Reviews

How can any director/producer be ok with that ending?

It gave me The Turning and The Devil Inside vibes...

The pacing is atrocious. There's no third act. Characters get introduced in the last 15 minutes and then forgotten. What happened to the rest of her team? Why did they get teleported? How will they return? What's the point of portals?

Nothing gets explained. It's hilarious. The movie just ends when that part should have been the second act. No real plot. The movie is lifeless. That final monster came from nowhere. There's no setting up, no building, nothing. It just happens.

I won't give an F because I liked Tony Jaa and the CGI for the monsters and some of the action.

D+

This movie has everything you can expect from a Jason Statham flick. Crazy stunts, laughable action scenes, shootouts, fight scenes.

That's all you'll get by watching this movie.

Plot is lazy and it never picks up until the 40 min mark. I was really worried about it, but it really gets better once he gets arrested.

Really bad CGI ( I'm sure I saw blue spots from bullet holes and red spots on walls coming from bullets ), there's music taken straight from The Dark Knight ( when Alba gets kidnapped, I'm sure I heard that theme in TDK during scenes with Joker ). By the end of the movie, they also get theme from The Equalizer ( scene where Denzel walks away from the explosion ). It's laughable.

This movie is meant to be a sequel, but you don't need to watch the first one before watching this one. It's OK on its own.

Overall it's a nice way to kill 1 hour and half. Statham kills a lot in this movie. Tommy Lee Jones needed money the mortgage, I assume. He does nothing in this movie ( even though he's one of the main targets that Statham has to kill ). At least he doesn't die!

6/10

Nothing new. It's the same old plot showing a group of thieves stealing some secret file during a heist, again.

Obviously, the main character claims that's her last job and she quits. However, like every movie, her friends get killed by a ruthless killer and his gang, again.

So, our girl must fight her way out and evade the assassins, in order to stay alive, again.

It's a fast paced flick, with several fights and some shootouts. Purefoy and Olga Kurylenko are the best characters here.

Morgan Freeman is in 3 scenes, for less than 5 minutes. For some reason, the director thinks this movie might get a sequel, judging by its ending. So, there's no closure.

It's a short movie, so you won't feel your time got wasted. I say give it a chance.

Think about every possible cliché: Corrupt cops, the good guy that comes back to work, the good guy that gets framed, the good guy that has to clear up his name, the bad guys who miss the good guy even if he's way too close.

This time the movie even tries to surprise you with a twist, which was also predictable.

Overall, it was OK. It's short and it doesn't waste time with characters that don't belong to the movie. It's basically one hero against a group of bad guys. One of them is Colossus from X-Men movies.

The camera work is annoying during the shootouts. The bodycount is not high, but it's quite fine on its own.

Nothing new. You can enjoy it if you don't have anything else to do.

Enemies Closer is the kind of movie that clearly doesn't take itself seriously, which is a good thing.

Plot is paper thin: A plane carrying drugs, ends falling into the ocean. Van Damme is the bad guy. Van Damme and his men are trying to get the drugs back. The good guy is just a guard taking care of a couple of tourists. The setting is some kind of island. Our hero isn't just a guard. A mysterious man tries to kill the hero, but it's obvious that they'll both work together to take down the bad guys who'll obviously try to kill them.

So, you know what you're going to find with that flick.

THE FLAWS:

1)The night setting is boring. It just shows how the movie was so low budget that they had to use the night to mask the fact that many actors didn't know a thing about fighting style. Had the movie happened during the day, I would probably have liked it much, much more.

2)Cops are so dumb. Seriously, why does every cop or guard ( except the hero ) act like a complete idiot in a movie?

3)The twist is so badly executed that it brings more holes to the movie. It also shows that Van Damme's character was way too cocky to the point that any idiot could have done better than him. You'll see the movie, so I won't tell the twist. It's not that you won't see it coming.

4)The bad guys were way too weak. By the last 15 or 20 minutes of movie, only Van Damme was still standing.

5) Black guy adds nothing and he's there just to mess up with the hero. You see he clearly didn't want to kill him. Then, we had the old cliché enemies working together to bring down baddies.

6) Van Damme's son is a bad actor.

7) The old hostage situation is old...

THE GOOD STUFF:

1)Van Damme still has the skills to fight people. The opening fight scene was cool. He easily killed at least 6 armed guys. The deaths were quite interesting and original. He even broke a CD in half to use as a weapon. Nice.

2)It's good that we had dumb guards at the island. That means more people to be killed by Mr Van Damme. Poor bastards.

3)Van Damme talking in french to his men in order to confuse our hero.

4)The always old Die Hard formula doesn't get older here. Our heroes take the baddies one by one, usually through fist fights! That's right, instead of using guns, the hero either beats the guys or makes traps to kill them. That happens a lot in the movie. Cliffhanger also had a nod in this movie.

5)There is a mercy killing and Van Damme performs it quite well!

6)The way the bad guy dies is the same way that the bad guy dies in Die Hard 2.

7)Van Damme kills a defenseless old man. Best scene in the movie.

If you're a fan of Van Damme, you should give the movie a try. He's clearly having fun with himself. If you're not a fan, just watch it as any action movie. It was OK. Disappointing because Hyams could do better, if you look at his previous movies. It wasn't bad.

5/10 because the twist ruins a lot of the flick in my view. Still, I had good laughs. XD

White House Down is like most of the PG-13 action flicks: no blood, no intense scenes, sloopy editing.

If you watched and liked Olympus Has Fallen, you'll get disappointed with this one. If you didn't watch Olympus, there is a chance you might like this one a little more...

Budget: 150 million. I guess most of the budget went to Jamie Foxx's pockets and wallets.

Horrible CGI and explosions that were hilariously bad and terrible.

A team of 13 or 15 guys were able to take over the White House without nobody even noticing, until a little girl uploaded a video on youtube.

So many shootouts. Nobody gets hit, no visible blood. When some gets killed, it's so bland, so generic.

Editing was weak with this one. The movie also has a feeling of a TV flick...

The positive elements were the villains, hilarious. I mean, you have a almost naked guy with a giant mustache, trying to show he is a tough man. You always have the expert hacker who acts like he is smart and polite, when he is really a dumb guy and gets himself killed by his own explosion...You have a guy who has a mental problem and starts shooting people and poiting the gun to the head of a kid. You also have Jason Clarke with his bloody nose throughout the movie.

Wait for this movie on DVD or watch it online. The real movie is called Olympus Has Fallen.

Finally we got a Saw movie with several enjoyable elements: a good story, reasonable characters, a reasonable amount of violence without being too over the top( like Saw 3 and 4 were).

Do you have to watch the earlier movies in order to understand Saw 5? YES!!! You really should, or you'll be totally lost throughout this movie.

The movie starts with a very interesting trap and ends with another trap. It's also sad that Hoffman didn't get what he deserves.

The main problem in Saw 5 was the huge amount of flashbacks. Yeah, be ready, because this movie is 45% flashback( the opening scene is a flashback). The "twist" isn't as good as the one seen in Saw 1 and 2. However, I was glad they focused more story, instead of torture( Saw 3 anyone?). Of course, there are even more questions to be answered, so you can expect a Saw 6 sooner or latter.

My vote is a solid 7.