TheRetroCritic

Remaking genius cult B-movie Death Race 2000 was either going to end up being a very bad idea or a very good idea. The film (think Wacky Races with gore, Sylvester Stallone and boobs) said pretty much all it had to say it seemed. But here we are with a Jason Statham B-side actioner that's... Neither bad or good, really. More the latter than the former, though. The film opens with a cool car chase involving masked driver Frankenstein (played by David Carradine in the original film and rocking a cameo here), a really good start: the cars look great, the action's fine... That is, until the character is killed off! Yeah, then it becomes a prison movie for some reason with Jason Statham getting locked up after being wrongfully accused of killing his own wife. It's like Steven Seagal came in and rewrote the movie! It's not bad but it's not quite what you expect walking in, frankly. Thankfully, though, things finally get down to business and the movie gets bac

Jack Sparrow returns in this new Pirates of the Caribbean spin-off which finally discards of Keira Knightley and Mr Bloom to focus on Depp's very own adventure on the search for the Fountain of Youth. Director Gore Verbinski is replaced by Rob Marshall so this looked set to be a very different movie indeed. Well, different in an...exactly the same sort of way... To be fair you've got new faces: Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane, some mermaid, some priest... But even they feel familiar. The priest/mermaid lovey-dovey stuff is pure Keira/Orlando nonsense, McShane's Black Beard stands in for Bill Nighy's Davy Jones and Cruz is a 3 dimensional version of a tougher Keira Knightley we've seen in the previous Pirates movie. Story-wise, you've got no less than 4 teams of people (pirates, Spanish people, Barbossa...) all hunting down the Fountain of MacGuffins but of course there's plenty of double-crosses, magic and pointless rules on the way. Why one can't sim