David Vining's Blog, page 6

Mark Review: The Naked Gun (2025) 3/5 stars

TL;DR – An honest attempt at a sequel, if you go into it looking for a comedy, you’ll have a good time. Liam Neeson does a pretty good job playing Frank Drebin Jr, carving out a new genre for himself.  It’s not as good as the original but it might be better than the 3rd sequel.

Full, rambling review:

A funny thing happened when I went to see The Naked Gun sequel (TNGs hereafter). Well more than one funny thing, it was a comedy and I did laugh out loud a few times, but the main thing is...

Taken 2

I was expecting to like this movie a lot less than I did. It has just enough spark in just enough sections to raise it from tired repeat to moderately entertaining…in spurts. The continuing adventures of Brian Mills and his family getting taken by Albanian gangster has no idea how to get to the action in any kind of efficient manner, twisting itself into knots to justify the action, and filling the film with stilted character interactions that kind of just undermine any attempt at emotional ...

Taken

A dad movie through and through, Taken is the story of an older man who wrecks the world in pursuit of a singular goal: saving a member of his family. It’s quick at only 90-minutes long, efficient in its storytelling without detours, and focused on the bare bones of what it needs to do to entertain and get off the stage. It’s not high art. I has modest ambitions, and it fulfills those ambitions with professional competence that does no more than what it needs to do.

Brian Mills (Liam Nees...

Taken: A Statement of Purpose

For scheduling purposes, I need a break of three films. So, what trilogy should I do?

Well, a lot of the more interesting ones I’ve found are too tied to individual filmmakers, so I settled on Taken.

Culturally, the trilogy is an interesting artifact. The first movie was a complete fluke driven by an actor deciding to do something different and solid action chops on the part of the director to create a very simple man-on-a-mission adventure.

And it continued for two sequels.

It’s...

Dead Bang

John Frankenheimer is in a real funk. Another largely dull, disconnected thriller without much other than some very basic genre appeal, Dead Bang is a wet squib of a genre exercise, poorly structured and just kind of not all that interesting as the rogue cop goes well beyond his jurisdiction. He’s more of a sadsack than a compelling Martin Riggs ripoff, and he just drags the whole film down with him.

Los Angeles homicide detective Jerry Beck (Don Johnson) is brought into investigate the d...

52 Pickup

John Frankenheimer adapts an Elmore Lenoard novel, and it’s a largely unremarkable erotic thriller, a genre with previous few actually good movies in it. Telling a story of the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles without every progressing outside of its core group of badly intentioned characters or successfully making the good characters caught in the net particularly likeable. It’s a milquetoast exploration of thriller elements that doesn’t really connect. But, it’s competent at least.

Harry...

Ivan Reitman: A Retrospective

Ivan Reitman is not someone many people would hold up as an example for auteur theory. I think auteur theory quickly ran amok from the original idea as posited by Francois Truffaut in his Cahiers du Cinema article which essentially amounted to a pair of writers were taking control of adaptations and missing the point of the original texts except when working with Jacques Cocteau. Combined with the magazines focus on directors like Hitchcock and Hawks, the idea became “directors are king” rat...

Vacation Update – Roma

Roma…I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this place until I got off the train at Termini.

And I got a few unsanctioned pics of the Sistene Chapel.

And not a single movie watched in days. Last was Conclave on the plane (pretty good, but a good night’s sleep would have been better).

Days!

Who have I become?

Roger Corman: A Retrospective

There’s a moment in the documentary Corman’s World, during a section dealing with Roger Corman’s lack of embrace by the film industry in Los Angeles that caught my attention. About a moment after Nicholson is mugging to the camera about how Corman had refused him more than scale for writing The Trip, which had led to Nicholson essentially cutting Corman out of any residuals from Easy Rider, Nicholson says “If Roger feels unappreciated, I’ll go over to his house tomorrow night.”

It’s a won...

The Holcroft Covenant

I get the impression that Robert Ludlum novels shouldn’t be adapted into film. They should be gutted, retained the title, and recrafted into something more…sensical. This adaptation by three writers and helmed by John Frankenheimer often makes little sense with too much time explaining things that never seem to matter in service to a plot that doesn’t seem to need to exist at all. It’s mostly kind of dull without any real clear reason why most of the film actually happens, but it has some mo...