The Wolf of Wall Street, Grudge Match

Grudge Match

The Wolf of Wall Street

About 10% of the time, I struggle with a movie’s star rating.

Escape Plan

As 2013 dawned, Arnold Schwarzenegger bombed with "The Last Stand" and Sylvester Stallone with "Bullet to the Head." Their new collaboration, "Escape Plan," is better than those pictures - good enough to kill a couple hours if you come across it on the tube.

Bullet to the Head

Following quickly on the heels of Ahnold’s “The Last Stand,” Sly returns as hitman Jimmy Bobo in “Bullet to the Head,” a workmanlike but generic and unexciting policier involving corrupt Crescent City real estate developers buying up public projects and bulldozing them to make way for condominiums.

The Expendables 2, Hit and Run

The Expendables 2

Hit and Run

The one thing you have to give "The Expendables 2," it doesn't stand on ceremony. Within the first two minutes, about a hundred bad guys have been killed, one or two at a time, before we know why they're bad or why we should care. There's another scene early on in which Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham co-pilot an airplane that has to gain altitude to clear a tall embankment. Rather than give us an exciting shot (from either side) of the plane just getting over (or grazing) the bulwark, director Simon West cuts from an interior shot of Sly and Statham to one of the plane flying well past it. Totally inept.