit. The analogues to Escape are many, but if John Carpenter could claim plagiarism for this flick, then the entire horror and sci-fi movie industry should operate under the constant threat of litigation. Anyway… Continue readingShitty Movie Sundays: Lockout (2012)”

Empty Balcony: Renegades, aka American Renegades

The Luc Besson action mill has turned out some of the most successful action flicks of this century, and also some of the genre’s most overwrought messes. Renegades (released in the States as American Renegades) lies somewhere in between. It has the grandiosity one would expect from a Besson-produced action flick, but the end product is something anonymous.

Continue readingEmpty Balcony: Renegades, aka American Renegades”

Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter

Sometimes I watch movies so you won’t have to. I sacrifice hours on lazy Sunday afternoons abusing my eyes and my sense of taste not just because I enjoy bad cinema, I do, but because some bad movies descend so low that even cinematic shit-eaters like myself can find no redeeming qualities to them whatsoever, and viewers need to be warned to avoid them. Like a signpost jutting out of the desert warning of rattlesnake country ahead, or a toxic waste dump, consider this article a harbinger, for there will be trouble for those who ignore it. Continue readingShitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter”