Review: "Uncharted" Stays Straight, Too Straight, On Course

by Jason Adams

When is a cannonball not just a cannonball? When it's a sight-gag aimed straight at Tom Holland's crotch, that's when. Rolling up out of nowhere in the explosive and overblown finale to Ruben Fleischer's fitfully entertaining but mostly lifeless video-game adaptation Uncharted -- which involves two full-sized pirate ships being swung below dueling helicopters careening through tropical passageways; don't ask --  the cannonball strikes me as more than just a cannonball and more than just a kick-in-the-nuts punchline. The cannonball becomes a Mousetrap-type puzzle-piece that Uncharted doesn't have the madcap skill to deploy in any interesting fashion. It's a what-could-have-been in the movie that never was.

Because a better filmmaker would've introduced that cannonball, or, even better, dozens of them, earlier...

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Gangster Squad: Bullets and Boredom

Michael C here to kick off the movie year with my first review of 2013 for a movie I noticed had slipped through the cracks here at the Film Experience in the rush of Oscar Nomination Fever. But surely 2013 will get better than this! 

Gangster Squad is a film haunted by the ghosts of its superior cinematic ancestors. Some films do gain resonance from evoking earlier titles in their genre but Ruben Fleischer’s crime saga is such a creative void that it can’t wrestle the audience’s attention away from the specters of film noir past. So much more rewarding to occupy one’s mind with fond memories of Chinatown, than to watch characters we don’t care about exchange gunfire in action scenes we can’t follow for reasons not worth understanding. 

Penn vs. Brolin in "Gangster Squad"

The most obvious film intruding on Gangster Squad (2013) is The Untouchables (1987) - at times the new film borders on a beat-for-beat retelling of the earlier story with Al Copen switched out for Mickey Cohen... [more]

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