TheRetroCritic

Eeeeee! So yeah, here's the Dark Knight Rises teaser. A nice little treat on a rainy day like this one (London). Can't say it reveals much of anything but we do get a sense that something epically badass is about to go down. Not sure how Catwoman will fit into all this Bane on Bat man-fight action and still not convinced the Bane/Catwoman/Rhas Al Ghul villain combination was a good idea to begin with but I can't deny that based on this teaser, it doesn't look like Nolan's jumped the shark just yet. Along with a quick glimpse of Tom Hardy's Bane we get a Commissioner Gordon in hospital looking not too good continuing his awesomely overblown speech from the end of Dark Knight . Unless he's taking over the Two-Face role, I'm guessing either Bane beat the hell out of him or Al Ghul's latest dastardly plan involves some other potent poison spreading throughout Gotham City... ...or Anne Hathaway's catsuit looked too silly and a suicide attempt f

Making a worse sequel than Highlander 2 was always going to be a challenge and although they do try very hard here to indeed achieve this nirvana of cinematic assness, it just falls short and ends up being mostly dull. The film starts off pretty much exactly like Conan The Barbarian : bad guys on horses with silly helmets burning down a village, Mako, montages...literally all that's missing is Basil Poledouris's score. Then the nonsense inevitably begins as a statue inexplicably turns its head and opens its eyes, we cut to the present then back to 18th century France for some reason, we're given an odd, super long gratuitous sex scene and the list goes on. That said, the film at the very least acknowledges the shortcomings of its predecessor as it doesn't even attempt to fix anything and just never mentions it. We are shown bits from the first film so we can only assume either the action is taking place in between 1 and 2 or they're just pretending like The Qu

It's no secret that sequels very rarely live up to the original. Occasionally, a sequel is actually so bad it can even single-handedly destroy all that was good about the first film, and what better example than Highlander 2? Never a big fan of Highlander myself, I never really understood what the big deal was with the first film and why people were such big fans of it when it came out. That said, in retrospect it's easy to understand its charm: the originality of the premise and the creation of this entire mythology from scratch is a welcome departure from the countless monster/vampire movies which came out at the time. Sure the whole thing was always silly, overblown and inherently flawed but people didn't care, they just wanted to see a bad French actor kick ass with a sword, pretending to be Scottish the entire time, heads being chopped off, references to Queen and lots of electricity. LOTS of electricity. I get that. A sequel can either build on an original concep

It has been a while since a film has sparked so many discussions. Inception, whether you liked it or not, most probably already got you to debate about a million ridiculous dream-within-a-dream scenarios. With a film this rich, this dense, there's certainly a lot to ponder. Philip K Dick meets The Matrix in one of the biggest concept movies ever in which a team of dream...thieves pull their resources to try something different for one last big job and attempt to implant an idea into some guy's head. We are then thrown into multiple layers of dreaming as Tommy from 3rd Rock From the Sun flies around a hotel room, Di Caprio gets hit by a train in a city street and Marion Cotillard goes psycho. This is all great stuff! Great action, impressive special effects, very good cast, a complex and gripping sci-fi story...what more could a sci-fi nerd such as myself ask for? And yet there is something a tad underwhelming about Inception, a film which, in its trailers, promised the a