Mr. Brown Versus

Ok, let's be honest -- the calendar year for 2016 has been kinda shit, hasn't it? Sequels to cult hits that gave us secondary slop....superhero movies that failed to deliver on the super....studios still trying to cram the awfulness of Kevin Hart down our throats....and this season's offering of summer popcorn flicks did nothing to buck the trend. Does it get better as we turn to fall and the Awards race? Maybe, but for now, here's my compiled list of the worst this calendar year had to offer us thus far. London Has Fallen  - Baltimore movie critic Max Weiss warned me about this abhorrent, xenophobic, racist and profoundly idiotic picture and gave it one star in her review. I felt that was waaaaaaay too kind after sitting through one of the worst action films I've seen in the last 15 years. Gerard Butler is doing his second rate John McClain thing, Aaron Eckhart is still the President with a target on his back, and fine performers like Angela Basset, Melissa ...

If there's a few good things I can say about The Divergent Series: Allegiant , they are the following: I only have to play "Name That Sci-Fi Film Reference!" once, because this installment of this stale Hunger Games -knockoff really only borrows from another slightly better dystopain sci-fi series in the form of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials . Miles Teller really is the best part of this whole movie. You can see how much he does not want to be apart of this series, and each time he speaks, the disdain comes comes through loud and clear. He knows this is a waste of his talents and his time, and he allows the audience in on the joke.  Besides that, though? Allegiant is bad. It's legitimately bad, in addition to being even duller affair to sit through than the first two, which is saying something. After the revelation that Chicago was one big experiment in order to help repopulate the world and the destruction of the faction system, the city of Chicago is on the...

The last time I dived into the world of Divergent , Tris (played by Shaileen Woodley) had just stopped Jeannine (Kate Winslet) and her dastardly plot to initiate a hostile takeover from Abnegation for control of the remains of a mostly intact Chicago, seemly the last refuge of civilization on Earth. It's been five days since their escape and.....well, Jeannine, despite that setback, has taken over the Windy City and has enacted martial law. So, the whole third act of the first movie where Tris and Four (Theo James) break into Eritude, stop the tyrannical ruler-in-waiting from using a mind-control serum from killing an entire faction? It was all for nought, because she still assumes power. In fact, couldn't she still use the mind-control serum and still pull off her genocidal plan? Being a diabolical villain who's end goal was complete and total power, wouldn't she have a few spares of that drug, or the formula to remake it at the very least? If you've guessed that t...

The last time I watched Divergent , I thought it was Summit Entertainment trying to cash-in on the success of big-brother parent company Lions Gate's The Hunger Games series, as well as the film borrowing from other respectable films and young-adult novels such as Harry Potter , Ender's Game and The Giver , without a hint of originality of it's own. But since the film made $288 million worldwide on an $88 million budget, a sequel was green-lit, and so we have the big followup in Insurgent , the second installment in the series. Maybe they'll finally get around to explaining how the existence of "Divergents" threaten the system. Perhaps we'll see star Shaileen Woodley unleash her inner Black Widow and do some serious damage on the bad guys. Or maybe they'll start borrowing from The Matrix films as well as Inception ! You know, I was joking when I commented that the second installment would start borrowing from Lana & Andy Wachowski and Chri...

Toward the end of The Hunger Games: Mockingay - Part I , Madam President Alma Coin (played by the wonderful Julianne Moore), she gives a rousing speech to her citizens of District 13 about a great victory they have just won under her direction. The monologue basically tells her comrades in arms that soon they will storm the Capital with the backings of the other Districts, that a new world will be born where they will become one people, once voice, and that all will share in the wealth and prosperity in this new Panem. And then....cut to black. Time to go home, tweet about how awesome this installment was, tell your BFF's to see this movie, and make sure you come back to spend more money on Part II now! The speech about unity and sharing among each other in a new, harmonious community comes off feeling hollow and empty; not because Moore doesn't sell this brave new world well, because she's one of the bright spots in Part I of this two-part finale. The reason this feels hol...

In the distant future, North America is in ruins. Entire factions have been split into Districts, as they all fall under the evil totalitarian rule of...oh, no, not this again! It was bad enough that I had to play  "Name That Sci-Fi Film Reference!" when I reviewed Oblivion  last year, but now again with Divergent ? You know, it's just one reference; I'm sure the premise will get better as the review goes along. Ok, so this isn't Panem, There aren't twelve Districts, and Donald Sutherland isn't the totalitarian bastard running the show. But it is the near future, and it appears that anything resembling North America has been wiped out, save for the remains of Chicago, for some reason. In fact...how the hell is the Windy City mostly intact? Did whoever fired off the nukes hit every major city in North America and accidentally left off Chi-town? Crap, I'm thinking too much about this, so let's just roll with it. Anyway...in this brave new world, ...

Going into The Giver , I was expecting the worst. For starters, they changed the age of the lead character Jonas, from a naïve 11 year-old boy to a swoon-worthy, naïve 18 year old. The same with his friends - both Asher and Fiona are now teens as well. Next was they way they marketed the film, as a cross between 1984 and Brave New World meets some teen melodrama you'd find on ABC Family. But mostly, I am just nearly burnt out by seeing studios take hot young adult novels and turn them into mediocre ripoffs of better-done adaptations, and given how poor Divergent , The Host , Ender's Game and The Fault In Our Stars turned out, you could understand my hesitation over seeing the final product. Imagine my surprise that the film version of author Lois Lowry's dystopian sci-fi thriller wasn't as terrible as I thought it would be. For starters, the cinematography and color palette by Ross Emery is how I imagined this world would look like. This bland, colorless world feels...