Hunted. It’s rare to find a film with such a straightforward plot so completely unhinged. Benicio Del Toro is the special forces soldier gone completely bonkers, and Tommy Lee Jones his former training officer, and together they have a terrible terrible relationship. Both become increasingly mental with each scene, until it reaches the unlikely peak of them fucking off into the woods to make knives and stab each other. If they had tried for something a little more grounded, it could have been dark and compelling. Instead it’s just ridiculous. I think Del Toro is supposed to be brooding, but he comes off as a pantomime caricature. Jones bites off his dialogue as quickly as he can, probably to minimise the time he spends on screen following Del Toro like some sort of tracking robot. Two out of two crazy eyes.
Spit my coffee out at this with a much needed chuckle!
Death Wish. The remake stars some sort of old, giant baby in the lead, in this incredibly boring tale. At least the originals seemed to wholeheartedly believe in vigilante justice. This one gives us an incredibly modern “It’s okay, I guess.” shrug, and there’s nothing else to recommend the film. There’s no particularly choice action, no believable rationale espoused by the baby at any point (there is precisely one scene where he talks about it, and it is not acted with any kind of real feeling, mild histrionics at best), and no real discussion of the social and moral ramifications.
Death Wish 3: Charles Bronson just fucking machine-gunning poor minorities. At least it’s honest.
Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen. Now, while I can forgive some blatant propaganda, what I have a hard time with is shitty, inept propaganda. I’d much rather watch the laugh-a-minute genocidal antics of the Japanese in City of Life and Death again, than watch this. Donnie Yen plays a kind of Shadow-esque figure in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and while the Shadow would just blow two .45 calibre holes in you, Chen Zhen has no problem hoofing you in the bollocks so hard you fly 30ft across a room. Unfortunately, you have only a thin veneer of superhuman beatings and intrigue over a tale in which the Chinese are Good and the Japanese are Bad, delivered with all the subtlety of someone punching you so hard you find out what the inside of your eyeballs look like. There are too few fights, and nothing but cardboard cut-outs for characters. Even the end fight is an anticlimax, delivering a message of Chinese unity that is hopelessly false. Political messaging this clumsy instinctively makes people restless.
Ah, Hong Kong kung-fu cinema! An acquired taste! (As for myself, I’m not a fan of heavy “wire-fu”, I prefer the more restrained martial arts films.)
The beauty of “Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen”, is that it carries on, with the exceptional Donnie Yen, the legacy that started with the incomparable Bruce Lee as Chen Zhen in “Fist of Fury”, then furthered by the great Jet Li in “Fist of Legend”. I recommend all three to fans of kung-fu cinema. 
Alas, with Hong Kong going over to mainland China in 1997, Hong Kong kung-fu cinema has suffered at the hands of the communist Chinese government, as have all movies. Foreign scripts are influenced before they are written, in the hopes of getting the greenlight from Chinese censors to hopefully get released in the Chinese market. Often, Chinese backers are brought onboard, as well, to increase the chance that a Chinese release will be approved. How much more so is Hong Kong cinema influenced.
Back in the day, Japan was viewed as the villain. Now, it’s not uncommon for the communist Chinese influence to also portray the Brits in Hong Kong as evil oppressors, in the films since the handover. IMHO.
Alas, the golden age of Hong Kong cinema is over, I fear. 
The Day Shall Come. If you take one very odd religion, and the FBI takes an interest, the resulting mix is often a disaster for all. I didn’t think he could top Four Lions, and he hasn’t, but Chris Morris has no trouble showing that the FBI using pretty much their one and only trick to try and sting a potential group of criminals, often ties them in to getting a result no-one wants, in order to justify starting something they never should have begun. The thoroughly harmless odd squad are in totally over their heads from the beginning, and it is only their complete lack of ill intent that keeps them safe for so long. The situation starts absurd and gets worse.
Used Cars. They don’t make 'em like this any more. A comedic farce directed by Zemeckis, with a cast all too capable of producing laughs, most ably Frank McRae (you will know him as the shouting black police lieutenant from several films) as the narcoleptic mechanic. A young Kurt Russell is excellent as the shameless car salesman, and Zemeckis has no problem infecting you with broad-spectrum comedy. Very good for light hearted laughs.
Roadhouse. An alive Patrick Swayze plays a bouncer for an absolutely terrible bar. If this sounds like a joke, it’s because the entire film is a fucking joke. The best thing about this film is Sam Elliott in the few scenes he gets before he’s murdered to give Swayze an excuse to murder the bad guy. The climactic punch-up happens several scenes before the climax, which is honestly one of the least wrong things about this film. Shout out for the main bad guy being shot to death by what is essentially the town’s Better Business Bureau. Double shout out to Kelly Lynch who has to play the love interest, a character so badly written that she’s a doctor who has real reservations about the violence around Swayze’s job, but has no problem staying with him, after witnessing him tear out a man’s throat with his bare hands.
This film makes me feel like I might be mentally ill, but it goes away when the film ends.
Oh, and bonus Keith David in one scene for ten seconds. Nice.
LOL, I have not seen it in years; it’s inexplicable, it is not a good movie, but I loved Roadhouse. 
Mentioned this in another thread. F1: Drive to Survive. Quite interesting docu-series showing the politics, Rivalry (even inside teams) and high stakes of F1. I don’t think you even have to be much in to F1 let alone cars to enjoy this. Pretty great for a binge as I did yesterday. On Netflix. Two series.
A Prayer for the Dying. Mickey Rourke, looking like he’s been shot in the hair by a gun firing liquefied tigers, is some sort of contract killer who, after blowing up a school bus (hey, he never said he was any good at it), flees to the UK, and is offered one last job by local organised crime as a price for a new life in the US. He’s being sought by the IRA for blowing up said school bus, in the form of Liam Neeson who was there when the bus was blown up, so one can assume Neeson dropped him in it. This subplot just sort of fizzles out, in favour of Rourke and Bob Hoskins, a local priest, beating the shit out of gangsters and agonising over things. Alison Doody (you may know her as Elsa Schneider from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) is only in the film to look gorgeous for a few minutes, then fuck off home. Pointless. Rourke looks bloody stupid in every scene.
In this scene he’s just escaped from Allo Allo. Fucking Hell.
Robocop. Yes, the original, because I’m not an animal. A very prescient film that’s more relevant than ever, as a megacorp takes advantage of failing institutions in order to make a profit. Great performance by Peter Weller (not, as my brain insists, Paul Weller), which mostly consists of his incredibly violent death, then spending most of the film with his face covered, or looking like a cyborg baby. Violence, gore, satire, stupid laughs.
I will insist to my dying day that Verhoeven is the unsung auteur of our time. His ability to weave in satire in the midst of ruthlessly violent action is peerless. Whether he is skewering commercialism in Robocop, political propaganda in Starship Troopers, or just generally mind-raping everyone in Total Recall, his stuff was far beyond the brainless norm for the genre. As evidenced by how poor attempts to remake his movies have been.
The Rachel Divide. This really should have been called Rachel Profiling, the hilarious/tragic case of a white woman who identifies as black. Some stuff is utterly miserable, some merely ridiculous. Watching society struggle with individual autonomy is always entertaining when we keep ourselves in a society that relies so much on conformity to work; but you can see why smaller communities are defensive regardless.
Extraction. Some very competently directed action scenes let down by constant use of low grade CGI, all the more odd when there’s otherwise great stunt work. Stupid story. Deeply stupid.
There is a scene near the end of Clear and Present Danger where Jack Ryan is hanging from a helicopter and the background looks so fake it completely takes me out of the movie. I know SFX were much more limited then, but that scene always reminds me of how important effects can be as every time the movie is mentioned that is the very first scene that comes to mind. I feel like in this day and age when CGI is used so liberally it is even more important to not mess it up. Haven’t seen Extraction yet, but I’m sure the CGI will irk me.
I understand it can be a necessity, but when it isn’t, don’t. CGI muzzle flash in particular annoys me, for instance, but there’s also CGI blood effects that regularly look terrible, vehicle crashes, scene details, etc and one particularly bad transition to cover a cut which doesn’t really make sense and is very much at odds with the rest of the camerawork in the film, which is of a high standard. I know it can be difficult to resist in terms not only of cost but also safety concerns, and I appreciate that, but it really sticks out here.
The Sand. A deeply terrible film that probably has permanently marked everyone involved, and should brand anyone who has watched it, right in the fucking eyes, including me. Some of the worst ‘acting’ I have seen in a long time.
Better Watch Out. Competent but forgettable. Does a nice job of looking away from the worst of the violence though, allowing you to imagine it without seeming too cowardly.
Blood Quantum. This is more like it. A zombie apocalypse, but Native Americans are immune. Some superb acting, unflinching bleakness, and only occasionally let down by poor effects. This made my day.