Tag Archives: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Terminator Genisys (2015)

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Terminator Genisys
Director: Alan Taylor
Writer: Laeta Kalogridis, Patrick Lussier
Sequel to: Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, J.K. Simmons, Dayo Okeniyi, Matt Smith, Courtney B. Vance, Byung-hun Lee
Seen on: 21.7.2015

Plot:
Since the machines have taken over the world, John Connor (Jason Clarke) has been leading the human resistance. To make sure that he can actually do that, John has to make sure that he is actually born as the machines sent a killer back in time to kill his mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke) before she gives birth. So John sends his best friend Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) in the past as well, giving him specific instructions on how things are. But as Kyle arrives in the past, he finds that it doesn’t actually match John’s memories. So he has to figure out how to navigate this changed past.

After Terminator Salvation, I was prepared for this film to be extra bad. So I packed my trusted bottle of alcohol and steeled myself for atrociousness. But while there could have been a second bottle of alcohol, easy, I found that I was honestly entertained by Terminator Genisys, despite the astonishing amount of stupidity contained within. Or maybe because of it.

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The Expendables 3 (2014)

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The Expendables 3
Director: Patrick Hughes
Writer: Sylvester Stallone, Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt
Sequel to: The Expendables, The Expendables 2
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, Antonio Banderas, Jet Li, Kelsey Grammer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Glen Powell, Victor Ortiz, Ronda Rousey, Kellan Lutz

Plot:
Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and the rest of his crew (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Jet Li) have just freed former Expendable Doc (Wesley Snipes) from prison and are headed to Somalia now to take down an arms dealer. Said arms dealer – Stonebanks (Mel Gibson) – turns out to be another former Expendable, a founding member in fact. The fight quickly turns extremely personal and Barney, worried that they are all too old for the job, decides to find younger fighters to get rid of Stonebanks once and for all.

It might have been the overexposure because of the triple feature (I doubt it) but Expendables 3 didn’t blow me away. It wasn’t as funny as the second one and the host of new characters the throw at you is seriously displaced.

expendables3

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Re-Watch: The Expendables 2 (2012)

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The Expendables 2
Director: Simon West
Writer: Richard Wenk, Sylvester Stallone
Sequel to: The Expendables
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Nan Yu, Liam Hemsworth, Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Charisma Carpenter
[Here’s my first review.]

Plot:
Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and the rest of his crew (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Jet Li and Liam Hemsworth) have just saved a Chinese businessman who was kidnapped, when Church (Bruce Willis) calls in a favor: they are supposed to retrieve something from a safe in a crashed plane in the Albanian mountains. To crack that safe, they need to take Maggie (Nan Yu) along (though Yin Yang [Jet Li] stays in China). What should be a very quick and not very eventful mission, goes south when Villain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) appears.

When I saw Expendables 2 for the first time, I finally watched the kind of film I wanted The Expendables (1) to be and it made me happy (I liked it so much I watched the first one again which I shouldn’t have). On second watch it isn’t quite as good anymore, but it is still above and beyond the first film.

The_Expendables_2

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Re-Watch: The Expendables (2010)

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The Expendables
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Writer: Dave Callaham, Sylvester Stallone
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Charisma Carpenter, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger
[Here’s my first review.]

Plot:
The Expendables are a group of mercenaries, most notably Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Ying Yang (Jet Li) and Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren). They mostly go around blowing up bad guys and getting tattoos from Tool (Mickey Rourke), who always throws some wisdom into the mix. When Barney gets the job to get rid of the General, a tyrant on a small Latin-American Island, he has to face is own humanity. And he has to blow a lot of shit up.

I knew that The Expendables wasn’t a good film. In the spirit of completism and masochism, puzzledpeaces and me decided to take the release of the third one as the perfect opportunity to make it a triple feature. So here we are and I can honestly say that it is even worse than I remembered.

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Escape Plan (2013)

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Escape Plan
Director: Mikael Håfström
Writer: Miles Chapman, Jason Keller
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel, Faran Tahir, Amy Ryan , Sam Neill, Vincent D’Onofrio, Vinnie Jones, 50 Cent

Plot:
Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) works as a security consultant, basically: it’s his job to test prison security system by getting incarcerated and then breaking out. But his newest assignment doesn’t go as planned. He gets taken differently than agreed on, he finds himself facing the sadistic warden Hobbes (Jim Caviezel) instead of the person who knew about his real identity and the prison seems impossible to break out of. But at least he finds support for his breakout plans in fellow prisoner Emil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Escape Plan has all the markings of a craptastic film. And parts of it are as shitmazing as I expected them to be. But unfortunately I found myself pretty bored during most of the film despite that.

escape_plan

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The Expendables 2 (2012)

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The Expendables 2
Director: Simon West
Writer: Richard Wenk, Sylvester Stallone
Sequel to: The Expendables
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Nan Yu, Liam Hemsworth, Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Charisma Carpenter

Plot:
Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and the rest of his crew (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Jet Li and Liam Hemsworth*) have just saved a Chinese businessman who was kidnapped, when Church (Bruce Willis) calls in a favor: they are supposed to retrieve something from a safe in a crashed plane in the Albanian mountains. To crack that safe, they need to take Maggie (Nan Yu) along (though Yin Yang [Jet Li] stays in China**). What should be a very quick and not very eventful mission, goes south when Villain*** (Jean-Claude Van Damme) appears.

The Expendables 2 is everything The Expendables should have been already, but was too shoddily directed and taking itself way too seriously for. In this one, they just go with the flow and end up with a film that is pretty damn satisfying.

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Re-Watch: Total Recall (1990)

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Total Recall
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Writer: Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, Gary Goldman, Jon Povill
Based on: Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, Marshall Bell

Plot:
Douglas Quail (Arnold Schwarzenegger) would be happily married to Lori (Sharon Stone), if it wasn’t for a recurring dream where he’s on Mars with a mysterious woman. He decides to confront this dream by going to Rekall Inc., a company that provides real-seeming memories of vacations in the most exotic places – like Mars. But the Rekall treatment triggers actual memories and suddenly Doug finds himself in the middle of the revolution on Mars as a spy.

I had completely forgotten how absolutely campy and gory this movie is. That completely makes up for the rather lackluster performances. It’s amazingly fun to watch. Plus, they actually improved the original story.

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The Expendables (2010)

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The Expendables is Sylvester Stallone‘s vanity project, starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Charisma Carpenter, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Plot:
The Expendables are a group of mercenaries, most notably Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Ying Yang (Jet Li) and Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren). They mostly go around blowing up bad guys and getting tattoos from Tool (Mickey Rourke), who always throws some wisdom into the mix. When Barney gets the job to get rid of the General, a tyrant on a small Latin-American Island, he has to face is own humanity. And he has to blow a lot of shit up.

The Expendables should have been great cinema: that cast and a bunch of fights and explosions, whatever could go wrong? The answer is simple: Sylvester Stallone. He should have never directed it, and neither he nor any of the other writers should be allowed to get within 200 meters of a script ever again. Also, everyone in this project should grow a sense of humor (except for Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who seem to have one already).

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quick good night story

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I should be in bed right now. But I had to share this with you. Studying my blog statistics, two things struck me as odd.

  1. search term used: “joseph fiennes pregnant”
    I can honestly say: I hope he’s not! I keep getting flashs of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior. Though I really loved this movie when I was a kid, I don’t want to see it happen in real life…
  2. Somebody translated my entry about German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz to German with the google translator. I know that usually, only crap comes from automatic translating programs but google saw it fit to translate my perfectly neutral “the teacher” into “die Lehrerin”, which is female and especially wrong because it was a male teacher in the book.
    I wouldn’t object to it if they made everything female but police officer stays male in the translation, as does painter and expressionist.
    Not fair and not good.

Sorry, if I wasn’t completely coherent, I’m very tired right now. Sleep.

— 

Edit:
Ok, I almost got six hours of sleep so I can see that my first point might be misunderstood. So a quick note on that:
I’d love to see men get pregnant. That would really be cool. But I wouldn’t want it to end up like in Junior with all the hiding and being followed and the complications.
Also, men have no pain threshold to speak of when sport’s not involved [I know, I’m generalising and prejudiced and sooo PunC but that’s my experience], so I guess it could be easier to just get the child yourself.

Anyway, Joseph Fiennes, if you are pregnant, congratulations! And let the world know how it’s done! But only, if the child’s mother confirms that pregnant men are bearable. :P