The Raid: Redemption & The Raid 2: Berandal
The Raid (2011) follows a special forces team entering an apartment block in Jakarta to arrest a crime boss when things go haywire…
To be honest, there isn’t much more to the plot than that – once things do go haywire the action starts – and great action it is.
A Hard Day
A little-known but fun thriller from South Korea.
A corrupt cop gets entangled in a web of his own making. And in someone else’s web too. It’s just one of those days where everything and everyone seems against you.
Kill the Messenger
I always felt Jeremy Renner to be a B-list actor who got lucky. The Hurt Locker was great, but I thought that was more down to the script and photography than Renner’s acting; Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was just a fun watch but too silly to remember, his role in The Avengers is fairly irrelevant, and The Bourne Legacy was just a disappointing movie all around.
Nightcrawler
Close… but no cigar…
Nightcrawler is the story of Louis Bloom who by chance decides to work his way into filming accidents and crimes and selling the footage to the local news station.
I enjoyed the movie. The story is ‘interesting’ in an American Psycho kind of way, the atmosphere is dark and the cinematography is pretty good.
Zodiac
A long, somewhat clinical approach to the story of the Zodiac Killer by David Fincher. At the same time it builds good depth in the main characters, and it does not get boring despite is 2.5 hour running time.
Headhunters
A Norwegian crime thriller based on a Jo Nesbø book about a headhunter with ambitions.
Various interesting productions have come from Scandinavia over the last decade or so, but I don’t think this is one of them… The storyline is fairly silly, the characters shallow, and the missed forensic clues must be everywhere… Nevertheless it is a pretty enjoyable watch, but a thriller it is not. It is almost slapstick.
Pain & Gain
Michael Bay + Marky Mark + The Rock…? That doesn’t bode well…
So I started watching it with some trepidation. Guess what: it is surprisingly entertaining. No spoilers so I won’t go into the story, but these guys have lost the plot. And this is supposedly not even just based on a true story, it effectively is a (Bay-ified) docudrama of the actual events. The acting is surprisingly good – The Rock is funny in his reborn stupidity; Tony Shalboub is on form as asshole/victim, and Mark Wahlberg is believable as the man-with-a-plan.