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Dredd

Director: Pete Travis

Cast: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Wood Harris, Lena Headey

5

Dredd is exactly the movie it sets out to be. It’s a grimy, ultraviolent action flick set in the future dystopia of Mega City One. The only thing flashy about Dredd is its blatant 3D-specific conceit. The drug SLO-MO causes anyone who uses it to feel like time is passing at 1% of its normal speed, which allows for all sorts of crystalline 3D effects whenever someone is on it. Other than that, though, the movie gives both fans of the cult UK comic and action movie aficionados what they want. Karl Urban is intense and all-business as Dredd, and he never takes off his helmet. Olivia Thirlby hits the right blend of wide-eyed surprise and growing confidence as the rookie Judge Anderson. When the two of them get trapped in a 200-story slum tower, they fight their way to the top to stop the flow of SLO-MO and take down the drug lord (Lena Headey) who wants them dead. There’s no pretension here, just wall-to-wall action as the judges punch and shoot their way through one great action set piece after another. Chris Conaton

Rock of Ages

Director: Adam Shankman

Cast: Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Malin Åkerman, Mary J. Blige, Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise

4

Rock of Ages is undeniably terrible. I mean, it’s ungodly awful. Just a calamity on almost every level. Almost. The one level it exists and—dare I say thrives—is the one where Tom Cruise wanders around shirtless singing “Pour Some Sugar on Me” while he mock-masturbates in front of a packed house of classic rock fans. Yeah. That part I’m not ashamed of at all. Cruise is so committed to playing the drugged-out rock god he manages to make the part unforgettably magnetic despite everything and everyone surrounding it being absolute crap. It certainly helps he has the voice of 1,000 angels born from the deceased souls of Italian opera singers, too. Ben Travers

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Director: Neveldine/Taylor

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Ciarán Hinds, Violante Placido, Johnny Whitworth, Christopher Lambert, Idris Elba

3

Neveldine/Taylor are responsible for the gonzo Crank series, but trash movie aficionados should banish any thoughts of an electric-shock-powered Nicolas Cage. To be clear: this is still a PG-13 sequel with some presumed fidelity to the comics (David Goyer, who has worked on the Blade and Batman series, is a cowriter), and contains few to none of Crank‘s winking transgressions.

Instead, the film offers other pleasures. Just as Neveldine/Taylor is a sillier, more self-aware directing entity than Mark Steven Johnson, Spirit of Vengeance is a tighter, weirder, funnier enterprise than its predecessor. The story is supernatural-thriller boilerplate: there’s a child (Fergus Riordan) who could bring about the apocalypse (or something) if the devil, in human form called Roarke (Ciarán Hinds), gets ahold of him. The child and his protective mother Nadya (Violante Placido) go on the run from the devil’s minions, and the rogue priest Moreau (Idris Elba) seeks Blaze’s help, promising to rid him of the Ghost Rider curse. Vehicular chases and battles with various demonic superpowers ensue, all shot with scrappy energy. Jesse Hassenger

Haywire

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas

2

Aaron Cohen, the former IDF soldier who served as a technical advisor and weapons trainer on Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, has said of his work on the film, “You can’t sell a B-action movie to an A-action audience.” On the surface, the convoluted exposition, thin characterization, and modest production values of Haywire all contribute to the film’s B-movie patina. But the combat scenes featuring Gina Carano as heroine Mallory Kane are among the most genuinely thrilling set pieces of the year. Soderbergh built the movie around MMA star Carano, and she’s unforgettable in her debut starring role.

The second act of the film begins with Mallory stating that she doesn’t like loose ends, and the remaining plot strictly consists of her settling those loose ends and avenging double- (triple-?) crosses. Soderbergh’s reunion with screenwriter Lem Dobbs prompts a return to the zigzagging vengeance plot of The Limey, and the visual design owes much to the globetrotting aesthetic of his underrated Ocean’s Twelve. Shooting and editing the film himself but substituting his parents’ names as pseudonyms, Soderbergh is back in fighting form after nearly a decade of middling efforts. Each sitting-down-and-talking scene of Haywire is by design a prelude to another outburst of action. Each of Mallory’s combatants is played by an A-list leading man in a supporting role. From a commercial standpoint, nearly everything about the film is a risk, but the film succeeds as a test of Cohen’s maxim: In its committed and accomplished embrace of so-called B-movie pleasures, Haywire is a grade “A” Soderbergh effort. Thomas Britt

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Cast: Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rufus Sewell, Marton Csokas

1

The fantastically-titled Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is every bit the messy exercise that a film about an icon of American history dispatching undead bloodsuckers directed by a former Red Army artillery officer (Timur Bekmambetov) was likely to be. But this sincerely-mounted collage of genre influences, ludicrous quasi-history, and performances of unconvincing conviction does boast wildly creative action sequences and buckets of spurting, artful blood. It was both a pulpier alternative to Spielberg’s later prestige drama about the 16th President and a wholly inadvertent critique of the distortions perpetrated on historical fact by the popular mythmaking impulse of American culture. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter amused some of the people some of the time, and was totally ridiculous all of the time. Ross Langanger