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Two-time Academy Award® nominee Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a researcher in the year 2019, when an unknown plague has transformed the world’s population into vampires. As the human population nears extinction, vampires must capture and farm every remaining human, or find a blood substitute before time runs out. However, a covert group of vampires makes a remarkable discovery, one which has the power to save the human race.While
Daybreakers presents vampiric traits that distinguish its vampires from others in the many films that have ridden 2009's vampire movie wave, there is a lack of humor here that makes this film sour compared to sweeter ones like
Cirque du Freak: A Vampire's Assistant. Maybe that's because the plot in this horror feature from Peter and Michael Spierig! (
Undead) is more akin to zombie films like
28 Days Later. The year is 2019, and nearly all humans are converted vampires searching in vain for blood during a blood shortage, as they drain remaining humans into extinction. Nightly, CNN airs segments about the Blood Crisis, while vampire citizens around the globe attack each other like cannibals. Humans are farmed like cattle while tied to blood-draining machinery in the top-secret pharmaceutical corporation run by evil CEO Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Sound like a heavy-handed metaphor for our oil wars?
Daybreakers can definitely be viewed in that light, as a story about greed and consumption. Stylistically, it looks like a cross between
Alien and
Batman, with its Giger-esque set design and blue-tinted hue to represent night fallen on society. The lead actors help to salvage this movie. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), chief hematologist at Bromley, straddles the vampire and human wo! rlds, with the aid of humans Lionel "Elvis" Cormac (Willem Daf! oe) and Lisa Barrett (Harriet Minto-Day), to search for a blood replacement to placate the starving masses. These three protagonists carry the film, though not well enough to call
Daybreakers any sort of genre breakthrough. --
Trinie Dalton
Stills from Daybreakers (Click for larger image) Two-time Academy Award® nominee Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a researcher in the year 2019, when an unknown plague has transformed the world’s population into vampires. As the human population nears extinction, vampires must capture and farm every remaining human, or find a blood substitute before time runs out. However, a covert group of vampires makes a remarkable discovery, one which has the power to save the human race.
Stills from Daybreakers (Click for larger image) At a remote desert truck stop the fate of the world will be decided. Evils armies are amassing. Armed & united by the archangel michael a group of strangers become unitting soldiers on the frontlines of the apocalypse. Their mission: to protect a waitress & her unborn child from the demonic legion. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 05/11/2010 Starring: Paul Battany Lucas Black Run time: 100 minutes Rating: RAs pure ! check-your-head-at-the-door popcorn entertainment, the apocalyptic action-horror hybrid
Legion delivers in nearly every frame--its story of a band of strangers fighting an army of angels and demons for the fate of mankind is proudly loud, bullet riddled, and knee-deep in gore and CGI. That doesn't mean it's particularly good or even coherent--the story has renegade angel Michael (a glum Paul Bettany) come to the aid of diner owner Dennis Quaid (equally glum) and his patrons (a cross-section of stereotypes embodied by a capable cast, which includes Lucas Black, Charles S. Dutton, Tyrese Gibson, Kate Walsh, and Jon Tenney) as a host of heavenly and diabolical beings, dispatched by an angry God, descend on the diner with the intent of killing waitress Adrianne Palicki (
Friday Night Lights), whose unborn child may be the salvation of humanity. The orgy of special effects--endless hails of bullets and a menagerie of unpleasant demonic creatures, the most unsettling! of which is the ice cream man (Doug Jones,
Hellboy)--i! s eye po pping but ultimately repetitive, and since no character rises above a cipher in director Scott Stewart's script (cowritten with Peter Schink), the whole affair feels unwieldy and eventually tiresome under a barrage of hackneyed dialogue. Naturally,
Legion ends with the possibility of a sequel, though one wonders where the story can go after Armageddon.
--Paul Gaita Stills from Legion (Click for larger image) In this terrif! ying glimpse into the “American Dream†gone wrong, an unex! plainabl e phenomenon has taken over the citizens of Ogden Marsh. One by one the townsfolk are falling victim to an unknown toxin and are turning sadistically violent. People who days ago lived quiet, unremarkable lives are now depraved, blood-thirsty killers. While Sheriff Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his pregnant wife, Judy (Radha Mitchell), try to make sense of the escalating violence, the government uses deadly force to close off all access and won’t let anyone in or out â€" even those uninfected. In this film that Pat Jankiewicz of Fangoria calls “disturbing,†an ordinary night becomes a horrifying struggle for the few remaining survivors as they do their best to get out of town alive.This 2010 remake of a somewhat obscure 1973 George Romero picture injects a mysterious virus into the water supply of a small Iowa town, and the consequences are… well, you didn't expect the consequences to be positive, did you? The movie is called
The Crazies, after all. So ! when local folk begin acting a mite peculiar, it just means they've gone to the well too often--literally. Borrowing the structure of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the remake gets off to a clumsy start, but as the noninfected rally around the sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and his doctor wife (Radha Mitchell), the action becomes streamlined and reasonably inventive. Director Breck Eisner has a particular knack for finding ingenious ways of killing people (a knife through the hand becomes a useful tool for the sheriff in one turn-the-tables moment), and he's been wise enough to hire respectable actors for the top-lined duties; along with Olyphant and Mitchell, there's also Joe Anderson (
Across the Universe) as a loyal, amped-up deputy. If the movie misses the tart social-context stuff that Romero does so well, it at least fills the bill when it comes to the chase-and-escape business of a contemporary horror picture. The spate of such 21st-century remakes of 1! 970s horror pictures misses the raw, raggedy unease of those l! ow-budge t projects, but if you're going to make a slick new update,
The Crazies is the way to do it.
--Robert Horton
Stills from The Crazies (Click for larger image) Academy Award® winners Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs) and Benicio Del Toro (Traffic) tear up the screen in this action-packed thriller. Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) is lured back to his family estate to investigate the savage murder of his brother by a bloodthirsty beast. There, Talbot must confront his childhood demons, his estranged father (Hopkins), his brother’s grieving fiancée (Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada) and a suspicious Scotland Yard Inspector (Hugo Weaving, The Matrix Trilogy). When Talbot is bitten by the creature, he becomes eternally cursed and soon discovers a fate far worse than death. Inspired by the classic Universal film that launched a legacy of horror, The Wolfman brings the myth of a cursed man back to its iconic origins.The mist rising over the moors feels right, and so does the slan! t of moonlight coming over a Victorian village-scape. And if t! he moon is full, this must be
The Wolfman, Universal's 2010 attempt to revive one of the crown jewels in its deservedly legendary horror stable. Benicio Del Toro takes on the old Lon Chaney Jr. role of Lawrence Talbot, an American visitor to his ancestral home in England. Talbot's brother has recently been torn to bits by a beast in the forest, leaving behind a grieving fiancée (Emily Blunt) and a not-visibly-grieving father (Anthony Hopkins). This central situation seems drained of blood even before the full-moon transfigurations begin to bloom, and Del Toro's Talbot--an actor by trade, which raises interesting possibilities for a story of a man divided by different personalities--is mystifyingly blank. The intriguing casting of Del Toro (what an opportunity for a cool werewolf!) comes to naught as Talbot seems to languish on the periphery of his own story. Hugo Weaving tries to generate some interest as the police inspector on the case, but he too is defeated by the combin! ation of mechanical storytelling and bland computer-generated werewolves. The script skips from one exposition scene to the next, but nothing registers long enough to create character, tension, or the slimmest desire to see what happens in the next scene. Every once in a while director Joe Johnston (
Jumanji) finds a grand staircase or CGI fog that conjures up the atmosphere of the old Universal horror classics, but otherwise this is a clueless affair--not as bad as
Van Helsing, but flat-out dull. The movie can't even find a way to get the old Gypsy lady (Geraldine Chaplin stepping into Maria Ouspenskaya's tiny shoes) to deliver a proper recitation of screenwriter Curt Siodmak's great "Even a man who is pure in heart" doggerel from the 1941 film. Instead, it's thrown away in a voice-over at the beginning--one hairy way to start the movie.
--Robert HortonJames Reece (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador to France, is secretly moonli! ghting as a low-level CIA operative. Looking for more action, ! Reece ac cepts a job that teams him with wise-cracking special agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta), a trigger-happy loose cannon sent to Paris on a mission of international importance. Now, Reece finds himself on the wildest ride of his life as the new partners pull out all the stops to annihilate the enemy in this explosive, white-knuckle, non-stop thriller.An uncomplicated, moderately entertaining action film,
From Paris With Love offers an enthusiastic performance by John Travolta as a
just-this-side-of-crazy agent and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (
The Tudors) as the low-level operative newly partnered with him. Outwardly an aide to the U.S. Ambassador in France, James Reese (Rhys Meyers) is also a low-level CIA operative, tasked with generally mundane duties. Then his inside contact offers him a high-level assignment that could lead to a promotion to full agent. All Reese has to do is drive CIA agent Charlie Wax (Travolta) around Paris on an undisclosed mission. ! But Wax is a shoot first, don't bother with questions kinda guy, and the straitlaced Reese quickly finds himself riding shotgun to a killing-spree through Paris' underground drug sub-culture. The drugs lead the obviously opposite duo to a hidden terrorist cell, and they race to stop the suicide bombers' plot. Wax's wise-cracking, one-on-many fight scenes are adequately entertaining--especially when he flings bad guys down a curving staircase, as Reese tries to avoid getting hit by the bodies--but the action generally leaves you wanting more. An undesirable characteristic in an action movie. Based on a story by Luc Besson, (
The Fifth Element and
The Transporter movies), one can't help wonder if the complexity of the story and characters could have been improved if he'd written the screenplay himself. However, the simplistic story offers a few surprises and laugh-worthy one-liners. The climactic final chase scene--Agent Wax hanging out the window of! a speeding Audi, armed with heavy artillery and a driver with! nerves of steel, as he attempts to stop one phase of the planned attack--is as impossible as one could hope for in this kind of movie. And hearing Travolta call his burger a “royale with cheese†is almost worth the rest of the movie.
--Jill Corddry
Stills from From Paris with Love (Click for larger image) Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 05/11/2010 Run time: 109 minutes Rating: Pg13As pure check-your-head-at-the-door popcorn entertainment, the apocalyptic action-horror hybrid
Legion delivers in nearly every frame--its story of a band of strangers fighting an army of angels and demons for the fate of mankind is proudly loud, bullet riddled, and knee-deep in gore and CGI. That doesn't mean it's particularly good or even coherent--the story has renegade angel Michael (a glum Paul Bettany) come to the aid of diner owner Dennis Quaid (equally glum) and his patrons (a cross-section of stereotypes embodied by a capable cast, which includes Lucas Black, Charles S. Dutton, Tyrese Gibson, Kate W! alsh, and Jon Tenney) as a host of heavenly and diabolical bei! ngs, dis patched by an angry God, descend on the diner with the intent of killing waitress Adrianne Palicki (
Friday Night Lights), whose unborn child may be the salvation of humanity. The orgy of special effects--endless hails of bullets and a menagerie of unpleasant demonic creatures, the most unsettling of which is the ice cream man (Doug Jones,
Hellboy)--is eye popping but ultimately repetitive, and since no character rises above a cipher in director Scott Stewart's script (cowritten with Peter Schink), the whole affair feels unwieldy and eventually tiresome under a barrage of hackneyed dialogue. Naturally,
Legion ends with the possibility of a sequel, though one wonders where the story can go after Armageddon.
--Paul Gaita Stills from Legion (Click for larger image) 
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