The best action movie since Die Hard.

GOOG GOD HAVE YOU SEEN THE RAID!? That action movie that was out in cinemas for like two days!? If you haven’t then I extremely recommend picking up a copy of it on DVD when it comes out.

The Raid is the best action movie to mole its way into cinemas since Die Hard. It is action in its purest form. It doesn’t mess around, it doesn’t waste your time, it just throws you straight into the action from the moment the curtain goes up!

The movie is about a team of Special Forces who are tasked to raiding an apartment block ran by an organised crime drug-lord maniac. It mainly focuses on one of the team members who is seen as a rookie but has more weaponry in one of his fists than the whole of North Korea!

Boom.

Thankfully this year there will be no helping of Transformers movies, this is something we all should cherish. However when one door closes another opens; this year’s explosion extraordinaire also comes from Hasbro: Battleship.

I know, it sounds ridiculous but there is a movie based on the game Battleship. You know B2: Miss D7: Hit. That sort of thing. It’s hardly the kind of thing you’d expect to see getting a movie made about it, but here we are.

Battleship is all about, well battleships. There isn’t much else to it really apart from the fact this isn’t blue battleships vs red battleships, this is battleships vs ALIENS! Because as we all know adding Aliens makes your movie a whole lot better! Case in point Indiana Jones 4.

Hunger 2012.

Another teenage book adaptation was released this year, this time it was Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games to receive the Hollywood treatment.

Set in a dystopian futuristic world where the rich essentially oppress the poor for their own greedy means, The Hunger Games focuses on the story of the poor as they are sent on an annual trip to the big city to fight to the death with one another.

It sounds ridiculous but in fact there isn’t a great deal of difference between the rich and poor divide in this story and the one found in real life, with the only difference being that governments don’t openly kill poor people…

Safe as Houses.

Denzel Washington returned to add yet another thriller to his CV this year with Safe House, an action thriller set in Cape Town.

The movie also stars Ryan Reynolds who arguably plays the main character, Matt Weston, a frustrated man who is stuck in his role running a safe house for the CIA. Denzel plays Tobin Frost, a rogue agent who’s been out there for years evading the CIA. One way or another he ends up captured and lo-and-behold he is introduced to woefully inexperienced Matt.

Unfortunately the US government are fairly inept, according to this movie anyway, and they fail to secure the location and somehow grant every man and his dog in South Africa the knowledge of the safe house’s location. Due to this several armed men force their way into the compound in an attempt to get to Frost. During the inevitable firefight, Matt takes Frost out with him and they head off on the run while the Americans wonder just what to do. 

Optimus!

This summer the Transformers movie trilogy came to an end with the release of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. Was it any good? Of course it wasn’t, it was a horrible movie that only has one silver lining: it‘s the last one!

Now, I watched the first Transformers movie when it first came out back in 2007 and it wasn’t too bad. Sure the story is a complete wafer but on the whole it was a decent movie. It didn’t get nominated for any Oscars but it was watchable if nothing else. Transformers 3 however, makes the original look like The Shawshank Redemption!

You see Martin Harris, you really had a wonderful life.

It was revealed this week that there will be a sequel to the popular action movie Taken starring Liam Neeson. Of course Neeson will be back to find them and kill them…again. There’s currently a movie out in the cinemas that resembles Taken; it also stars Liam Neeson performing in a kick-ass role. It’s called Unknown.

Unlike Taken though, Unknown has a bit more of a well thought out plot. Sure Taken is good, but in the end of the day, there’s no twist or anything you just watch Liam Neeson’s daughter get kidnapped and then witness him hunt down the abductors and kill them. Simple as that. With Unknown there’s a lot more thought put into it.