Jacob Boon

Monsters versus giant robots seems like can’t miss Oscar-bait, but a scattered plot and world-weary soul drags Pacific Rim down. For years now, massive “Kaijus” have been rising from a dimensional rift in the ocean floor and attacking cities. Humanity fights back the only way it can—forging big-dick robots that rocket punch things to death. […]

John Depp plays Tonto, making any and all revisionist flares The Lone Ranger attempts all the sadder. With a stupid bird on his head, Depp’s “noble savage” rescues attorney John Reid after being ambushed by ruthless outlaws. Now a “dead” man, Reid dons a mask, loads up some silver bullets and sets out to avenge […]

Ideas prove the least important part of filmmaking, in the creatively bankrupt but nevertheless existing Despicable Me 2. Let’s unpack this; following up on 2010’s super villain spectacle, DM2 finds the Anti-Villain League enlisting ex-baddie Gru (a boilerplate Steve Carell) to recover a powerful mutagen and find out who’s stealing secret laboratories via giant magnets. […]

Lady cops kick ass, and come dangerously close to wearing out their welcome, in The Heat. Sandra Bullock stars as an uptight FBI agent who’s Starsky & Hutch‘d to a rambunctious Boston police detective played by Melissa McCarthy. The odd couple clash, repeatedly, over procedure while attempting to take down a mysterious drug lord in […]

Oh ho! English nerds the world around should be well familiar with this tale by now; the story of a beloved filmmaker who won All The Money by directing the biggest movie ever, now spending some goodwill by adapting a classic Shakespearean comedy. Thus we have Much Ado About Nothing, the stripped down, black and […]

OK, I guess, here’s another Pixar sequel which didn’t really need to be made and is mostly fine. Monsters University is a prequel to 2001’s Monsters Inc. which finds college-bound Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal, surprisingly still versatile) butting heads with his new scaring school rival, James Sullivan (the also-returning John Goodman). The two will have […]

When ex-special forces agents stage a coup in the capital, beaten down cop Channing Tatum teams up with surprisingly capable president Jamie Foxx to wrestle back control of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the stupid but handsome, White House Down. The plot is bonkers, but it somehow remains enjoyably more reasonable than the exact same scenario […]

Already being compared to Spring Breakers (because girls behave badly), The Bling Ring is spiritually much closer to Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain; an early summer misfire that revelled in watching shallow buffoons steal money from rich assholes. Based on the Hollywood Hills burglaries, where four high schoolers went into unlocked celebrity homes and lifted […]

It doesn’t matter how beautifully something started, eventually everything ends. And so we have the second sequel to 1995’s Before Sunrise, in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight. Reprising their roles from the original (and 2004’s Before Sunset), stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke are now a committed couple, living in France with their twin daughters. Spending […]

The ocean is foreboding, but not always that exciting in the historical sailing drama, Kon-Tiki. Already Oscar-nominated, Norway’s most expensive production is a big-budget retelling of national hero Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 expedition across the South Pacific. Attempting to prove wrong the prevailing theories that Polynesia was settled from the west, ethnographer Heyerdahl (played by mouthful […]

Multicultural swarms of CGI people are attacking and the planet is helpless to stop them, until Brad Pitt decides he’s had enough. Or so goes the slim plot of World War Z (American title: World War Zee), which shoehorns a stoic Pitt into a variety of global set pieces as he attempts to traces the […]