𝐓𝐨𝐩 𝐁𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐟𝐥𝐢𝐱
Battle: Los Angeles — A survival war against foreign invaders in the heart of the city of angels.
There’s one tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Battle Los Angeles which hints at an interesting film director Jonathan Liebesman – the man who brought you the Texas Chainsaw prequel and that Tooth Fairy movie Darkness Falls – chose not to make.
Early on, a couple of grunts wonder aloud in thudding dialogue whether the aliens they’re fighting are soldiers following orders just like them. Later, after much computer-game style ET-blasting carnage, there’s a busy skirmish between Our Side (the US Marines, hoo-rah!) and Them (Evil Alien Bastards) in which it’s easy to miss a little vignette of two aliens pulling a wounded comrade out of the line of fire. So they’re not a hive mind or zombies or robots or insects and might have more complicated characters than we’re allowed to see.
Liebesman isn’t interested in competing with District 9 or Monsters, though, just in trashing Los Angeles (a city of no strategic value whatsoever) and shooting aliens. The menace comes from spindle-legged, semi-armoured, mushroom-headed, welded-on-weapons monsters the like of which we’ve seen a dozen times before, and the heroics are delivered by the sort of soldiers who were cliché as John Wayne hit The Sands of Iwo Jima let alone when Clint Eastwood stormed Heartbreak Ridge.
Rebel Ridge — When justice must shed blood to speak out.
A retired marine travels to the small town of Shelby Springs to bail his nephew out of police custody on a minor drugs infringement. When police officers confiscate his bail money upon entering the town, he finds himself up against a corrupt local justice system and is forced to fight for more than his cash.
There is a lot in new Netflix thriller Rebel Ridge that is going to feel like a warm blanket to its target audience. This is smartly made, efficient delivered entertainment for anybody seeking one man against an army, or cool military types running rings around incompetent villains. It does not bother to reinvent the wheel. In fact, it barely repaints it. It could easily be described as a First Blood remake without ruffling too many feathers.
Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, who previously made the excellent revenge film Blue Ruin, is working in very comfortable territory here. He seems to specialize in small-town crime, and he undertakes such films with great talent. In this case he works with a particularly smart protagonist in Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), a former marine martial arts instructor who thinks ahead, adopts a tactical approach, and constantly surprises the Shelby Springs police force.
It is a smart character in what is honestly a pretty smart film. Viewers expecting wall-to-wall bloody violence and aggressive death counts may surprised as just how restrained Rebel Ridge can be. It is a better film for that restraint, and a more satisfying experience. Saulnier’s screenplay shows the difference between delivering an audience what they expect and delivering what they actually need. He knows what to include and what to leave out – and most importantly when to enter the action and when to leave. It begins with a cyclist being violently run off the road: it is immediate, visceral, and intense. How it ends is up to the viewer to find out.
Wanted — The Secret Assassin with the Fateful Curved Bullets!
‘Wanted’ starts off with a mystery guy who is being sniped by a small group of people disguised in health-and-safety-gone-mad work clothing. I should clear this up and say that these are blatantly not builders or engineers, but if they were, they should be fired on the spot for not doing their job properly.
Instead, these are a clan of professional assassins who have tracked down this guy and are in the process of tearing him a new poohole. The guy then takes a run up and smashes through the window, shooting all the assassins… dead. He lands on top of the building opposite to where he just was, smiles, then realises he’s stood on an ‘X’ on the floor. ‘Oh no’, he thinks; and then a bullet from an apartment miles away, bursts through the back of his head, making its way all the way through, like how one may decide to de-core an apple if one was hungry.
Hidden Strike — Jackie Chan & John Cena Join Hands, Fight in the Desert!
With the new Chinese action-comedy starring Jackie Chan and John Cena becoming a highly anticipated hit in the US, curiosity around Hidden Strike 2 news has already started to surface, as the idea of a Chan and Cena-led franchise of any kind definitely has merit. Hidden Strike stars Jackie Chan as a former Chinese Special Ops agent who has since retired and gone into business in the private security sector. When he is hired to help rescue some workers at a Chinese oil refinery, he discovers a plan in place to steal the oil, with a group threatening the biggest oil heist in history. He then has to team up with a former American Marine (John Cena) to rescue the workers and stop the criminals.
If there will be a Hidden StrikeI sequel, it will depend on the studio’s reaction to how well the movie does on streaming in the United States. This is where an actor like John Cena comes in. Chan’s best movies over the last decade have been mostly animated voice movies, although he did have a couple of average success stories with The Foreigner in 2017 and Skiptrace in 2016. However, Cena has become a major star thanks to his role as Peacemaker in the DCU and his great comic timing in action movies. As for Hidden Strike, it dropped on Netflix in July 2023, so Hidden Strike 2 will likely rest on if it does as well in the US as it has done internationally.
Mile 22 — A death mission only for the brave.
CIA Officer James Silva leads a top secret CIA Special Activities Division unit, code-named Overwatch, to infiltrate a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) safe house in the United States. Under the supervision of James Bishop, Overwatch’s mission is to locate and destroy shipments of caesium before the highly toxic substance can be weaponized to kill thousands. The unit kills the occupants, while Overwatch Agent Alice Kerr is wounded. One of the Russians, an 18-year-old named Anatole Kuragin, falls out of a window during an explosion after failing to save the caesium. Silva executes Kuragin despite his pleading, and everyone escapes.
Sixteen months later, Indocarr (a fictional country loosely based on Indonesia) police officer Li Noor surrenders at the United States Embassy to negotiate for passage out of the country in exchange for information on the remaining caesium. Kerr vouches for Noor’s reliability as an asset, but he refuses to reveal the password to an encrypted, self-destroying disc until he is safely on a plane. While Noor is being tested, Kerr tries to come to terms with her family issues. Axel, leading a team from the Indocarr State Intelligence Agency, arrives at the embassy and demands that Noor be handed over as Noor fends off an assassination attempt by Indocarr government agents. Overwatch Agent Sam Snow and Kerr arrive, shocked at his combat prowess, learning that Noor used to be Indocarr Special Forces.
Silva agrees to take Noor to an airplane 22 miles away. Noor reveals he is turning on the corrupt Indocarr government because it killed his family. Bishop’s surveillance feed blacks out, then comes on again. During the blackout, Axel’s men place a bomb on the car, which explodes. While Silva’s unit helps fend off Axel’s men, Sam is mortally injured. Silva gives Sam two grenades and leaves her, letting her suicide-attack the remaining henchmen.
Silva, Noor, Kerr, and another Overwatch Agent, William Douglas, enter a restaurant. Silva sees Axel and walks toward him despite Bishop’s orders. Axel tells James to give up Noor, but James refuses. While returning, he brushes past two girls and realizes that there is a grenade in the restaurant; he tackles civilians before it explodes. When the dust clears, Douglas is severely wounded, and Silva is attacked by the girls. Noor helps Silva kill them. While going to a safe house, Douglas dies while holding off Axel’s men.
After taking cover in an apartment complex, Kerr is separated and meets a young girl. Kerr and the girl escape harm by using booby-trapped grenades. Silva and Noor split up, fighting Axel and his henchmen. Silva and Noor meet up again, as well as the young girl Kerr saved. She leads them to Kerr, who is losing against a henchman, until Noor kills him.
On the way to the air strip, the remaining team members briefly confront Axel. Exasperated, Silva has Overwatch destroy his car with a drone strike. The team barely makes it to the airplane. Li Noor boards the airplane, along with Kerr who is going to meet her family once again. While on the airplane, Bishop notices Noor’s heart rate is accelerating, and it is revealed that Noor is not a double agent, but a triple agent working for the Russian government, and Kuragin was the son of a high-ranking official within that government. The official hired Noor to give Alice the wrong information, so they would trust him. Just as Alice realizes this, Bishop’s Overwatch surveillance team is raided. The entire team is shot and Bishop walks outside to die. Silva refuses to acknowledge that Alice is killed on the plane. Silva realizes this too late and details his experiences during a post-mission debriefing. Back at home, Silva puts up Noor’s picture, vowing revenge.
Extraction 2 — Chris Hemsworth returns, saving people in the midst of a fiery hell.
Extraction 2 is set nine months after the original 2020 film, following Australian mercenary Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) as he accepts his next high-stakes mission: rescuing the battered family of a ruthless Georgian gangster from the prison where they are being held. After helming the first film, Sam Hargrave returned as director with Joe and Anthony Russo also back as producers. Joe Russo also wrote the sequel’s screenplay.
The first Extraction was a major success for Netflix, shattering viewership records to become the most-watched original film on the service at the time. It remains to be seen if the sequel will perform as well on Netflix. If it does, Hargrave and Hemsworth are willing and ready to get back in the saddle for Extraction 3.
Mad Max: Fury Road — A crazy race in a post-apocalyptic world.
With the series’ name currently splashed in huge letters over Manhattan’s video billboards, it’s strange to remember just how small the original Mad Max was. Filmed with a handful of cars and extras from a local motorcycle gang, its low-budget realism translated into focused, powerful action sequences that most Hollywood choreography still can’t match. But it’s the sequel, The Road Warrior, that people remember. Director George Miller took the core elements of Mad Max and made everything bigger: biker gangs became futuristic tribes, and chases turned into outright warfare, culminating in an extended battle so chaotic that we needed a diagram to explain it. A few years after that, Miller decided to go even bigger, but we ended up with Beyond Thunderdome, a film that stripped out a lot of what made the series great in the first place — namely, the car chases.
It took 30 years, but George Miller is back, and he’s promised to deliver what we all really want: a movie that is, as he put it, “almost a continuous chase.” It’s possible to look at parts of Mad Max: Fury Road and just see a bigger, more elaborate version of its 1980s predecessors — which isn’t a bad thing. But like the survivors of its blasted wasteland, it’s also a movie that seems intent on leaving the past behind. Fury Road is what happens when retro pulp meets social progress. And that’s the whole reason it works.
Outside The Wire — Soldiers and war machines: who is in control?
“Outside the Wire” opens with a full-on action scene. Robot soldiers fight alongside human ones — or maybe against them. It’s hard to tell. Bullets fly. Tough guys in helmets crouch behind concrete barriers. Two men are hit, and their commanding officer makes plans to pull them to safety, while half a world away, in the middle of the Nevada desert, a hot shot named Harp (“Snowfall” star Damson Idris) eats gummy bears and takes control of the situation. Disobeying a direct order, he launches a drone strike, killing two and saving the other 38. In the next scene, he is court-martialed and sent to the demilitarized zone for a taste of combat.
So begins the latest Netflix action movie, which I wager will be seen by more eyeballs than took in “Tenet” on the big screen last year. They will watch because it stars Anthony Mackie as a android super-trooper, and because there’s not much else new to consume in the way of movies, but also because the movie has been front-loaded with this intense but almost nonsensical set-piece.
“Outside the Wire” plays like Netflix’s version of “Gemini Man.” It doesn’t star Will Smith (although the streamer got him to do “Bright,” so it could have), and it wasn’t directed by Ang Lee (but rather Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, who helmed the atmospheric hotel-horror movie “1408”), so the budget’s a lot smaller and so is the ambition. But the plot’s actually pretty similar and the movie takes itself every bit as seriously about how much the world has to fear military technology — and especially the idea of cyborg/clone/robot soldiers. This is not something that keeps me up at night, but screenwriters Rowan Athale and Rob Yescombe seem very, very worried about it. So much so that the whole business of barely-old-enough-to-vote joystick jockeys remote-controlling drone strikes from Nevada hardly registers as problematic.
Triple Frontier — 5 warriors, 1 mission, and loyalties tested!
Triple Frontier has a familiar plot. A drug enforcement officer named Pope (Oscar Isaac) sniffs out where a Colombian drug lord’s money is hidden. He decides to assemble a team of veteran soldiers with a plan to break into the mafia’s lair, steal the money and escape quietly. Joining the Pope’s group are “Iron Hand” Ironhead (Charlie Hunnam) who has killed 43 people, Ironhead’s younger brother Ben (Garrett Hedlund), pilot “Catfish” (Pedro Pascal) and veteran soldier “Red Fly” (Ben Affleck) who was shot 5 times… but did not die. Of course, things are not that easy and the 5 people have to face the consequences of their actions.
Belonging to the “muscular” genre, Triple Frontier has done well in creating drama that stimulates viewers from fiery gunfights to tense scenes of flying a plane through a canyon. Despite having 5 characters, the film still finds a way to show off the skills of each guy. The most impressive thing is probably the discipline and coordination of this group of “thieves” in the campaign to break into the safe of the boss Lorea.
If you are a fan of shooting games and military combat movies, you should not miss the scenes of giving each other candy in Triple Frontier. Along with some natural scenes with many types of terrain from jungles to rocky mountains, the film is truly an interesting role-playing version for violence fans.
However, from the moment the mission goes wrong, Pope’s team turns into a group of C-rank soldiers instead of the A-rank as expected. Every action of theirs is so reckless and careless that it is hard to understand compared to a commando team as described. Most of the difficulties and troubles that the group encounters are due to the mistakes of the members themselves. From there, the journey to hide the money becomes lengthy and tiring because it delves into the psychology and personality of each member of the group.
A small part of the disappointment comes from the role of Ben Affleck – who is almost absent-minded throughout the film while this character has the most worth-telling story. Because of focusing on the staged fighting scenes, Triple Frontier also forgets to connect the members and make the audience truly trust them. Everything we know about the gunmen in the group until the end of the film is really vague.
Suggested videos for you:
