Loose Thoughts on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

by Tony Dayoub


I've been wracking my brain all week trying to figure out why I can't come up with a coherent review for this weekend's big hit, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It wasn't until I saw it again this weekend, in an obligatory revisit to take my two young boys, when I came to this conclusion. My thoughts are only as scattershot as the film itself tends to be. Dawn of Justice is Zack Snyder's attempt at jump-starting the DC Extended Universe or DCEU, the filmic counterpart to its rival Marvel's own cinematic franchise the MCU. It is reminiscent of those graphic samplers DC Comics puts out a month before they introduce a major storyline that will snake through its entire publishing lineup. The movie tries to whet the viewer's appetite for future installments, but fails to come up with a satisfying story that can stand on its own. So why not mirror the movie itself in presenting my own disjointed thoughts on the failures (and yes, some minor successes) of this schizoid superhero dirge.

Movie Review: Spectre (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


A bravura, single-take shot launches Spectre, the latest 007 film. Sam Mendes helms this follow-up to his brilliant Skyfall, with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema stepping into Roger Deakins' big shoes. Van Hoytema certainly announces himself loudly with the shot that propels one of Bond's best opening sequences in some time. The camera snakes through Mexico City during a colorful Day of the Dead festival, first following a thug clad in a light colored suit, before switching over to a masked reveler dressed in a skeletal suit with a top hat whose distinctive walk soon makes it clear we are seeing Daniel Craig's superspy in medias res. Before long, Van Hoytema has taken us through a busy public square, up a palatial set of stairs, into and out of a cramped elevator, into a bedroom and out a window to a balcony where Bond sets up to assassinate the thug in question. For those brief minutes, Spectre soars higher than even Skyfall did. It all goes downhill from there sadly, with Spectre devolving into probably the most conventional of all the Craig flicks (yes, more so than even the unfairly maligned Quantum of Solace).

Blu-ray Review: The Flash:The Complete First Season (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


Spinning off from it's popular sister show, Arrow, The Flash largely succeeded from escaping Arrow's long shadow within just a couple of episodes. Where it took nearly its entire first season for Arrow to fully embrace its comic book origins and leave behind the teen soap conventions of its home network, the CW, The Flash arrived fully formed, as its creators confirm in the new blu-ray set's only audio commentary. It has done so by turning its back on the dark, brooding atmosphere popularized by the Dark Knight epics that Arrow emulates. Instead, The Flash feels sunny and optimistic, largely a credit to the enjoyable bumbling geekiness of its nice-guy star, Grant Gustin, and his interpretation of CSI tech Barry Allen. It's a show whose occasional X-Files creepiness never really exceeds Goosebumps-level frights, making it ideal for family viewing, a fact which I can personally attest to (my wife and kids love it as much as I do).

4 Reasons Fantastic Four Is Anything But

by Tony Dayoub


I take no pleasure in piling on a bad movie, but a lot of us who grew up reading "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine," as Fantastic Four was sub-titled for many years, are mystified by the fact that not one of its movie iterations has been successful. It shouldn't take rocket science to re-calibrate the property to reflect what made the Marvel Comics' flagship title and a template for the superheroes that would follow. Take one look at director Josh Trank's version, though, and one starts to wonder if even the team's gifted scientist, Reed Richards (Miles Teller), could work out the formula needed to make Fantastic Four truly live up to its name. Here are four reasons Fantastic Four was anything but:

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


19 years after Tom Cruise first appeared as super-spy Ethan Hunt in the first entry of the series, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation gives us one of the first indications that the box office star is getting a little old for action films. It's not that Cruise isn't capable of pulling off the abundant stunts littered throughout the film, or at least appearing that he does. Five minutes in, Ethan Hunt is hanging off of the side of an Airbus as it takes off, and the camera is firmly planted on a real-life plane's wing, trained on Cruise dangling from the plane's doorway, not some stunt-man. But it's a silly scene, related to the plot in only the most tangential way, as are most of the other stunt setpieces in Rogue Nation.

Movie Review: Ant-Man (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


Let's forgo all of the groaners about good things coming in small packages and so forth. Ant-Man is a pleasing enough take on the superhero movie that it doesn't need any help, tired jokes or otherwise, from a hack like me. Ant-Man is neither overstuffed epic like the recent Avengers sequel, Age of Ultron, nor clever, brooding thriller a la Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Ant-Man is a perfectly modest adventure about a man out of his depth in all levels of life who finally finds his niche in the disorienting world of the sub-atomic.

Movie Review: The Equalizer (2014)

by Tony Dayoub


I never watched the original Edward Woodward TV series Antoine Fuqua's The Equalizer is based on. As a critic colleague reminded me, "Well, it was for the blue-hairs." And so it probably was, despite having a high quotient of violence and a killer main theme by the Police drummer Stewart Copeland. The new remake isn't much different, except maybe for abandoning Copeland's classic pulsating bit of electronica. Fuqua reunites with his Training Day star Denzel Washington and further strips down a premise that's already pretty spare to begin with. What's left is so thin and empty, a cloud of vapor would feel more substantial in comparison.

TV Review: Sons of Anarchy: Season Seven

by Tony Dayoub

If the first few episodes of Sons of Anarchy's final season are any indication, then the series is going down in the same manner it started: as a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, with the eponymous motorcycle club's royal family and their dysfunctional dynamics at the heart of what ails its crown prince. Jax (Charlie Hunnam) is as dark and vengeful this season as he was bright and optimistic just before his wife Tara's shocking demise. SAMCRO is licking their wounds while preparing to once again make their ascendance in their town of Charming. And Jax's mother, Gemma (Katey Sagal), is alternately remorseful and gratified that sacrificing Tara allowed her to preserve the strength of her two fractured families: Jax and his young sons and the motorcycle club.

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Movie Review: The Expendables 3

by Tony Dayoub

Anyone looking for The Expendables 3 to provide summer's final hurrah at the box office might want to look elsewhere. Where the first Expendables played like a shaggy, small-scale reprieve from career oblivion for former action stars Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, and Jet Li, this one feels like it's lining up the burial plots. Where the second and best film in the series raised the stakes by bringing in Jean-Claude Van Damme as its villain and Chuck Norris as comic relief, The Expendables 3 overplays its hand amassing a cast of has-beens and future never-will-bes of such an unwieldy size that few get a chance at making any kind of impression.

Movie Review: Sabotage (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Sabotage is a visceral (literally) new white-knuckler that often turns on some fairly surprising plot twists. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John "Breacher" Wharton, a legendary DEA agent who leads a squad of unruly undercover agents that also happen to be about the best there are at what they do. The nervy prologue shows us the team in action. Lizzy (Mireille Enos) has infiltrated a party at a drug lord's mansion pretending to be a hooker. Breacher makes the requisite macho joke to her husband "Monster" (Sam Worthington) about how she may be the one with the bigger balls. The rest of the roughneck crew—Grinder (Joe Manganiello), Neck (Josh Holloway), Pyro (Max Martini), and Sugar (Terrence Howard)—all have a laugh before they get to work breaking in after her to confiscate the cash. They funnel $10 million of it down into the sewer by way of a toilet filthier than the one in Trainspotting, burn the rest, and manage to exit with the loss of only one life. Which is to say, drug enforcement is the dirtiest of jobs, and it takes this type-A boys club and the kind of woman that can keep up with them to get it done. But before they can retrieve the cash and tag it for evidence, it's already gone missing. Someone on their team can't be trusted.

Movie Review: Lone Survivor (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

Adapted from the book of the same name, Lone Survivor is the story of US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell and SEAL Team 10's failed mission to apprehend a notorious Taliban leader nearly 10 years ago in Afghanistan. Only the most insensitive would lack any empathy for Luttrell and his fellow soldiers if the brutal ordeal they go through occurred as depicted onscreen. Discovered on a treacherous mountaintop by shepherd's loyal to the Taliban, they are soon surrounded by greater numbers and the film proceeds to show how they are mowed down over the course of the next 40 minutes. But only the most jingoistic would celebrate this punishing endurance test, as anything more than a kind of cruel Passion of Private Ryan.

Movie Review: Escape Plan (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

I can't ignore that my kneejerk reaction to just about any Sylvester Stallone movie is, "This is gonna be good." So I'm putting that out there. But Escape Plan is just the kind of well-executed high concept thriller that I believe demonstrates how canny the actor's instincts have become, especially in his middle age. Here's a man who didn't listen to casting directors who wanted to pigeonhole him in stereotypical thug roles early in his career, wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Rocky to showcase his leading man potential, then after working with some notable filmmakers got sidetracked by movie star excesses in the 90s before returning to late stardom with The Expendables, a franchise which he humbly shared with action star friends and rivals, figuring that a rising tide lifts all boats.

NYFF51 Review: All is Lost (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

While hardcore admirers of Gravity are getting their collective back up because astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is finding all kinds of nits to pick in their beloved movie, there's another front from which to criticize the science fiction survival film that has seen very little discussion. Let's be clear, just as Tyson admits he liked the film, I believe Gravity is a spectacular adventure. But its tale of an astronaut stranded in the vastness of space is not too dissimilar from All is Lost, starring Robert Redford as a man adrift miles from land in a sinking sailboat. Between the two, Gravity has nothing on All is Lost when it comes to creating even the impression of real despair in the face of peril.

Movie Review: Gravity (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

Alfonso Cuarón—the director who so flamboyantly enhanced the dystopic Children of Men with a number of extended single-take shots nearly impossible to deconstruct—opens his newest film Gravity with its own dizzying, extended take which I clocked at 20 minutes long. It brilliantly introduces laidback veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and his high-strung novice subordinate, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) on a routine spacewalk. The shot establishes the majesty of their work environment in space and slowly ratchets up the unsettling feeling that in this unnatural environment the dangers are far from predictable. Emmanuel Lubezki's constantly pirouetting camera contributes to the stomach-churning feeling of disquiet that gradually increases as the shot goes on way past what most audiences are subliminally accustomed to. So when an unforeseen collision demolishes the space shuttle the two astronauts are tethered to, the shock and terror is more than palpable. In 3D on an IMAX screen, it is unforgivingly all-encompassing.

More Like Olympus is Flailing

by Tony Dayoub

One doesn't go into Olympus Has Fallen expecting originality or nuance. As trailers have made pretty clear, this is a noisy, over-the-top potboiler that basically boils down to this description: Die Hard in the White House. However, Antoine Fuqua—whose last solid film was Training Day and displayed the most ambition in 2004's flawed, but not-hard-to-like, King Arthur—seems here to be working out some resentment over not getting a chance to do the long-planned 24 theatrical upgrade he was briefly up for. Or at least it feels that way because Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is as generic a clone of Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer as one has seen in a long time. And as goes our hero, so goes Olympus Has Fallen, a scattered mess of a picture as far as even movies of this kind go.

Bullet to the Head

by Tony Dayoub

Conceptually, the idea of director Walter Hill's return to cinema with a movie starring Sylvester Stallone is an appealing one, especially for this fan. Before serving an undeserved, decade-long sentence in movie jail, Hill was best known for re-inventing the action film with the prototypical buddy flick 48 Hours (1982). Though based on the graphic novel Du plomb dans la tête, Hill's newest, Bullet to the Head, might as well be a twisted spiritual sequel to the Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte cop thriller. The mismatched duo here are New Orleans hitman Jimmy "Bobo" Bonomo (Stallone) and D.C. cop Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang). The two team up to find out who hired Bobo to execute Kwon's ex-partner (Holt McCallany), before double-crossing the button man himself and killing his fellow assassin (Jon Seda).

Illuminating Bond in Skyfall

by Tony Dayoub


We've come to expect a certain formula from the 007 movies, now numbering 23 with the release of Skyfall: opening stunt scene, sexy title sequence playing over a torch song, 007 on a mission where he first meets the bad girl, then the evil villain that keeps her and finally, the good girl before he fights the baddie to the death. Any freshness injected into the traditional outline has usually come through the recasting of James Bond himself (Daniel Craig is the sixth actor to play him in the official series) or by stripping the character down to his gadget-less essence so that the only thing he can depend on are his wits. In only one instance have we ever strayed close to knowing the man behind the facade. That was in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, my personal favorite and most underrated of all the Bonds, in which he gets married not because of any ulterior mission but because he has truly fallen in love. Things don't end well for Mrs. Bond needless to say. More grist for the cold, callous mill.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

by Tony Dayoub

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face

- You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

One of the most arresting images of the entire James Bond series is the sight of Sean Connery, THE iconic 007, laying dead and bloody in a bed. The shocking scene occurs even before the opening credits roll on the fifth of the 23 "official" films based on the Ian Fleming spy novels. For this and many other reasons, You Only Live Twice is a watershed movie in the series. The Death of Bond is a potent trope that has and will be repeated again throughout the 007 series. Bond's death and subsequent resurrection not only foreshadow the handful of times 007 would be regenerated in the performance of another actor; they also look forward to Connery's departure from the role before returning to it in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and again in the "unofficial" Never Say Never Again (1983). Watching the schizoid You Only Live Twice—satisfying in some respects, frustratingly comic in others—is instructive in explaining why Connery was getting fed up with the series and how the Bond movies would eventually stray quite far from their source material before its triumphant reboot decades later.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

So let's get the major criticism out of the way right now. Why reboot the Spider-Man series so soon? The dismal Spider-Man 3, overstuffed with dangling plot threads left over from previous films, only came out 5 years ago. But it isn't like the series couldn't recover from one crappy film. Rising salaries for its three principals, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and James Franco may be partly to blame. But why not just recast? Perhaps the aim is to rebuild on a better foundation. Whatever the reason is, the one thing that's certain is that Sony Pictures had to make a Spider-Man film pronto because, if they didn't, the rights would revert back to Marvel Entertainment and presumably its owner, Disney. Since Maguire and Dunst are getting a bit long in the tooth to realistically keep up the romantic histrionics in perpetuity, the reframing of the series with a younger audience in mind was assured. Hence, The Amazing Spider-Man.

Nicholas Ray's Other Western

Run for Cover (1954) Finally Arrives on Blu-ray

by Tony Dayoub

Following on the heels of Nicholas Ray's notable Western Johnny Guitar (1954) and released just before his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Ray's other Western, Run for Cover, fits rather nicely between the two from a historical perspective, refining some of the tangential themes of Johnny Guitar (including the growing influence of McCarthyism) while also serving as a transition to the "troubled youth" subject matter explored in Rebel.