Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-02-16 (Sunday)

On 2/17/25 9:29 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
 

Broken Arrow (blu-ray) 1996 movie directed by John Woo (I had *no* idea
Woo directed this when I put the disc in) starring John Travolta as a US
Air Force pilot who steals his plane's nuclear weapons during a training
flight with Christian Slater as his determined copilot out to get the
nukes back.  And hey it's Samantha Mathis from Super Mario Bros. as the
love interest.  I don't think I've watched this since around the time of
the original release.  It was better than I was expecting.  Although one
annoyance was the way Travolta was constantly giving exposition to the
guy who financed the operation.  I know movies need exposition, but if I
was financing stealing a pair of nuclear weapons, you best believe I
would have already been fully briefed on the plan and all contingencies
well before it began!  Who are the co-conspirators, how are the bombs
being transported, and transported to where, are really not the types of
information you should be learning the day of!  LOL

 I enjoyed this movie when I first saw it despite an incredibly weak
script, with an especially strong performance from Christian Slater.
 Sigh. I agree with you about Vinnie.

I believe I saw this movie in the theater, and I want to say I disliked it a lot.

Face/Off (4K disc) 1997 movie directed by John Woo starring John
Travolta as an FBI agent who agrees to have his face surgically removed
and replace it with the face of a criminal played by Nicolas Cage so
Travolta can pretend to be Cage and trick Cage's brother into revealing
the location of a bomb.  There has got to be easier ways to make someone
talk!  I watched with an interesting commentary track.  The pair doing
the commentary were all over the place, occasionally discussing the
movie, but often just talking snark and trivia.  I don't know why I
found it so funny but I couldn't stop laughing when one said Travolta
was playing the character like an evil Danny Zuko and the other said
Danny Zuko *was* evil.  One piece of trivia they mentioned was Nicholas
Cage and Tomas Jane shared a scene together is that both men were
married to Patricia Arquette.

 So absurd and over-the-top, but Cage was at his scenerary-chewing best.

I actually enjoy Travolta's scenery chewing more in this film. This is kind of an underrated 'guilty pleasure' of a film.

Swordfish (blu-ray) 2001 movie starring Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as a
hacker who is recruited by Storm (Halle Berry) to hack into a bank for a
patriotic terrorist played by John Travolta.  Rounding out the cast are
War Machine (Don Cheadle) as an FBI agent trying to take them down and
Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) as one of Travolta's henchman.  I've been
looking forward to revisiting this for a long time.  I'm glad I was
finally able to watch it again.

 I hate this movie.

As do I.

Blackhat (4K disc) 2015 movie directed by Michael Mann starring Thor
(Chris Hemsworth) as a hacker recruited from prison by the FBI to team
up with Chinese law enforcement and track down the hackers who tried to
melt down a U.S. nuclear power plant, and succeeded in melting down a
Chinese power planet.  I *think* I maybe saw this in the theater, when
it first came out, but I had no real memory of the movie.  There were
three different versions of the movie available, U.S, international, and
director's cut.  I went with the U.S. version simply because it was the
longest version of the three, and I hate wondering, what did I miss,
with shorter cuts.  In spite of the generally bad reviews this movie
has, I liked it.  I'm not going to say the movie wasn't a mess, and
maybe a shorter version would have been more coherent (I did after all
turn to the Wikipedia page to figure out what was happening), but the
movie held my interest.

 The movie is so mediocre from start to finish, I don't even care that
no motivation and no part of the plot makes sense.

I have never seen it. It's on my list, but way down it, so I've never gotten to it.