Tim joined Tom Barnard and the morning show crew on the “The KQ Morning Show” on KQRS-FM to review the new theatrical release “Bullet Train.” Tim will also reviewed the film and more with Jordana Green on “Adam and Jordana” show on WCCO-AM on Friday, as well as with Kelly Cordes on “It Matters with Kelly Cordes” on WJON-AM and KLZZ-FM. Click to listen to below. All of Tim’s segments are brought to you by Michael Bryant, and Bradshaw and Bryant.
Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for “The KQ92 Morning Show” with Tom Barnard on KQRS-FM, “Adam and Jordana” with Adam Carter and Jordana Green on WCCO Radio, “It Matters with Kelly Cordes” on WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere, and reviews streaming programming on WCCO Radio’s “Adam and Jordana” as well. On TV, Tim has made hundreds of guest appearances on NBC affiliate KARE on the news program “KARE 11 News at 11”.
With the “Fast & Furious” franchise seemingly in the rearview mirror, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham are off roaring to bigger and better things with “Hobbs & Shaw,” an outrageously entertaining spinoff movie featuring the friendly adversaries from the most recent chapters in the Vin Diesel film series.
“Hobbs & Shaw” gives the exact amount of time to Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Statham’s Deckard Shaw to begin the film by inventively splitting the screen and their scenes in two, where they go about their morning routines, which wildly differ. Eventually, though, the lawman Hobbs’ and the reformed bad guy Shaw’s paths converge, as they’re both asked by their countries’ intelligence services to recover a programmable virus being carried by a lethal MI-6 agent. The stakes are raised when the MI-G agent turns out being Shaw’s estranged sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), and her revelation that he had the virus – protected by capsules – injected into her bloodstream.
Making matters worse, a secret organization hell-bent on winnowing out the weaker of the human species on Earth sends the technologically enhanced super soldier Brixton (Idris Elba) to recover the virus, and Hobbs and Shaw quickly find out that there’s little they can do to stop him. That’s bad news if he gets his hands on the virus, since it will kill millions if it’s unleashed into the world.
AUDIO: Tim reviews “Hobbs and Shaw” with Tom Barnard on “The KQ Morning Show” on KQRS-FM. Segment brought to you by Michael Bryant and Bradshaw & Bryant.
Yes, “Hobbs and Shaw” is chockfull of the same over-the-top action and doomsday scenarios that turned the “Fast & Furious” movies into a multibillion franchise, but instead of being a big, loud and dumb movie franchise that’s lost its sense of humor with its last outing, “Hobbs & Shaw” captures perfectly the chemistry that was clearly evident between Johnson and Statham in the “The Fate of the Furious.” Plus, with “Deadpool 2” director David Leitch at the helm, the film finds a way to balance the excessive crash, boom, bang with several laugh-out-loud funny moments humor throughout, making “Hobbs & Shaw” big loud and smart, and even throwing in a bit of science fiction into the plot, to boot.
Even better, Leitch employed a couple brilliant big star cameos in the film to amp up the funny, even though the film, truthfully, already had enough star power with an impressive Kirby and charismatic Elba in sizable roles, and the always delightful Helen Mirren reprising her kick-ass role from “The Fate of the Furious” as the Shaw family matriarch.
Clearly the brightest stars in “Hobbs & Shaw,” though, are Johnson and Statham, who clearly having a ball throughout the movie (there were no reports of Johnson calling anybody in the film a “candyass,” err, Vin Diesel). Johnson is especially notable because it’s clear he’s in his element, a place he hasn’t been in the underwhelming action pictures “Rampage” and “Skyscraper.” It just goes to show that a performer, once again, is only as good as their script, and even more to their benefit, is a skilled filmmaker like Leitch and a buddy movie partner like Statham.
In comparison to any of the chapters in the franchise that launched it, because of the camaraderie of the cast and clockwork precision of Leitch and his crew of filmmakers, “Hobbs & Shaw” doesn’t even feel like a “Fast & Furious” film. That’s a good thing because honestly, the “Fast” films feel like they’ve become a game of one-upmanship between cast members, and the mandate has been put on the directors to come up with new and more ridiculous ways of topping the action of the film before it.
With “Hobbs & Shaw,” as Leitch has proven before – first as the co-director of “John Wick” and again on “Deadpool 2” – the goal of the movie is to make it as entertaining as possible without taking itself too seriously. And while we already know the characters (even though nothing is lost by not seeing the previous “Fast” movies), “Hobbs & Shaw” in an odd sort of way feels new, refreshing and fun – the way summer popcorn movies should be.
Lammometer: 9 (out of 10)
Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for “The KQ92 Morning Show,” WCCO Radio, WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere. On TV, Tim has made hundreds of guest appearances on “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC).
As the film’s audience and the box office numbers can attest, there’s ample room in the movie marketplace for R-rated superhero adventures like “Deadpool 2,” director David Leitch’s and star Ryan Reynolds’ outrageously entertaining sequel to the 2016 worldwide blockbuster “Deadpool.”
The great thing is, Leitch, as well as Reynolds — who co-wrote the sequel with the original film’s scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — have proven that there’s much more to the film than Deadpool/Wade Wilson’s trademark wiseass humor that made the original such a blast. The four creatives without question realized that there was a lot of room for the narrative to grow with “Deadpool 2,” which makes the film not only one of the best of the year so far, but arguably better than the brilliant film from two years ago.
One of reasons for that, Leitch believes, is apart from the F-bomb slinging irreverence and vengeful nature of the title character, Deadpool/Wade is a real person who feels pain like the rest of us.
“There’s something about the blue humor and subversive nature of ‘Deadpool’ that, it has to be rated R and it has to be naughty, but it doesn’t mean that it can’t have a heart — a beating heart — and a soul and a moral message,” Leitch said in a phone conversation Wednesday from Los Angeles. “I think that’s what makes it unique. It’s something that you don’t find in anything else, and that’s what makes it such a breath of fresh air.”
Now playing in theaters nationwide, “Deadpool 2” finds the mutant affectionately known as the “Merc with a Mouth” on a mission to save a young and rebellious mutant, Russell (Julian Dennison) from the crosshairs of Nathan Summers/Cable (Josh Brolin), a time-traveling cyborg who comes back from the future to eliminate him. Deadpool isn’t about to go it against Cable alone, though, recruiting fellow mutants like Domino (Zazie Beetz) and a handful of others to form the X-Force — leading to, as a result one of the film’s many unexpected but laugh-out-loud hilarious scenes.
Despite the enormous success of the first “Deadpool” film, it became immediately clear from the very beginning that Leitch, Reynolds and company weren’t going to rest on their laurels and coast on the waves for the sequel. It became apparent, in fact, from the opening scenes of “Deadpool 2,” where Deadpool suffers an unspeakable tragedy, that the film was willing to not only break the mold of its predecessor; it was going to have to obliterate it to move the story forward.
“It wasn’t a matter of ‘Can we go there?’ We had to go there,” Leitch said. “We wanted to access the character’s humanity and keep the stakes insular and about Deadpool. It wasn’t about global stakes and world-ending consequences. He’s a relatable, flawed human like all of us. There’s a wish-fulfillment part that of him when he says all the raunchy stuff that we wish we could say and there’s the bumbling nature about his political correctness, but at the end of the day, his heart is huge. If you play into that emotion and people love him, they’ll go on the journey with him and all his wisecracks and irreverence. Without that, he’s just a grating asshole.”
Even though the next film for Deadpool/Wade is “X-Force,” fans will be excited to know that there’s more of “Deadpool 2” on the way, either in the form of an extended theatrical cut or in all likelihood, as part of the home video release of the film. Leitch said there’s an additional 12 minutes of the film fans will see, which is a significant amount of footage that will be interspersed throughout the original cut.
“In terms of the additional footage, I feel the movie speaks to you in postproduction and the movie that we presented theatrically is the best version of the film. I really do believe that,” Leitch said. “There’s a pace to making a film and a pace to the storytelling and you want the audience to be constantly falling forward, and getting their dose of drama and narrative and subverting it with a laugh. You find a rhythm and with this movie we did and I’m really proud of it.”
However, when the success of movie allows a director the opportunity to add back in footage they toiled so hard to get in the first place, it hard not to go for it.
“As a filmmaker, there’s a cathartic process where you have all these things you worked so hard to get during production that you have to let go,” said Leitch, who is currently in pre-production on his next film, the “Fast and the Furious” spinoff “Hobbs and Shaw.” “You feel like, ‘Man, we shot 15 hours that day! We’re going to cut that scene? We can’t cut that scene!’ and then you have to cut it for the scene for the betterment of the movie and that’s part of the process.”
Still, Leitch said, it will be fun to show the additional footage for fans who would love to have more material. And while Leitch realizes it’s a tricky proposition to add footage back into a film, he assures fans that it won’t alter the story that fans are loving now.
“I don’t think it changes the narrative, but it changes the flow of the film maybe a little bit,” Leitch said. “If you’re already a fan of the theatrical cut, you’re going to love this one. There are some more jokes, there are a couple additional scenes and a little more action, but it’s not exhaustive in any way. It’s actually in the spirit of everything else that’s going on. There were just some jokes that we loved as a creative team that we wanted to share with audiences as we move forward.”
Tim Lammers reviews movies weekly for The KQ92 Morning Show,” “KARE 11 News at 11” (NBC), WCCO Radio, WJON-AM, KLZZ-FM, “The Tom Barnard Podcast” and “The BS Show” with Bob Sansevere.
See Tim’s review of “Atomic Blonde” with Adrienne Broaddus on KARE 11.
Atomic Blonde (R)
Charlize Theron mixes a bit of James Bond espionage and a lot of extreme “John Wick”-type action in “Atomic Blonde,” an energizing spy thriller that despite its thrills, still falls short of the wickedness of “Wick” and the intrigue of Daniel Craig’s 007 outings.
“Atomic Blonde” certainly the potential of, at the very least, being another “Wick.” David Leitch, who co-directed the first Keanu Reeves revenge thriller is at the helm of “Atomic Blonde,” and Theron has already well-proven that she has an incredible handle on the action genre with her kick-ass turn as Imperator Furiosa in “Mad Max: Fury Road” and recent turn as the villain in “The Fate of the Furious.”
Set in 1989 in the waning days of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Atomic Blonde” stars Theron as MI:6 spy Lorraine Broughton, a no-nonsense field operative whose myriad of skills includes a lethal form of hand-to-hand combat. When one of her fellow MI:6 agents turns up dead in Berlin, Lorraine is dispatched to the city to not only recover his body, but join the city’s top operative (James McAvoy) to ferret out a double agent betraying the agency and most importantly, recover a list that names several undercover agents and vital personal details about them.
The biggest problem with “Atomic Blonde” is in its pacing, since the film is rooted in a debriefing of Lorraine by her MI:6 superior (Toby Jones) and an American CIA authority (John Goodman), and told almost entirely in flashback scenes.
Hear Tim’s review of “Atomic Blonde” with Tom Barnard on “The KQ Morning Show” on KQRS-FM.
Yes, while Theron’s charisma commands your attention every second she’s on film, “Atomic Blonde” suffers as Leitch builds intensity in scenes with pulse-pounding action (usually though encounters of hand-to-hand combat or car chases), only to suck the energy out of the air by continually reverting to the debriefing.
The “Wick” chapters, on the other hand, had linear narratives that escalated in intensity throughout the film, creating burning anticipation for whatever the end game was going to be. The hopping back and forth in “Atomic Blonde” only lends to confusion.
