Transporter 2 (2005) – I actually like this one better than the original. The mainspring to the plot of first Transporter movie was Frank (Jason Statham) stepping outside his strict self-imposed rules for no good reason, and it got sillier and schmaltzier from there. Here, the plot springs from Frank keeping his rules: As a fill-in-driver for the young son of a government official, Frank accords him as much protection as any of his clients or cargos — so when the kid is kidnapped, Frank is duty-bound to get the kid back.
The action often crosses the line between “extravagant” and “cartoony” (if you want to know exactly where that line is, it’s right in between the John Wick movies and this one), but sometimes spectacle is just the right thing for a movie to give you.
The Game (1997) – A supremely paranoid thriller. Rich banker Nicholas Van Orten (Michael Douglas) is enrolled in an immersive but vague “game” by his unpredictable younger brother (Sean Penn), and starts to see his life unravel one step ahead of him.
It actually reminded me of the SF novel Daemon by Daniel Suarez, in the idea that an expansive enough grasp of variables (in The Game, the variables being a thorough knowledge of Van Orten’s own psychology) will allow the design of an entirely dependable predictive program or algorithm — provided one has the resources to put it into play.
(And then I look at the world around us, and thank my stars that either humans aren’t quite as ultimately predictable as either story posits, or that the people who want to rule in the Real World are a lot stupider than the controlling entities in either story.)
Dune Drifter (2020) – There are a lot of scorching reviews of this one on the IMDb (where it currently sits at 3.3 stars), prompting me to say: “C’mon, it’s not that bad…”
Writer/director Marc Price garnered some fame a few years ago for his “£25 zombie movie” Colin (2008), which I watched and reviews several years back and thought not half bad for the price. Dune Drifter has an exponentially higher budget (it couldn’t really be less), but it’s still a micro-budget sci-fi “epic.” And by those metrics, it’s pretty good.
It’s also pretty simple: After a space battle against alien forces in which our protagonists’ squad is decimated, she crash-lands on a barely hospitable planet with an unfixable problem on her fighter. But she knows an alien ship also came down, and that the analogous part of the alien ship could be jerry-rigged to work in hers… so across the barren landscape she goes.
It’s not a great movie by any stretch — the space battle seems drawn out with characterization bits that go nowhere, and the alien costumes are pretty clearly all terrestrial components (like gas masks) — but the barren volcanic plains of Iceland work well for an inhospitable exoplanet, and the fact that the one cockpit (used for all the fighters) was built in Price’s living room… There’s a lot to be said about the can-do attitude here.
And frankly, those belligerent boobs on the IMDb which proclaim this “the worst movie I ever saw” need to sit down with me for movie night. I’ll have them screaming and tearing their hair out.
Abandoned movies:
Rise of the Gargoyles (2009) – For what it was, the script wasn’t bad, but the cinematography was so impoverished, even before getting to the bargain-basement CG…
You are not out there by yourself. Rotten Tomatoes critic reviews acknowledge it is (a) low budget, and (b) much better than they expected. No audience reviews yet.
It being DUNE DRIFTER.