22 Things I Learned From John Wick

1. Contrary to expectation, Keanu Reeves is chock full of awesome.

2. This film’s trailer has more plot than this film.

3. Assassins have their own hotels.

4. Assassins have their own gold-coin based economy.

5. Assassins never fight in anything other than immaculate three-piece suits.

6. Stabbing yourself is a reasonable fight move.

7. Aggressive stunt driving is a great way to work off widower grief.

8. New York City is jam-packed with actors from HBO TV shows.

9. Dogs get delivered at night by courier.

10. The most exclusive nightclubs require you to shower before entry.

11. When in doubt, blame a nepotistic Russian crime syndicate.

12. Ornate churches are reasonable cover for money laundering.

13. You can never have enough gunfights, until you can.

14. You can always have enough chrome.

15. Michael Nyqvist may very well be able to act, and possibly to act well, but we see no evidence of this here.

16. The handcuffs can always be picked.

17. The best friend always gets tortured.

18. The villain always has a chopper waiting.

19. Don’t hang around Bethesda Fountain after dark.

20. It’s acceptable to kill approximately 6,567 people one-by-one in gruesome ways if you’re avenging the death of a cute puppy.

21. Since Reeves’s rhythmic, slightly off-tempo and quite beautiful fight manoeuvres make up exactly 96.7% of the running time, perhaps John Wick would have worked better as a ballet.

22. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the land of mediocre action thrillers, the one that can string together a halfway adequate fight scene is disappointingly hailed as a masterpiece.

22 Things I Learned From Spectre

1. It’s acceptable to recklessly endanger civilians so long as they’re Mexican.

2. Long takes are a cheap way of making your film seem technically accomplished.

3. Rooftops are like Super Mario levels.

4. Spy laptops come with instant DNA scanners.

5. The villainous and endlessly resourced Spectre organisation only have the one branded ring, and they share it around.

6. The word ‘cuckoo’ is not scary.

7. Dave Bautista paints his fingernails.

8. Daniel Craig is a big fan of Roger Moore.

9. James Bond carries a tux everywhere, but not necessarily a gun.

10. You don’t need wings to pilot a plane.

11. There’s no point introducing magic nano-blood if you then don’t do anything with it.

12. Sam Mendes never conceived of a visual motif he couldn’t run into the ground.

13. Everyone massively overdresses for dinner.

14. There’s always a soft landing.

15. Unless you’re a villain.

16. In 2006 interrogations were being recorded on VHS tapes.

17. Truly evil people don’t wear socks.

18. One bullet is all it takes to blow up an entire building.

19. Hack writing deploys bland references as though they had inbuilt emotional and dramatic weight, and weren’t the cheap gimmicks they actually are. (See also: Star Trek Into Darkness)

20. It’s acceptable for a black female field agent to hang out with the white men during the mission planning stages, but she has to wait in the car while the important stuff happens.

21. Spending $300m and being two-and-a-half hours long doesn’t make you big.

22. Quoting past franchise outings in illogical ways and giving a character a Proustian name doesn't make you clever.

22 Things I Learned From 'Fast Five'

1. Briefings by hard-ass DEA agents are always delivered while disembarking a military plane.

2. Drug warehouses have less security than a local supermarket.

3. Uniform cops always take reading material with them to the bathroom.

4. Goatees require hair stylists.

5. South American criminal overlords, invariably played by Joachim de Almeida, are getting dumber by the year.

6. Police in Rio are equipped with top-of-the-line cruisers (for a refutation, see Elite Squad).

7. Female criminals, trained by Mossad, are only good for wearing bikinis and getting groped.

8. Car thieves aren’t bad guys, just misunderstood.

9. Brazilians aren’t misunderstood, they’re just all bad guys.

10. Eliding nearly all muscle car races from a series that has built a reputation (albeit infamous) on such things is a witty, but risky, approach.

11. The DEA have access to technology that can see through masks and scan entire cities in seconds, yet insist on transporting stolen criminal assets on unprotected passenger trains.

12. If wearing a vest were acting, Vin Diesel would be nominated for an academy award.

13. If sweating were acting, Dwayne Johnson’s head would win an academy award.

14. If having blue eyes were acting, Paul Walker would, well, still be a confused-looking beach bum.

15. Favela da Rocinha in Rio is swarming with the heroes of stalling franchises, and contractually requires sweeping helicopter shots every five minutes (see also, The Incredible Hulk and the forthcoming Twilight: Breaking Dawn).

16. With pregnancy comes solidarity.

17. Taking part in a horrendously dangerous and destructive heist won’t cost you your job with law enforcement.

18. Six codas is five codas too many.

19. After directing three of these films, Justin Lin has finally figured out how to smash one car into another car (and – preferably – smash that car into another car into a bridge into another car and into a bad guy, and into another car).

20. This film makes the Nicolas Cage Gone In Sixty Seconds look like the Nicolas Cage Drive Angry 3D.  And as if that wasn’t enough to recommend it, it doesn’t star Nicolas Cage.

21. Driving irresponsibly isn’t just cool, it’s heroic.

22. Fast Five, Fast and Furious Five, Rio Heist: whatever you call it, five is this franchise’s lucky number.

 

22 Things I Learned From 'Drive Angry 3D'

1. Satanic cults have a high rate of attrition.

2. Hard asses take their coffee black, with lots of sugar.

3. No one caresses a handbrake like Amber Heard.

4. The US mid-west has been abandoned by all rational people and colonised by laconic, diner-visiting demons (see also Legion, which I can only assume is better, if only because it’s four minutes shorter).

5. Calling a slightly overweight person “fat” is a funny enough joke to sustain five minutes of screen time.

6. Real men ask for a shotgun the same way the rest of us order an espresso.

7. The sheet at the back of the garage always conceals an immaculate classic American car.

8. Hell has a poorly protected armoury (which is running low on stock – three bullets?!), and a disintegrating drawbridge of some kind.  No, really.

9. Louisiana police captains have a very relaxed dress code (and poor taste in t-shirts).

10. There’s always an old friend that lives nearby.

11. There’s always a flirty waitress (or several).

12. Never trust the FBI.

13. Women don’t bruise.

14. Nicolas Cage seems to be interested in little else these days than a self-directed retroactive career assassination.

15. David Morse has given up on life, or at the very least on cinema. (You’re not the only one, David, you’re not the only one).

16. If this film was aiming for the vibe of an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty then it failed, and only succeeded in making me wish it were as brief and succinct as an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty.

17. That this was written, edited, and directed by the same person indicates that that person should seek help.

18. A perverse, slightly intriguing performance by William Fichtner as a diabolical bounty hunter can look like a stunning exercise of comic genius when surrounded by utter, utter dreck.

19. Drive Angry 3D.  The three Ds are driving, demons, and despondency.

20. When even Nicolas Cage looks bored, you know you’re close to witnessing the very atomic structure of boredom.

21. Grindhouse this ain’t.  Shucks, this wasn’t even Machete.

22. Hell is another Nicolas Cage film.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Next Three Days'

1. Having identified the prime suspect of a murder minutes after the crime has taken place, the police will sleep on it and arrest the suspect the following morning.

2. Prison doctors exhibit undue commitment to their felonious patients, and sound as though they were educated at Oxford.

3. Accepting a lift across state lines from a kindly stranger makes you an accessory after the fact.

4. You can break into a van using a tennis ball.

5. You can pick a lock using a filed down key.

6. Suicide attempts should under no circumstances be taken seriously.

7. Don’t trust a sleazy, drug-dealer-recommended low-life to make you a fake passport.

8. Do trust a motorcycle riding deaf stranger to make you a fake passport.

9. Russell Crowe ate all the pies.

10. Male detectives are intense, psychic, and insanely committed to their jobs.

11. Female detectives bitch a lot.

12. It takes heavily built criminal lackeys, armed with shotguns, an age to kick (not shoot, apparently) open a locked wooden door.  Only faced with the threat of imminent immolation is the required effort put in.

13. You don’t need psychological depth when you have criminal instruction videos.

14. Given the choice between a possibly sociopathic Elizabeth Banks and a kindly, flirty, willing-to-babysit Olivia Wilde, some men would choose the former.  Fools.

15. There’s always a group of sports fans to blend in with.

16. The professor always delivers a lecture which is spookily appropriate to his own situation (here, on Don Quixote and escapism).

17. Writer-Director Paul Haggis cannot write a scene, or frame a shot to save his life.

18. The centre of every American city can be locked down within fifteen minutes.

19. The murder of drug dealers will be investigated with all the manpower and forensics that the Pittsburgh police department can muster.

20. The murder of a well-paid company executive will not.

21. Sponsored items required for a jailbreak include, but are not limited to, an iPhone, a satnav, a North Face coat, a digital camera (with face recognition), and a Prius.  Access to youtube, google and amazon are also musts.

22. Willing suspension of disbelief is fine.  Three days worth of unbelievable, badly plotted, poorly judged nonsense is not.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Book of Eli'

1. It’s okay to kill a hairless cat.

2. Thirty years after the end of the world it’s still worth checking the taps for running water.

3. Jeopardising a mission to save mankind by sidetracking to charge your iPod is not the action we expect of a stoic protagonist.

4. KFC, Motorola and General Motors will survive the apocalypse, their marketing departments remarkably intact.

5. Once you go black, you go Christian.

6. The hero always enters the town in slow motion.

7. The hero always enters the bar in slow motion.

8. Gary Oldman is at his most entertaining when he is channelling the ghost of Jack Lemmon.

9. You don’t need a seatbelt if you’re pretty.

10. There’s always a quirky, fidgety guy who’s good with electrical appliances (preferably to be played by Tom Waits).

11. End-of-the-world settlements will be ruled over by a faux-intellectual despot and populated by a bunch of illiterate thugs (see also The Postman, 28 Days Later).

12. There may not be any water or food in this world but there is plenty of petrol.

13. Having a character whistle Ennio Morricone does not a clever Western pastiche make.

14. Two fight scenes and two exploding cars does not an action film make.

15. Ponderously dull and literal scripting does not an art film make.

16. Casting the woman who voices Meg Griffin in Family Guy as the love interest somewhat undermines whatever credibility your listless production may have initially had.

17. Shooting Denzel Washington in the chest only makes him stronger (see also Man On Fire).

18. It is possible to make an entire film about the bible without understanding one word of it.

19. Malcolm McDowell is making a career out of being the last straw.

20. Endings which sacrifice logic, characterisation and the moral lessons of all that has gone before at the altar of “looking cool” are somewhat frustrating.

21. If you couldn’t get enough of the trash-punk vehicles, windswept desert vistas and imperative-free plotting on offer in Terminator Salvation, this should certainly be for you.

22. For everyone else, you’re better off reading a book.

22 Things I Learned From 'Robin Hood'

1. We have Robin Hood to thank for the Magna Carta.

2. It takes a band of men less than a week to sack a dozen towns from York to Peterborough.

3. All English monarchs are idle, self-involved and idiotic. French monarchs are strategically minded, cunning, and intelligent.

4. ‘The Odyssey’ is a strange, but welcome, inspiration for the second act of a movie with this subject matter.

5. Robin Hood is a ‘Big Society’ Tory.

6. Women may command troops in battle, but only if their troops consist of children, and their presence is in no way vital or commented upon.

7. The repeated use of day-for-night filming techniques in the twenty-first century smacks first of genius, then of weirdness, and finally of boredom.

8. French rapists prefer cunnilingus.

9. Director Ridley Scott can do ‘historical epic’ in his sleep, but ‘cheeky family fun’ is not his forte.

10. Historical accuracy be damned: Cate Blanchett demands foundation and she demands it by the ton.

11. Convoluted scripts aren’t necessarily good scripts.

12. Innuendo-laced comments about Little John are funny.

13. Mark Addy’s boisterous portrayal of Friar Tuck is most avowedly not funny.

14. Protagonists in Hollywood fare must find meaning and purpose only through a new understanding of what a great man their father was (see also ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Star Trek’)

15. When the hero rides towards battle a subordinate must throw him a sword.

16. Even when creeping political correctness demands an absurdly re-imagined Maid Marian, it is still acceptable to vilify both the Church and the French.

17. If you’re going to feature a beach-based swords-and-arrows battle as your climax, why not go ahead and make a movie about the Battle of Marathon instead?

18. There was more twelfth century ambience in thirty seconds of the recent ‘Valhalla Rising’ than there is in all 140 long minutes of this.

19. Peter Jackson should sue for royalties.

20. Robin Hood spent more time launching military campaigns on the seashore than he did as an outlaw in the woods.

21. When the animated closing credits of your film are more ingenious – and bloodier – than what has come before, there’s something amiss.

22. If this is the best this creative team can come up with then the inevitable sequels are going to be very hard work.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Crazies'

1. If a Zippo lighter is going to be used later, it must first be introduced and demonstrated as fully functional.

2. Rather than slashing (or shooting) car tyres, the US Military will instead go through the unnecessarily long-winded process of wheel-clamping every vehicle in a containment zone.

3. If the protagonists of a movie about a pandemic viral outbreak are a husband and wife who are town sheriff and town doctor respectively, then numerous references will be made to the role of the sheriff, while the doctor will dress exactly one wound and provide no insight into epidemiology.

4. It’s never a good idea to split up.

5. Always check behind the door.

6. Never flee up stairs. Come on people, it really is time we learnt this one.

7. There’s only one black man in Iowa.

8. Car washes are scary.

9. Bone saws are scary.

10. A lone girl bicycling through an abandoned high street is ridiculous, and not scary.

11. Having no one torn to pieces by a combine harvester is a missed opportunity.

12. Three-day growth goatees are a nightmare for continuity.

13. No car or truck is safe from overturning spectacularly. Or exploding. But not both.

14. Small town mayors always put politics before the safety of the people (see also: ‘Jaws’). They also, oddly, fail to get their comeuppance.

15. It would be more rewarding for audiences if the rules and consequences of infection were delineated in more detail. Or, in fact, any detail at all.

16. The keys are never in the cab.

17. Timothy Olyphant is made for this sort of stuff.

18. Radha Mitchell is not.

19. The American military a) fail to successfully transport a hazardous biological agent from one state to the next, b) cannot secure even the smallest of civilian populations, and c) merrily wait for three full days before deploying the nuclear option they were going to use all along.

20. If a cap and trade system were judiciously applied to the amount of shock moments in horror films, ‘The Crazies’ would be way over quota.

21. Slickness, explosions and chases have replaced tension, satire and existential dread.

22. Just because you can remake a little known George Romero horror film, doesn’t mean you should.

22 Things I Learned From ‘Sherlock Holmes’

1. Having a limp that requires a cane in no way hampers fighting, wrestling or running.

2. Rachel McAdams takes forever to put on a dressing gown.

3. Beginning a story in media res is both bracing and dramatically convenient.

4. Giant comedy henchmen impervious to punches, kicks or several electrocutions are funny.

5. The sewers beneath Parliament are easy to access, lead directly to the top of Tower Bridge, and travelling from one landmark to the other takes only a few seconds on foot.

6. Obscuring the villain’s face in shadow is not an acceptable cinematic device.

7. A dog farting is not an acceptable comedy punch line.

8. An antiquated ambi-pure machine full of poison is not an acceptable dramatic crux.

9. It’s only appropriate that Sherlock Holmes resemble Peter Falk, since the nineteenth century detective is really just an earlier incarnation of Columbo.

10. It’s hard to get excited about the possibility of a cabal of elderly white gentleman wrestling control of Britain from another cabal of elderly white gentleman.

11. Guy Ritchie never met a fight he wouldn’t rather see in super slo-mo.

12. Composer Hans Zimmer’s score is so good that it must be played as loud as possible, preferably obscuring sound effects, dialogue, and the thought process of the audience.

13. Construction work on a major London landmark is never undertaken in the middle of a weekday.

14. No one wears shirts quite like Robert Downey Jr.

15. There’s always a lower ledge.

16. Somebody always puts their foot in a loop of rope.

17. The celebratory glass of wine is always drugged.

18. Bare knuckle fighting is a purely cerebral exercise.

19. In these kinds of things, wife-to-be characters require neither distinguishing characteristics of any kind nor chemistry with their betrothed.

20. Conclusive – or even remotely satisfying – endings are not necessary when riding the train to franchise-ville.

21. If Arthur Conan Doyle had co-written a Bond movie with the makers of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ this is what it would look like.

22. That this exercise in faux-retro steam-punk blockbusterised nonsense is as entertaining as it turns out to be is something of a miracle, and a welcome one.

22 Things I Learned From '2012'

1. Doctors wear scrubs all the time, even when at home.

2. Ex-wives may trade up financially, but never emotionally.

3. Mega-earthquakes and clouds of super-heated ash always move just slightly slower than John Cusack, altering their speed as necessary. Tsunamis are a somewhat different matter.

4. Leaving your children alone when camping while you have a chat with a mentally unstable man inside his trailer is perfectly acceptable parenting.

5. In three years time Paris Hilton will be married to a Russian Oligarch.

6. Shifting tectonics and the reversal of the earth’s poles in no way impairs the navigation systems of Russian cargo aircraft.

7. Eastern monks drink milky tea.

8. Two lessons training as a pilot is more than enough.

9. Car horns are louder than supervolcanoes.

10. When briefing the President about cataclysmic temperature changes it’s considered bad form not to check out the first daughter.

11. The Chinese put a bewildering array of cameras on their vessels. These cameras have microphones and function underwater.

12. The apocalypse unfolds without a drop of blood spilt.

13. Limousines have fantastic suspension, steering, and acceleration.

14. Several days into the end of the world, with all governmental infrastructure destroyed and most cities wiped from the face of the earth, it will still be possible to get a cell phone signal.

15. The dog always makes it.

16. Seeing a tidal wave crash nearer and nearer is not dramatic enough – a prominently placed clock ticking down the seconds until impact is also required.

17. With seconds to live it’s more important to let your friend know he has failed you than embrace your family.

18.The balance of power truly is moving towards China.

19. Novels that end with the line “…and we all realised we had relatives in Wisconsin” are destined to only sell five hundred copies. They will also take exactly twenty-seven days to read, and be considered alongside ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ as a great work of literature.

20. Dangling a giraffe from a helicopter and careering it through a frozen tundra will not in any way impair its health.

21. Watching various American cities tumble into the earth's core like God sweeping the remains of last night’s dinner into the bin is rather entertaining.

22. The fact that it goes on for 160 minutes is not.

22 Things I Learned From 'Star Trek'

1. Starfleet spacesuits come in a range of primary colours.

2. The senator for Iowa has enough pull to ensure spacecraft construction occurs there. Rather than in space.

3. After five television shows and eleven films, I still have no idea what Starfleet is actually for.

4. Mining ships are equipped with bunker-busting missiles and near-impregnable shields.

5. No one ever thinks to bring a phaser to a sword-fight.

6. Bruce Greenwood is far too old for this ship.

7. There’s no corner that can’t be written out of with recourse to warp drive or the ability to beam anywhere in the universe in seconds.

8. It’s no fun when the unstoppable bad guys are so bad and so unstoppable.

9. Chris Pine’s William Shatner impression is at times uncanny.

10. Karl Urban’s DeForest Kelly impression is just the right side of weird.

11. Simon Pegg’s Simon Pegg impression is just the wrong side of tacky.

12. Apple (or possible Brawn GP) do Starfleet’s interior decorating.

13. Starfleet’s ‘peacekeeping armada’ is neither an oxymoron, nor in any way effective. In the twenty-third century equivalent of an oilrig taking on an aircraft carrier, the former consistently wipes the floor with the latter.

14. Engine Rooms on warp-drive equipped space ships look like a warehouse in Swindon with overlarge see-through plumming.

15. It still isn’t advisable to be the third man on an away team.

16. It takes three years of training, a famous father, and being an insufferable git to gain control of the flagship of the Federation.

17. There’s more cataclysm in ten minutes of this film than all seven seasons of Jean-Luc Picard’s tenure.

18. It’s not blockbuster entertainment without a spot of genocide. (See also Star Wars.)

19. Director J.J. Abrams never met a lens flare he didn’t like.

20. Writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci never met a character they wouldn’t undermine.

21. The Enterprise’s mission to explore new worlds and civilizations will have to wait until next time.

22. With its bright lights, uncomplicated morality, and lack of responsible adults, this is a children’s film at heart.

22 Things I Learned From ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’

"Looks like he died waiting for the magic to happen."

1. Elvis songs, CGI prairie dogs, Soviet spies, area 51 and drag races do not sit well beside one another. And that’s just the first five minutes.

2. The effects of the Holy Grail have been greatly exaggerated. Downright lied about, it turns out.

3. FBI agents wear matching ties. And, once laboriously introduced, vanish into bureaucratic air.

4. Man-gets-hit-in-the-crotch-by-fast-moving-foliage jokes are funny.

5. By climbing inside a fridge you can survive a … no, I’m not writing that down, it’s just too silly.

6. It’s been a while since Karen Allen worked for a reason.

7. South American sanatoriums are really quite spacious, and the management take a relaxed view to in-room vandalism.

8. Russians keep rocket-propelled grenade launchers (loaded, of course) in the same place as highly dangerous captives.

9. It takes but one burly extra to sate an entire colony of flesh-eating ants.

10. Ray Winstone knows a place to get lighters which work after having been submerged in water several dozen times.

11. A been-there-done-that archaeologist has trouble identifying a rapier.

12. The Amazon is full of parallel roads.

13. Cate-Blanchett-gets-a-magnetic-erection jokes are really, really funny, and probably unintended.

14. That is the janitor from Scrubs.

15. John Hurt needs a new dentist.

16. Shia LaBeouf needs a new hairdresser.

17. Jim Broadbent needs to learn how to say no.

18. The mythical city of El Dorado was actually … no, I’m not writing that down, it’s just too silly.

19. George Lucas is a toxic human being lacking any creative idea which doesn’t involve moving vehicles, jumping, clanging scenery, jumping, swarms of things, and jumping.

20. The desire for knowledge is punishable by unpleasant immolation; the desire for material wealth is an admirable, rakish pursuit.

21. Some franchises retire for a reason.

22. This movie will result in neither fortune nor glory for anyone involved.