This morning my wife told me she wanted to watch a movie based on a true story. After scrolling for a bit, I came across the film INTO THE WILD, which interested me for a couple of reasons. First, it was directed by Sean Penn, whose directorial debut, THE INDIAN RUNNER (1991), gave my favorite actor of all time, Charles Bronson, a late-career character performance that critics actually took seriously. I’ve followed his directing career ever since. Second, the movie stars Emile Hirsch, who my wife and I had the rare opportunity to watch up close this summer while he was filming a movie here in Central Arkansas… an awesomely surreal experience that’s had me revisiting the work of the actors I saw that day. As such, today seemed like the perfect time to hit play on INTO THE WILD!
INTO THE WILD is based on the true story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a bright, idealistic young man who graduates from college in the early 1990s and immediately walks away from the type of life everyone expects him to live. Chris donates his savings to charity, abandons his car, burns the cash in his wallet, reinvents himself as Alexander Supertramp, and sets off across America on a great Alaskan adventure. Along the way he comes across different people who impact his life in a variety of ways, from some free-spirited hippies, to a grizzled old widower, and even a beautiful young lady who takes an immediate liking to him. Each of these encounters offer Chris a chance to form meaningful relationships, but he always decides to keep moving on. When he does eventually make it to the wilds of Alaska, it’s everything he hoped for… at first. But as the months wear on, his loneliness and inexperience take their toll, and Chris is forced to face the ultimate consequence of his decisions.
I’ll start out by saying that INTO THE WILD is a truly beautiful film. Sean Penn and his cinematographer Eric Gautier capture so many amazing images, from the Grand Canyon and Lake Tahoe, to the Denali National Park in Alaska. We see an America that is awe-inspiring, and we can at least somewhat understand why Chris might want to escape to such a world of promise. I also liked the music, especially when Eddie Vedder’s voice emerges to punctuate a scene that seems perfectly in tune with Chris’ restless spirit.
I must admit that Chris McCandless, the person, is quite the frustrating subject. He’s intelligent and sincere, but he’s also painfully naive and self-righteous. It’s noble that he wants to find ultimate truth, but he goes about it by running away from the messy parts of his life, especially the parents, played here by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, that he sees as horrible people. I guess my frustration with Chris’ decisions may be the point, and Director Sean Penn doesn’t turn him into either a saint or a fool. While watching the film, I was somewhat torn between admiring Chris for the way he rejects materialism and lives his life on his own terms, while also being disappointed as he continually walks away from any person who gets too close or tries to help him.
Emile Hirsch is incredible in the lead role as Chris McCandless. He captures his restless spirit, as well as his determination to make it completely on his own, that is, until he realizes that he overplayed his hand. The other performances that stood out to me came from Vince Vaughn as a farmer that Chris stops and works for, Catherine Keener as a hippie with her own set of issues, and especially Hal Holbrook as a lonely, but perceptive old man who sees in Chris the grandson he never had.
At the end of the day, I feel that INTO THE WILD is a powerful film, but not because of what ultimately happens to Chris. Rather, what lingers with me is his too-late realization that personal freedom without meaningful relationships is not satisfying. As beautiful as this movie is to look at, its strongest moments are Chris’ interactions with the caring people he meets along the way. I just wish one of them had been able to convince him to call his mom and dad.
When architect Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and aspiring chef Ivy (Olivia Colman) meet in London, it is love at first sight. Ivy wants to move to America so that she can pursue her dream of opening a restaurant. Theo impulsively decides that he wants to move with her. (Take that, Britain!) They marry and the film follows them as they settle in California and pursue success in their respective fields while raising precocious twins. At first, Theo has more success than Ivy but that changes when a freak storm causes one of Theo’s buildings to collapse on the same night that it also causes hundreds of stranded tourists to suddenly show up at Ivy’s restaurant. Ivy becomes a success while Theo, who is now basically unemployable, becomes a stay-at-home dad. Theo starts to resent Ivy’s success. Ivy starts to resent the amount of time that Theo spends with their daughters. Looking to fix their fraying marriage, Theo design an ultra-modern and chic home for them. Needless to say, by the end of the movie, Theo is being chased through the house by a gun-wielding Ivy.
Oh, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. They’re both good actors and I’ve appreciated many of their past performances but, watching them in The Roses, I do have to admit that I realized that I’ve started to get a bit bored with both of them. Their performances here all about technique. Cumberbatch does his barely repressed anger thing until eventually he explodes into a frantic fury. Colman does her cutting barb followed by a goofy smile thing. Neither performance really has much emotional depth and, even when they’re supposed to be happy, you don’t really buy them as a couple for a second. Even when they blow up at each other and fully embrace their growing hatred, it doesn’t have much of an emotional impact because they never really seemed to like each other to begin with. Every line that Colman delivers sounds like a sarcastic attempt at a bon mot, even she’s supposed to be sincere. There’s nothing shocking about either one of their cruel comments to each other. It just feels like two actors doing their thing.
At its heart, The Roses is meant to be a satire. Theo and Ivy grow to hate each other but neither one is willing to give up their rather tacky house. Unfortunately, Jay Roach is exactly the wrong director for this material. Roach has gone from directing broad but genuinely funny comedies to becoming something of a second-rate Adam McKay. Perhaps even more so than McKay, he’s a prime example of what happens when a director decides that he can’t just be happy making movies that people actually enjoy. (Trumbo and Bombshell may have gotten mildly good reviews from critics who are sympathetic to Roach’s liberal politics but, in the end, Austin Powers is the film for which audiences will remember Jay Roach.) There’s not a subtle moment to be found in The Roses and, as a result, there’s not really much genuine emotion to be found either. Towards the end of the film, we get a montage of Theo and Ivy escalating their attacks on one another. It’s one thing for Ivy to create an AI video of Theo smoking crack. It’s another thing for Theo to spike the food at Ivy’s restaurant with hallucinogenic shrooms, leading to an slow motion orgy involving a bunch of middle-aged tourists. It all becomes so cartoonish that the film loses sight of whatever it was trying to say about marriage.
Touted as an Oscar nominee before it was released and subsequently forgotten about, The Roses was one of the many disappointing films of 2025.
That my reaction to watching Shiver Me Timbers, one of three killer Popeye movies that came out in 2025. Online, there’s some debate over which of the three films is the worst. I’ve only seen two of them so I really can’t say. What I can tell you is that Shiver Me Timbers makes Popeye The Slayer Man look like a freaking masterpiece by comparison.
The film actually does start off with a vaguely clever premise. The year is 1986 and a group of friends are camping so that they can watch as Halley’s Comet crosses the night sky. Our main character is Olive (Amy Mackie), who isn’t sure whether or not she wants to go to M.I.T. I have to admit that I could relate to Olive, just because I wouldn’t want to go to college in Massachusetts either. Plus, Oliva wears all black and has a generally sarcastic attitude, which is pretty much the same way that I was when I was 18.
Anyway, a piece of a meteorite falls out of the sky and, after getting nearly burned up in the atmosphere, it falls into the pipe of a scrawny sailor who is fishing out at the lake. The sailor smokes the tiny meteorite and is immediately mutated into a hulking killer. He proceeds to kill all of Olive’s friends. The deaths are extremely bloody and go out of their way to shock but, oddly enough, they don’t make much of an impression. Part of the problem is that Olive’s friends aren’t that interesting and, as a result, you don’t really care that much about any of them getting killed. The film has this weird habit of featuring close-ups of decapitated heads still struggling to speak. I’m going to be charitable and assume that this was meant to be an homage to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Herzog, however, was smart enough to only have one decapitated head speaking.
For all the pain that the character go through as Popeye snaps their bones and removes their heads, the real pain is reserved for those watching the movie. The pacing is abysmal, the dialogue is terrible (and please, can we stop making slasher movies where the victims all keep talking about other slasher movies?), and the mutated Popeye looks so dumb that it’s hard to take him seriously as any sort of threat. (Popeye The Slayer Man at least had a vaguely credible killer Popeye.) The film ends with a shout-out to Evil Dead II and it actually would have been pretty cute if the film before it had been better. As it its, it feels like an unearned comparison.
On the plus side — because I hate to be totally negative about anything — the shots of the night sky were actually very effective. That may sound like almost a parody of faint praise and I guess maybe it is but seriously, there was some real beauty to shots of the stars moving across the sky.
Anyway, let’s stop turning public domain characters into murderers, shall we? Thanks!
My nephew told me that he liked the film BARBARIAN (2022) when we were hanging out at the family cabin for Christmas. This particular nephew loves movies and every time we get together we talk about our favorite films, and he knows his stuff. We didn’t really talk about what happens in this movie, but he just casually mentioned it was a film he thought was good. As such, the title caught my attention when I was scrolling through my Hulu app today. Knowing nothing about the plot of the film, my wife and I settled in for our initial viewing….
BARBARIAN’s setup feels quite ordinary. Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives in Detroit for a job interview, only to discover her Airbnb has been double-booked with a stranger, Keith (Bill Skarsgård). Through a variety of circumstances, the two end up agreeing to share the house for the night. Needless to say, it takes a bit for the two to get comfortable with each other. Every polite smile, every offered cup of tea, or glass of wine for that matter, feels loaded with possibility. Is he harmless? Is she overreacting? What in the hell is about to happen? Director Zach Cregger milks these scenes beautifully, allowing the tension to build until they finally seem to find a reason to trust each other. And just when you think you’re starting to understand where the movie is going, it begins throwing curveballs at you by introducing new characters and new perspectives to everything that has been introduced thus far. Justin Long’s character of AJ McBride, the owner of the Airbnb who arrives about halfway through the film, is especially inspired as it provides both a break in the tension and another unique personality to the mix.
By the time BARBARIAN starts to come to its full conclusion, it has truly become the stuff that nightmares are made of, but it doesn’t feel completely evil. As outrageous as it all is, I actually understood why the characters behave the way they do, so there’s almost a sense of sadness under the horror. There’s real danger, but that danger is brought on by unimaginable cruelty and neglect. It’s ugly and gross, but it’s also somewhat realistic since the filmmakers have taken the time to set up both the hows and the whys of their horrific scenario.
At the end of the day, I enjoyed BARBARIAN. I’ve never been the kind of movie watcher who searches out horror movies. When I was a kid, I watched scary movies at sleepovers with friends. As an adult, I’ll watch them with my friends at #ScarySocial on X, or when they’re recommended to me as is the case here, but then I’ll seamlessly move back to my world of action or comedy films. Such is the case with BARBARIAN. With its freaky images and multiple jump scares, my wife and I were both glad that we watched the movie when it was still daylight. It’s one of those films that crawls under your skin and hangs out with you for a while even after the closing credits. I’ll have to watch some football or a Charles Bronson movie just to get my head straight!
“An idea, a feeling became clear to me. The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.” — the Creature
Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited take on Frankenstein finally lumbers to life after years of speculation and teases, and it’s every bit the dark, hypnotic fever dream you’d expect from his imagination. The film, a Netflix-backed production running close to two and a half hours, stars Oscar Isaac as the guilt-ridden Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his tragic creation. The result lands somewhere between Gothic melodrama and spiritual lament—a lush, melancholy epic about fathers, sons, and the price of neglect. It’s both a triumph of aesthetic world-building and a case study in overindulgence, the kind of movie that leaves you haunted even when it occasionally tests your patience.
From the very first frame, del Toro plunges us into a Europe steeped in rot and beauty. His world feels more haunted than alive—every misty street lamp and echoing corridor loaded with centuries of decay. Victor, introduced as both a visionary and a failed son, is shaped by years of cruelty at the hands of his domineering father, played with aristocratic venom by Charles Dance. That upbringing lingers in every decision he makes, especially when he turns to science to defy death. Del Toro shoots his laboratory scenes as though they were sacred rituals: the flicker of candlelight reflecting off glass jars, the close-up of trembling hands threading sinew into flesh. When the Creature awakens, lightning cracks like some divine act of punishment. It’s a birth scene that feels more emotional than monstrous—Elordi’s raw, wordless confusion gives it a painful tenderness that lingers longer than the horror. Del Toro discards the usual clichés of flat heads and neck bolts, opting for something far more human: an imperfect body full of scars and stitched reminders of mortality.
One of the most striking choices del Toro makes is reframing Victor and the Creature as mirror images rather than opposites. Instead of playing Victor as a simple mad scientist, del Toro paints him as a broken man desperate to reclaim the control he never had as a child. That fear and obsession ripple through the Creature, who becomes his unacknowledged shadow—an extension of Victor’s failure to love or take responsibility. The movie often frames the two in parallel shots, their movements synchronized across different spaces, suggesting that creator and creation are locked in a tragic loop. The audience watches both sides of the story—Victor’s guilt and the Creature’s anguish—without clear moral lines. This emotional split gives the film its heartbeat: the Creature isn’t a villain so much as a rejected child, articulate and lonely, begging to know why he was made to suffer.
Jacob Elordi’s performance is revelatory. He channels something hauntingly human beneath the layers of prosthetics and makeup. There’s a fragility to the way he moves—those long, uncertain gestures feel less like a monster testing its strength and more like someone trying to exist in a world that never wanted him. His eyes carry the movie’s emotional weight; the moment he sees his reflection for the first time is quietly devastating. Oscar Isaac, meanwhile, leans hard into Victor’s manic idealism, all sweat-soaked ambition and buried grief. He makes the character compelling even at his most despicable, though at times del Toro’s dialogue spells out Victor’s torment too bluntly. Still, the scenes between them—particularly their tense reunion in the frozen north—achieve the Shakespearean tragedy that del Toro clearly aims for.
Visually, Frankenstein is pure del Toro—sumptuous, grotesque, and alive in every corner of its composition. Each frame looks painted rather than filmed: flickers of gaslight reflecting on wet marble, glass jars filled with organs that seem to breathe, snow settling gently on slate rooftops. The film feels drenched in the texture of another century, yet vibrates with modern energy. Costume designer Kate Hawley, longtime collaborator of del Toro, deserves special recognition here. Her work helps define the story’s emotional tone, dressing Victor in meticulously tailored waistcoats that hint at obsession through precision, and the Creature in tattered fabrics that seem scavenged from several lives. Elizabeth’s gowns chart her erosion from warmth to mourning, using color and texture as silent narration. Hawley’s palette moves from opulent golds and creams to bleak greys and winter blues—visually tracing how ambition and grief drain the light from these characters’ worlds. The costumes, much like del Toro’s sets, feel alive with history, heavy with stories stitched into every seam.
Mia Goth gives a strong, if underused, turn as Elizabeth, Victor’s doomed fiancée. Her early scenes bring a spark of warmth to the story’s coldness; her later ones turn tragic in ways that push Victor toward his final breakdown. Minor characters—the townspeople, the academics, the curious aristocrats who toy with Victor’s discovery—carry familiar del Toro trademarks: grotesque faces, eccentric manners, glimmers of compassion buried in callousness. The composer’s score matches this tone perfectly, alternating between aching melodies on piano and surging orchestral crescendos that make even the quiet scenes feel mythic. Combined, the sound and visuals give Frankenstein a grandeur that most modern horror films wouldn’t dare attempt.
Still, not every gamble lands cleanly. Del Toro’s interpretation leans so hard into empathy that it dulls the edges of the original story’s moral conflict. Shelley’s Creature grows into a murderous intellect, acting out of vengeance as much as sorrow; here, his violence is softened or implied, as though del Toro can’t quite bring himself to stain the monster’s purity. The effect is powerful emotionally but flattens some of the tension—Victor becomes the clear villain, and the Creature, the clear victim. It fits del Toro’s worldview but leaves the viewer missing some ambiguity. The pacing also falters in the middle third. There are long, ornate monologues about divinity, creation, and guilt that blur together into a swirl of purple prose. The visuals never lose their grip, but the script occasionally does, especially when it slows down to explain what the imagery already tells us.
Those fits of overexplanation aside, del Toro’s Frankenstein stays deeply personal. The story connects directly to the themes he’s mined for years: innocence cursed by cruelty, love framed in pain, beauty stitched from the broken. The Creature isn’t just man made from corpses; he’s a kind of prayer for grace—a plea for understanding in a world defined by rejection. Victor’s failure to nurture becomes an act of spiritual cowardice rather than scientific arrogance. The parallels between them give the film its emotional voltage. Every time one character suffers, the other feels it by proxy, as if their bond transcends life and death.
By the final act, all the grand tragedy is distilled into the silence between two beings who can’t forgive each other—but can’t let go, either. The closing image of the Creature, trudging across a barren arctic plain beneath a rising sun, borders on mythic. His tear-streaked face and quiet acceptance of solitude bring the story full circle: a being born of man’s arrogance chooses forgiveness when his maker couldn’t. It’s sad, tender, and surprisingly spiritual, hinting at del Toro’s constant fascination with mercy in a cruel universe.
As a whole, Frankenstein feels like the culmination of del Toro’s career obsessions condensed into one sprawling film. It’s not perfect—it wanders, it sermonizes, and it sometimes sacrifices fear for sentiment—but it’s haunted by sincerity. You can see del Toro’s fingerprints in every gothic curve and crimson hue, and even when he overreaches, you believe in his conviction. Isaac anchors the film with burning intensity, Elordi gives it wounded humanity, and Goth tempers the heaviness with grace.
In the end, this version of Frankenstein isn’t about horror in the traditional sense. It’s not there to make you jump—it’s there to make you ache. The film trades sharp scares for bruised hearts, replacing terror with empathy. Del Toro reanimates not just flesh but feeling, dragging one of literature’s oldest monsters into our modern reckoning with parenthood, grief, and the burden of creation. It’s daring, messy, and undeniably alive. For better or worse, it’s exactly the Frankenstein Guillermo del Toro was always meant to make.
Though Magazine Dreams did not get a brief theatrical release until 2025, the film first made an impression two years earlier. At the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, Magazine Dreams was one of the most buzzed about entries. A film about a mentally unbalanced body-building fanatic, the film starred Jonathan Majors. Majors was on top of the world at that time. Not only was he being groomed to be the new center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but he was also just a few months away from playing the antagonist in the highly anticipated Creed III. The U.S. Army was using Majors in recruitment commercials. Both Magazine Dreams and Majors’s performance were lauded at Sundance. Some critics started to say that Majors had, at the very least, an Oscar nomination in his future.
Then, on March 25th, 2023, Jonathan Majors was arrested and charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Several other women came forward and said that they had also been abused physically and emotionally by Majors. The Army stopped airing his commercials. Marvel announced that Majors would no longer be appearing in their films and that the storyline around his character would simply be abandoned. (Indeed, the fallout over Majors’s arrest was so much a problem for Marvel that they eventually resorted to bringing back Robert Downey, Jr. to try to staunch the bleeding.) Creed III took on a whole new meaning as the relatively likable Michael B. Jordan beat the hell out of Jonathan Majors’s snarling ex-con.
As for Magazine Dreams, it fell into limbo. Fox Searchlight had acquired the film at Sundance and had given it an Oscar-friendly December release date. After Majors’s arrest, Searchlight removed the film from its schedule and, eventually, the rights were sold back to the film’s producers. Eventually, Briarcliff Entertainment released the film on March 21st, 2025. The film made barely a million at the box office.
With all of the behind the scenes drama, it’s tempting to overlook the most important question. Was the film itself any good?
It’s …. okay. Jonathan Majors plays Killian Maddox, a grocery store worker who, as a child, was traumatized by the murder-suicide of his mother and father. Maddox is obsessed with body building. He studies body building magazines the way that some people study ancient texts. One gets the impression that Maddox feels that having the perfect body will make up for all of the imperfections in his life. He shoots steroids. He uploads painfully earnest videos to YouTube. He doesn’t know how to express his emotions, allowing his anger to come out at inappropriate times. He wants to connect with someone but he doesn’t know how to do it.
To the film’s credit, it understands just how intimidating Killian Maddox can be. A scene in which Maddox confronts the nephew of his boss initially seems as if it’s going to be about Maddox standing up for himself but instead becomes increasingly disturbing as Maddox upsets the man’s family. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was obviously an influence on the film but Magazine Dreams doesn’t have that film’s wit or its subversive edge. There are scenes that work. The scene where a bloody Killian Maddox tries to compete despite being seriously injured is effective, even if it does owe a debt to Whiplash. Another scene, in which Killian reads the trolling comments that have been left on one of his YouTube videos, actually does make you feel a bit of sympathy for him. Ultimately, though, the film is so downbeat and unpleasant that you start to wonder why it was made in the first place. Was Killian Maddox really so interesting a character that the audience needed to spend two hours with him? Is there really anything to be learned from Killian Maddox and his experiences?
As for Jonathan Majors, he gives a believable performance. He was a good actor, even if he couldn’t quite make Killian Maddox into a truly compelling character.
I’ve always appreciated any made-for-TV movie that’s absolutely shameless about ripping off a big budget feature film and, as such, I did appreciate the chutzpah of Taken At A Basketball Game. I mean the word “TAKEN” is right there in the title! D.B. Woodside plays Wayne Edwards, an ex-cop who is now the head of security for a casino. Wayne is haunted by a shooting that left an innocent girl dead. Wayne is also middle-aged and struggling to relate to his teenage daughter, Robyn (Claire Qute). When Robyn is abducted by sex traffickers at a basketball game, Wayne sets out to track her down and rescue her. It probably will not surprise you to hear that there’s a scene where Wayne explains that, even before he was a cop, he was a member of Special Forces and, as such, he knows how to get information out of people.
That said, it’s been quite a while since Taken was first released. The first film came out in 2008 and it can be somewhat surprising to remember how excited everyone was about it. At that time, Liam Neeson was best-known for appearing in prestige pictures so there was something enjoyably subversive about him playing a relentless torturer on a mission. A lot of people were also under the impression that Taken was based on a true story. A sequel followed in 2012 and, by that point, people were much more used to the idea of Liam Neeson killing people. The third (and, to date, final) Taken film came out in 2015 and no one really cared. There was a television series that sputtered along for two seasons. There were countless Taken rip-offs, many of which starred Nissan himself. The initial cultural footprint of Taken was huge but, by the start of the 2020s, it had pretty much evaporated. Taken At A Basketball Game comes out at a time when even Liam Neeson has started parodying his image.
This is my long-winded way of saying that Taken At A Basketball Game would probably have worked better as a parody than a straight action film. At this point, whenever an actor starts to give a monologue about how he’s been given very special training, it’s hard not to laugh because it’s a scene that has shown up in so many movies that it’s basically been done to death. Everyone thinks that they can do a perfect impersonation of Liam Neeson reciting the Taken speech. Of course, what originally sold the speech in 2008 was that Neeson delivered it with an intensity and a commitment that kept it from sounding like a bunch of empty boasts. Listening to Neeson in that first film, you sincerely believed that he could and would kill someone if he felt like it. D.B. Woodside, who is probably best-known for playing the less interesting of 24‘s two President Palmers, comes across as being a bit too mild-mannered to give a convincing “I’ve been trained to inflict pain” speech. For most of the film, he seems like he’d rather just go back to his office and maybe sell someone some insurance.
The other problem with Taken At A Basketball Game is that very little of it actually takes place at the basketball game. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of basketball. Those squeaky shoes give me a migraine. But the stadium was a good location and it’s easy to imagine a fairly entertaining film could have been made out of Woodside spending 90 minutes running from one level to another, searching for his daughter and fighting off various bad guys. (Yes, I realize this would have made the film into a Die Hard rip-off instead of a Taken rip-off but Die Hard rip-offs still work whereas Taken reached its expiration date years ago.) Instead, the film abandoned the game early on and just went through the motions for the remainder of its running time.
Oh well. Maybe Liam Neeson will make a basketball movie someday….
17 year-old Brad Crain was at the movie theater in April of 1991 to see Steven Seagal’s latest action film, OUT FOR JUSTICE! Seagal’s career had shot out of a cannon with his first three films being the highly successful movies ABOVE THE LAW (1988), HARD TO KILL (1990), and MARKED FOR DEATH (1990). As a guy who loved action movies, Seagal (with his pony tail) was a cool new action star, and I was down for it.
Steven Seagal plays Detective Gino Felino, a Brooklyn cop called into duty when a guy who grew up with him in their neighborhood, mob enforcer Richie Madano (William Forsythe), goes completely off the rails. Hooked on drugs and looking to settle some personal scores, Richie murders Gino’s partner, and begins turning their neighborhood into a war zone, even pulling a woman out of her car and blowing her away in broad daylight over a simple traffic incident. Convinced that Richie will not leave the neighborhood he grew up in, Gino talks Captain Ronnie Danziger (Jerry Orbach) into letting him have an unmarked police car, a shotgun, and his approval to engage in a manhunt for the drugged out psycho. From that point forward, Gino shakes down Richie’s family members and associates to try to find out where he is. As bodies and broken bones pile up, Gino is determined to do whatever it takes to bring Richie to justice!
I’ll just say up front that OUT FOR JUSTICE is my personal favorite Steven Seagal film. It’s not the crowd pleaser or the box office champ that the next year’s UNDER SIEGE (1992) would be, and film critics largely blew it off when it first hit cinemas, but it does feature the star at his most charismatic, something that would all but disappear after the mid-90’s. I love the way Seagal plays Gino. Sure he’s tough, but he talks more, he laughs more, and it feels like he’s actually enjoying himself. His Gino isn’t just a badass cop, he’s a neighborhood guy, a former street punk who grew up and made something positive out of himself. Seagal’s performance here truly works, and he plays the role with so much confidence that it’s a shame that he didn’t remain this engaged in future performances.
OUT FOR JUSTICE is a badass action film. After it opens with Richie’s horrific murders, it then follows Gino’s hunt for the killer into smoky bars filled with wannabe tough guys who know more than they’re letting on. They get their asses handed to them. It follows Gino as Richie’s goons attack him at various places, from meat shops to apartment buildings, and he dispatches them with calm precision, but often in gruesome ways. I still wince when I see the results of meat cleaver fights and close quarter shotgun blasts. OUT FOR JUSTICE is a throwback to an era when action films featured men with integrity who kick ass and take names. While the movie does have some melodrama and humor, at the end of the day, this is tough-guy cinema done right.
I did want to shout out a few other things about OUT FOR JUSTICE that helps put it over the top for me. William Forsythe is incredible as Richie Madano. He’s sweaty, twitchy, cruel, and completely unhinged. He makes you believe that he’s literally capable of doing anything, and it seems like his goons may be following more out of fear than anything else. His Richie is a man who doesn’t expect that he’ll be alive that much longer, so he’s willing to cross every line that may have once mattered in his life. Director John Flynn captures the urgency of the film’s action very well, and we can feel the tension as Gino tries to locate the crazy Richie as quickly as possible before more innocent people are killed. He isn’t afraid to show the brutality of the violence as part of Gino’s quest, either. This shouldn’t be surprising when you recognize that Flynn directed the revenge classic ROLLING THUNDER (1977) about fifteen years earlier. The one last thing I wanted to point out about OUT FOR JUSTICE is that it was written by R. Lance Hill, who wrote the brutal Charles Bronson hitman film THE EVIL THAT MEN DO (1984). These are talented guys who know how to tell tough stories about even tougher men who are willing to do what it takes to get justice when no one else can.
At the end of the day, Steven Seagal would go on to make a lot more movies, but I don’t think he ever quite recaptured the balance of charisma and toughness that he shows here. And OUT FOR JUSTICE is a badass action movie that doesn’t really care what movie critics think, either. Buoyed by Seagal’s performance, the film’s action is angry, focused, unapologetic, and still hits hard over thirty years after it was originally released.
Let’s hear it for War of the Worlds, the 2025 film that took one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written and then re-imagined it as something really stupid.
It takes a certain amount of balls to take a book that was written in the 19th century and to adapt it as a low-budget screenlife film. Plus, the idea of making the protagonist an employee of the DHS who abuses his power to monitor his children, and his daughter’s boyfriend? That’s actually kind of clever. Good for you, movie! Way to point out just how invasive our current surveillance state is. It always kind of amazes me that, here in America, we’ve given up so much of the freedom that people died for but, whenever you point that out to people, you just kind of get an apathetic shrug.
You know what isn’t a good idea? Casting Ice Cube as the DHS employee in question.
Ice Cube plays Will Radford, the straight-laced and uptight DHS employee and 90% of the film is basically just shots of him staring at the screen of his laptop. During the day, he argues with his kids and tries to ascertain the identity of a mysterious hacker. He also checks in with Clark Gregg (who plays the head of the DHS) and with a NASA scientist who is played by Eva Longoria. Let’s give some credit where credit is due and admit that Clark Gregg seems to understand exactly what type of film that he’s in and, as such, he gives about as good a performance as anyone could in the role. Eva Longoria, on the other hand, comes across as if she’s just killing time until the next Democratic convention comes around.
But let’s get back to Ice Cube. Ice Cube is not a bad actor. When cast in the right role, he can bring an unbeatable authenticity to the screen. That said, Ice Cube does not have a particularly wide range. When he was cast as the Captain Dickson in 21 Jump Street, the intentional miscasting made for one of the best jokes in the film. In War of the Worlds, when Will starts yelling at his daughter’s boyfriend, it’s hard not to be reminded of Captain Dickson reacting to Jonah Hill dating his daughter in 22 Jump Street. The only problem — well, not the only problem — is that War of the Worlds is not meant to be a comedy.
So, what is War of the Worlds meant to be? It’s not easy to say. It’s certainly not meant to be any sort of tribute to H.G. Wells and his classic novel. If anything, the film seems to take a perverse joy in not caring about the source material. It can be argued that the film is meant to be a commercial for Amazon, seeing as how an Amazon drone plays a key role in the film’s conclusion. Considering that the film was released on Prime, that certainly seems to be a fair interpretation. In the end, even though the villains are ultimately revealed to be some of Will’s colleagues, the film still feels like a perhaps unintentional endorsement of the Surveillance State. Where would be without Ice Cube watching over us?
In 2011, the news broke that 51 year-old Doug Hutchinson had married 16 year-old Courtney Stodden. I can still remember my initial reaction.
“Who?”
Though the stories all made Doug Hutchinson out to be a some sort of household name, I wasn’t sure who he was. This was despite the fact that I had seen The Green Mile and Lost and a few other shows in which he had roles. With the exception of The Green Mile‘s Percy Wetmore, the majority of Hutchinson’s roles were small and he never made enough of an impression for me to really remember him. Doug Hutchinson was not a big star and yet, all of the initial stories about his marriage to Courtney focused on Doug and not on the 16 year-old girl that he had married. The stories often mentioned that Courtney was blonde and a few found an excuse to list her measurements but few really seemed to give much thought to how a 16 year-old ends up married to a 51 year-old. Courtney’s mother was often portrayed as being the ultimate stage mom, pushing her daughter into marrying an older man out of a belief that it would help her career (as if Doug Hutchinson was some sort of power player as opposed to being an occasionally employed character actor).
Today, it’s fashionable for everyone to claim that they were outraged from the moment that they heard about the Hutchinson/Stodden marriage. At the time the story came out, though, most people treated it as just another bit of a salacious gossip from “Hollyweird.” Doug and Courtney appeared on reality shows, including quite a few that featured them getting marriage counseling while the cameras rolled. If Doug was usually portrayed as being an old lech, Courtney was often portrayed as being a young gold digger. (Again, the fact that Doug Hutchinson was hardly a star rarely seemed to factor into these portrayals. He was an actor who had co-starred with Tom Hanks and hence, people assumed he had money.) It’s only now, with the marriage over, that people have really started to acknowledge that Courtney Stodden was a victim of both Doug Hutchinson’s grooming and the world’s tabloid culture.
Lifetime’s I Was A Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story dramatizes the story of Courtney’s life and her marriage to Dough Hutchinson. The film was produced by Stodden and she also provides the narration, commenting on what’s happening onscreen and trying to explain what was going through her head at the time. In the dramatization, she’s played by Holly J. Barrett while Doug Hutchinson is played, to creepy perfection, by Doug Savant. Maggie Lawson plays Krista Stoddard, Courtney’s mother. The film follows Courtney as she goes from being pushed into stardom by her mother to then being ordered to give up her career by Doug. When the story of Doug and Courtney’s marriage comes out, Doug mourns that his career is over while Krista excitedly pulls up every online story. When Courtney points out that most of the stories are bad, Krista chirps that all publicity is good publicity. (The film implies that Krista is the one who leaked the details of Courtney and Doug’s marriage to the press.) Soon, teenage Courtney is the breadwinner for both her 51 year-old husband and her mother.
The film is ultimately effective, even if it’s sometimes just as salacious as the tabloids that the movie criticizes. I was proud of Courtney for having finally broken free from Doug. That said, the story leaves quite a few unanswered questions, especially about the extent of the role that Krista played in Doug and Courtney getting married. Parents are always told to be aware of who their children are talking to online. But what do you do when the parents know and just don’t care?
Through the Shattered Lens 