janus-20

I really like this film, its a diverting, high tech, cold war thriller, which entertainingly subverts many of the tropes of spy and espionage movies of the time.

It reasonably translates its source material intact to the screen, that being Craig Thomas's novel of the same name and manages to juggle the sci-fi / thriller genres, whilst allowing Clint to add a new facet to his tough guy persona. Being a long time Clint fan, its significant to me, as its his first movie i saw at the cinema, also as it was the first AA certificate film i manage to obtain admittance to here in the UK.

Clint plays Mitchell Gant, a former USAF Major who is "encouraged" by the CIA to undertake a mission into cold war era Russia to steal one of the new fighter plane prototypes the Soviets have developed. The plane in question is the MiG-31, a hypersonic aircraft with revolutionary new stealth and combat capabilities. Handicapped by post traumatic stress disorder and a lack of intelligence mission experience, Gant must successfully steal the aircraft, failure would mean a dangerous shift in the balance of World power to the USSR.

Can Gant pull off this daring heist? Well i'd be shocked if there's anyone reading this who doesn't know the answer by now, but thats the charm of this movie, its re-watch value, i feel, is significant and it makes a great "beer and pizza" night in movie.

There are elements that date it, foremost the long gone cold war setting, some people may cite the miniature based special effects. These are primarily in the last third of the movie, some may claim they look a little dated in our whizzo CGI age, but i call foul on that. The effects have nice weight and heft to them that CGI still cant muster and the dramatic effects of Firefox's hypersonic footprint, make anything in modern movies look positively arthritic, well I think so anyway.

The cast are all getting stuck into their roles, particularly Warren Clarke (who passed away recently and prompted me to write this today) who plays a disgruntled Russian dissident and underground operative.

Firefox is a film that didn't perform financially as well as it may at the time of its release, but 1982 was a year over shadowed by ET and most things that year followed on that movies coat tails.

Its a nice little thriller, out of a time where you knew where the bad guys were and could generally see them coming and its nice to immerse yourself in the nostalgia of that from time to time.

There was a follow up novel written by Thomas, Firefox Down, which is a thumping good read, it never followed its precursor to the screen and would now seem a little out of its time if it did, thats a shame.

I recommend Firefox, as a great thriller, sci-fi, espionage, action movie, if you can imagine such a thing and if you cant, then just think in Russian!

I will start by saying this is my least favourite of the Expendables franchise. I thought it seemed a little obvious they'd trimmed the violence and it didn't have the immediacy of pacing the other ones had. Niggles aside, this is still fantastic, machine gun toting, head smashing, building demolishing entertainment.

There's no getting away from the site of a helicopter gunship being piloted by Harrison Ford, whilst Arnie and Jet Li man the guns and lay waste to an army, transcends awesome and approaches hitherto undiscovered levels of gung ho nirvana.

Mel Gibson makes a great villain, one of the best scenes is his conversation with Barney in the back of the van on the nature of their business.

The new Expendables are perfectly good, as far as their involvement goes, but the task they have is to make us like them as much as we have Sly, Arnie, Harrison, Dolph etc over the last thirty years, only they've got two hours to do it in. Tall order.

What saves the day here again, as with the other Expendables, is the same thing that elevates these movies above all the CGI, wire-fu, teenage fantasy movies we get every year, purporting to be "action movies", legitimacy !! All these guys look, act and have the undeniable pedigree of being real action heroes.

They have a history through this type of film and they wear that history on their sleeves in these movies. That's why when they start vaporising the bad guys, it feels more.. legitimate.

I hope there's a Expendables 4, as there are a few things they could improve on next time. But for now Expendables 3 is great fun, I mean where else are you going to see Rambo and Frasier drinking in a nightclub?

I really want to convey how thoroughly enjoyable this movie was, but at the same time I don't wish to gush over it. The reason being, that if anyone was reading my review with the thought of watching the film, it is possible to build something up too much and precipitate disappointment.

So no hyperbole, just a cool, clear, opinion, delivered with an almost scientific emotional detachment.

1. Ask a question, to whit, should I go and watch Gravity, the new science fiction thriller starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney ?

2. Conduct research and make observations. Which I did, after reading up on this movie, the consensus seemed to be a favourable one. I had also observed previous efforts by the actors involved and had enjoyed them.

3. Propose a hypothesis. The theory being that it would be to my benefit to drag my TV loving backside down to the local purveyor of IMAX entertainment and watch this film.

4. Design an experiment to test this hypothesis. Plans were quickly drawn to rendezvous at 19:45 BST at the Odeon, for a screening of the entertainment.

5. Test the hypothesis. I watched the movie.

6. Collate results and draw conclusions, to support or reject you hypothesis. The results were that I had a fantastic evenings entertainment. Watching a tense, thrilling tale of two astronauts left stranded, by a terrible accident, in orbit, two hundred miles above the Earth.

I concluded that the fantastic performances given by the two leads in the piece, combined with assured and innovative direction from Alfonso Cuaron and some dizzying special effects on the IMAX screen, produced a infrequently experienced, yet palpable sensation within me, that for the purposes of this experiment I choose to call, "thrilled to bits".

I strongly suggest you conduct your own experiment, as I did, in relation to the subject matter. I feel confident you will draw the same conclusions I did.

I did notice that some people here on IMDb seemed to have drawn somewhat muddled results from their experimentation in this area. Their conclusions were tainted by perceived scientific and procedural inaccuracies within the film. Having a limited knowledge of these things, I could not hope to debate these issues on any kind of an equal footing. (SPOILER-ISH) That said, I did read a vehement "technical complaint" in relation to something (completely scientifically impossible) that occurs in a scene which is well established as a dream sequence. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.