Gary Busey | Motion State Review

This review contains minor spoilers for 2018’s The Predator. Also, minor graphic language. Okay, major graphic language.

Shane Black’s new Predator movie, which opened last night and was advertised as an “explosive reinvention” of the series, purportedly debuts on the crest of a new wave of R-rated Hollywood blockbusters. Deadpool and Logan did pretty well in ’16 and ’17, see, and Kingsman and Mad Max: Fury Road succeeded in ’14 and ’15, so we must be in a New Age of Hard-R Blockbusters, right? The Predator will do for 2018 what those other movies did for the previous half-decade, injecting some hardcore badassery into a film landscape increasingly populated by PG-13 flicks about pretty people in capes and tights. This is the same Shane Black who wrote the Lethal Weapon movies and directed the mouthy noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so The Predator must have the brash and unforgiving potency of a genuine R-rated monster movie. Right?

Pah! The ’80s laughs at your puny efforts. Steve Rose at the Guardian lays it out:

Predator represents a bygone era of ripe, risky, reckless action movies, often dripping with blood, testosterone and cheese but also wildly entertaining…[Predator‘s popularity] reflected a movie scene where Hollywood didn’t have to play it safe and pitch every movie at the broadest possible demographic in order to recoup costs.

We’ll get to the 2018 version of Predator in a minute; whatever sadness this nostalgia may engender for a bygone era of balls-out filmmaking is going to have to take an emotional backseat, because 1990’s Predator 2 is here to peel the skin from your bones.

Continue reading Predator 2 (1990) →

Just now I googled “Tom Cruise best roles”, “Tom Cruise worst roles”, “Tom Cruise best movies” and “Tom Cruise worst movies”, partially because I’m interested to see where his role as Mitch McDeere in The Firm lands and partially because my boredom has reached carrying capacity. I found, unsurprisingly, that the internet does that thing where it reaches consensus about certain things being “good” and certain things being “bad”, which in this case is sometimes inarguable (A Few Good Men = “good”, Far and Away = “bad”) but sometimes weirdly unearned, as with the endless praise heaped upon Edge of Tomorrow or Cruise’s role in Tropic Thunder. The former is a fairly fun movie and the latter is a fairly funny movie, but to say that these number among Cruise’s best seems a stretch. Again, the common consensus surrounding mediocrity doesn’t exactly come as a shock.

What was surprising, though, is that not a single article or top ten list included Mitch McDeere or mentioned The Firm at all. “Good” and “bad” are complicated, sure, and you might even suggest that the overarching opinions of the internet’s burgeoning culture commentary is at fault for this, too, as if to say “those other guys didn’t claim The Firm to be a great Cruise movie, so we won’t either.” But not a single one mentioned The Firm. No outliers buried in a list to satiate the unconfessed desire of a film blogger, no mention of Mitch McDeere even in reference to another role. It’s like The Firm never registered as a Cruise flick. Putting aside common consensus and inescapable truth (Far and Away = “bad”), that just seemed strange.

Continue reading The Firm (1993) →