U-571 |
Unbreakable |
Urban Legend |
Urban Legends: The Final Cut |
U.S. Marshals
U-571 (2000)
(PG-13)
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A crew from the Navy is ordered to find a German code machine during WWII by pretending to be German and boarding the submarine that the machine is on. They end up having to use all their resources to fight a German destroyer ship with a limited crew and weapons. A decent suspense film, with good directing and acting. The characters weren't as interesting as I would have liked and several scenes ran a little long, but overall it was able to create some good suspense and bring the story alive, making it an good, if not terrific film.
Links:
Official Studio Site
Film.com's Review
Radio Free's Review
Roger Ebert's Review
Unbreakable (2000)
(PG-13)
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Bruce Willis plays a security guard who meets a man (Samuel L. Jackson) with bones that are more sensitive to impacts than most people. Jackson happens to be a big fan of comic books, and because of events in the movie, believes that Willis may be a real life version of a superhero. The movie is fairly intriguing, creating an interesting story and characters. However, the story did seem a little contrived, as if all the pieces were falling together a little too easily and in the standard Hollywood, slightly removed from reality way. Also, both the story and the twist ending weren't quite as interesting as writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's last movie, The Sixth Sense. Overall, all the elements of the movie were well done and help make a fairly entertaining film, but the plot could have used a little more of a reality check to make it really good.
Links:
Official Studio Site
Robert Horton's Film.com Review
Sean Means' Film.com Review
Roger Ebert's Review
Urban Legend (1998)
(R)
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Someone is killing students on a collage campus. This is another take on the Scream style of movie making (such as I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween H2O, and a few others). It did offer a few good scares, and fans of this type of movie will enjoy it, but it had a little too much talk and not enough horror for me. The talk all lead to the climax of the film, which was actually a little too unoriginal and not worth all the time devoted to it. The movie is almost worth it for some of the scares, though.
Links:
Official Studio Site
Urban Legends: The Final Cut (2000)
(R)
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A group of film school students work on a movie involving a killer murdering victims by imitating urban legends, while a real killer starts killing people at the school. This movie had a big problem trying to decide exactly what it wanted to be, with the result that every fifteen or twenty minutes it felt as if I was watching a completely new film. The movie swings from being painfully gross to just a little bloody, from being slightly creative to depending entirely on clichés, and from attempts at suspense to jump-out-of-the-shadows surprises to humor and back again. The different parts don't add up very well, making this a rather boring attempt at a horror movie. And to top it off, the killer was a character that got a pitifully small amount of screen time and had a very week excuse for what he was doing.
Links:
Oficial Studio Site
Gemma Files' Film.com Review
John Hartl's Film.com Review
Roger Ebert's Review
U.S. Marshals (1998)
(R)
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A great continuation of the story of the characters from The Fugitive. Tommy Lee Jones has a new fugitive to chase, and he
and his team of U.S. Marshals take pursuit. This movie has a lot of the same plot ideas as the first one, but twists them enough
so it feels like a different story. The focus of this movie was also changed, from the escapee to the marshals, giving them the
ability to develop these characters a lot more that they were able to in the first movie. I was surprised by how forgettable they made the fugitive character in this movie, though. Wesley Snipes plays him well, but doesn't have much to work with. If the fugitive character was stronger, this movie would have been great. As it is, though, this is still a very good suspense film.
Links:
Movie Mania's U.S. Marshals Page
Radio Free's Review
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