Ryan Reynolds Delivers Unexpectedly Intense Acting in Buried

Before he made it big as Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds was a common sight in indie movies. In fact, in the last three years before he got to play a comics-accurate version of The Merc With a Mouth, Reynolds worked with indie directors like Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, Marjane Satrapi and Atom Egoyan. I'll always wonder, if Deadpool had never happened or even flopped, would Reynolds have just kept on doing these types of indie movies? Would he have just quietly fizzled out doing these movies or would he have eventually found the role that catapulted him to the status of indie darling? We'll never know now that Reynolds is busy doing Deadpool movies until the end of time.

A Bunch of Famous Names Can't Make 6 Underground Interesting

Two very distinct creative talents have formed a union to bring the new Netflix blockbuster 6 Underground to life. In one corner, we have director Michael Bay, the man behind the first five Transformers movies and an assortment of other high-octane action films. In the other corner, we have the writing duo of Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, the screenwriters who penned the two Deadpool movies. Though both known for making movies where big things blow up, their sensibilities are quite different. Bay is known for his lavish hyperactively edited visual-oriented productions whereas Reese & Wernick tend to work in the confines of mid-budget comedic exercises relying heavily on snappy self-referential dialogue.

The Amityville Horror (2005) Brings Viewers Back to a Dark Age of American Horror Cinema

We currently live in a Golden Age of horror cinema. All around the world, the creative filmmaking juices are flowing and unique visions of horror movies are being delivered on a constant basis. The likes of Robert Eggers, Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster, Julia Ducournau and Jordan Peele are delivering some truly one-of-a-kind takes on the horror genre. But it has not always been this way. Though the 2000s had their fair share of noteworthy horror fare, but when it came to American horror cinema, way too much of the decade was squandered on tired torture porn movies and even worse horror remakes, the majority of the latter delivered in a mechanical conveyor belt manner by Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes.

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu Has A Messy Script But Lots of Delightful Pokemon Antics

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu does not begin with the titular hat-wearing critter, rather it starts with  Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), a young twenty-something living out a mundane life working for an insurance firm in a small town. That quiet existence is upended when he gets news that his distant father has been killed. Tim heads off to Ryme City, a city Tim's dad lived in where humans and Pokemon live in harmony together, to simply say good-bye to his deceased pops, but those plans change when he discovers a talking Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) in his dad's apartment, one that is convinced Tim's dad was embroiled in a larger conspiracy he and Tim now must solve.

Putting It All On Two Great Lead Performances And A Strong Script Lead Mississippi Grind To A Big Win

I'm always fascinated by major turning points in an actor's careers, that moment where you can clearly see how one movie changed the trajectory of their careers. Think of how Leslie Nielsen forever became associated with spoofy comedies with Airplane! I'm especially fascinated by contemplating what would have happened if those major turning points hadn't happened. Take Ryan Reynolds for instance. He finally secured A-list leading man status with 2016's Deadpool, but between that film and 2013's blockbuster box office bomb R.I.P.D., Reynolds did a number of offbeat indie projects like The Voices, The Captive and Mississippi Grind that allowed him to show off his talents as a performer beyond just cracking wise and breaking the fourth wall. 

The Hitman's Bodyguard Is Paint-By-Numbers Action Fare But At Least The Two Leads Are Fun

Considering Samuel L. Jackson has been a prominent figure of American cinema for nearly a quarter-of-a-century now and also considering that Ryan Reynolds has become (after a couple of big box office duds that seemed to suggest he might not get there) Hollywood's go-to leading man thanks to the rousing success of Deadpool, it feels like it was just about inevitable that the two would star in a movie together. They've managed to do just that with director Patrick Hughes (the guy who directed the third Expendables movie) new movie, The Hitman's Bodyguard, an R-rated action film that allows both Reynolds and Jackson to drop all the buckets of profanity and hardcore violence that their past biggest movies are known for.

Get Trapped With Overly Familiar But Sometimes Chilling Thrills In Life

Jake Gyllenhaal has been on quite the roll lately. His exemplary lead turn in Nightcrawler was one of the peak moments of his entire career and even in something more middling like Southpaw Gyllenhaal managed to craft a solid performance out of a subpar script. Last years Nocturnal Animals continued his recent career choices of doing bold and daring projects by offering Gyllenhaal a chance to inhabit a tortured persona to fascinating results. So, of course, after all these challenging dramas, it's no shocker that the next big movie Jake Gyllenhaal is headlining is Life, a science-fiction horror film chock full of blood and mayhem, just like Nocturnal Animals. What I'm trying to say is that Life is the exact same movie as Nocturnal Animals.

Criminal Review

OK, so, the plot for Criminal is more than a bit dense, so allow me to parse through it with a synopsis. Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) is a criminal serving a life sentence who, thanks to being thrown out of a car as a child, basically has no frontal lobe. The movie uses this as an excuse for why he has no moral compass or any knowledge of what emotions are. That lack of a frontal lobe is also why Jericho specifically is the perfect candidate for a procedure wherein scientist Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) will inject Jericho with the memories of the recently deceased secret agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds), who tragically passed away while doing the cinematography for The Jungle Book. High-ranking military official Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) hopes that, with Pope's memories in Stewart's body, he'll able to retrieve the whereabouts of a man who has control of an arsenal of nuclear weaponry.

Deadpool Review

So, full cards on the table time...I've never been a big fan of Deadpool. I don't "hate" the character, but he's always struck me as just another individual in the same vein as Venom or Shadow The Hedgehog, a "too kewl for school bro" character that ends up being more grating than anything else. So while the marketing campaign for Deadpool's first solo movie has been non-stop brilliance, I freely admit to being ambivalent that this character was gonna work in a solo movie.

First Photo Of Ryan Reynolds As Deadpool Is All Kinds Of Sexy

Deadpool's been a long time in the making (to say the least!) but it's filming now and Ryan Reynolds just dropped the first official image of the wonky superhero! Thanks to El Mayimbe on Twitter for pointing out this photo had been posted!