Preeminent straight man Paul Rudd (Role Models, I Love You Man) plays Tim, an ambitious young investment banker on the verge of joining the elite ranks at his firm. But in order to be fully inducted into the executive inner circle, he must first participate in a peculiar ritual called the “Dinner for Winners,” a monthly event hosted by his boss, Lance (Bruce Greenwood), to which each attendee is charged with bringing a high-functioning dimwit for the rest of the guests to ridicule. More than just a company tradition, it’s an opportunity for high-climbers like Tim to prove their mettle in an area crucial to the success of stereotypically cutthroat businessmen: exhibiting callous disregard for those who exist on the fringes of society. Needless to say, attendance at the dinner is not optional.

Tim believes he’s found the ideal dinner guest when he literally runs into Barry (Steve Carell), a clumsy, bespectacled IRS employee whose great passion in life involves staging elaborate dioramas with taxidermic mice. Several of Barry’s exquisitely strange creations, dubbed “mouseterpieces,” are depicted in the film’s opening sequence, which proudly nods to the intricate quirk of Wes Anderson. (Its soundtrack even apes his musical tastes, playing an obscure song from a legendary rock band: the Beatles’ Fool on the Hill, a melancholy little number that cost a paltry $1.5 million to license.)

That’s where the comparisons to Anderson’s work end. As a director, Roach’s greatest asset has always been his ability to assemble a group of talented comic actors and hand them the reigns, trusting that they’ll produce enough funny material for him to sow together into a relatively cohesive piece. It’s what fueled Roach’s better works, like the first Austin Powers flick, and it’s ultimately what saves Dinner for Schmucks from falling victim to the director’s less admirable qualities, namely, a penchant for contrived and predictable situational humor, an over-reliance on cheap physical and sight gags, and a general disregard for plot and pacing.

Carell has carved a lucrative niche for himself playing charmingly oblivious goofballs of varying levels of competence, and he earns every dime of his reported $15 million paycheck in this film. Rudd’s character, for all his caustic wit, isn’t nearly as manipulative or amoral as his French counterpart; we never truly believe him capable of deliberately humiliating an innocent like Barry, even if he does drive a Porsche.

But they labor heroically to make the most of their suboptimal comedic circumstances, forming an amiable, intermittently hilarious odd-couple dynamic as Tim struggles to contain the chaos wrought by Barry. That, combined with the efforts of Jemaine Clement and Zach Galifianakis, both sublime in supporting roles, are what ultimately what elevate the film above its meagre material. These are guys who could send us into hysterics reading a grocery list, which in this case would constitute an upgrade over the Dinner for Schmucks screenplay.

RATING : 3/5 More of a healthy snack than a full meal, but still plenty satisfying. – Credits to Hollywood.com original writer Thomas Leupp

But flash is one thing Salt never lacks for. Its breathless cat-and-mouse game hits full-throttle almost from the outset, when a former KGB officer named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) stumbles into a CIA interrogation room and begins spilling details of a vast conspiracy. Back in the ‘70s, hardline elements of the Soviet regime launched an ambitious new front in the Cold War, flooding the western world with orphans trained to infiltrate the security complexes of their adopted homelands and wait patiently — decades, if necessary — for the order to initiate a series of assassinations intended to trigger a devastating nuclear clash between the superpowers, from which the treacherous Reds would emerge triumphant.

The Soviet Union may have long ago collapsed (or did it? Hmmm…), but its army of brainwashed killer orphan spies remains in place, and if this crazy Orlov fellow is to be believed, they stand poised to reignite the Cold War. It’s a preposterous — even idiotic — scheme, but no more so than any of our government’s various harebrained proposals to kill Castro back in the ‘60s. As such, the CIA treats it with grave seriousness, even the part that that pegs Salt, who just happens to be a Russian-born orphan herself, as a key player in the conspiracy.

Salt bristles at the accusation, but, suspecting a set-up, she opts to flee rather than face interrogation from her bosses Winter (Liev Schreiber) and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor). A former field agent, she’s been confined to a desk job since a clandestine operation in North Korea went south, leaving her with a nasty shiner and a rather unremarkable German boyfriend (now her unremarkable German husband). She’s clearly kept up her training during while cubicle-bound, however, and in a blaze of resourceful thinking and devastating Parkour Fu, she fends off a dozen or so agents of questionable competence and takes to the streets, where she sets about to clear her name and unravel the Commie orphan conspiracy before the authorities can catch up with her. That is, if she isn’t a part of the conspiracy.

The premise, which aims to resurrect Cold War tensions and graft them onto a modern-day spy thriller, is absurdly clever — and cleverly absurd. But Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay isn’t satisfied with the merely clever and absurd — it must be mind-blowing. Salt is one of those thrillers that ladles out its backstory slowly and in tiny portions, every once in a while dropping a revelatory bombshell that effectively blows the lid off everything that happened beforehand. No one is who they seem, and every action, every gesture, no matter how seemingly trivial, is imbued with some kind of grand significance. The effect of piling on one insane twist after another has the effect of gradually diluting the narrative. When anything is possible, nothing really matters.

But spy thrillers, by definition, trade in the preposterous, and the principal function of the summer blockbuster is to entertain. In that regard, Salt more than fulfills its charge. Noyce wisely keeps the story moving at pace that allows little time for asking uncomfortable questions or poking holes in the film’s frail plot. And he has an able partner in the infinitely versatile Jolie, who, having already exhibited formidable action-hero chops in Wanted and the Tomb Raider films, proves remarkably adept at the spy game as well.

It’s well-known that Jolie wasn’t the first choice to star in Salt, joining the project only after Tom Cruise dropped out, citing the story’s growing similarities to the Mission: Impossible films. But she’s more than just a capable replacement; she’s a welcome upgrade over Cruise, not least because she’s over a decade younger (and a few inches taller), than her predecessor. Should Brad Bird require a pinch-hitter for Ethan Hunt, he knows where to look.

RATING : 4/5

COURTESY : HOLLYWOOD.COM FOR THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, a professional thief who specializes in swiping not cars or diamonds or paintings but intellectual property. What sets Dom apart from the typical Chinese hacker, and what makes his services so appealing to his powerful corporate clients, is his expertise in “extraction,” a process whereby he utilizes a cutting-edge process known as “shared dreaming” to enter the mind of the mark while he or she is sleeping and steals information directly from their subconscious. (The nuts and bolts of “shared dreaming” technology aren’t ever explained, and only obliquely referred to as an innovation of the U.S. military.)

Dom is a reluctant criminal, a former academic forced underground after authorities unfairly pegged him for the murder of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). Weary of his itinerant fugitive lifestyle and longing to be reunited Stateside with his two young children, he agrees to take on a dangerous new assignment — his One Last Job, in heist film parlance — from an energy mogul named Saito (Ken Watanabe), who pledges to clear his name (in the movie world, fugitive suspects can be exonerated with a simple phone call from a CEO) if he can convince the heir of a rival energy conglomerate, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to dissolve his ailing father’s empire after the old man passes on.

The danger of the new job lies in a key detail that distinguishes it from previous ones: Instead of extracting an idea from Fischer’s brain, Dom will need to implant one — a significantly riskier and more complicated process dubbed … wait for it … “inception.” To pull it off, Dom and his right-hand man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), assemble a crew consisting of the best and brightest in the shared dreaming field.

As you might have gathered, Inception’s waking life/dreaming life construct is a complicated one, and fraught with all sorts of weighty existential implications. To make it all work, Nolan must devote the vast majority of the film’s dialogue to simply laying out the various rules and caveats: dreamers are given a cocktail of sedatives to maximize REM sleep; when they die in a dream, they awake in real life; if they don’t die, they can be awakened with a “kick,” which ranges in intensity from a classical music melody to a punch in the face; each dreamer carries a “totem,” a sort of personalized cogito ergo sum device to help them distinguish between reality and dream in times of doubt; and so on.

One of Nolan’s more admirable traits is that his films, no matter how fantastical they might get, are always anchored in a certain logic, with a premium placed on scientific accuracy. If this were an Ocean’s movie, Soderbergh would have glossed over the above in a dizzyingly hip montage set to a swingin’ Elvis dance remix. But for Nolan, the details are essential. Which might make great fodder for fanboy forums, but it leaves precious little room for other important narrative tasks, such as developing the supporting characters, who, unlike Inception’s subject matter, are uncomplicated and thinly drawn. (In perhaps a cheeky nod to this fact, Ellen Page’s character, the crew’s rookie member, chooses a chess pawn as her totem.)

Inception’s avalanche of information (at one point juxtaposed with an actual avalanche, for irony’s sake) becomes so intense you almost expect the film to simply seize up, a giant spinning hourglass appearing on the frozen screen, as Nolan’s relentless download finally overwhelms our ability to process it all in real-time. Tasked with pondering both the dramatic and philosophical ramifications of every action, our grasp of the plot grows ever tenuous, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between events occurring in the past or present, between characters real and imagined, between heroes and villains.

If there are any villains. Saito and Fischer, the scheming corporate titans whose rivalry catalyzes Inception’s storyline, both gradually emerge as sympathetic characters. A simulacrum of Dom’s deceased wife pops up at inconvenient moments to sabotage his efforts, as do a phalanx of anonymous goons spawned by one character’s subconscious, but neither feel like genuine antagonists. As such, the film’s blistering climax loses much of its impact. The explosions and gun battles and zero-gravity fist-fights are all amazing, truly, but it’s unclear what the point is to all of them. Inception, though always riveting, isn’t always comprehensible.

Director Nimrod Antal and screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch have cut out all distractions, all the fruitless complications most sequels experience as they try to overly explain any unanswered questions from the first film. Their story ignites with a bang and shows no immediate signs of pausing for needless introspection. Predators opens with Adrien Brody’s character falling from the sky into an unknown jungle where he meets up with a handful of fellow air-dropped jarheads, each as equally confused as to what’s going on as the next. The audience knows exactly what’s going on, though. They, a collective sampling of Earth’s most lethal badasses, have been parachuted onto an alien game preserve for the hunting pleasures of the Predators.

The first 30 or so minutes of the film are a much-needed refresher course on not only how to do ensemble-based action movies, but how to make a film that cashes in on a previous phenomenon without betraying the people who made it a phenomenon in the first place. We know just enough about the characters to let our own real-world instincts fill in any of the gaps. And since we know the Predators are out in the jungle, patiently stalking Brody and his defacto gang of killers, there is also no need to de-cloak the alien killers prematurely. The result is an exciting, feels-like-the-good-ole-days start to a movie that is constantly on its toes as it pits the group against a host of interesting challenges the Predators’ planet has to offer, both old (elaborate, hand-made traps) and new (they aren’t the only dangerous things the Preds dropped in by parachute).

However, that is only the first 30 or so minutes of the film. Sadly, around a third of the way through, Antal and company have reached their cruising speed and from there on out Predators enters a predictable trajectory that doesn’t really aspire to introduce and explore more of the Predator world. For sake of keeping this review spoiler-free I’ll leave out the specifics, but a plot device is introduced that promises to be yet another wild-card for the movie, but it just shows up, pauses to provide unnecessary exposition, and then disappears. Unfortunately, the momentum of the movie never fully recovers from this small but crucial misstep.

When it’s on fire, though, Predators is a total blast of all the extreme machismo and action-movie staples that made John McTiernan’s original such a seminal entry in both the sci-fi and action canons of cinema. Antal really knows how to balance an ensemble cast, giving each character enough screen time to be memorable for one reason or another, be it the weapon they carry or the lines they deliver, lines seemingly engineered to be as quotable as possible (Walton Goggins’ dialog alone is reason enough to like the movie). And he also has great instincts for how to maximize the scale and scope of set pieces, transforming jungle that is claustrophobic in one scene into a landscape so sprawling it seems like it could never be escaped in another.

That said, even with a film that is significantly more exciting in the beginning than it is in the end, a movie that is one-third great and roughly two-thirds above average isn’t exactly something to be angry about. Especially not in this summer’s current film climate, where most releases have been unilaterally bad. It’s just unfortunate that Predators’ pacing problems later on the film give one’s mind plenty of time to wander, to start to notice the gaps in the characters and internal logic within the script. Those are things you never really want to spend time examining in any action movie, let alone a Predator movie. Had it come out when it was originally conceived by Robert Rodriguez over fifteen years ago, it would have been perfect for the time period. All these years later though, one must wonder how all those uneven spots weren’t ironed out in the intervening time. But, all things considered, this is unmistakably a Predator movie, and to that end Predators is a faithful, respectful hat tip to a franchise loved the world over.

courtesy credits : hollywood.com

And yet, Hollywood keeps trying, lured by tantalizing visions of cash-cow franchises fed by loyal, built-in — and most importantly, international — audiences. The latest casualty of this misguided ambition is The Last Airbender, based on the hit Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. To be fair, Avatar isn’t anime in the orthodox sense, in that it was conceived and produced in the States, but its style and soul are almost exclusively anime-inspired. As such, its big-screen fate is similarly sealed.

Who could possibly break such a rueful trend? For some reason, the minds at Paramount thought M. Night Shyamalan, that notorious purveyor of ponderous and increasingly shlocky supernatural thrillers, might succeed where so many other directors had failed. Even worse, they saw fit to hire him to pen the screenplay as well, ensuring that every vital aspect of the film would feel the crushing weight of his heavy hand. With such a hacky burden to bear, it comes as no surprise that The Last Airbender never really takes flight.

The film’s story is set in a world divided into four tribes, each aligned to an element: Air, Earth, Water, and Fire. Certain gifted tribe members, known as a “benders,” can manipulate the properties of their assigned element to suit their ends. In order to do so, they must first perform an elaborate and utterly ridiculous kung fu dance, after which a torrent of fire, water, or whatever arises to obey their command.

For the better part of a century, the oppressive and warlike Firebenders have besieged the other nations, gradually thinning their respective ranks. The Air Nomads have faired the worst of the lot, and are presumed to be extinct until Water peeps Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) discover a boy named Aang (Noah Ringer) trapped in a giant ball of ice. Not only is Unfrozen Kung Fu Warrior the last remaining Airbender (thus the title) he is also an Avatar, the only being on the planet capable of wielding all four elements. And only he can bring an end to the Firebenders’ evil reign.

Blessed with an opportunity to reinvent himself in a new genre and with a new demographic, Shyamalan can’t avoid falling back on old habits, most notably his penchant for awkward and cumbersome dialogue. It’s difficult enough for adults to deliver his lines, but it’s absolute hell for The Last Airbender’s youthful protagonists, whose not yet fully-developed temporal lobes can’t hope to adequately process the inanities of Shyamalan-speak. One can almost see the smoke coming from little Noah’s ears as he labors to complete each portentous sentence. Poor kid. Where are the Child Labor people when you need them?

But bad dialogue is only one of a litany of problems that plagues The Last Airbender, which suffers from mediocre CGI, inexplicable casting decisions (caucasians actors, none of whom are especially talented, are tabbed for asian roles when sufficiently mediocre race-appropriate actors were surely available), and a plot comprehensible only to the most ardent fans of the Nickelodeon series. Much as Aang bends the air, Shyamalan tries to bend the laws of quality cinema to his will, but they refuse to yield to the force of his ego. I only wish the execs at Paramount had been as stalwart.

VERDICT : M. Night Shyamalan tries to bend the laws of quality cinema to suit his shlocky ambitions.

MOVIEFILM.IN RATING : 2/5

ORIGINAL ARTICLE COURTESY : HOLLYWOOD.COM

Or so we thought. Twilight’s fateful love triangle is revived in earnest by Eclipse, part three of the series, and this time the implications are serious — relatively speaking, of course. Taking over the helm from New Moon director Chris Weitz is David Slade (30 Days of Night, Hard Candy), who adds a hefty dose of action to Twilight’s trademark mix of soaring romance and manic melodrama, making Eclipse the first film in the saga in which — get this — something actually happens.

Indeed, action is a primary theme of Eclipse. Like most high school seniors, Bella wants some; her pasty paramour Edward Cullen, however, remains stubbornly chaste, and not just because the briefest exposure to his unbridled vampire lust would almost certainly kill his all-too-human sweetheart. You see, chivalrous Edward hails “from a different era,” one in which the institution of marriage meant everything and a man took care to mount a proper courtship before marrying a girl nearly a century his junior. (He’s 109 years old.) He asks her to marry him; she agrees, but only if he’ll turn her into a vampire first; he hesitates, pondering the unalterable consequences; the matter is tabled and heavy petting resumes. (This exchange is repeated, ad nauseam, throughout the remainder of the film.)

The constant fawning and unwavering devotion from impossibly beautiful Edward aren’t enough to sate Bella’s thirst — she needs validation like a vampire needs blood — and so she uses the flimsiest of pretexts to re-insert herself into the life of Jacob Black, the sensitive werewolf she previously shunned, who dutifully plies her with his own declarations of undying love. (Jacob, to his credit, has developed enough game since we last saw him to qualify as a serious contender for Bella’s affections, and is no longer the devoted doormat we saw in New Moon. He’s still a tool, though.) Game on.

But Edward and Jacob aren’t the only ones with designs on Bella. (Seriously, are there no other hot emo chicks in the greater Pacific Northwest?) A ginger-haired menace (Bryce Dallas Howard) has emerged, one that will require Edward’s vampire clan and Jacob’s wolfpack tribe, longtime enemies forever on the verge of a climactic battle (in which Bella will serve as the jeans-and-hoodie-clad Helen of Troy, no doubt) to put aside their differences and unite against a common enemy. In order to ensure Bella’s safety, Edward and Jacob must form an uneasy tag-team (no, not that kind of tag team, much as it would likely better serve to resolve matters) to keep Bella safe from harm.

With its amped-up action, sharpened wit, and darker, horror flick-inspired atmospherics, Eclipse boasts the broadest appeal of all the Twilight films thus far. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. Director Slade’s grasp of plot development borders on amateurish in this film; Eclipse often feels less like a movie than a weighty discourse on the pros and cons of vampiredom, laid out in lengthy, exhaustingly repetitive chunks of exposition and awkward, campy flashbacks, as just about every character in the film, including Edward, attempts to dissuade Bella from joining the ranks of the bloodsuckers.

But alas, no force, no matter how utterly rational its arguments, will keep Bella from her destiny. Which, obviously, is Edward. Or is it? Eclipse goes to great pains to invent ways to perpetuate the film’s romantic rivalry, inserting scenes like the one in which Bella, on the verge of freezing to death in a tent high up in the mountains, is saved when Jacob arrives to heroically spoon her body temperature back to its proper level. (Eclipse is being hyped as the first “guy-friendly” Twilight flick, but no film which includes a climactic spooning scene can rightly claim such a distinction.) Edward, meanwhile, with his poor vampire circulation, is powerless to help.

Who will win in the end? Will it be abs over eyes? Obviously, it will take two more movies (at least!) to solve this kind of wrenching dilemma.

Rating : 4/5 – Don’t Miss This One

Original Article courtesy : Hollywood.com

Each character brings his own baggage to the reunion: Sandler’s team captain is now a big-shot Hollywood agent (a questionable fit for his good-guy goofball persona) with a high-maintenance trophy wife (Salma Hayek) and two spoiled sons; Rock’s a full-time househusband suffering in the shadow of his successful corporate wife (Maya Rudolph) and her browbeating, flatulent mother; Spade, looking especially weathered, plays an acerbic lothario who refuses to give up his hard-partying ways, no matter how pathetic they now appear; Schneider’s a massage therapist who employs a host of dubious new-age therapies to cope with the all but unbearable fact that he is, well, Rob Schneider; and sitcom émigré Kevin James, drafted to the Happy Madison varsity squad after ably delivering the unfunny in Paul Blart: Mall Cop, plays a family man ashamed of his working-class status.

It’s fitting that Grown Ups is set over the course of a weekend, because that’s probably how long it took to conceive, plan and produce. There’s nothing wrong with brainless humor — it can be the perfect antidote to the leaden, self-righteous fare that so often litters the multiplex — but Sandler and company seem to have forgotten that even so-called “dumb” comedies still require competent filmmaking to work effectively.

But work seems to have been the furthest thing from their minds. In Grown Ups, they lazily amble through a series of uninspired gags that wouldn’t have made the Wild Hogs cut, string together a plot structured vaguely around a rematch of a climactic basketball game, and task director Dennis Dugan with capturing the whole sordid affair on his cell phone camera. At least, it looks like it was shot on a cell phone camera.

Sandler’s charisma may well be enough to turn Grown Ups into yet another $100 million hit for the beloved comedian, with audiences perfectly eager to cough up $12 to subsidize his make-work program. But it’s abundantly clear that his friends — and his brand of comedy — aren’t aging well.

MovieFilm.in Rating : 2/5 – An ok watch,but not must at all… you can miss this one

Credits to Hollywood.com for the original write-up

Knight and Day is the pinnacle of studio laziness: two pretty people forcefully crammed into an empty vessel in the hopes that their celebrity will dupe more than a few rubes into buying a ticket. This movie is lifeless; it has no pulse from beginning to end. I’m not naive. I know why movies like this exist and I know that I am not the target audience. But what really burns me about Knight and Day is that it fails to deliver on the one note on which movies like this typically bank: cheap romance.

The principal design of a film like this is to provide masturbatory fantasies for people who read gossip magazines. When you are making a film in that vein, the only requirement of you is to create chemistry and steaminess between your two leads. Knight and Day managed to fashion a film like that without spending a lick of effort to create sexual tension between the characters. At no point in the film did I feel like they had a relationship — or that they were even interested in one another — until I was explicitly told that it was true.

Most of the absence of heat between them is a product of two veteran movie stars who obviously could not care less about the film they are making. If you are a fan of either Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz, I would highly suggest taking a trip to Madame Tussauds and staring at their wax likenesses because they will offer more skilled performances cast in wax than they did on screen. If Cruise’s performance were any more phoned in, AT&T would’ve sponsored the film. To counterbalance that, Diaz is a complete doorknob. Her “fish out of water” routine more often than not devolves into completely inauthentic stupidity and emotionless non-reactions. And I’m sorry, Tom, but even you have to exert yourself just an iota to be charming.

The plot of the film isn’t just generic, it’s insultingly stupid. Take the actors out of the film — hell, take away the fact that the film exists — if you were to recount the plot points of Knight and Day to someone as if it were a story, that person would think you a moron. MacGuffins about batteries, characters identified by their naiveté suddenly becoming fully cognizant of complicated schemes, and being pretty serving as the only criterion for graduating to superspy all expected to be swallowed as fact.

At least it’s an action film, so there are moments of sheer entertainment, right? Wrong! The action scenes are as bland and unsatisfying as the rest of the script and offer little more than sweet retreat from the idiocy of the plot and the inadequacy of its cast. Please do not waste your time, money or brain cells on this unmitigated garbage. If we collectively say no to movies like this, perhaps the next summer vehicle for pretty people will have the good decency to be mediocre.

Eleven years have elapsed since Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen) and all of Andy’s favorite playthings had their last adventure — rather, 11 years have elapsed since Andy stopped playing with his toys. Buoyed by Woody’s never-failing devotion, the gang is all optimistic that Andy will elect to bring them with him to his first year of college, but as that fateful, empty-nest day approaches, it becomes clearer and clearer that the only toy that will be making the trek to school is Woody. The rest are all, by a series of unfortunate events, consigned to live out their remaining days at Sunnyside daycare. Things are actually looking up for the neglected entertainers until they realize just how careless the ankle-biters are when it comes to playing with toys.

Unfortunately, there is no escape in sight for the lovable personalities Pixar has been refining for over a decade. Lotso Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty) runs a tight ship at Sunnyside; the new toys are just going to have to be sacrificed to the aggressive toddlers so the old veterans can have a relaxing time with their more mature counterparts. Eventually, Woody catches wind of what kind of life his old pals are being forced to live, and Toy Story 3 quite brilliantly becomes a riff on classic prison escape movies as Woody seeks to breach Lotso’s security measures and bring his bunch back to Andy, where they belong. And while this on-the-run chunk of the film is some of the most thrilling material Pixar has ever delivered, it’s also some of the most touching.

Unlike most sequels, not a moment of Toy Story 3 feels artificial. There’s no sense that Pixar decided to make a third film because it knew that the box office would gladly support another entry; no sense that this is a cash grab (unlike a certain green ogre’s most recent trip to the big screen). All of those typical sequel pitfalls are carefully avoided by a swelling sense of finality. Toy Story 3 isn’t just another adventure with these characters — there is, in fact, no doubt that this is their final adventure, their final hoorah together. Director Lee Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt meticulously lead the audience along with bated breath the entire time, culminating in a life-or-death scenario for the toys that is more heartfelt and genuine than most live-action films can ever muster.

It’s astonishing how the creative team at Pixar can make you forget that what you’re watching is all a bunch of digital wizardry. Maybe it’s the 3D this time around, maybe it’s that this is the studio’s most accomplished technical feat to date (there are single shots at a landfill that pack in richer detail than the entirety of the pioneering first film) that makes Toy Story 3 such an immersive experience. Or maybe it’s simply because Pixar treats its property, which is ostensibly for children, with the utmost sincerity. The result is an overwhelming success, the rare kind of film that, were it a human being, would be your best friend.

One could reasonably make the case that Toy Story 3 is the single best animated film ever made. I wouldn’t outright agree with such grandiose claims, but it’s certainly not a baseless proposition that you’d be laughed at for bringing up. However, with part three now tucked under Pixar’s belt, one could present an even better case that Toy Story is the best film trilogy ever made — a claim I am far more comfortable signing on the dotted line for.

Moviefilm.in Rating : 4/5

Hollywood.com Says – Toy Story 3 is an overwhelming success, rounding out what might just be the best film trilogy ever made.

Much has changed in the update: Daniel Larusso is now Dre Parker; California’s San Fernando Valley is now Beijing, China; Mr. Miyagi is now Mr. Han; and karate is now kung fu. Most of the story beats and thematic elements, however, are essentially the same. After his single mother (Taraji P. Henson) gets a job transfer, 12-year-old Dre (Smith) is forced to move from his native Detroit to the unfamiliar climes of Beijing, where he’s besieged by a local group of pubescent fascists after being caught innocently flirting with a pretty schoolmate.

Dre’s tormentors, all of whom practice a peculiarly sadistic version of kung fu taught at the neighborhood martial arts academy, adhere vigorously to the “No weakness, no pain, no mercy” credo of their autocratic master. As such, they’re not about to let their puny prey off with just one humiliating beatdown. During a subsequent ass-whooping, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), the eccentric maintenance man from Dre’s apartment building, comes to the rescue, fending off the ruthless urchins with some pretty fancy fighting moves of his own. After some cajoling, Mr. Han reluctantly agrees to teach the child kung fu, and several life lessons and inspirational montages later, a resurgent Dre finally faces up to his adversaries at a climactic kung fu tournament.

The case for nepotism in this new Karate Kid is not without merit. Though allegedly 11 years old, Smith doesn’t look a day over 10, and appears jarringly undersized for a 12-year-old. Seeing the baby-faced lad (he definitely takes after his mom in the looks department) get repeatedly brutalized by adolescent thugs twice his size gets uncomfortable, as do later scenes of him training shirtless, his torso the size of Chan’s forearm.

But it’s a minor quibble. In truth, Smith surpasses his predecessor Macchio in both acting ability and martial arts proficiency. Whereas Daniel-San’s fighting scenes in the original Karate Kid require a suspension of disbelief that diminishes his eventual triumph at the All-Valley Karate Championships (Even as a kid, I always suspected that the Cobra Kai kids were either sandbagging it, or their sensai was the worst in-game coach since Jim Tressel), Smith’s moves are both more authentic and more athletic. Moreover, he has the good sense not to collapse hysterically into a wailing heap at the slightest touch from an opponent, as Macchio so famously did.

The Karate Kid is every bit an unabashed crowd-pleaser — which isn’t necessarily such a bad thing in a summer movie season that has thus far given audiences precious little to cheer for. At two-and-a-half hours, it takes far too long to get going and would have benefited from a more assured hand behind the camera. Zwart’s overemphasis on the bullying and fish-out-of-water elements becomes redundant, and the dialogue and culture-clash jokes border on embarrassing at times. But the meat of the story, the bond that forms between an unlikely kung fu teacher and his equally unlikely student, is undeniably affecting.

MovieFilm.in Rating : 3/5

courtesy : hollywood.com