Film Review: “Bullet Train”

Welcome to late-stage Brad

Balletic Fighting
Brad Pitt and Bad Bunny star in Bullet Train.

Fading assassins looking to complete the latest job. Low-level criminals looking for a clean exit from the life. Under-loved princesses looking to deal with daddy once and for all. Others looking for nothing more than cold, hard revenge. And in the middle of it all is bucket-hat Brad Pitt. In his latest, Bullet Train (or: Bucket-Hat Brad with a Bullet), Pitt romps, skips, hops, twirls, guffaws, and even sings his way through an overly-complicated, needlessly-sprawling, yet more than semi-entertaining roller coaster. Continue reading “Film Review: “Bullet Train””

Film Review: Atomic Blonde

Theron heats up a cold city

Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) smokes, drinks, kicks, and kills with the best of them.

Take a world nearing collapse, a main character with oodles of bitchy beauty, add some cold-war cloak and dagger spycraft, throw in some “fluid sexuality,” lots of fight scenes, and just a pinch of back story. Good so far? Not so fast. Take away the script. Take away the music. Take away much of the acting. Not so great? Ok, so put one truly fantastic fight scene back in, and you’re served Atomic Blonde, the Charlize Theron vehicle opening wide today.

First time helmer David Leitch, a former stunt man with co-directing credits on John Wick has taken the graphic novel series The Coldest City and turned it into a mostly a muddled mish-mash that owes much of its existence to Luc Bresson’s La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional, as well founding father Doug Limon’s The Bourne Identity.
Continue reading “Film Review: Atomic Blonde