The View From The Mountain

When I first heard about Unit 234 , I initially thought it was a war movie about an infamous unit that did war crimes. But then I saw the title referred to a unit in a storage facility. This storage facility is owned by a young woman named Laurie (Isabelle Fuhrman), who inherited it from her deceased parents. Laurie is settling in for an extremely rainy evening at work when she's visited by an older man named Jules (the always good Don Johnson), who claims to have lost his key to his storage unit, and he'd like for Laurie to give him another one. But when Laurie checks his account, she clearly sees that Jules isn't who he claims to be. And that's when the fun begins. I'm tempted to say that Unit 234 is another Die Hard ripoff, and it certainly fits into that sub genre of a hero battling villains in a specific and claustrophobic setting, but Unit 234 winds up being much better than most of the Die Hard wannabes. Don Johnson ( Miami Vice, A Boy and Hi...

I thought the first M3GAN , about a killer robot that goes on a bloody rampage, was fun. It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece, but I didn’t hate it, either. It treaded over the same familiar ground that the original Chucky movies did, but did a slightly better job of it--at least as far as a slasher film about a killer doll can go. The first M3GAN still did well enough to warrant a sequel three years later: M3GAN 2.0 . The sequel was a huge bomb at the box office, with its main producer, Jason Blum, actually going out and doing press to apologize for the “wrong turn” that the sequel made. But that "wrong turn" is exactly why I enjoyed M3GAN 2.0 so much. The sequel wisely throws out the horror trappings of the first film in favor of a more fast-paced, heavily science fiction-imbued action tale. M3GAN 2.0 opens with AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno), a super spy robot, on a mission into Iran, where she is tasked with finding a kidnapped scientist. But AMELIA goes r...

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

I was really looking forward to seeing Furiosa , despite these prequel-crazy times we’re living in where every movie, TV show, and book has to be a prequel that shows us exactly how Miles first met Becky, and how it almost always winds up an underwhelming exercise in frustration because it wasn‘t done very well. There are exceptions, like House of the Dragon (which is far superior to Game of Thrones ), Star Wars: Rogue One (a great movie that compliments the original Star Wars film), and--now having finally seen it--I can add the Mad Max prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to that esteemed list. The reason I had such high hopes for Furiosa was its director, George Miller, who brought his Mad Max saga back to rip-roaring life almost ten years ago with the incredible Mad Max: Fury Road . First starting out as a doctor in his native Australia, Miller has gone on to become an extremely talented film director over the course of his over forty year career. Furi...

I had always been a huge fan of the Planet of the Apes movies, from the moment my father took me to see Beneath the Planet of the Apes at the theater when I was very young. Beneath was the sequel to the original, seminal POTA , and it was a horror show dealing with subterranean humans who peeled off their faces to better worship their “God,” which was a super thermonuclear bomb. Just a toddler at the time, I fondly remembered my father abruptly pulling me into a tight hug every so often in the theater, and loving it then. But I didn’t realize, until much later, that my dad was actually making sure that I wasn’t staring at the screen whenever some of the still-disturbing images in Beneath occurred. I was greatly impressed with the smartly done POTA remakes that were recently released, starting with Rise of the Planet of the Apes , and so I looked forward to seeing the latest, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes , and I wasn’t disappointed. Taking place s...

Director Guy Ritchie is making a lot of movies, lately. Ritchie will make a big-league film--like Aladdin , for Disney--and then go off and make a mid-budget movie immediately afterward. And this is a good thing. Because the more Guy Ritchie films, the merrier. His latest, Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre , stars Jason Statham as Orson Fortune, a cool, suave, James Bond-type agent who does special missions for the British government. Cary Elwes plays Nathan, his long suffering handler, who constantly has to explain Fortune’s maverick antics to Knighton, their tedious boss at MI6 (well-played by long-time Ritchie collaborator Eddie Marsan). Fortune is called upon once more when an experimental weapon known only as “the Handle” has been stolen from a secret lab. Tracking the theft to international arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant, who seems to be having a lot of fun here), Fortune must stop Simmonds before he can sell the Handle to a buyer. Fortune is...

Zoë Kravitz, the future Catwoman, stars in Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest film. Kravitz plays an agoraphobic young woman who’s living through the pandemic in Seattle. She works for a tech company, fixing “bugs” that pop up in the code of Kimi, an Alexa-like computer assistant. Whenever Kimi mishears someone asking for something, or does something in error, it’s up to Kravitz’s character, Angela Childs, to make a note of what went wrong and how to fix it. This is a well-paying tech job that Angela does in her spacious, luxury apartment and she’s as happy as a clam. That is, until Angela hears something on a particular audio file, where Kimi was accidentally switched on while people were having a severe argument in the background. But as Angela cleans up the audio, she discovers to her horror that what initially sounded like an argument turns out to be a murder that Kimi had innocently recorded. Clocking in at just 90 minutes, Kim...

Daniel Craig exploded onto the scene as James Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale. And, after four 007 adventures, he calls it a day with No Time To Die, a film that was supposed to have been released back in 2020 but was pushed back for a year and a half, thanks to the pandemic. Apple and Netflix made multi-million dollar offers to the 007 people to air NTTD on their streaming services, but the Bond producers held out for a theatrical release, which they finally got in the fall of 2021. The irony here is that MGM, which releases the Bond films, was bought out by Amazon, which owns its own streaming service. James Bond is happily retired from spy craft and happily living with Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) in Italy--until their extended honeymoon is disrupted by the usual assassins who come out of the woodwork gunning for Bond. It turns out that Spectre, the criminal organization that Bond previously tangled with, is still very much active--and it looks as if Madeleine aided i...

When I was a kid, my G.I Joe figures were twelve inches tall, and they came with an assortment of vehicles, many of which I had. I was a kid back in the 1970s, and G.I. Joe then was mainly an adventurer, he was an Indiana Jones-type of explorer several years before Raiders of the Lost Ark had even been released. When the G.I Joe resurgence happened in the 1980s, I was too old to be playing with G.I. Joes, having given my old figures away to my younger cousins. Besides, I really didn’t care for the whole 80s craze of having the cartoons be nothing more than half hour commercials for the toys. When I heard they were making Snake Eyes, I originally thought it was going to be a remake of the Brian DePalma film starring Nicolas Cage as a cop trying to uncover a conspiracy during a hurricane in Atlantic City. In other words, I really had no knowledge of the “new” G.I. Joes--one of which is a dude dressed in all black who goes by the handle of Snake Eyes. But when I went in ...

Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley team up for Chaos Walking , a science fiction film that’s based on the book The Knife of Never Letting Go by author Patrick Ness. Ridley plays Viola, an astronaut who crash-lands on an alien planet that’s already been colonized by a first wave of settlers from Earth. The only problem is, she winds up in a settlement that consists only of men, with the women having vanished years before. And all of the men have a strange affliction where their thoughts can literally be seen and heard in the air around their heads. Holland plays Todd, the youngest member of the colony who comes to Viola’s aid--although it becomes an equal partnership as Viola and Todd fight to survive in a world gone mad! Chaos Walking was directed by Doug Liman, who’s done some pretty good films in the past (Edge of Tomorrow, Go), and it runs with its interesting premise of how all of the males’ thoughts on this planet are an open book (women’s thoughts remain ...

The Hunt is yet another tired adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game , a short story written by Richard Connell in 1924 and has been turned into motion pictures at least several dozen times (both officially and unofficially), starting with the 1932 film of the same name (which starred Fay Wray, who shot this film at night on the very same jungle sets where she shot King Kong during the day) and including the very silly (but still vastly entertaining) Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity in 1987. The basic story is that of a famous hunter who, growing bored with animals, decides to hunt humans for sport on his private island, instead. The Hunt is a variation of this theme, where a group of people are kidnapped and brought to the private hunting grounds belonging to wealthy elites who hunt them for sport. But for some strange reason, the people being hunted are given working guns and other assorted weapons--which was something that not even the hunter in the origi...