Movies Merica

In 1995, Michael Bay made Bad Boys and introduced us to the characters of Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowrey, played respectively by Martin Lawrence and Will Smith. Now 29 years later, they’re back in the fourth Bad Boys movie, Bad Boys: Ride Or Die. Again it brings you some more intense action than you’d expect in a comedy but also of course the slap you in the face laughs you’d expect. Since it’s al...

It’s a retro review this week for Movies Merica with the political thriller “The Contender” that flew under the radar when it was released in 2000. It’s the story of a political figure that is going to shake things up in Washington D.C. in a way many D.C. power players don’t want. As a result, those power players launch an all-out legal and media assault on them to drive them out of D.C. Sound fam...

It’s been 9 years that we’ve been waiting for director George Miller to make another Mad Max movie. We’ll have to keep waiting because he still hasn’t made a Mad Max movie with the new movie, Furiosa. In the 2015 smash hit Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa was really a co-lead character with Mad Max ironically enough given Mad Max is literally in the movie title. As a result, the assumption by some is t...

John Krasinski is most famously known for playing Jim Halpert on “The Office.” However, he’s also a movie director. His last two movies, “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part II”, were ones that would give kids nightmares. In his latest movie, “If”, he tries to take them, and their parents, to a happy place instead.  “If” is the story of Bea, a 12 year old girl that has gone through a tragedy an...

We’ve been getting Planet of the Apes movies for decades now and the latest installment is Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. This installment jumps many generations into the future after the events of the last Apes movie, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes. We meet the main character of this installment, Noa, and his friends and family. They’re part of a peaceful ape clan who raise eagles as p...

Movie stars are made to look heroic, awesome, tough and gritty in their movies and who makes them look that way? Stunt men and women. The Fall Guy is a love letter to the stunt community within the movie business directed by former stuntman David Leitch. It’s of course also a take on the hit 1980s Lee Majors TV show of the same name. This time it’s Ryan Gosling playing Colt Seaver as a Hollywood s...

I go back to 1994 for this week’s review. Specifically the epic, action-packed Arnold Schwarzenegger spy thriller True Lies. This was James Cameron teaming up again with his Terminator for this big budget, eye-popping spectacle. Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker who has his wife and daughter convinced that he’s just a dull to the bone computer salesman. In reality he’s a spy for the covert Omega S...

The British pride themselves on being gentlemanly. That goes all out the window in the movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare when they know they’re dealing with Nazis during World War II. British officers, along with none other than Winston Churchill himself, send a team of bad boys to deal a critical blow to the German submarine fleet. This team is led by Henry Cavill, who’s character they...

Up until this movie, everyone has had to picture only in their mind what the next civil war in America would look like. Now the new movie from director Alex Garland, “Civil War”, provides the visual representation of what such a war would look like. As you’d expect, it’s horrifying and brutal and the protagonists in this movie are there to take pictures of much of it. Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spae...

If one of the things on your bucket list is to see a movie that is part John Wick, part RRR and part Slumdog Millionaire, prepare to be happy. I give you Monkey Man directed by Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel. He also stars in this as the main character named Kid who is a street fighter that gets paid to be the heel in fights. The guy that gets beat up and loses every night. He wears a monkey mask...

In the world of Godzilla x Kong The New Empire, you have good monsters and bad monsters, but even with the good ones, a lot of humans get taken out. That’s what you’ll see in the latest monster movie from Adam Wingard who directed Godzilla vs Kong a few years ago. In this latest movie, Kong is at home in Hollow Earth which is a world deep within Earth that was discovered in the last movie. Godzill...

Apparently the Ghostbusters aren’t afraid of no ghosts or sequels. Forty years after the original Ghostbusters comes Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. We get the Ghostbusters that started it all minus the late, great Harold Ramis. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson. Annie Potts is back as well. Then we also see the new characters introduced in 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife played by the likes o...

Who doesn’t dig a movie with a lovable dog? Arthur the King has a lovable dog and has Mark Wahlberg bringing you some exciting multi-terrain adventure racing. This movie starts with Wahlberg’s seemingly washed up adventure racer character, Michael Light, wanting one last chance to finally win an adventure racing championship in the Dominican Republic. This is racing that takes place in tough terra...

In “The Abyss”, after a U.S. nuclear submarine is lost at sea, the U.S. Navy enlists the help of a crew of an underwater oil drilling platform to help find it. A team of Navy SEALs, led by Michael Biehn as Lieutenant Coffey, is sent down to the crew to lead the rescue operation. Unbeknownst to the crew, led by Ed Harris as Bud Brigman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Lindsey, the SEALs have anot...

The Dune books by Frank Herbert are widely said to be impossible to make into movies or shows. However, a few have tried and the latest is director Denis Villeneuve with, first, his Dune Part One film in 2021 and now Dune Part Two. Overwhelmingly, the consensus is that Villeneuve succeeded beautifully with his first Dune film in introducing movie audiences to the world of Dune. Now we get his Part...

The gunfights are plentiful, the explosions are numerous, the hand-to-hand combat is abundant and the tension is sky high in the new movie Land of Bad starring Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia, Ricky Whittle and Luke Hemsworth. In Land of Bad, special forces operators are sent on a mission in the Philippines to rescue a CIA asset in the hands of terrorists. Unfortunately for Sgt. JJ...

Bob Marley is known as the most famous Jamaican but he’s also considered the paragon of reggae music. Bob Marley One Love is the new movie that gives us a closer look into what drove him and the turbulence he experienced. Marley grew up in poverty, the son of a black mother and a white father, but his undeniable musical ability helped him rise above that. This movie features those sweet musical of...

When someone makes a list of the best 90s movies, this week’s movie is usually on the list. I bring you my review of classic, The Crow. The Crow was Brandon Lee’s final film. He sadly was accidentally killed on the set of The Crow. He was famously precluded in death by his father Bruce Lee, who also died far too early in life. We still got a masterful performance by Brandon Lee as Eric Draven, who...

In Argylle, spy movies get turned on their heads quite a bit. The main character is reclusive, shy author Elly Conway who writes best-selling novels about a spy named Argylle. She gets writers block while writing the latest book but some real-life spy action she suddenly finds herself might inspire some creativity. This starts when she is rescued by a spy played by Sam Rockwell and Elly is thrust...

It’s a dark, brutal time in Japan because of the evildoing of a psychotic, murderous lord, and half brother to the Shogun. He threatens the peace and safety of the Japanese people with his sadistic ways. It’s decided that the few samurai still left in Japan must come together for a suicide mission to take him down. First these samurai have to be convinced, by explaining what evil this lord has com...

The Earth, from space, looks beautiful unless it’s on fire from nuclear annihilation. That’s what the American and Russian astronauts in the new movie I.S.S., for International Space Station, see up there and it leads to some international tension with deadly results. Suddenly the U.S. and Russia are in a nuclear war and each countries astronauts have received orders to take the I.S.S. over by any...

If Jason Statham isn’t kicking somebody’s butt, he must be sleeping or in the shower. Statham has carved out a nice niche in the action genre for decades now. The Beekeeper is his latest, and honey, is there a lot of buzz about it as it’s coming out! Statham plays Adam Clay who befriends an elderly lady who lets him keep bees on her property. She is then becomes a victim of cybercrime and loses al...

In professional wrestling, the Von Erich family was legendary. The patriarch of the family, Fritz, was a wrestler with his signature move “The Iron Claw.” He handed that down to his sons who took the wrestling world in Texas by storm. Everything was going so well until tragedy struck the Von Erich family. Unfortunately, fate would have it that one tragedy wouldn’t be near enough. “The Iron Claw” t...

The Wonka candy empire had to start somewhere and someone decided to make a prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to tell the origin tale. That someone is director Paul King, who also directed the Paddington movies. Timothee Chalamet, from the Dune movies, stars as the young Willy Wonka who arrives at an unnamed town to open up a chocolate shop. He soon finds out that it isn’t going to...

This guy is big, scaly, has razor sharp teeth, atomic breath and is almost 70 years old. His name? Godzilla and his new movie Godzilla Minus One is creating some major buzz. The word of mouth is rampaging across the world. Made by the original Godzilla movie studio Toho in Japan, Godzilla Minus One starts towards the end of World War II with a kamikaze pilot who’s ashamed he couldn’t perform his d...