When M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender made its way into US cinemas last July, critics bashed the film to a pulp like a  hapless piñata. Once considered to  be the next Hitchcock with film’s like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Shyamalan’s career suffered a stroke with The Village and has been on life support ever since, Airbender being the director’s worst reviewed film to date. Yes, [...]

Give ‘Em Hell, Malone is yet another one of those straight to DVD pseudo noir action flicks trying to cash in on the style of much better films like Sin City but unfortunately comes off more like a carbon copy of other bad films like The Spirit, which were also trying to rip off the Sin City magic.

Mindless action movies can be absolutely fantastic, especially if you are in the right mood to consume a patently ridiculous plotline, exaggerated physics and a heroic protagonist with a flair for blowing things up. Some of these films can be appreciated for being “so bad their good”, others are well conceived spectacles with uber cool, or bad ass, main characters. Sometimes they will even poke fun at themselves, or pay homage to classic action movies of old.

Diabetics steer clear; so awfully saccharine is the derivative romantic drama Letters to Juliet, it may induce a hyperglycaemic coma.

Romantic comedies, especially those aimed at the lonely-gooey-hearts out there, rarely find a warm reception from me. Although I must profess that those starring Hugh Grant (Notting Hill, About a Boy, Bridget Jones) do set my steel-reinforced heart just a wee bit aflutter. So, I shuffled into Did You Hear About the Morgans? clutching an embarrassingly large bag of confectionary and shreds of hopeful expectation. Alas, if was not to be – the film was absolutely dismal. And Grant was just an ungracefully aging chap who delivered poorly written lines with about as much gusto as custard (the ones that come out of a box and have 0% eggs).

“It’s like a screensaver!” says John Fevreau’s character upon arriving at their stunning Island resort in Couples Retreat. The line perfectly encapsulates my attitude towards the film overall, as like a screensaver, Couples Retreat is something you want to appear on-screen when you’re not around. It’s little more than a plodding slideshow of gorgeous scenery and gorgeous people, with little rom or com to speak of. If only bringing an end to its insufferably drawn-out 110 minute runtime just meant wiggling the mouse.

In The Taking of Pelham 123, Tony Scott’s camera zips around like paranoid fly, orbiting his cast like it hasn’t got anything better to do. It appears Scott grows restless because he desperately wants to make a 90 minute long music video, but has been told by his producers he must make a film about a heated phone conversation instead. Mind you, it hasn’t stopped him from trying; Pelham is packed with enough rap music, nauseating jerks, speed shifts and freeze frames to almost, so nearly, convince us something actually interesting is occurring on screen.

If you ever plan on adopting a child, make sure you enquire about the return policy. If the Coleman family had done that in Orphan, then there’s a good chance neither they nor the audience would have had to endure through this absurd, distasteful and ultimately joyless horror.