Action & Adventure > Badham, John Action & Adventure

Johnny Depp As You've Never Seen Him Before!

Advantages: Some tension
Disadvantages: Very slow

...in so I thought that Nick Of Time must have been a low budget, straight to DVD film and guess what… I was right! Unfortunately starring Johnny Depp and the excellent Christopher Walken just isn’t enough to save this movie from being a bit of a washout. From the synopsis I thought that although it was likely to be a low budget thriller, from the A-List cast I thought that it may just be a diamond in the rough and not the budget bin filler it was ...
...cheap feel to it right from the start, it was made in 1995 so it’s obviously a little dated but straight away when the credits came on I got the feeling that it was likely to be a little substandard and lacklustre as so many straight to DVD movies are. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad film, far from it actually and at times it shows real potential but I feel that if a bigger budget were issued and the story was revised a little then it could ...

Great_reviewer07 26.10.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Nick Of Time (DVD)

Harmless actioner from Snipes

Advantages: Skydiving scenes, filmwork
Disadvantages: Some acting deficiencies

Drop Zone is a harmless 1994 action film starring Wesley Snipes and Gary Busey. Snipes had a run of films in the 1990s that featured some high octane chases and extreme situations. Here, in Drop Zone, we see the art of skydiving from a competition aspect and also how it can be used for more sinister causes. Snipes plays Pete Nessip, a US Marshall who loses his brother and the computer geek they were escorting to federal prison following an attempt ...
...determined to catch his killer and rescue the computer geek Leedy (Michael Jeter), Nessip infiltrates a group of skydivers to get closer to the villains, led by Ty Moncrief (Gary Busey). Moncrief has big plans involving Leedy, and plans to use skydiving to do the crime. Nessip must act quickly and without suspicion falling on him in order to prevent a catastrophic heist from taking place. And, of course, there's the revenge of his brother to think ...

pmcds 25.10.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Drop Zone (DVD)

A very realistic computer game

Advantages: Exciting story
Disadvantages: A bit dated looking now

...directed by John Badham. WarGames is about a young computer hacker, David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), who hacks into his school records to change his grades. However one day he inadvertently hacks into a super computer called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), which has control over the US nuclear arsenal, believing it to be a computer game and almost starts World War III. Lightman must convince WOPR that he was only playing a game and to attempt ...
...film looks very dated, especially with the massive computers and chunky buttons, which are very eighties. Matthew Broderick demonstrates that he has the talent to be the lead star in a film, in what was the start of his film career. There is good support from Ally Sheedy, Michael Madsen, Dabney Coleman and Barry Corbin. The story is good and it is a scary idea of a teenage boy being able to start a nuclear war. This is a good film which I found enjoyable, ...

mozzie76 19.11.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Wargames (DVD)

Encore Une Autre Femme Fatale

Advantages: Reasonable acting from respected cast
Disadvantages: Predictable. It's been done before

Reading elsewhere about this movie, The Assassin, you’ll see that there’s a raft of opinion that it was “a film too far”, having already been made by Luc Besson under the title “Nikita”. Having not seen Nikita, here’s my view. I just bought this movie on DVD, (having seen it somewhere that excapes me in the recent past), luckily for only £7.99 (good old www.play247.com!). And, yes, there it is in the opening ...
...version, subtitled The Point of No Return, and stars Bridget Fonda in the title role, her mentor at the “mysterious undercover agency” is Gabriel Byrne (Defence Of The Realm, Usual Suspects), Anne Bancroft is her personal etiquette trainer, and Harvey Keitel plays a particularly nasty piece of work of a “cleaner”, i.e. someone who tidies-up the aftermath of an assassination. The basic plot, and I promise not to enlarge this ...

BNibbles 08.10.2001 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of The Assassin (DVD)

Only a review for Wargames 2

Advantages: Original WOPR prop and voicesynth
Disadvantages: No original ideas or cast members

OK, forget everything you know from the original. None of the original cast are involved in this "sequal" and it's only loosely (huge emphasis on the word loosely!) based on the ideas of the original 80's hit cult movie which is still popular today. This is set in the modern day as we're seeing a base in Afghanistan get destroyed by a UAV (unmanned airborn vehicle) right at the start. And that's exactly where the movie jumps the shark. UAV's aren't ...
...I'm aware it's never been tried for real. We get to see the computer that has masterminded this operation and it's called R.I.P.L.E.Y (and your never told what that stands for either), so forget any ideas about seeing Joshua/WOPR from the original movie for the time being. Everyone says this one just went straight to DVD so that kind of speaks volumes about MGM's confidence in it's ability to get bums on seats. We are introduced to our "hacker" Will ...

atytyut2434 23.02.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wargames/Wargames 2 - The Dead Code (DVD)