Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Jerry Maguire is the middle work in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s trio of deeply pleasurable movies, flanked by Say Anything and Almost Famous (after which…what happened, man?), and it holds up very well. Tom Cruise plays the title character, a callow sports agent, incapable of alone time or failure, who suffers a brief bout of conscience, bats out a moral manifesto, and loses his job, along with all but one of his clients, as a result. As Crowe explains on the commentary track, it was co-producer James Brooks who came up with the idea of starting the movie where most rom-coms end (selfish go-getter has his wee-hours epiphany), then following our anti-hero’s glide to the bottom before carving a new path of success that enshrines intimacy and commitment as well as ambition. It sounds corny, but Crowe and his ensemble cast (at the time all unknowns, except Cruise) pull it off.

Anchored by a disquietingly reserved performance from star Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy), this Portrait is an artful character study of a very bad man. Loosely based upon documented events, Henry explores the unspeakable crimes of an unrepentant murderer, a dark soul whose bleak existence is punctuated by frequent acts of violence. And when he brings his particularly loathsome roommate into the fold, no one in Chicago is safe. The matter-of-fact dramatic style makes the instances of gore hit that much harder, and yet plot developments are sometimes revealed in clever, original ways.

What if Superman hadn’t been a good guy? Could the government do anything about it? After the events in Batman v Superman, members of the U.S. government are nervous that aliens and metahumans could wreak havoc upon the Earth at their whim and there would be nothing the human race could do about it. With this in mind, a covert government agent named Amanda Waller hatches a plan to use incarcerated supervillains to form her “Task Force X” in order to combat evil forces in the world. To control them, she has explosive devices implanted in their necks that will detonate if they decide to not follow orders. As circumstances have it, her team is needed shortly after it’s formed to battle an ancient villain named Incubus who has invaded Midway City.

Matt Damon returns to the role that Universal has built a hit franchise upon and resolutely keeps churning out. Once again, Jason Bourne’s mysterious past is catching up with him faster than he can remember it. The titular protagonist is still living off the grid and making ends meet by pit fighting in some dark corner of the globe, apparently standard procedure for all retired super-soldiers living abroad.

How do you make a two-hour movie about a forced water landing in the Hudson River that lasted 208 seconds, where everyone already knows the happy outcome? You don’t. You keep it to a 90-minute running time and make two mini-movies: one about the exceptional skill and decision-making that saved lives in the air and on the ground, and one about bureaucrats second-guessing that decision-making. Weaving the stories together keeps Sully from being overly dull, but a documentary format might have been more interesting.

Henry is part of a radical military experiment that merges cybernetic machinery with biological tissue to create the ultimate super soldier. When Henry wakes up in a high-tech laboratory missing two of his limbs, he is unable to speak. He also has no memory of who he was beforehand. A fetching lab technician attaches his new cybernetic limbs, and very shortly thereafter, the door to the lab explodes open and all hell breaks loose… and pretty much stays on the loose for the next 90 minutes.

Forget all the hyperbole about an all-female cast and man-hating: Is this Ghostbusters reboot any good simply based on merit? Yes and no. The movie retreads familiar ground and tries too hard to emulate its predecessor but has fantastic special effects. Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are a group of paranormal hunters. McCarthy and Wiig play longtime pals once estranged from each other, reunited when Wiig is fired from her position at Columbia University due to McCarthy’s publishing of a book they wrote years earlier expounding on the existence of ghosts.