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I like Clint Eastwood, who's enjoyed a fabulous career both in front and behind the camera. "Juror #2," however, is not one of his better efforts in either position. The premise and setup are really the blueprint for what could have been a special film; however, the writing and execution of "Juror #2" is so rigid and plastic, it is nothing but a mediocre final product. The strong cast is given dialogue that could have been written by a 15 year old. Complex aspects of the case in question are glossed over in clumsy fashion making what could have been tense courtroom scenes flat and unemotional. Characters are shallow, one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Little emotion is displayed by any of them and lines are delivered in a monotone manner, resulting in robotic performances. The film is not all bad. The plot is enough to help maintain interest. It's just a disappointment, because it could have been much better with a little more effort.

"Civil War" is a well-constructed mess. It employs terrific visuals throughout and tense scenes with absolutely no context, backstory or logical flow. The US is embroiled in a civil war, but we never really understand who's fighting whom and why. Disjointed scenes show gratuitous violence and war horrors, but why is the war even happening? We follow a small band of media photographers across country to get to Washington, D. C., where they happen to know something bad is going to happen to the president. They go over 800 miles, encountering death and mayhem along the way, and a lot of boring conversations between characters we know nothing about. Fortunately, they get to D. C. exactly in time to see some action go down, again with no context as to what or why or who. Civl War is the most well-shot empty drivel of a film; do not believe the positive reviews.

For a video game adaptation, this film is amazingly boring. It includes characters that are not likable, a script that plays like it was written by an eighth-grader and CGI-laden action scenes that simply don't excite. For an "action movie," there is a lot of dramatic talking with little action occurring. Instead, we get plenty of breathy dialogue and little else. For an almost two-hour run-time, most of the film is set-up material, slow-moving and uneventful; Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas add little to the mix. They seem to be there to collect a pay check. The days when filmmakers labored to craft movies with care, technique and painstaking attention to detail appear to be over forever. Instead, we get films like "Uncharted," that rely upon gimmicks and computer-imaging to hold audience attention.