Category Archives: 00’s movies
Robocop Prime Directives: Dark Justice
Robocop Prime Directives: Dark Justice 2001
While the two Robocop sequels aren’t that well known at this point, they did at least get a theatrical release. What’s even lesser known is this Canadian miniseries that takes place ten years after the events of the first movie and moves things away from Detroit to Delta City, and yet continues to have multiple flashbacks from Murphy’s time as a police officer in Detroit. This is the first of those movies and while it’s not quite the TV series or cartoon which made Robocop much more family friendly, this returns to the violent and satiric tone of the first film, although with much less talent behind the writing, acting, and special effects. It’s an interesting concept, but very little was done with it to make things more interesting than a low budget, TV movie.
The Phantom
The Phantom 2009
This is one of the very few superhero miniseries that I know of, it aired on the Sci-Fi channel back in 2009 in two parts. While it was initially conceived of as a backdoor pilot it never actually materialized into a series. There are extremely loose ties to the 90’s Billy Zane Phantom movie, but for the most part this updated the Phantom into the 21st century as a teen aged, parkour loving douchebag with an updated costume that gives him a few extra super powers. But as a miniseries, it takes way too much time trying to set up all the relationships and the new Phantom as a character, but that ultimately makes most of this miniseries uninteresting. There are only a few action set pieces, the villains are uninspired, and there’s a plot twist that I saw coming the moment the character stepped on screen. It’s not awful by any means, but it’s just incredibly mediocre.
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Krrish
Krrish 2006
Continuing on after watching Koi… Mil Gaya I finally watched the first actual superhero part of this Bollywood trilogy. But even then the film surprised me to a certain extent as it is still mostly a romantic comedy with a supernatural angle to it where the actual superheroics don’t come into play until around the two hour mark of a three hour film. But where Koi… Mil Gaya had some problematic elements with its romance, there was none of that here and while it also fell into a few sitcom-esque cliches, it was a whole lot more fun to watch. It ultimately turned into an odd combination of Tarzan, Superman, and Spider-Man but it all somehow worked well together. Even the musical numbers were less distracting and felt fewer and further between as well.
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Almost Super: Koi… Mil Gaya
Almost Super: Koi… Mil Gaya 2003
This was one of the first foreign titles that I had heard of to add to my big superhero movie list as it is the first movie in the Bollywood Krrish trilogy where Krrish and Krrish 3 are both clearly superhero movies, but even early on I had heard that this had very little to do with superheroes at all. But over at Cinefessions they are holding an annual Summer Screams Challenge that I decided to join in this year, and as part of that challenge there are weekly themes. The theme this week happens to be foreign sci-fi & horror films with a bonus if you watch an entire trilogy. So I thought this would be the perfect time to finally watch and review this Krrish trilogy. I’m not entirely well versed in Bollywood films, but I have seen a couple so I knew roughly what to expect: long run times and random musical interludes. I wasn’t entirely expecting the whole Flowers for Algernon subplot that took up the entire first third of an almost three hour movie. But even with that in mind, this was still a generally enjoyable film that fell into a few cliched traps along the way.
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Underdog
Underdog 2007
I’m starting to get back on the bandwagon of this site by continuing where I had left off when I made a Twitter poll asking what type of films I should watch next and kids films won. I’ve actually owned this one on DVD for quite a while and have seen parts of it more than once as my daughter was a fan of this movie. I wouldn’t quite say that I was a huge fan of the original Underdog cartoon, but I had seen several episodes and from what I remember I enjoyed them well enough. But when this film came out, I could tell that it was just a shlocky kids film trying to cash in on a little bit of nostalgia and somehow wrangled a handful of decent names, or at least names that were on the rise like Peter Dinklage and Amy Adams. Jason Lee was a bit of a mixed bag as this was also the same year that he starred in the live-action Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. But as expected, this is a schlocky kids movie that felt like it was trying too hard to cash in on a random piece of nostalgia while missing the mark as to what made that property great in the first place.
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Lightspeed
Lightspeed 2006
I think it’s kind of funny that lately I’ve been visiting my local library a bit more often and I will keep an eye out for movies that might be on my list that I haven’t reviewed yet. This is one that I noticed, but for a long while decided against picking it up, but I would still keep checking on it from time to time and I noticed that just about every other time I would go there, this movie would be checked out. The only thing I really knew about it was that it was yet another one of those Stan Lee original movies that aren’t affiliated with Marvel, along with the likes of Mosaic, the Condor, and Mighty 7. The only difference is that this one is actually a live action movie that was made for the Sci-Fi channel despite the cover art character who looks like a CGI character with way more muscles than Jason Connery. It totally feels like a very low budget TV movie that essentially creates a middle aged Flash in order to fight the Lizard except he’s the Python. It was pretty poor on all levels, from characters to plot to special effects.
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Push
Push 2009
I’m continuing on my quest to finish off the last few popular superhero and comic book movies that I haven’t gotten around to yet, going by a reasonable metric of 50,000 IMDB user ratings I should have them covered by the end of this month at the rate I’m going. And somewhat surprisingly two of these films have Chris Evans in them. Push was one of those films that went past me in theaters. Honestly, there was a big gap in my theater movie watching from 2007 to about 2010 as when my daughter was born at the end of 2006, we stopped going to the theater until she was about 4 or 5. Judging by the trailers, it looked like a generic action movie about pared down X-Men and as little as I had paid attention to it, I always assumed it was Selma Blair in the Camilla Belle role. But when I actually sat down and watched it, it was like a pared down version of X-Men that focused on the characters and had a fascinating plot device that it was built around. By the time it was over, I really enjoyed this film and I’m disappointed that it seems to have faded into relative obscurity with only a small cult of fans who really enjoy it.
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Art School Confidential
Art School Confidential 2006
2016 is almost over and I’ve come down to my last movie review of the year. I didn’t quite achieve any of my movie related goals that I had set for myself at the beginning of the year. I’ve only seen 9 movies in the theaters, one short of my goal. I haven’t watched every 2016 release, though Max Steel will follow shortly thereafter, and I didn’t get too far on my goal to watch every movie on my list from 2010 and later. But I have watched a large number of superhero and comic book movies. This one is one of those movies that I realized I knew nothing at all about. I knew it was about art school and it was based on a comic by the same author as Ghost World, even the same director. Somehow, I had the impression that it was a generally well-liked film, though when I looked up the various metrics, it actually has a mediocre to below-average consensus. And like several other movies that I’ve watched in the past couple months, it started out with an intriguing premise, but then faltered by the time it came to its conclusion. I tend to be a fan of coming of age movies, and I honestly saw quite a bit of myself in the main character, and then it went into a bizarre downward spiral that just didn’t make any sense any more. It made me laugh, but not enough to recommend it as a comedy.
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Silver Hawk
Silver Hawk 2004
I took a bit of an unexpected break over the holidays, but the other day I decided to pop in another movie that’s been sitting in my DVD collection for a while just waiting to be reviewed. I hadn’t heard much about this movie aside from the fact that it has Michael Jai White in a villain role and Michelle Yeoh in the lead. I also had a feeling that it was a bit of a cheesy action movie. I didn’t quite expect the level of humor that was present throughout most of the film, but especially in the latter half. There were some good elements, some familiar elements, but it could have been improved quite a bit with some better cinematography as much of the fighting was marred by poor camera work and odd moments of slow motion. It wasn’t quite the camp level of Batman 66, but there was some fun to be had here.
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Jumper
Jumper 2008
Every once in a while I still come across a movie that I have to make a decision on whether or not it falls into my criteria of a superhero movie. Sometimes, like with the film the Destructor, it falls just outside of that criteria for one reason or another. Other times, like in this case, it falls just inside. This is a film about kids with super powers, set in the real world in the current era, and it’s hard to think of another actor that could be a more theatrical villain than Samuel L. Jackson with stark white hair leading a group called “paladins”. There aren’t any costumes or alter egos, and it was based on a novel rather than a comic book, but I think there’s enough here for me to go on. Replace jumping with telekinesis and you’ve got Chronicle which very few people argue against it being a superhero movie. But as for the actual quality of the film itself, it stars a post-Episode III Hayden Christensen as a rather bland character, but at least the film does have quite a bit of fun with the teleportation concept.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 