Our Top Five Action Blu-Ray Movie Picks
These are our top five Blu-Rays that we love in the Action Category.
5 Stars = Outstanding 4 Stars = Very Good
Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Aaron Eckhart (Blu-ray - Dec 9, 2008)
The Dark Knight arrives with tremendous hype (best superhero movie ever? posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger?), and incredibly, it lives up to all of it. But calling it the best superhero movie ever seems like faint praise, since part of what makes the movie great--in addition to pitch-perfect casting, outstanding writing, and a compelling vision--is that it bypasses the normal fantasy element of the superhero genre and makes it all terrifyingly real. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is Gotham City's new district attorney, charged with cleaning up the crime rings that have paralyzed the city. He enters an uneasy alliance with the young police lieutenant, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), and Batman (Christian Bale), the caped vigilante who seems to trust only Gordon--and whom only Gordon seems to trust. They make progress until a psychotic and deadly new player enters the game: the Joker (Heath Ledger), who offers the crime bosses a solution--kill the Batman. Further complicating matters is that Dent is now dating Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, after Katie Holmes turned down the chance to reprise her role), the longtime love of Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne..
Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, and Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Blu-ray - 2008)
Will Smith stars in the third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic science-fiction novel about a lone human survivor in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by vampires. This new version somewhat alters Matheson’s central hook, i.e., the startling idea that an ordinary man, Robert Neville, spends his days roaming a desolated city and his nights in a house sealed off from longtime neighbors who have become bloodsucking fiends. In the new film, Smith’s Neville is a military scientist charged with finding a cure for a virus that turns people into crazed, hairless, flesh-eating zombies. Failing to complete his work in time--and after enduring a personal tragedy--Neville finds himself alone in Manhattan, his natural immunity to the virus keeping him alive. With an expressive German shepherd his only companion, Neville is a hunter-gatherer in sunlight, hiding from the mutants at night in his Washington Square town house and methodically conducting experiments in his ceaseless quest to conquer the disease.
R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Brad Pitt, Benicio del Toro, Dennis Farina, and Jason Statham (Blu-ray - 2009)
When jewel thief, Franky Four Fingers (Benicio Del Toro), takes a slight detour to London on route to delivering a huge stolen diamond to his boss in New York, he unwittingly sets off an avalanche of sinister and comic events that wind their way through the rough and tumble worlds of bare-knuckle boxing, Irish gypsies, pawn shops, pig farming and... a stray dog. Snatch, Guy Ritchie's brilliant follow up to his critically acclaimed Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, exposes us to his hip and helter-skelter view of London's gangster underbelly. Ritchie's characteristic fast-paced and constantly twisting story features a madcap ensemble cast of larger-than-life characters, including Jason Statham, an unlicensed boxing promoter; Stephen Graham, his bumbling Sidekick; Alan Ford, the local underworld kingpin; Dennis Farina, Franky's no-nonsense boss; Vinnie Jones, a legendary thug; Rade Sherbedgia, a psycho double-crossing Russian; and Brad Pitt, in a hilarious turn as a fast-talking gypsy bare-knuckle boxer.
Tomas Arana, Russell Crowe, Djimon Hounsou, and Derek Jacobi (Blu-ray - 2009)
A big-budget summer epic with money to burn and a scale worthy of its golden Hollywood predecessors, Ridley Scott's Gladiator is a rousing, grisly, action-packed epic that takes moviemaking back to the Roman Empire via computer-generated visual effects. While not as fluid as the computer work done for, say, Titanic, it's an impressive achievement that will leave you marveling at the glory that was Rome, when you're not marveling at the glory that is Russell Crowe. Starring as the heroic general Maximus, Crowe firmly cements his star status both in terms of screen presence and acting chops, carrying the film on his decidedly non-computer-generated shoulders as he goes from brave general to wounded fugitive to stoic slave to gladiator hero.
Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, and Dominic Monaghan (Blu-ray - 2009)
Wolverine, fan favorite of the X-Men universe in both comic books and film, gets his own movie vehicle with X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a tale that reaches way, way back into the hairy mutant's story. Somewhere in the wilds of northwest Canada in the early 1800s, two boys grow up amid violence: half-brothers with very special powers. Eventually they will become the near-indestructible warriors (and victims of a super-secret government program) known as Wolverine and Sabretooth, played respectively by Hugh Jackman (returning to his role) and Liev Schreiber (new to the scene). It helps enormously to have Schreiber, an actor of brawny skills, as the showiest villain; the guy can put genuine menace into a vocal inflection or a shift of the eyes. Danny Huston is the sinister government operative whose experiments keep pullin' Wolverine back in, Lynn Collins is the woman who shares a peaceful Canadian co-existence with our hero when he tries to drop out of the program, and Ryan Reynolds adds needed humor, at least for a while.
