Alex (Ben Stiller), Marty (Chris Rock), Melman (David Schwimmer) and Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) are leaving Madagascar, but their trip ends short with them crashing in a reserve in Africa. There, Alex is reunited with his parents (Bernie Mac and Sherri Shepherd) and the rest find themselves fitting in with their kind a little too well.

This movie takes a step in the right direction. Having introduced the characters in the first film, this sequel brings a stronger, more personal story and a much slower and tighter pace. Each of the characters gets a decent amount of time to themselves, although admittedly Gloria once again has the least amount of time and does not get her own story. Everything feels a lot more refined as the characters have more to do and more other characters to interact with. This movie even has its own villain, voiced by Alec Baldwin, and he’s great as he always is when he plays the villain. They even found a way to bring humans into the mix that was funny and made sense.

I would argue though that these exact things that make it better than the first also bring with them their own problems. It does feel early on as if there are just too many story lines forming. There’s around six or seven stories all introduced in the first half of the film and it’s a little exhausting at first. As the movie goes on though, the stories begin to slowly melt into one another and create some great character moments. There are a lot of things I was expecting to not work, such as Melman’s sudden infatuation with Gloria, that ultimately work out really well.

There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments as well as some hearty chuckles and best of all there are a lot less groan-worthy jokes this time around. In the first there were a lot of jokes pandering to the younger audience but here there is far less of that. All of the side characters, like Julian (Sacha Baron Cohen) and the penguins are not only funnier here but they work into the plot a lot better. The whole movie has the same feeling to it that Toy Story 3 did having come off Toy Story and Toy Story 2. It’s much more mature but still fun and entertaining.

Final Verdict: 

Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria the Hippopotamus (Jada Pinkett Smith) live in the New York Central Zoo, but Marty wants to live in the wild. He gets his chance when the four of them find themselves lost on a jungle island called Madagascar. They then have to befriend a tribe of lemurs and avoid both the natural predators and the predators inside themselves.

When I think of DreamWorks, my mind usually wanders to their movies that I don’t particularly like. Shrek. Shark Tale of course. But I always seem to forget that they actually do make movies I really enjoy as well. Maybe it’s because they’re always outshone by Pixar but I tend to forget movies like Madagascar exist. But watching this again I remember now how much I enjoyed it the first time I saw it. There’s not a whole lot to it and it feels like it was written by freshman writers, but it’s an entertaining movie with some really great characters.

I really love Ben Stiller in this movie. He’s not a very good voice actor but he brings a charm to the movie that works really well. David Schwimmer is great as the neurotic giraffe and Chris Rock, well, he’s Chris Rock, and I’m okay with this. Sacha Baron Cohen plays King Julian of the lemurs and has some of the best moments of the film. The accent he uses amuses me to no end and I just like how he seems to be completely unaware of his surroundings and yet competent enough to prove himself as self-proclaimed King of the Lemurs.

The animation is probably the film’s biggest downfall. That’s not to say it’s terrible. I do like the art style but it’s pretty obvious they were going for simplicity and the actual animation is a little sophomoric. They’re able to hide it with a lot of fast movement but when things slow down you can kind of see it isn’t perfectly smooth. But maybe that’s what they were going for, to go along with the art style. If that’s the case, then it just didn’t work for me. It’s still not nearly enough to keep me from watching the film again, and I recommend you give it a try as well.

Final Verdict: 

Battleship is pretty much exactly what I was expecting. I could just see the writers shrugging when handed the premise and saying, “We got nothin’.” It was a complete waste of two hours of my day sitting through this mess of boring CG propaganda.

The movie centers on Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy who encounters an alien invasion on what was to be his last day before they kicked him out of service. He ends up having to lead his ship as captain in a war against the invaders.

I’m going to just skip over the fact that this movie has absolutely no reason to exist. It’s just a marketing ploy and I don’t have a problem with those as long as they’re done well. I’m more concerned with everything else that was pointless about the film. For instance: The aliens. Why are there aliens in this movie? Why couldn’t you just make a period war film involving warring battleships on the high seas? I mean, okay, I know the actual reason there are aliens in this movie. Two weeks ago we got aliens in The Avengers. We’re getting Men in Black III next weekend. Cowboys & Aliens. District 9. Transformers. I get it. But they just feel shoehorned into this for the sake of having them and that makes it lame and pointless.

The second useless thing is Liam Neeson. Don’t get me wrong, I love Liam Neeson. I figured he’d be the saving grace in seeing this but he only gets about five minutes of screen time. They only got him so they could sell the movie with his name, but I don’t think Liam Neeson has ever met that level of stardom, even now. They literally could have hired anybody else and it would have worked just as well. And Neeson acts like he just wants his check so he can go home. They actually forced in a scene of him yelling at somebody over the phone just so they could have a scene of him yelling at somebody. It’s really pathetic to watch. The acting in general was fine though, but nobody ever really had any scenes in which to prove their acting skills so it’s not worth going into. Oh, except for this one big black guy who lost his legs. I think he was an actual veteran they got just so they could use that character in the movie. Yeah, he was a pretty terrible actor.

Actually, I need to address the aliens again because the movie didn’t seem to want to address them all that much. I feel like the writers had a reason for the aliens only attacking weapons and machinery but not people, but refused to let the audience in on it. They take several points in the film to establish that they are not trying to hurt humans, only protect themselves from them. This could have been used for some sort of emotional realization but instead they opted to just keep the movie about blowing up things we don’t understand. They even say at one point that the aliens are only firing on what attacks them first, but they decide, “Screw it, fire at them anyway!”

I don’t really understand why they called in actual naval officers to make this movie when their ultimate goal was to just kill all of them off. The whole movie has this pseudo-American pride motif but then also has a weird subplot about the U.S. Navy being at odds with the Japanese Navy. I spent most of the film trying desperately to figure out why the writers put this in and it still hasn’t come to me. Was it just for conflict? There are aliens shooting at you. Isn’t that enough conflict?

I would call Battleship better than Transformers, but at least the Transformers movies pretended to have a story. This just barely tries and fails miserably. There’s a scene after the credits that goes on forever and ultimately just ends up to be fodder for a sequel. Please, for the love of film, don’t let this movie have a sequel. Don’t make me have to sit through a sequel. Let’s get Hasbro to bring something else they make to the big screen. Something with a huge fanbase of all ages that would actually have a plot and characters worth watching. Something that would teach of the Magic of Friendship. Too bad they don’t have anything like that. Wait…

Final Verdict: 

I’m reluctant to say whether I was ever a fan of Rugrats on Nickelodeon. Honestly I remember spending more of my childhood on The Disney Afternoon or on Cartoon Network. I guess I was a fan to some extent though because I do remember seeing this movie in theaters, and this is pretty much the first time I’ve seen it since then. And while I have a really hard time bringing myself to call this a “good” movie, it’s definitely a very cute film that has a lot of heart behind it.

As his new baby brother is brought into the world, toddler Tommy (E.G. Daily) and his friends Chuckie (Christine Cavanaugh), Phil and Lil (both Kath Soucie) are not too happy with the addition. But after an accident sends them flying into the woods, they must put their other problems aside and find their way home.

I do have to say that there is a lot of stuff about this movie I don’t like. It is an incredibly juvenile film, which is to be expected with the humor from the show. But I don’t remember ever liking those jokes on the show either. While I like the idea of the kids having a hard time pronouncing words, it’s constant and gets really annoying. Even the Smurfs and their incessant insertion of their own names in place of verbs and pronouns isn’t quite as grading to listen to. There’s plenty of talking about bodily functions and for that matter body parts that are sure to make the kids giggle but that’s just never been my style of humor. There’s always been another side to the humor that’s a little more subtle that I’ve always appreciated, even when I was younger (I’ve, uh, never had many friends) and that’s present here. There’s also a few jokes that went completely over my head when I was little and most of them work for me now. There are a lot of really good laughs but there are also moments when I just sat there groaning at how much they were pandering to their demographic. And I guess that’s fine but I’m nowhere near that demographic.

I have never liked Klasky-Csupo animation style. I’ve always found it to be just grotesque to look at. Even with a much bigger budget here, they weren’t able to shake that, and there’s a lot of little animation things that I really didn’t like. Some of the character’s movements are way over-animated, making it look very unnatural and being generally unnecessary. Speaking of unnecessary, this movie is a musical. Yeah, that wasn’t necessary at all. And the songs are really awful too. There’s a point about halfway through the movie where they stop writing their own (awful) songs and start doing renditions of established songs. I began to pine for the simpler days of them writing their own material. I can’t even say this idea could have worked because the way the babies talk would have made it impossible to make the film a musical worth listening to.

I kind of fell like I’m being hard on this movie, which I guess I do a lot. The Rugrats Movie is very flawed but I found it to be an adorable film with a couple of surprisingly touching moments, and I bet kids like it even more than I did.

Final Verdict: 

After what seems to be a meteor shower off the coasts of every major city in the world, the military is called in to treat it as a military attack from another planet. We spend a majority of the film following a specific group of soldiers as they traverse L.A. in search of a way out or a way to stop the invasion.

I can’t begin to describe to you how worthless this movie is. I’m even having a hard time coming up with anything to say about it because nothing interesting happens in this movie. It is note-for-note exactly what you expect from the moment it begins to the moment it ends. It’s actually kind of insulting in that way. What I mean is, this movie pulls the same exact stuff that just about every other wartime film pulls, especially with forcing emotion to the extent that it’s so obvious that you don’t feel anything. When they show a character with a child or whose wife is about to have a child, you know they’re going to bite it. But I’m getting to this point where I actually sort of feel offended by that, like the writers are forcing the child in there just so that they can lose their father. What a horrible thing to do to that child you just invented! And to the soldier’s wife for that matter, who now has to raise the kid on her own because you, the writer, specifically wrote that kid in there to stir up emotion when they kill off daddy.

And no, I don’t feel like I’m spoiling anything. And if I am, I don’t really care. There isn’t a single character in this movie that I felt I needed to invest any sort of emotion into. I never cared whether any of them got killed off, but then again I could tell from a mile away which ones were going to make it in the end. I think the only person in the movie I was a little surprised about their fate was Michelle Rodriguez, and if you know her track record in movies then that definitely was a spoiler. Sorry, I don’t care. Even the aliens in this are incredibly uninteresting. Actually their more confusing than anything because they spend several minutes trying to figure out how to kill them, ultimately with no purpose because we find out in later action scenes that their vulnerable to bullets and being blown up. Who knew?

I’m even having a hard time finding anything to praise on the technical side of this film. The effects are pretty basic for wide release sci-fi films these days, but everything else is extremely subpar. I have no idea whose idea it was to film this movie like a documentary and yet stick to a basic Hollywood movie structure but it was a terrible idea. It makes it impossible to see a lot of the action and just feels out of place. The dialogue is unbearable at times with the same speeches we’ve heard a thousand times, only written worse than normal with absolutely no passion to them. They got several good actors but none of them give the kind of performances they would in something with a better screenplay. It feels like all of them are there just to collect their paychecks, and frankly I can’t really blame them.

Battle: Los Angeles is a prime example of a stock movie. Absolutely every single moment of the film seems to be mapped out to make it as completely boring and predictable as possible. There is absolutely no reason to ever see this movie.

Final Verdict: 

Sacha Baron Cohen is back, this time as Admiral General Aladeen, ruler and dictator of the African Republic of Wadiya. After being threatened by the rest of the world to stop oppressing his people, Aladeen travels to the United States to speak to the United Nations. But he is forced into a life of American mediocrity when his right-hand man Tamir (Ben Kingsley) attempts to murder and replace him. Aladeen now has to rise back to power and stop his beloved country from becoming a democracy.

I think Cohen is a very talented comedian. He does a great job in every movie I’ve ever seen him in, no matter how bad the movie itself is. But he’s one of those people who is only able to deliver other people’s lines well. His own material, for the most part from what I’ve seen, just doesn’t work and is not funny. It especially doesn’t work in a standard comedy format like this. The reason Borat worked was because it was a mockumentary. The jokes work most of the time because the people are reacting to real situations, and when it is staged they kept to the same film style and at least faked it well. Here it’s just lazy, unfunny improv wrapped around a very thin plot.

This movie wants so desperately to offend, but because of how desperate it is being, and because we’ve already seen this done a million times (by Cohen himself even), it just doesn’t work. It backfires and feels as desperate as it is, like they weren’t trying as hard to make funny jokes but just say offensive things. There are several moments where lines come out of nowhere, without anybody’s lips moving. It’s incredibly obvious when they just dubbed in a quick joke, none of which ever work. There’s a reel of lines and scenes they didn’t go with that play during the credits and none of them are any funnier than the material they actually used, leading me to believe they just didn’t come up with very good material. And it’s kind of hard to come up with material when its on the spot like that, which is one of the reasons I’m slowly coming to really hate improv artists.

I can’t think of anything about this movie that works, really. I think Anna Faris, who played Zoey, a woman Aladeen befriends in New York, is just as good as she ever is. That isn’t to say she got any good jokes though. I like Faris, but she has nothing here. Nobody does. Chris Parnell shows up in this as a news anchor and I like him too but his scenes in this movie are just worthless. In fact, there are a number of scenes in the movie that have absolutely no reason to exist and jokes that just go nowhere. I do recall, early on, chuckling at a couple of things. I can’t for the life of me remember what they were now, but I do remember it happened. After that though, I just couldn’t wait to get out of the theater. The only reason I don’t hate it is because it doesn’t deserve my hate.

Final Verdict: 

A lot has happened between Underworld: Evolution and Underworld: Awakening. The humans have discovered the vampires, the lycans and their war and have decided to put a stop to it. Twelve years after the purging, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) awakens in a laboratory and set out to find Michael. But on her journey she encounters a little girl (India Eisley) who may be the key to finding what she’s looking for.

This is a huge leap forward for this series and admittedly a tiny step backwards. First of all, the production quality far exceeds that of the previous three with much nicer cinematography (possibly necessary for the 3D, which I have not seen) and a lot more graphic violence than ever before. We’re back to the crazy, over-the-top gun blazing and unabashed blood-gushing that this series does best, but the story is also a lot more engaging than it has been. The stakes are much higher now (no pun intended, vampires and all), not only because the humans have actually won the war against non-humans but because Selene is no looking for what’s left of what she could call a family. There’s also a group of lycans working on a serum that would be able to turn them into super-werewolves, able to absorb silver and be virtually impenetrable.

I had a lot of fun watching the first three movies, but this one really blew me away. It is action from start to finish and it only stops to let you breathe for a moment and then dunks you back into the excitement. Because so many things change so drastically between films, it takes a moment just to take it all in. But the film never gives the characters that moment like most other films would. It’s nice to have that moment in those other movies but it would probably feel out of place and unrealistic here. These characters are running for their lives and they really never stop running. There are twists and turns all throughout this movie with characters dying when you least expect it and several unexpected surprises. I also thought it had some really great sound work, with plenty of metal crashing into other metal and walls, lots of roaring from the lycans and all sorts of other sounds that made it even more epic.

The only real downfall this movie has, and the only reason I don’t give it the 10/10 that I wish I could, is the dialogue. I can honestly see this dialogue completely killing the film for anybody who doesn’t already love these films. Almost every single line is exposition, a lot of which we don’t even need, and they talk a lot. Sometimes it can be really campy and almost sort of work in a funny way, but other times it’s just annoying and repetitive. I really wish they’d focused a little bit more on this because the rest of the film is so entertaining that it sucks that there aren’t a lot of memorable quotes or anything. At the very least the movie should follow the “show-don’t-tell” method that the other films sort of followed.

Underworld: Awakening is the definition of action-packed. It’s vampires fighting werewolves and there is nothing wrong with that. I highly recommend this, as well as the rest of the Underworld films, and I am very anxious to see if and when they continue the story.

Final Verdict: 

Centuries before the events of the first two Underworld films, lycan (werewolf) Lucian (Michael Sheen) was in love with Sonja (Rhona Mitra), the daughter of the ruler of the vampires, Viktor (Bill Nighy). Their unity brought with it the rise of the enslaved lycans, leading to the war that we’ve all become well acquainted with in the present story.

Going back and telling this story is a little confusing to me. From a marketing standpoint, I find it odd that they would make an Underworld film without Kate Beckinsale. From a storytelling perspective, I don’t see the point in it existing at all. We already saw this story in flashbacks and it was impactful at the time. Drawing it out and telling every little detail gets kind of boring as it goes on. It takes a lot of emotion out of a story like this when we already know exactly how it ends. It’s also a pretty generic story they went with, hitting beat-for-beat everything you’re expecting.

That being said, the emotion does work when you think of the film as its own thing. It’s a tragic love story in somewhat of the vain of Romeo and Juliet, only it’s with vampires and werewolves and that makes it so much more awesome. The chemistry between Lucian and Sonja works, but the chemistry between the two of them and Viktor is even better. I love seeing Nighy get a bigger role in one of these films because he seems to love making them. Viktor is way over the top in the best way possible, yelling and screaming and being a generally fierce antagonist. If you loved him in the first movie like I did then you’ll really love seeing him throughout this whole film.

I wish I could say the action was as good as in the first two films. While it is, from a gore perspective, it’s all shot way too close and it’s hard to tell what’s going on half the time. There’s even a fight near the end of the film that takes place during a lightning storm and the flashing lights mixed with the close up shots make it pretty much impossible to see anything. They also use some effects more than once and that sort of cheapens them a bit. It’s all still on a much lower budget than it wants to be but it does an okay job making up for it. They just could have done a better job staging everything and getting the camera in the right place.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is not a necessary story in the Underworld series, but it’s one worth checking out if you like the others. It may not be quite as exciting as the first two but Michael Sheen’s and Bill Nighy’s performances make up for it.

Final Verdict: 

Twenty years after her mother murdered several members of the cloth during her own exorcism, Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade) decides to bring a film crew (namely one camera man, Michael (Ionut Grama)) to Italy and see if she can perform another exorcism on her mother. She inducts the help of Fathers Rawlings (Simon Quarterman) and Keane (Evan Helmuth) who work outside the Catholic church’s endorsement.

I don’t really understand this film. It sells itself as being legitimate, even going as far as to give a website right before the credits for “more information.” But then it goes on to show all the people who worked on the film, including the actors. I understand trying to engage the audience through the illusion of realism but even if I do take it as a real thing, I still don’t understand the point of it. The filmmakers seem to have a very negative view of the Catholic church, but considering the subject matter I don’t really understand their motivation. If this were actual footage then it would make sense but I know it’s a screenplay they’re working from so there motives don’t really work.

Two or three exorcisms are performed, but they are relatively brief and really show off how low the budget was for the film. I wouldn’t say the rest of the film is boring exactly, but it’s definitely forgettable. I like the twist the film takes after they perform the exorcism on Isabella’s mother Maria (Suzan Crowley), but then the movie stops early and doesn’t give us much reason to care about what happened. If they had spent less time preparing us for the mediocre exorcism of the mother and focused more on what happens after, this could have been a very interesting and possibly even memorable film. As is though, it’s just a standard, dull horror flick that’s only worth checking out if you literally have nothing better to do.

Final Verdict: 

It’s a zombie apocalypse and while some are, well, dead, the rest are surviving the only way they know how: Taking in the pure joy of slaughtering the walking dead. Known only by their native cities, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) are on a journey across California on their way to anywhere that isn’t full of zombies.

I feel like I’ve made this point plenty of times before but I am not a fan of zombies. I feel like the exist solely for the purpose of making gory horror films. Apparently the makers of Zombieland feel that way too and have fully embraced the concept. And I guess in a way that works but it’s still not enough to get me to care. There are some elements to the film that I really like but that feel like they would have worked better in something that took itself a little more seriously. Columbus has a set of rules for survival and one of the main ones is to “enjoy the little things.” That’s a good rule to have that situation, but when they’re having just as much fun fighting off zombies as they are doing anything else, the rule sort of becomes pointless.

Most of the fun of the movie comes from the killing of zombies, which again I just don’t care for myself. To me, zombies are no better than storm troopers. They’re just mindless, soulless, nameless targets and I have no investment in their killing. That being said, when you can at least make the kills entertaining in a way other than just slaughtering them, it can work. And in the third act of this movie it does work. It takes place in an amusement park and they’re killing the zombies while riding the rides. That works. I just wish it hadn’t taken until the end to have it work. For the rest of the movie it’s just not all that funny or exciting to me.

And on that note, there is a major difference, especially in a film like this, between killing off zombies and murdering living people. If somebody gets eaten by a zombie that’s fine, but when a living person is killed in some way by another living person, and it’s played up for laughs, I just find that to be mean-spirited. This is done only a couple times in the film and it feels really awkward, like we’re supposed to be laughing at a human being being scraped across the pavement. The second time it happens it could have worked much better if there was some sort of emotion put into the scene, but it’s just like “Oh, you killed a living person. That kinda sucks.” It’s not funny just because it happened, you have to back it up and keep the scene going too.

If it didn’t already have a following, I would look at Zombieland as one of those comedies that would just get brushed under the mat and forgotten for decades. But it won’t because it can’t because apparently I’m in a minority, and I’m okay with that as long as other people are okay with me being okay with that. If this looks like your thing, have a ball. It’s not mine and I’m not going to recommend it. And I’m certainly never watching it again.

Final Verdict: