You don’t go to Tom Cruise movies to think.
Christopher Lawrence
Christopher Lawrence is the movie critic for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
clawrence@reviewjournal.com … @life_onthecouch on Twitter. 702-380-4567
Given the game’s inherent poetry, it’s nearly impossible to make a bad baseball movie.
Take away the woefully rudimentary computers, Laura Dern’s mom jeans and Samuel L. Jackson’s hair, and it has all the trappings of a modern blockbuster.
As franchises go, “G.I. Joe” was less a fixer-upper than the sort of thing you burn to the ground for the insurance money.
Of all of this year’s movies in which a lone hero is tasked with saving the president when a violent paramilitary group seizes the White House, “Olympus Has Fallen” is certainly one of them.
If Las Vegas can take a wide-eyed innocent, whose only crime was rocking a mullet well past its expiration date, and turn him into a raging, narcissistic jackhole, what hope is there for the rest of us?
It looks like a blockbuster. It feels like a blockbuster. On the set, it probably even smelled like a blockbuster.
Let’s face it, most viewers really only care about the big six — picture, director and the four acting categories — at tonight’s 85th Annual Academy Awards (5:30 p.m., KTNV-TV, Channel 13).
He’s made a career out of portraying over-the-top characters, ranging from an ancient Egyptian king to the Tooth Fairy. But in “Snitch,” Dwayne Johnson is finally stymied by his most mundane role yet: an ordinary dad.
It seems almost quaint that there was a time when young lovers in the movies could be kept apart simply because one of them came from the wrong side of the tracks, practiced a different religion or, even though the town strictly forbade it, couldn’t stop dancing to Kenny Loggins music.
Possible side effects of watching “Side Effects” include increased brain activity, confusion, occasional irritability and warm, fuzzy feelings about Jude Law.
