TheRetroCritic

Also known as Jet , Ground Control was a 1998 Kiefer Sutherland flick about a disgraced ex-air traffic controller called back in to help manage a particularly difficult situation. The film sounded like it could offer some cheap Airport 1975 or Die Hard 2 -style entertainment. Man did it not do that, like, at all. As it turns out, the entire film was made to show how difficult air traffic controllers' jobs are, having to monitor several aircrafts on several different paths just by looking at abstract Atari-style monitors. It's a fair enough endeavour but this was also meant to be a film and in terms of drama and excitement, Ground Control is about as fun as a night spent sleeping on one of those uncomfortable airport seats. If you close your eyes and listen to Kiefer Sutherland's voice speaking over the score, you could fool yourself into believing you were watching the worst season of 24 ever made but even that would have been miles better than what the film offer

After the success of Once Upon A Time In China , it was time for Jet Li to set aside his serious face for a bit and try something a tad lighter. The Wong Fei-hung films are great, don't get me wrong, but the tone throughout these movies is all-over-the-place, so much so that whenever it does attempt to lighten things up a bit that tends to come off as a bit distracting. The Legend does have its weird tone-shifts but they work well as a whole. Jet Li's Fong Sai-Yuk is much less of a flawless superhero than Fei-hung, he's a mischievous kid who happens to be good at martial arts due to his mother being a true badass. Yes, his mother. It's not everyday that a film's hero is upstaged by his mommy but Josephine Siao is so good she actually steals the show rather effortlessly. At first it's all a bit dodgy with her and her son having to take a beating from Kong Chu's father in order to keep his reputation as the strong head of the family intact but later

Putting such a crazy-epic cast together should really be enough to make a good movie. And yet the past has shown that no matter how many famous faces you cram into a flick, it's just not sufficient. Remember the original Casino Royale ? Yeah, that had Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and Orson Welles: terrible. Mars Attacks! had a crazy-big cast but that was a good, fun movie. The Expendables , however, was not. The first movie really was a missed opportunity to say the least. You had a cast that included Stallone, Statham, Rourke, Lundgren, Jet friggin' Li and yet what we got was an instantly forgettable mess. Now with The Expendables 2 we've got more Arnie, more Bruce Willis, a good bunch of newcomers (Van Damme, Norris), how could that movie be anything BUT awesomeness itself? Well, frankly I have no idea but this sequel certainly isn't "awesomeness itself". That said, I gotta admit it is better than the first film in that it at least gives us a dece

Here’s a film which might as well have been called « Giant Cock and Balls ». The testosterone involved in this Sly-directed pumped-up action best-of is simply overpowering. And yet, I would say, not quite overpowering enough. By this I mean the lack of so many other worthy action stars such as Kurt Russell, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Vin Diesel, JCVD, The Rock (and yes even Hulk Hogan, Wesley Snipes and Jackie Chan would have been welcome!) makes this feel like HALF of the biggest, most badass action film ever, not the actual thing. And yet all this isn’t even the film’s biggest problem. With awful dialogs, dire direction and terrible acting plaguing such a potentially awesome film, The Expendables just fails to impress on almost all accounts. Instead of showing off how cool these guys were, Sly manages to show up how bad, how unspeakably bad their acting really is. Rourke, Roberts and Statham just about get away with it but pretty much everyone else is painful to watch. Lundgren’