The first Alien vs Predator was pretty dire (it had its moments), but as you should know by now I’m a complete glutton for sci-fi / action punishment. I got Aliens vs Predator – Requiem on DVD and tried watching it today. I knew it wasn’t going to be good news when I had to ramp up the backlight, brightness and contrast before I could even see the predator in the first opening scenes.

Even regular scenes on earth, in the daytime, the shadows were too dark. It’s a technical nightmare, I just gave up.

I started fast forwarding through the dialog, hoping for some engaging action, but any action is in the pitch black and impossible to see. I’m sure if you stick with it you might find a character you want to empathise with (I didn’t) and worry about enough to watch through the murk, but it wasn’t for me.

I stopped watching and put another DVD in. Very poor movie, avoid at all costs.

Another DVD I purchased recently when scooping up a bunch of ‘under £5 movies’, but this time it’s a movie I’ve seen before on TV a couple of times. I guess that gives an immediate indication that I enjoy it, and feel it’s worth owning to watch again. There’s nothing individually spectacular about Ronin but together all the different elements join to make a solid, good quality, entertaining action-thriller.

De Niro’s ex-CIA character is suitably under-stated, and I love Jean Reno in just about anything anyway. Reno may play the same character every time, but I happen to like it, and I like the way he plays it, and this one is no exception. While the dialog is sparse overall, the interplay between De Niro, Reno and the other cast is what I really enjoy most about Ronin, what goes unsaid is as critical as what you do hear.

The plot is pretty simple, a collection of rag-tag guns for hire are brought together to obtain a case (contents unknown), a twist and betrayal ensue, interspersed with car chases and explosions and finally nearly all is revealed. The pace is excellent, the story continually moving along and keeping you engaged, and the performances are all good.

Watching De Niro sprinting reminds you of his age a little and drags you away from the moment, but otherwise it’s an excellent quality movie, nothing overly original, but delivered in a polished and enjoyable package.

It’s a couple of weeks since I watched this (for the first time) on DVD, but I think it’s taken that long for my opinion to fully ferment in my head. I’m not sure where I’d heard that this was ‘a great classic movie’, but I had heard it, and when I went on a reduced-price amazon dvd purchasing spree I picked this one up along the way.

It was already reasonably late, but I wanted to watch a movie to wind down before bed – and I made an obvious school boy error, I didn’t check the running time. At around three hours, this is not a movie to just drop into before you go to sleep, and I have to admit that towards the end I was willing it to finish.

Heat takes a look at a cat and mouse hunt between a top quality thief (De Niro) and a top quality cop (Pacino) and includes a look at their lives and how they live them. It’s not an action movie, although it has some action scenes but those scenes are incidental to the movie. It’s really a character movie, trying to give us an insight into how the two main characters are similar in so many ways, dedicated to what they do at the expense of their own personal relationships.

It’s entertaining, given the right amount of free time it’s worth watching, but it’s not something I enjoyed on a great level. Some scenes feel contrived (the only scene in which Pacino and De Niro are both on-screen at the same time is entirely contrived), some sections aren’t entirely believable which is essential since the movie tries to portray a real-true-to-life grit, the characters around Pacino and De Niro are flat and under-developed. The action isn’t very explosive, and the pace is slow and uneven.

Pacino’s character is so over the top that you wonder how he didn’t burst a blood vessel with all the constant shouting. De Niro’s character is the only person in the movie with whom I could empathise on any level, and that results in dissapointment during several scenes where you want the character to be more than he can ever be. However, De Niro’s character and performance makes it worth watching this movie at least once.

Overall this movie is too long and too focussed on giving Pacino and De Niro a platform to show off. All the flaws add up to a feeling of confusion because it is obviously a high quality movie, and on a technically level demonstrates that quality, but the screenplay doesn’t manage to step up to the plate.

Jumper is such a shame, a movie that could have been so good, and yet turned out to be so vacant. It’s a promisingly simple concept, young kid finds he can teleport about, uses it to have fun, discovers it has consequences, meets a girl, runs from the bad guys. Usually I enjoy simple concepts done well, small casts and a tight plot.

But Jumper is vacant and flat. It’s 88 minutes of average prologue. Oh it’s reasonably exciting, and the action scenes are done well, some of them pretty nice. But the characters are underdeveloped, the story is far too short, and the small cast is both tiny and uninteresting.

Samuel L. Jackson is totally wasted, and the best performance is from Jamie Bell. There’s no serious tension and despite the amount of time spent setting things up, no real feeling of concern about whether the characters live or die. It’s essentially a prologue and setup for a sequel, which is a real shame.

Dissapointing.