BRONSON (2008)

You ever wondered what would happen if Mr. Bean gained a 100 lbs. of muscle and turned into a violent psychopath? Yea, me neither, but BRONSON answers the question anyway.

Human punching machine, Michael Peterson, who, later in life, would call himself Charles Bronson, is a punch-drunk loser who goes around punching everything while screaming "You cunts!!!". Eventually all that punching catches up to him and he's thrown in prison. In prison, he continues punching things until they get tired of his punching and send him to an insane asylum. Finally he runs out of stuff to punch so they let him go. As a free man he punches things like gypsies, humans and dogs for money. Naturally, "the Man" is jealous of Bronson's punching abilities so he's thrown back in prison where the guards continue the mind-boggling habit of allowing him to repeatedly take hostages. They also, for whatever reason, only confront him right in the punching region. You would think they would just tear gas him, but I guess it's more fun getting punched. The End.

You would hope a story about the "most violent prisoner in Britain" would be interesting, but I found the whole thing to be a mess. There was zero character development to this guy. He just ran around nonstop bashing shit like the caveman on Aqua Teen Hunger Force when he sees fire. Even worse is the fight scenes were all really short and completely unconvincing, by that, I mean tons of non-connecting punches and pulled punches. Also, there were times before the main character started calling himself Charlie that people were already calling him Charlie. I found that confusing. Overall, the entire thing looked very low-budget...I don't mind low-budget movies, but I do mind when movies look like shit because of it.

There was material here for a good film, but it didn't happen. The whole thing was weak and nowhere as violent as I had hoped it would be. Outside of the language and multiple shots of the dude's tallywacker, this movie could probably air on network TV. Also, I have absolutely no idea what the quote "A CLOCKWORK ORANGE for the 21 Century" on the poster means. That makes zero sense.

EDIT: Well, I guess I'm going to have to have to backpedal on my review a little. I just read some stuff on Wikipedia about the real life "Charles Bronson" (Michael Peterson) and he's taken hostages at least 6 times. So it appears that some of the stupid shit that happened in the movie actually happened in real life. It also said that he was released from prison not once, but twice! Brilliant!

ZOMBIELAND (2009)

"I'm in Garland, Texas. It may look like zombies destroyed it, but that's actually just Garland."

This movie was disappointing. I watch a lot of zombie movies and read a lot of zombie novels (go buy "The Rising" by Brian Keene right now) and for some stupid reason I actually thought, based on the trailer and word-of-mouth, that this movie was going to have some badass, high-budget zombie action in it. Instead, ZOMBIELAND is a poorly written story about a dweeb, a semi-hot chick, the semi-hot chick's little sister and Woody Harrelson on a road trip across America after the zombie apocalypse.

My biggest problem with the movie are the lame jokes. I have no problem with a comedy set in the zombie world (THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is one of my favorite movies of all time), but at least be funny! My second biggest problem is the lack of zombies. For a world taken over by zombies there's not many of them around. At the very beginning there's a little zombie action, but it's silly and played off more as a lame joke. It's like the zombies are just a nuisance instead of an actual threat. Then, for a long period in the middle there's only probably 6 zombies for like 45 minutes. Another problem here is how smug and slick this movie thought it was with the high speed camera action shots and the annoying "Rules" popping up all over the joint non-stop. They thought they were being clever, but after the 5th time it was just annoying.

I give the movie a little credit for at least trying, but it's still a failure. It felt like the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the zombie fad without actually being zombie fans...kinda like Christian music is always a watered-down, soulless rip-off of popular music. If you want my advise, just skip this dead duck and watch INFESTATION instead. I actually like that movie: the geek endearing, the story was interesting, the action was more entertaining and the hot chick was way hotter. Plus, there was a spider-dog!

Part 2 - Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

LADY VENGEANCE (2005)

As far as the Vengeance Trilogy goes...OLDBOY is the best, followed by SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE and this one third.  The story was too slow and the vengeance was weak as fuck. Visually though the film was great to look at!

The story jumps around back and forth and all over the joint, so I'll just give you the simple version and say a woman served 13 years in prison for the murder of a child she didn't kill. Now she's out and she wants revenge. She gets it, but it slooooowly. At least in SFMV you had a bunch of stabbing and that great baseball bat the the skull scene, in OLDBOY you had the tooth-pulling and the legendary hammer scene, but in SFLV there's really nothing that stands out. It's a good movie, but I found it overly boring and nowhere near as exciting as I had expected from Chan-wook Park.

Good film and definitely worth watch, but I found it to be a minor drag. Honestly the highlight of the entire movie was seeing the brief cameo by Kang-ho Song and that other dude, the guy who farted on his mother in THIRST. Check out Park's other stuff first.

Part 1 - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Part 2 - Oldboy (2003)