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rmorley
Reviews
The Fugitive (1993)
Good, but definitely not great
This was a decent action/detective movie with good pacing and good acting all around. My main problem with the movie centers around the holes in the plot: while it's suggested, it's never clearly stated why Helen was murdered; the fudged clinical trials of the drug all being ultimately controlled by one doctor seems rather unlikely; the number of times Kimble goes unrecognized by people who should know him on-sight (even without the beard) goes beyond the realm of unlikely into the realm of ludicrous; Kimble's skill at creating a false pass and faking out people who work at the hospital also seems rather lame. I'm sure I could come up with more if I watched it again.
In the end, it was a good enough movie to be enjoyable, but some very basic believability issues marred the overall story. Obviously the 90% or so of users who rated this movie better than I did will disagree with me on this, but I have a hard time understanding why this movie is so highly-rated. It was okay, but I don't feel any pressing need to watch it again at any point.
Eye of the Beast (2007)
Decent B-Movie
If you accept the fact that this is a B-movie from the outset, this isn't too bad of a movie. The writing wasn't too badly stilted anywhere, the story is...well...a fairly predictable "sea monster" story, and the acting, while nothing to write home about, was certainly nothing to complain about. Of course, James van der Beek makes the movie a little easier to watch too. :)
My biggest complaint about the movie, other than the obvious low-budget quality, was the straight-forwardness of it. Establish the town, figure out the relationships, show monster to viewers, nobody believes monster exists, prove monster exists, deal with it, male and female leads fall in love and live happily ever after. Wow, now there's a story that hasn't been told about a million times before!
But in spite of its shortcomings, it was suitably entertaining for a Saturday afternoon where I had nothing better to do. I don't think I'd ever watch it again, but I'm not disappointed at having watched it a first time.
Syriana (2005)
Confusing
While I'm sure this movie was good for someone who could keep up with it, for the most part, I found it confusing and direction-less. I think perhaps the greatest problem was that the characters simply weren't established well enough. Each time a character came on screen, I found myself thinking "Who is this, and why do we care about him, again?" The constant switch between English dialogue and English subtitles to Arabic/Urdu conversations was also more than a little jarring.
In the end, I got that the movie was about business politics and getting rid of an Emir who would have brought his country into the 21st century, but that was really ALL I got out of it. I have no idea who killed him or why, I have no idea what Matt Damon's character was doing throughout most of the movie, nor George Clooney's character.
In short, if you don't have a head for politics and can't keep track of the plethora of minute details that they throw at you in this movie, don't watch it--like me, you'll come out of it wondering what the point of it all was.
Desperation (2006)
Wow, this is bad!
As with almost all Steven King movies I've ever seen, this is bad. Unlike most of them, however, this is STUPENDOUSLY bad!
About the only real point to the movie is to spend 3 hours (with commercials, anyway) telling you how "God is good". As a Pagan, that didn't exactly get things off on the right foot for me.
As for the rest of the movie, the plot was awful, the pacing of it was way too slow--it seemed like it just dragged on and on forever--and what few special effects there were seemed pretty cheesy as well.
I recommend that you avoid this movie at all costs...in fact, even if somebody pays you to watch it, I would suggest you turn them down.