Event Horizon (1997)

★★½
Event Horizon represented Paul W. S. Anderson's most ambitious project to date (1997). His debut film was Shopping, a little-known but respectable effort about thieves who crash cars into stores to steal merchandise. He was also responsible for Mortal Kombat, one of the better video game adaptations. That movie's financial success opened doors for Anderson and gave him the clout needed to take on a bigger challenge. Event Horizon is a space movie with some horror mixed into it. Among Event Horizon's virtues is that it's a sci-fi thriller that gives us a future world that is mostly technologically plausible. I liked a tense scene featuring a man about to be exposed to space, and his commanding officer gives him all the right directions to minimize the damage to his body. There's attention to detail here. What's missing is a lack of ambition. The technical look is great, the special effects are realistic, and the premise is intriguing. Anderson's film just doesn't do these finer qualities much justice. He's satisfied to tell the tale and insert effective imagery, some shocking, but it feels like there's more to the story. Studio interference played a role, according to Anderson, and that wouldn't be a surprise. A similar fate would befall Walter Hill's Supernova several years later.

Abduction (2011)

★★½
Abduction (2011) gets plenty of things right. It has an interesting plot, a solid supporting cast, a talented director in John Singleton (in his last movie before his passing in 2019) and some good fight scenes. It goes wrong in a crucial area, though, and that is the lead role. Taylor Lautner, in the middle of his career peak thanks to his appearance in the Twilight movies, is physically adept, but his lack of emotional range interferes with the necessary task of conveying his character's mental stress while on the run from mob enforcers and C.I.A. agents. During a few scenes, when he's under extreme duress, he finds a believable way to react, but there's not much in between his two endpoints of "normal" and "dialed up to 11." His female co-star Lily Collins, on the other hand, gets it exactly right. Compare the two as the story progresses, and you'll see two different kinds of performances. She endures the same violent situations, but she dials up her emotional state according to the level of danger and decompresses in the same manner. When the two make out in a train car, she looks like she needs it more. For her, it's an emotional release after a close call with a mob henchman. For him, he's just kissing a girl while on a date.

Vanilla Sky (2001)

★★★★
Vanilla Sky is magnificent. It is absolutely astonishing. From beginning to end, I couldn't take my eyes off it. 2001 was a strong year with some brilliant movies, which was a relief because 2000 was weak by comparison. I don't know what happened there. I loved Beautiful People and The Virgin Suicides, but few others stood out. Gladiator was good, but not that good. When 2001 came around, it was like a return to form, and all was well. Vanilla Sky premiered in December, and I never once considered that its proximity to the end of the year influenced my decision to place it at the top of my year-end list. If it had come out in January, it would have still been the best movie of the year. That's how strong it is. It has a story that's beautifully told, features wonderful cinematography and contains memorable performances and a great soundtrack that sets the mood appropriately. There isn't a flawed moment, and writer/director Cameron Crowe deserves high praise for delivering to us this ingenious creation. It is significantly better than his over-hyped Almost Famous.

House (1986)

★★
There has been only one horror movie that made me scream out loud, and that was 1986's House, a horror/comedy production from the Friday the 13th team (producer Sean S. Cunningham, director Steve Miner). My dad took me to the theater to see it, and I remember the moment it happened. The entire theater blew up with a deafening noise. It was that good, and what made it better was the timing. I think we all expected something was going to happen after a well-placed false alarm, but it was scary anyway because of some effective editing and the gruesome special effects work. I'll go ahead and declare House's jump scare as one of the greatest in horror movie history, ranking up there with Wait Until Dark's iconic leap from out of nowhere courtesy of Alan Arkin. It doesn't matter that I was 10 years old when I saw it. A theater full of adults reacted the same way.

Cyborg (1989)

★★½
Mathematics teaches us that two negatives make a positive, but such a concept doesn’t apply to film very often. In the case of Cyborg, those two negatives are Cannon Pictures and Albert Pyun. The former was a 1980s production company with a wildly varied output, ranging from near greatness (Runaway Train) to laughable action (Invasion U.S.A.). The latter is an action movie director who had some success with theatrical releases, but was mostly confined to direct-to-video nonsense. With track records like these, it’s a wonder that Cyborg turns out to be pretty decent.

Despicable Me (2010)

★★★
Universal's Despicable Me has all the flair (though little of the depth) of a Pixar animated movie, with the kind of good humor reminiscent of that iconic company. It has a likable lead, funny creatures, cute kids and a greedy villain. The twist is that there is no hero with the usual traits of nobility. The likable lead is a thief, but he has a soft side that is exposed with time. The movie's selling point then is not how the hero can overcome obstacles on the way to victory. This is really more about the humorous situations in which the thief finds himself on his way to hatching his master plan.

Robots (2005)

★★½
The world of C.G.I. animation is opening up the doors to all sorts of visual artists who can't wait to impress us with the images they can create, but it's also opening up the doors to all these screenwriters who want to impress us with how smart they are. Actually, "smart" is the wrong word. The writers of Robots, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, are smart guys, but their script reveals that they've seen a lot of movies, so they're really just trying to impress us with their knowledge of movies.

Bloodsport (1988)

★★
Bloodsport was my favorite movie coming out of high school. Jean-Claude Van Damme was at his box office peak in the mid-'90s, and his physique and fighting skills were a sight to behold. He didn’t quite have the muscle mass of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he had more bulk than Chuck Norris, making him an atypical martial arts action star. Highly touted as a true story about the only American to win a secret tournament in Hong Kong, Bloodsport was based on the alleged exploits of Frank Dux, who told many disputed tales of his accomplishments both in martial arts and in the U.S. military. Whether his stories are true or not is no concern of mine. What is a concern is how the movie presents the story, and there are many glaring weaknesses that have become more apparent to me with the passage of time. That is the inevitable result of maturing and developing an ear for dialogue. The acting from the E.S.L. cast is horrendous. I've been all over the world. I've been to Hong Kong and Africa and the Middle East and Europe. I've conversed with many individuals whose second language was English, and they all sounded more natural than most of the actors here. The ability to recite lines is of paramount importance in motion picture storytelling outside of the silent era. Bloodsport fails to deliver because the producers hired the wrong people. It is as simple as that.

The Unforgiven (1960)

★½
Audrey Hepburn was a wonderful actress, but as good as she was, her range didn't spread far enough to play this role in The Unforgiven, her weakest movie. At her best, Hepburn delighted audiences with her ethereal beauty and charming disposition, and her best movies bring out those qualities, making her irresistible to watch. I don't know who was in charge of casting The Unforgiven, but whoever he was, he added a blemish to Hepburn's filmography. The movie doesn't work for a lot of reasons. It's badly executed, poorly scripted and miscast to the point of embarrassment.