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This is Vin Diesel’s take on the secret agent. Diesel plays the anti-hero who is recruited by the US government to help them infiltrate a criminal group who are experimenting with a deadly biological weapon. It’s short on plot, but the action sequences more than make up for the weaknesses in the story. This was easily one of the most entertaining movies of 2002.

Hard Ball

Keanu Reeves plays a chronic gambler who takes a job coaching a little league team to earn a few bucks to help pay off some of his gambling debts. Surprise, surprise, he quickly morphs from a hard-hearted gambler into a nice guy who begins to care about the kids. This movie couldn’t get more formulaic if it tried. It’s predictable and just plain bad. Did I mention that Reeves is an awful actor?

Jumanji

There once was a board game called Jumanji that brought its jungle characters to life, much to the dismay of those playing it. A young boy was one of those unlucky players and he got sucked into the fantasy world of the game. Years later, two other kids find the long forgotten board game, which releases the now grown boy (Robin Williams) from his jungle prison. Unfortunately, they have also started the game in motion again, and it has begun unleashing its jungle characters into the real world.

While the premise is interesting, the movie really isn’t anything special. The biggest problem that this movie faces are its computer generated jungle creatures. Apparently, the animals were supposed to look somewhat stylized, like they might look in a board game, but they end up looking cheap. They look like someone decided to save some money by going with second rate computer animation. It ends up being really distracting in a great many places during the movie. The fact that the computer animated effects are really what the movie is based around leaves the movie in a bad position. Maybe if the plot hadn’t had the sole purpose of moving us from one computer generated effect to the next, Jumanji might have been a little more entertaining. As it turned out, the movie was just one long series of crappy effects with no real story to go with them.

Final Destination

A group of teens survive a fatal plane crash when one of them has a premonition that their flight is doomed. He creates a disturbance that gets them removed from the plane before takes off. But death isn’t happy that it missed out on killing all who were supposed to be on the plane. The rest of the movie is spent by the teens trying to avoid “death” who wants to finish the job that it started on the plane. Not a bad movie. Not particularly scary, but as horror films go, it does benefit from the rather original premise.

Little Nicky

Adam Sandler plays the not so bright son of Satan. He is called to action when his brothers make a hasty exit from Hell which could lead to the Devil’s death. So the only way to save his father’s life is for Nicky to make the journey to Earth and capture his two hell raising (literally) brothers and bring them back down below. You would think that Adam Sandler as the spawn of Satan would have a few comedic possibilities. You would be wrong. Most of the jokes just fall flat. And the sight gags which do work are few and far between. And most of those don’t involve Sandler but the supporting cast, all of whom are funnier than the film’s star.

The Score

With a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Marlon Brando this should have been a great movie. Sadly it was only a mediocre movie at best. I’m not sure if it was all the fault of the movie, or the fact that with the cast that was assembled, it would have had to have been one amazing film to live up to it’s expectations. Either way, I walked away disappointed.

Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone

This is the first big screen adaptation of the best selling series of novels about the young wizard in training, Harry Potter. One of the more entertaining movies aimed at kids in recent years. Even the adults in the audience should enjoy it.

Maximum Risk

Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a cop who searches for the killer of the twin brother that he never knew he had. Along the way, he meets up with Natasha Henstridge, who plays his dead brother’s girlfriend. The only redeeming quality that this movie has is that Natasha gets naked. Other than that, everything about this movie is garbage.

Midnight Run

Robert De Niro plays a bounty hunter who has the misfortune of taking an incredibly annoying bail jumper (Charles Grodin) on a cross country journey. Good movie. The interaction between De Niro and Grodin more than make up for any flaws that the movie has. Who knew that De Niro would be so solid in a comedy?

Batman & Robin

As if one bad George Clooney movie wasn’t enough, for some reason, after watching From Dusk Till Dawn, I decided to sit through Batman & Robin again. That was a mistake I won’t soon stop regretting. Two hours worth of another Clooney movie that stinks up the joint. Clooney stars in the movie that brought down the Batman franchise to new lows of stupidity. For his part, Clooney isn’t half bad in the role, and if he had the benefit of a decent script, he might have been an OK Batman. But as it was, this movie made the 1960’s Batman TV series look like Shakespeare. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman play villains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy. Both are bent on destroying Gotham City. So what else is new? It was sad to watch how bad Schwarzenegger’s dialogue was. I’m not sure what the hell he was thinking when he took this role. It was a pathetic cartoonish character, and his lot in life was only made worse by the fact that he was surrounded by over-the-top special effects that overtook the entire movie. This is the final movie (so far) in the Batman series, instead of the dark brooding original movie that started the Batman series of movies, this one has devolved to the point where it is even campier and more cartoon-like than the Batman TV series. Not even Schwarzenegger and Thurman were able to begin to pull this movie out of the tailspin that it enters right at the opening moments of the film.