Author: Major Tom

Each and every year, you’re going to have great movies, terrible movies, and pretty much everything in between.  For every Black Panther, there’s a Ghost Rider, and for every Jaws, there’s a Sharknado.  It’s just gonna happen.  Movies of various quality are always coming out for one reason or another.  Sometimes, the film is rushed to meet a certain deadline, or the film-makers don’t care enough about the project.  On the flip-side, you’re also going to have movies that’ll just blow your mind at how awesome they truly are.  Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to discuss the best films of 2018, and I’m also going to start a new thing for each year called Lifetime Achievements.  It is not related to the American Film Institute’s award program, it’s just going to be my personal view on someone’s achievements within their lifetime.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.  2018, like any other year, has had its ups and downs in terms of movie quality.  For this post, I’m going to go over some of the movies that disappointed me the most.  These will include anything from major theatrical releases to short films.  I figure if one my posts is going to be pretty negative, I want to get this one out of the way first, so let’s get disappointed, shall we?

The Predator

This one hurts the most, as I’m a HUGE fan of the Predator franchise.  The original Schwarzenegger film is one of the all-time 80s classic action films.  The second film wasn’t as good, but I still enjoyed it, and even Predators was a pretty decent affair.  So….what the hell happened here?  I can’t be sure, but I believe that the sale of Fox Studios to Disney may have been a part of it, but there is some serious studio interference here.  The entire third act was re-written and re-shot into the nighttime mess that we got in theaters.  None of the characters are likable, and the kid is irritating.  The big bad Predator is a CGI monster, and the dogs are just plain stupid.  The movie definitely has its moments were it could be genuinely awesome, but Shane Black turned an action/horror/science fiction into a comedy where the humor doesn’t land.  I wasn’t laughing at all.  This movie is an embarrassment.  Shane Black, who starred in the original film, should be ashamed.  The only reason I would consider picking this up on Blu-Ray is to check out the deleted scenes, if there are any, and I would like to scope out the commentary track and see if Black is going to be forthcoming about what went wrong.  Honestly, Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem was a better movie.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Of all the films to make a sequel to, Sicario was NOT one of them.  I was curious about it, but to me, the first movie was perfectly self-contained and ended with a solid, yet down-beat conclusion.  It was a phenomenal film with amazing performances by Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro.  I want to know who green-lit this movie so I can smack them in the face for trying to turn Sicario into a franchise.  Why?  It didn’t need to happen.  It would have been one thing if the film was executed well, but the director they got was clearly way out of his league.  Del Toro and Brolin are still really good, but the rest of the film is a complete narrative disaster.  It’s violent and has fantastic action, but the story is awful.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

This was a serious miscalculation on Disney’s part.  After Star Wars and Lucasfilm were sold to Disney, they announced that Star Wars movies would be released on a yearly basis after the release of Episode VII.  I think a lot of people, at some point, knew that this plan was eventually going to backfire, and that’s exactly what happened.  Solo ended up not only being one of the least-anticipated films of the year, it ended being the worst-performing film in the franchise.  Having seen it a second and a third time, I see what they were trying to go for, but the execution was sloppy, with all sorts of behind-the-scenes issues, including the firing of Lord and Miller, the original directors.  This one was doomed right from the beginning.  I don’t hate it.  In fact, there’s stuff in here that’s actually really good, and I’m learning to like Alden Ehrenreich as young Han.  Unfortunately, the film’s performance has had a major effect on the films that were planned like the Boba Fett film and rumored Obi-Wan movie, neither of which is happening now.  Right now, they have to focus on making Episode IX the best possible film that they can make, other-wise, Star Wars is going to end up on the back-burner.  That breaks my heart, because I’m a huge Star Wars fan.

Braven

Jason Momoa has quickly become one of my favorite actors in the last decade.  From his performance Game of Thrones to his turn as Aquaman in Justice League, Jason is a fantastic actor.  The same can be said for Stephen Lang, who also stars in this film.  On the surface, the film seems like your typical back-woods thriller involving drug dealers and a stowaway kid.  When you begin to dig beneath the surface…..that’s all you’re getting.  The only things that make this film stand out are the location, which is set in Newfoundland and the acting.  That’s it.  Everything else is pretty much run-of-the-mill and generic.  Is it poorly done?  Not at all, but the film doesn’t do anything new with the formula and instead chooses to be a predictable action flick that only does the bare minimum.

Venom

After the release of the first Deadpool and Logan, Venom was announced.  That sounded awesome:  An R-rated Venom film featuring Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom?  What could go wrong?  Sony is what went wrong.  Sony and Reuben Fleischer, the director.  Instead of the uber-violent film that we should have gotten, we ended up with a watered-down generic origin story that’s saved only by Tom Hardy’s performance.  If it wasn’t for Tom Hardy, this movie would have bombed big time.  I enjoyed the film, don’t get me wrong, but it could have been so much more if it had better writers.  Honestly, an R-rating would not have saved the film.  Venom is a hard R-rated character that likes to chow down on people.  Holding that back was a big mistake.  I don’t care if it was meant to appeal to a wider audience.  The wider audience is not what Venom was created for.  Since Carnage has been all but confirmed to be in the next film, they really need to step up their game and make it an R-rated film, because you can’t make Kletus Kassidy a PG-13 character.  It won’t work.

Lucid, Thirsty, Bloodhunters, A Chase Sequence

When I was in London for the Fighting Spirit Film Festival, we got see a number of full-length feature films which were pretty awesome, but we also got to check out about 20 or so short films.  In my post about my experience in London, I listed the short films that I really enjoyed, which included Steam, Dead End, and Punch Me.  Well, here are some of the ones I didn’t particularly care for.  Lucid was one that I thought was awful.  The choreography, the concept, and the overall presentation was just plain….dull.  A Chase Sequence disappointed me quite a bit, because I was expecting a bit more in terms of fighting from Max Repossi.  He’s a fantastic martial artist, but this short film doesn’t do him any favors.  Bloodhunters was a really bizarre supernatural kind of film that just didn’t work for me in terms of action and story-telling.  Thirsty was basically nothing more than a demo reel.  It was well made, but there was really nothing else to it.  Now, I understand that most of these are short films and there’s a limited amount of things that you can do with a format like that, but some of them just weren’t that hot.  I hope to see these guys do better next time, because there is a lot of potential here.

While I can’t say that 2018 is the most disappointing year in film, as I haven’t been able to see everything that I wanted to see, there was just enough to think that either these studios and film-makers overdid it, or under-cooked their movies.  The results speak for themselves, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what comes our way in 2019.

For the longest time, I was like a lot of people when it came to direct to video movies: “If it goes direct to video, it must be avoided at all costs.  Theatrical released films are the only way to go.”  That may have been true 20 years ago, but things have changed considerably since then, especially towards the beginning of the new millennium.  With the advent of social media, digital and streaming platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, it’s actually a lot more cost-effective to skip the theatrical experience entirely, both for the film-makers as well as the audience.  That’s not to say that movie theaters are going away anytime soon, they’re not, but they’re not as relevant as they used to be.  Some film-makers like Christopher Nolan are lamenting the fact that people actually have options when it comes to watching movies.  You really can’t beat the convenience of clicking on Netflix and starting a movie.  Easy as pie, right?  There is something to be said for the theatrical experience that Netflix can’t provide, especially for movies that were designed for the big screen like Star Wars.  I think there is a place for both the theatrical experience as well as the home experience when it comes to movies.  A lot of indie film-makers tend to skip the theatrical option for a number of reasons which includes the cost of having to deal with the MPAA.  Also, Netflix and YouTube provide an outlet for indie film-makers to make their films a lot more accessible to general audiences.  Marketing is also not as prohibitive with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.  The idea of the direct-to-video is not the deal-breaker that it once was.  In fact, it’s often the better option for many film-makers, because it allows them to avoid certain pitfalls that come with dealing with major studios and ratings boards.  For this list, I’m going to go over some of my favorite films that went straight-to-video.  I’m going to go over the films that went straight to DVD for this list.  Netflix is going to be another one entirely, so stay tuned for that one as well.

The Debt Collector

Scott Adkins is going to be a name that comes up a lot, especially for fans of DTV action movies.  He’s made a name for himself in a lot of fantastic action movies, but films like Accident Man and The Debt Collector are giving the man a lot more to chew on than kicking people’s asses.  He still does that here, but he’s given quite a bit more to do here.  Director Jesse V. Johnson takes a different approach here by infusing the action with humor as well as heart, which surprised the hell out of me when I first saw this.  Adkins also works better when he’s teamed with other actors that can also bring it like Louis Mandylor.  The chemistry between these two is what drives the film and is easily one of the strongest elements of the picture.  The action is down, dirty and violent, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  There’s also a pervasive sense of humor throughout the film.  A lot of that is brought by Scott himself, and he’s got some pretty good comedic timing.  Overall, The Debt Collector is a film that would easily recommend to anyone.

Mandy

If there is a film equivalent to an acid trip, Mandy would be it.  This movie is insane.  Everybody knows that Nicolas Cage is known for being to able to got bat-shit crazy at a moment’s notice in his movies, but his performance here is something really unique.  The film does take a bit to get going, but when it does, it’s one of the most surreal and otherworldly experiences you will ever have.  It’s definitely violent, but it’s also darkly beautiful.  The story is basically your typical revenge plot-line but with Nicolas Cage.  But Mandy isn’t about the story.  It’s about the experience….and boy what an experience this film is.  There’s a lot of shit here that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it wasn’t meant to.  It’s an absolutely mind-blowing film that isn’t for everyone.  Some people are going to be turned off by the film’s content, but I really dug the film and the direction it took.  Nicolas Cage continues to prove that despite some of his choices in movies, he’s still one of the best performers in the business.

Revenge

Speaking of revenge thrillers: Revenge.  Rape-revenge thrillers are generally unsettling and uncomfortable by their very nature, but when done right, they can be some of the most compelling films that you will ever see.  Revenge tells the story of a rich white dude and his bubbly girlfriend as they head to a house out in the middle of nowhere, when the girl is assaulted and left for dead.  Now, while most films in this genre tend to go straight to the revenge part right after the assault, we get to see the girl survive being impaled on a tree and work her way up to becoming a serious bad-ass.  This is a brutal film, make no mistake about it.  If you have a weak stomach, avoid it, but if you can stomach the violence, this is an incredible film that is worth checking out.

Fist 2 Fist 2: Weapon of Choice

This particular film is special to me because it introduced me to hapkido master Jino Kang, who I got to finally meet in person when I was in London.  Weapon of Choice is the movie that made me a huge fan of Master Kang’s.  This guy is the real deal.  While the film certainly isn’t perfect, considerable effort was made in to not making this one another run-of-the-mill action flick.  There’s actually a serious amount of thought and philosophical ideas that went into the story and it makes for a more fulfilling experience.  The fight choreography is fantastic and the last 20 minutes of the film is a non-stop bad-ass thrill-ride.

Final Score

After Die Hard’s release in 1988, there have been a lot of movies that have tried to replicate the film’s success, most of which failed miserably.  Final Score is former WWE wrestler Dave Bautista’s latest action flick.  The film follows Bautista’s character, Knox, as he takes his niece to a soccer game in London, when the arena comes under attack from a renegade Eastern European general.  The film borrows heavily from films like Die Hard and Sudden Death, but it takes the best parts of those movies and crafts something that’s really good.  Dave Bautista not only shows that he can do action as well as anybody else, he also gives a very strong performance.  Yeah, the film’s predictable, but I’ll be damned if it ain’t awesome.  The quality of the stunts and action and how the film looks, I’m surprised this didn’t get a wide theatrical release.  It’s that good.

The Day After

This one’s a little different, because it’s a TV movie from 1983.  It didn’t hit theaters, so it still counts as DTV.  This is a film about nuclear war and it deals with the ramifications of a full-blown nuclear conflict between Russia and the United States.  While we don’t see anything on the Russian side, we see what happens on American soil.  Even 35 years after the film’s release, The Day After is still one of the most haunting and powerful movies released in the early 80s.  It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re interested in how realistic a nuclear attack on the United States could be.

Buybust

You don’t see a lot of movies coming out of the Philippines, especially ones that take place during the country’s war on drugs.  This is an absolutely brutal and visceral action flick that pulls no punches.  It follows a group of police enforcers as they try to apprehend a notorious drug lord only to end up trapped between the gang and the pissed off civilians who are sick of both sides.  It leads to some really intense shoot-outs and action sequences that are very violent.  It’s not just an action film, but it is a film that sends a very direct message to the country’s administration.  This one definitely comes highly recommended.

It’s amazing how many of these movies actually hit home video THIS year.  We are seeing a very interesting change in how movies are distributed and viewed by audiences.  Theaters, while they still have their place, are no longer the only option to see new movies.  In fact, with Aquaman coming out next month, Amazon Prime subscribers can actually see the film one week before it hits theaters.  This is the direction we are going now.  Yeah, some film-makers aren’t particularly happy about, but to be honest, the film-going experience has deteriorated in certain respects.  That being said, I think people shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss films that skip the theater entirely.  DTV movies these days actually have more effort put into them than you would think.  Sy-Fy Channel movies, though?  It’s okay to skip those ones.

Over the past decade, I’ve noticed an increase of surprisingly high-quality direct-to-video films.  Movies like Fist 2 Fist 2: Weapon of Choice, Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, Revenge, The Debt Collector, and Accident Man all prove that you can have a really good movie that doesn’t go to theaters, and still end up being more entertaining than their big-budget brethren.  There’s been a lot of really good DTV movies that came out this year, and I just mentioned only a handful.  However, over the course of several decades, I’ve seen a number of big-budget theatrical releases that really have no business being in the cinema.  How do they end up in theaters?  Money and brand-name recognition.  Now, the movies that I’m going to mention are ones that weren’t successful, and they bombed so hard that it makes you wonder if any effort was put into them.  To be fair, some of these films I’m bringing up aren’t necessarily god-awful and I have fun with some of them, but the quality of the film is laughable at best and grade-school quality at worst.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the movies that should have gone straight to the store shelves.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

I must confess:  I really love the first Mortal Kombat film.  I grew up with the games, so seeing these characters in a live-action film blew my mind and when the first film came out in 1995, I was not disappointed…except for the fact that the film was PG-13 and had no blood and gore.  That being said, the film was at least mostly faithful to the source material.  It also had interesting characters, a decent story line, and some really solid fight choreography.  Yeah, it had some pretty cheesy acting and visual effects, but that added to the experience.  Mortal Kombat: Annihilation has none of that.  It takes itself far too seriously, yet everything about the film is hilarious.  The visual effects look like they were done by a grade-school student, the acting is atrocious, and the casting is an absolute joke.  I mean, they couldn’t get Christopher Lambert to play Raiden again, so they went with James Remar instead?  The costumes are ridiculous and the decisions that the characters make are……WHAT?!  I was excited for this movie back in 1997, but when I left the theater, I was flabbergasted.  The visual effects were awful, even by 1997 standards.  This movie does have an awesome soundtrack and it isn’t boring, but the fights are uninspired and cheap-looking.  Yet, at the same time, I was entertained by the film….in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way.

Jaws: The Revenge

Do I really have to say anything about this one?  I mean, Jaws 4 is about a shark that follows the Brody family to the Bahamas….why?  Revenge?  Jaws 3 was bad, but at least the film kind of new that it was going to be silly, especially in 3D, but The Revenge?  What idiot thought that this film was a good idea.  I mean, they managed to bring Lorraine Gary out of retirement, only for her to disappear again after the film’s release.  We haven’t seen anything from her since, at least not according to IMDB.  This movie also commits one of the greatest sins of a film of this type:  It’s boring.  The pacing is all wrong, certain decisions were highly questionable.  I mean, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to have the shark roar in one of the scenes?  SHARKS DON’T HAVE FUCKING VOCAL CORDS!  Also Ms. Gary’s character has this weird psychic connection with the shark and has visions from the original film, even though she was never there in some of those scenes.  Also, the shark explodes when it gets stabbed by the goddamn boat.  Not only did Jaws 4 cause Lorraine Gary to go back into retirement, but it also killed any possible shot at another sequel.  This movie never should have seen the inside of a movie theater.

The Hurricane Heist

The Hurricane Heist isn’t the worst film on this list.  It’s not even a terrible film.  I find it to be legitimately entertaining and exciting at times.  The problem is that the concept has been done before and it has been done better.  The visual effects in this film are of the DTV-variety.  This is a film that you could easily find on the Sy-Fy channel if they put forward any effort into their films.  It’s a very by-the-numbers action/disaster flick involving a robbery during a category 5 hurricane.  The concept is actually really cool, and some of the execution is pretty spot on.  However: The film goes by the book and only by the book, which doesn’t put it very high in the action category.  Quite frankly, I’ve seen DTV disaster films that are better, but I have seen worse.  Speaking of worse…..

Gods of Egypt

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  Alex Proyas, the director behind awesome movies like The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing has given us one of the worst action movies to come out in the past 5 years.  The concept could have worked, but the execution was just gods-awful(see what I did there?).  Ignoring the fact that the film was completely white-washed with nary an Egyptian actor in sight, the film fails on nearly every level.  Considering the budget involved, this is a movie that should have been better than it was.  Had it been released direct-to-video, I think it would have been better received, but then again, maybe not.  Yeah, it’s a bad movie, but the fact that it got a theatrical release just boggles the mind.  This was an ill-conceived mess from the beginning.   So, yeah, this one should have gone direct-to-video.

I, Frankenstein

Here’s another one that I actually kind of like.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most respected novels ever written.  Not necessarily at the time, but over the years, it’s become an absolute classic, much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  So, over the course of the 20th century, various film-makers have attempted to make their own interpretation of the Frankenstein monster.  The last effort was 2014’s I, Frankenstein, in which they attempted to turn the titular monster into a superhero.  They did the same thing with Dracula: Untold, but that one was a much better film.  Aaron Eckhart plays the monster, now called Adam.  He’s not bad, but the writing is awful.  The entire film takes itself way too seriously for the concept to work properly.  Gargoyles versus demons?  It’s sounds like fun, doesn’t it?  If the film had more humor, it could’ve been something bonkers.  But instead, we have a dreary action film with visual effects that are straight out of the PlayStation 2-era and a story that is generic as hell.  This one needed to go directly to the shelves, because it bombed.  It’s not awful, but it’s not the film that it needed to be.

While movie studios gauge the success of their films by how many butts they can get into movie theaters, the actual success of a film depends entirely on how the audience sees the film.  Are they going to like it?  If so, the film may be successful.  If they don’t, the film may tank.  Neither outcome is a guarantee, but sometimes a film may find more success on home video than it will in theaters.  Movies like Highlander may bomb in the box-office, but they tend to find their audiences on the home video market, and with the advent of digital media and streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, people have more options to see these movies.  Unless you happen to be George Lucas, James Cameron, or Christopher Nolan, you may have a better shot at getting your film noticed by skipping the theater entirely.  The movies that I just listed are ones that went to theaters, but really shouldn’t have.  These are the ones that stood out to me the most.  The expectations for a theatrical release are much, much higher than something released directly to DVD.  While some of these films are awful, the other ones are decent at most.  That being said, I will be going over some of the better direct-to-video releases over the next couple of weeks.  With 2018 coming to a close, I will also be prepping my Best of 2018 series, so stay tuned.

Released: November 2018

Director: James Nunn

Rated R

Run Time: 85 Minutes

Distributor: Sony Pictures/WWE Films

Genre: Action/Thriller

Cast:
Mike “The Miz” Mizanin: Jake Carter
Shawn Michaels: Luke Trapper
Rebecca Quin a.k.a Becky Lynch: Maddy Hayes
Louisa Connolly-Burnham: Sarah Dillon
Terence Maynard: Shawn Taylor
Tim Woodward: Tommy Walker

Back in the day, I used to watch professional wrestling quite a bit.  It was either WWE’s(then WWF)Monday Night Raw or WCW’s Monday Nitro, depending on my mood and which wrestlers I wanted to see.  WWE had legends like Stone Cold Steve Austin, Triple H, Edge, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.  WCW had superstars like Sting, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Hulk Hogan, and “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair.  That was all before WCW got bought out and folded into the WWE.  Now, professional wrestling is really nothing more than a soap opera except with body slams, clotheslines and piledrivers.  I didn’t much care for the melodrama between matches.  I watched the shows to see people beat the shit out of each other on live television.  Obviously, some of it was stage and planned, but sometimes things got really physical and wrestlers got hurt; some to the point of forced retirement, so it’s not all fake.  I want to make sure that is clear.  Getting thrown from the top of a steel cage is not something you can just walk away from unscathed.  That being said, I stopped watching wrestling after The Rock left when he started getting into his film acting career.  A number of wrestlers have followed suit, some successfully, some not.  So imagine my surprise when John Cena got his own action movie called The Marine in 2006.  It wasn’t actually a terrible movie.  It was fun, action-packed, and had a lot of massive explosions.  The problem was with Cena himself.  He just didn’t have the charisma needed to carry a movie like that.  Still, the film was fairly successful and spawned a number of sequels.  For this review, I have selected the latest entry in the franchise: Close Quarters.

The film opens as a young girl is kidnapped by a group of Irish gangsters to force her father into causing a mistrial for the gang’s boss.  Later, two former marines, Jake Carter and Luke Trapper, end up at an abandoned factory to check up on an old veteran who has taken up residence at this factory.  Unwittingly, they run into the same Irish gang and girl that was kidnapped.  The group is led by Maddy Hayes, the daughter of the mob boss that’s on trial.  It’s a simple set up that doesn’t offer much in the way of twists, except for one major shift in direction that I didn’t see coming.  It surprisingly works, but I won’t spoil it here.  You have to see it for yourself.  While the overall plot is mostly predictable, there are a few issues that I have with it that don’t make sense to me.  How did they find the girl’s father and why was he specifically targeted? On top of that, we don’t get to actually see the main Irish boss, whom I thought would be important considering the lengths that Maddy is going to get him freed.  While those details aren’t necessarily that important, it does affect the film when certain situations don’t make a whole lot of sense.  It’s just something that I noticed that kinda bugs me a bit, but the film moves at a quick pace, so it’s not a huge detriment.

I don’t think anyone in this film is going to get an Oscar for their acting.  There’s not enough characterization to really drive those performances.  That being said, the acting in this film isn’t actually that bad.  In fact, I think it’s actually pretty good for a film of this type and budget.  After I stopped watching wrestling, a whole lot of new folks showed up including Stu Bennett, A.J. Styles, and Mike “The Miz” Mizanin.  Stu Bennett kind of left wrestling for the acting bug when he starred in Eliminators and I Am Vengeance, both of which were surprisingly good.  The Miz has been in action films before, namely, the last three Marine films playing the same character.  Now, I haven’t seen a Marine film since the original back in 2006, so my expectations for this film were fairly low.  Not only am I surprised at how decent of an actor The Miz is in a film like this, he’s kind of likable here, which is more than I can say for his wrestling persona.  Shawn Michaels has been one of my favorite wrestlers since I was a kid.  He had a natural flair for the business and he stole the show, because he could.  Seeing him in action movie is actually kind of cool.  I’m surprised he hadn’t branched out in that direction earlier.  He’s clearly still got the physicality for something like this.  What surprised me was the chemistry that he had with The Miz.  Now, the two had obviously worked together in the WWE before, so there was already a connection between the two, and that actually translates to the film surprisingly well.  Rebecca Quin, or as she’s known in the ring, Becky Lynch, plays the main villain, Maddy.  She’s not half-bad, but she’s not that great either.  It’s her first movie, though, so I can forgive her for some issues.  She’s clearly a talented athlete, as well as being a very stunning woman and that comes across pretty well.

While the original film was a completely over-the-top experience, The Marine 6 is basically the polar opposite.  This is a grittier and far more violent film than John Cena’s movie.  For one, there’s quite a bit more blood and bone-breaking here.  The action is pretty brutal and hits pretty hard.  What makes the action work in this film is a number of reasons.  One: The camera-work is fantastic.  Instead of the whole shaky-cam that we tend to see in movies like this, we can definitely see what’s going on and it’s pretty close-quarters, hence the film’s subtitle.  Two: The actors are obviously well-trained in terms of physicality because of what they have to do in the ring on a daily basis.  That means you don’t see a lot of stunt-doubles here.  There are obviously some, especially for Shawn Michaels, but that’s because he’s getting older, but he still manages to hold his own when he needs to.  The Miz goes all in feet first.  Even Rebecca gets to do some really solid fighting.  The fighting is staged by one of my current favorites, Tim Man, who stage fights in films like Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, Undisputed 4, and Accident Man.  He knows what the hell he’s doing and the fights are grounded in a gritty and realistic fashion.  So, yeah, no wires.  There is some CG involved, but it’s nothing terribly obtrusive.  Overall, the action is really solid and it keeps on coming.

I have to be truthful:  I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this film when I first saw the trailer.  The only reason I was actually curious was because of Shawn Michaels.  I hadn’t seen him since he retired from wrestling, so it was pretty awesome seeing him in an action film.  Does this mean I’m going to go back to watching wrestling?  Not really.  I’ve long since let that ship sail, it’s not something I’m big on anymore.  I pay attention once in a great while, but it’s not the same as it used to be for me.  The days of the Attitude Era are long gone and most of the great wrestlers have retired and moved on with their lives.  That being said, I’m actually glad that the WWE has branched out into the film business with WWE Films, because some of this stuff is actually pretty damn good, so I’m paying attention to the film division of the WWE, just not the actual wrestling.  Before I wrap this up, I want to give a shout out to Richard Hawes and Mike Parkin of The DTV Digest and their podcast.  I met these two when I was in London for the Fighting Spirit Film Festival, and they were incredibly knowledgeable and fun to talk to.  Their coverage of the film convinced me to check it out for myself, and I’m glad I did.  It’s a pretty solid action flick.  It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than I was expecting it to be, so I’m looking forward to seeing what The Miz does next.  I would also love to see Shawn Michaels in another action movie, as I think he’s pretty good at it.  I actually recommend this one.

My Final Recommendation: Why do I like this movie?  Because I can. 8.5/10