TheRetroCritic

Left Behind was sold to us as a disaster movie with only a soupçon of religion included in it to benefit the film's big concept. We were promised mostly CGI destruction with some Nicolas Cage thrown in and that didn't sound too bad, even if the film itself looked ridiculous. And ridiculous it is! Ah if only that was this movie's biggest flaw... If you don't already know, the film follows a pilot (Cage) fly a plane while, everywhere, the Rapture is taking place: people are disappearing out of their clothes leaving chaos to settle on the Earth. While that may sound entertainingly apocalyptic, Left Behind makes it feel about as plausible and threatening as that event did in Seth Rogen comedy This Is The End , a far superior film in every single way, I should point out. The disaster part of the movie doesn't kick off until half an hour of mostly Cage-less exposition where the pilot's daughter Chloe (a godawful Cassi Thomson) has sleep-inducing discussions

Liam Neeson is back and, this time, he's taking on an entire plane! After the likes of Taken , its sequel and Unknown , we get Non-Stop another punchy B movie thriller in which Neeson tries to figure some mystery out and cracks a few bones (and noses) in the process. The "mystery" this time is, quite simply, a whodunit. Neeson is Bill Marks, an air marshall who gets on a plane to find that someone is going to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless he transfers $150M into some account. Bill, an alcoholic with a troubled past, is pushed to his limits as he starts suspecting pretty much everyone around him, finding it near impossible to trust anyone. Eventually, a bomb is revealed to be on the plane and things take an even more destructive turn. The trailer for Non-Stop promised a lot of brainless fun and OTT plane-set action scenes and the film does provide that but it also brings some genuinely clever little twists and turns and keeps you glued to the screen an

With Die Hard maestro John McTiernan not onboard for this sequel, it could have all gone wrong and our beloved McClane could have been left carrying a mediocre retread over his shoulders leaving the franchise to slowly go downhill after that. Thankfully, what we got was a retread, for sure, but a decent one with enough action and enough lols to carry us through to the next, superior, round. Arguably the least memorable of all Die Hard flicks, this sequel is commonly known as "the airport one" and, indeed, there's not much more to it. Once again it's Christmas and once again John McClane is stuck in one place trying to stop terrorists from pulling off some elaborate plan which just happens to involve his wife, kind of. This would all be much too familiar and dull if it weren't for the likes of Bruce Willis himself, who still does a top job as the iconic put-upon cop, a brilliantly creepy bunch of villains (including a chilling William Sadler) and some kicka