This Week: The robotic retread of Chappie, Liam Neeson is an action star for the last time(?) in Run All Night, and The Newsroom signs off.
► Six years after he was championed as sci-fi’s newest visionary with ‘District 9,’ director Neil Blomkamp has taken nothing but lumps. ‘Elysium’ underwhelmed (even he wasn’t wild about it), and the strange slump continues with CHAPPIE. Dipping its toe in both ‘Robocop’ and ‘Short Circuit,’ it has a Johannesburg gang kidnapping the developer of a robotic police force and forcing him to reprogram one of the units to fight for them. As a result, it develops a conscience. Thanks to its modest budget the flick wasn’t a complete bust, but Blomkamp isn’t exactly heading into ‘Alien 5’ on a tear.
► It probably wasn’t a good sign when Liam Neeson promoted his latest action movie RUN ALL NIGHT by saying he was going to retire from action movies. Which is for the best if he’s going to keep re-making ‘Taken.’ For this one, reuniting him with ‘Non-Stop’ director Jaume Collet-Smith, he’s a former mob enforcer who must – yes – protect his son from the mob boss (Ed Harris) who’s also his best friend. Vincent D’Onofrio is the detective who has been trailing him for 30 years.
► Yeesh, this month has been mop-up time for some of the year’s biggest bombs. Of which UNFINISHED BUSINESS is one of the biggest. Vince Vaughn’s decade-long slump continues with this whiff in which he plays a businessman who pulls a ‘Jerry Maguire’ and quits his company, taking an old guy (Tom Wilkinson) and a young guy (Dave Franco) with him. They do squat for a year, but then go globe-trotting trying to close a huge deal, with his old company trying to scoop it from under him. Crudeness gets a few chuckles, but this is just predictable and played-out for Vaughn at this point.
► And that’s a wrap on THE NEWSROOM, which flipped the bird to its many critics by getting great just as it was ending. Season 3 finds the station reeling from its Genoa retraction, and with viewership trust at an all-time low, the Boston Marathon bombings happen. Dealing with a hostile takeover bid and heat from the FBI, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) goes to prison for refusing to name a source. A six-episode season wraps things up nicely, with more emotion than the previous two seasons hinted at.
► For her performance as a woman with borderline personality disorder, and the fact she gets nekked, Kristen Wiig lays it all out there in WELCOME TO ME. She plays a troubled woman who spends her benefits on lottery tickets, which is screwing up her life until she wins $86 million. She decides to go off her meds, moves into a casino hotel, and gets her own TV show spilling whatever’s on her mind at the time. The laughs predictably give way to some dark stuff before long. Another non-entity in theatres (it’s the trend this week), but Wiig turned the corner into a solid dramatic actress with this.
► Like a regurgitated ‘Pet Semetary,’ the cardboard horror flick THE LAZARUS EFFECT has Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde as medical researchers who develop a serum which brings the dead back to life. Only, they aren’t quite right. And when she’s electrocuted one night, he uses it to bring her back. Chaos (and clichés) ensue. Ideas about death and the afterlife could have been pursued here, but jump scares are easier.
► Based on the same book (‘Deathwatch’) which spawned the great made-for-TV thriller ‘Savages’ in 1974, BEYOND THE REACH has Michael Douglas as a businessman who takes a college student (Jeremy Irvine) with him for a hunting trip in the Mojave Desert. When someone’s accidentally shot, the student wants to report what happened. Douglas has other ideas. Came and went with barely a ripple, but if this intrigues you, definitely check out the original for the scary side of Andy Griffith.
► It took seven years, but Danny Tedesco’s beloved documentary THE WRECKING CREW finally hits blu-ray and DVD this week. A fascinating look at the famed Los Angeles session musicians who played – with little recognition – on classic records by Elvis, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, and more. During one stretch, they played on six straight winners of Record of the Year at the Grammys. That Oscar win for the similar ’20 Feet from Stardom’ likely prompted this long overdue release.
Also out this week:
CLICK HERE FOR A FULL LISTING OF ALL THE COOLEST DVD RELEASES OF THIS WEEK!
SO WHAT DVD/BLU-RAYS ARE YOU GUYS STOKED ABOUT THIS WEEK?!