Reviews

With Alec Baldwin gone after The Hunt for Red October, Harrison Ford took over as Jack Ryan for Patriot Games and does so again with Clear and Present Danger. As much as I wished Baldwin would have gone on as Ryan, in the third Tom Clancy film, Harrison Ford is on top form. He acts with wit, does some of the stunts himself and yes, here he lets you forget about there was another guy once. This is a hands on, full throttle thriller with some great lines, fine actors (Willem Dafoe as John Clark is stunning as is James Earl Jones' last time as Admiral Greer) and politic power game that could easily happen in reality again. The story has been tweaked here and there from Clancy's book, but that's okay. Plus we have a remarkably strong score by James Horner who already composed the music for Patriot Games.

By the way, the 4K version is looking great.

Seasons 1 and 2 were strong, really great and high standard TV making, good acting, great stories and nice cliffhangers. But with season 3 comes the change, the writing gets more plain and streamlined, some of the strongest characters are gone and it shows. But when we still have a good third offering, it shatters and drops with season 4 to just "the usual". Here the writing gets moderate, big surprises are almost not there and some of the characters are weak - and two old one get simply boring and their acting juts is not on par anymore. Mostly, all the good stuff has been left on Mars' ground in season 3 and the just can not pick it up anymore. If there really will be a season 5 after all, I hope they can reach the high standard from the first two seasons.

Nothing original here other than it's just a remake - and a bad one. Bad acting, bad writing. When do writers and directors finally learn that it's cheesy and doubtful a shooter shouts the name of the one he wants to shoot? Spare your time, do something else!

Oh dear God, this one's bad. Really bad. It was so unnecessary to do a remake of an in all points brilliant film in the first place (and yes, there are even some good remakes out there - did I just said that?). Remember how frightened we all were watching the 1982 Spielberg/Tobe Hooper Poltergeist back then? Well, stick to that one by all means as this new version is just not frightening at all. Plus it's poorly acted, looks cheap, has a lot of pretty stupid lines and they even had to tweak a great story and do it all wrong (oh, they had to change the names as well). Please, just as you should never build a house on a cemetery, do not touch good films.

Well, out of the many Hollywood action biggies, this is another one that tries to be very important, very clever and totally serious. Problem is that after 30 minutes all the plausibility has gone out the window. There are so many plot holes and stupid things happening (the death of the US-citizen with Arabian background for instance) that it becomes increasingly boring too.

And where do script writers take all this stupid names from? Ariia... oh well. And how clever to name Ariia's operator... yes, you guessed it, Bowman. Now guess again, Ariia does have a nifty red eye, of course, and goes crazy... of course. Thankfully that's it with uninspired parallels to 2001.

Avoid it. It's too long, it's too lazy and it's too "would-be-hightech thriller" to be taken seriously. Or even entertaining.

There is a strange mix in Vivace that doesn't work well. First we have some nice, very french comedy elements at the beginning with a couple, we seem to like. And what's not to like about them? Then there is someone watching the new neighbors. Just ten minutes later we already know who he is and wonder what this is all about? Finally we have a mysterious Brazilian plant, that grows and dies and grows again, literally taking the breath of the nearby sleeping Pauline, who gets so affected by this strange crop the couple nearly breaks because of it. And last we even have death, sorrow and murder! All that because of a jealous garden loving neighbor...? Comedy, relationship, a tiny little bit of thriller and crime. Vivace is really a strange film, and I don't mean this positively, that could have been much better if the makers would have had a line to follow from the start.