With the summer movie season beginning to wind down, I thought I would look back at the movies I saw this summer and issue some grades. Overall, it was an okay summer, nothing really came in and wowed me like the Avengers did last year, but then again how many times is something like that going to happen? I generally like the movies I go out and see, but there are always exceptions, like last year’s the Dark Knight Rises, that flick was like a fart in church. This year’s crop of movies were entertaining, and as the Summer draws to a close, join me as I take a look back…..
Here are the movies I saw this Summer, in no particular order other than the order in which I saw them. I’m going to go into some spoiler territory, so if you don’t want to have some of these movies spoiled you should have seen them in the theaters when you had the chance.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation- Okay, since this came out at the end of March this isn’t technically a “Summer” movie, but it was a typical set your brain on autopilot and don’t think too hard about the logic of what you are seeing movie. I won’t go too much into detail as I already did an extensive review here, but in summary it was a good movie that seemed to skip over a lot of detail that hopefully the Extended Cut Blu-Ray from Best Buy will help fill in (I sense another review soon!).
Grade: B- (Some work incomplete)
Iron Man 3- Shane Black is a favorite writer of mine, and he has done some of my favorite action films of the last 25 years, beginning with the original Lethal Weapon movie. His take on Iron Man was vastly different from the first two Iron man movies, and from last year’s blockbuster the Avengers, focusing more on Tony Stark than his armored alter ego. The film has the trademark Shane Black humor, and the Air Force One rescue scene is breathtaking, but I would have liked to have seen Tony in the Armor a little more. A good movie, and one that looks to be the wrap up to the Iron man franchise, as Robert Downey Jr. has signed on for the next two Avengers movies, but no further Iron Man sequels are planned.
Grade: B+
Star Trek Into Darkness- I have been a Star Trek fan ever since I was five years old, and I have seen this franchise rise and fall in popularity, and then fall off the edge after Star Trek: Nemesis and the last episode of Enterprise. It has been rebooted in an alternate timeline of the original series, and this second movie deals with Kirk and his crew crossing paths with Khan, in a story very different from their initial meeting in the original series episode “Space Seed”. I enjoyed this movie quite a bit, and I didn’t even mind all of the lens flares that run rampant through this rebooted universe. I’m willing to forgive a lot of the departures from the original Star Trek universe, but at times it seemed like it had to strain to fit in all of the callbacks to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, especially one moment towards the end that made my eyes roll (You’ll know what it is….). I intend to pick this one up on Blu-Ray when it comes out, and I look forward to more voyages of this Starship Enterprise.
Grade: A-
This is the End- I had a free evening one Friday night, and since there wasn’t anything else that I wanted to see, I figured I’d give this movie a shot. End of the world movies seem to be coming out every couple of weeks, and more than a fair share of them seem to be comedies like this one. Starring a bunch of actors as themselves on the day of the Rapture, This is the End had me laughing throughout, and while the actors were playing exaggerated versions of themselves, I have no trouble believing that if society would break down that Danny McBride would become leader of a group of cannibalistic psychopaths.
Grade: B-
Stay tune for the rest of my Summer rundown……
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