“Stop monologuing, you bi-polar f***!” could be the best career advice that anyone’s given Mark Wahlberg, even though it’s hard not to laugh when it’s John Malkovich speaking from under what’s easily the most outlandish toupee of his career. (Watch the way the filmmakers purposely compose around the Chia Whisk …
“Stop monologuing, you bi-polar f***!” could be the best career advice that anyone’s given Mark Wahlberg, even though it’s hard not to laugh when it’s John Malkovich speaking from under what’s easily the most outlandish toupee of his career. (Watch the way the filmmakers purposely compose around the Chia Whisk …
Cop-partner comedy from Adam McKay, not to say cop-buddy, with Will Ferrell wobbly in tone as a contented desk jockey and Mark Wahlberg a steady straight man as a pent-up eager beaver. It evinces a deathly pale image, a fair amount of industry, and a few amusing ideas (a fight …
Oy, Bay! Michael Bay, the Butcher of Burbank, returns, this time with one pound of script in a 20 lb. casing and a refrigerated display case fit to bust with shoulder cut of Mark Wahlberg, prime rib of Anthony Mackie, and filet of Rock. In order to help underwrite their …
Having lionized American Navy SEALS in Lone Survivor and American working men in Deepwater Horizon, director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg turn the spotlight on American police officers, taking the Boston Marathon bombing and the massive manhunt that followed as their occasion. It’s a gutsy move, what with that …
Moderately old-fashioned but modishly souped-up, grandiose, operatic, and overscaled account of a real-life disaster at sea ("a disaster of epic proportions," in the forecast of a TV weatherman), the swallowing of the Andrea Gail swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Mass., during the "Storm of the Century" of 1991. James Horner, …
The "unique personal vision" of Tim Burton comes down here to the burgeoning field of science-fiction graphics: a new illustrated edition of an old familiar classic. (Rather dark and murky illustrations, too, with a forest-primeval feel to deepen the timeless mythicality of it all.) Sure, the ape makeup, to say …
A rock-and-roll fantasy fulfilled: the lead singer of a Pittsburgh "tribute band" (not a "cover band," thank you) gets tabbed to take over the duties of his idol in a British metal band called Steel Dragon. The genial fun-poking at uncreative copycats evaporates fast when we hit the big-time, to …
A new Rambo for a new millennium. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger (a compact, tense, stoic, unswaggering Mark Wahlberg), already abandoned once in the field in Ethiopia, is lured out of mountaintop retirement ostensibly to use his sniper know-how to foil a plot to assassinate the President but in …
A kind of update of Kelly's Heroes, in deportment as well as in period: an insanity-of-war movie, set impudently at the end of Desert Storm, centered around four American soldiers (George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and, immediately recognizable as expendable, Spike Jonze) who have extracted from a captive Iraqi's …
Michael Bay: evil genius. Example: subject a 17-year-old hottie to all manner of sexual shenanigans - camera shots between her thighs, guns thrust menacingly at her face, monster tongues wrapped around her leg, and then take the curse off it by giving us an overprotective daddy-hero (Mark Wahlberg) who tells …
American exotica: a close-knit clan of con artists, of Irish descent, in the rural South. The movie doesn't spend long on the community itself; and the outside scams of the protagonist (Bill Paxton), though they claim your attention, are of more generalized, more generic interest. His affair of the heart …
Ostensible remake and update of Charade, but really more of a private party thrown by director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, etc.), who uses the date and place of the Stanley Donen original -- 1963, Paris -- to rationalize a French New Wave theme for the party: …
If the Screenvision pre-show exchange of deadpan drollery between stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg is any indication, these two boys are god's gift to their chosen profession. Pretty cocky for what appears to be yet another run for the paycheck through the land of cookie-cutter action. Credit director Ruben …