Movies -- A Recap -- Part XXIV -- The Shoot-'Em-Up Edition

Jungle Cruise is not a particularly good movie.  It was amusing though, especially the amount of gay sexual innuendo, which I certainly did not expect.  If you have nothing else to do on a Tuesday night, this will get you through to bedtime.

When I saw The Last Boy Scout, I thought I had found the origin story for the Die Hard movies.  It turns out that Die Hard preceded TLBS by three years; even Die Hard 2 came out a year earlier.  I guess by that point Bruce Willis had been typecast into the role of lovable-loser-who-comes-through-in-the-end.  But hey, if it's working for you, why change it?  Here, he plays a PI trying to solve a murder and root out some corruption in the meantime.  What I'll say about this (and the early Die Hard movies too, for that matter) is that there's something great and simple about 80s and 90s action movies (and older).  The plots and stories were simple.  The effects were simple.  But that is kind of great.  It's not all computer-generated explosions and unintelligible techno-jargon.  Just good guys and bad guys.

I'm slowly re-working my way through The Hunger Games films.  Most recent was Catching Fire.  You can see what I wrote about it the first time I saw it here.

S cued up The Adam Project for one of our flights somewhere, and I thought it was a great pick.  I'm a sucker for Ryan Reynolds when he's doing his funny superhero thing (see also: Deadpool). The kid in this movie was funny too, which is a bonus.  Some genuine laughs. I was thrown off by the whole time-travel-movie-where-Jennifer-Garner-and-Mark-Ruffalo-are-together thing (see also: 13 Going On 30).  In case anyone is wondering what happens in this one, Ryan Reynolds accidentally comes back from the future and meets his younger self.  Together they have to save the world.  Sounds simple enough.

Unhinged was creepy because to at least some degree (and as the subtitle indicates) some version of what goes on could happen to anyone, anywhere.  Russell Crowe has the ability to look entirely and genuinely menacing.

Dirty Harry is another one of those films that had been a hole in my (and also S's) movie-viewing history.  For something that came out in 1971, it was raunchier than I expected, but nevertheless one of those straight up good-guy-versus-bad-guy films. And now at least I know what scene(s) that famous line comes from.

On our trips to/from Germany, our airline had, among its offerings, a whole slew of James Bond movies available for viewing.  I watched Goldfinger, Skyfall, and No Time to Die.  Let's face it: all these movies are the same.  But that doesn't mean they're not a rollicking good time.  It's a formula, but it works.  Goldfinger was definitely heavy on the old-school chauvinism, and I also noticed (because I was working at the time too) how much of it was just sound effects with no dialogue.  I had to do a lot of looking up from what I was doing to know what was going on.  Skyfall it turns out I had seen before.  But I like Daniel Craig so I went with it. No Time to Die is the latest addition to the franchise, and in case you haven't seen it yet, I won't spoil anything.  All good fun.