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CHIPS - REVIEW

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Along with Baywatch , another dated TV series that got the movie remake treatment in 2017 was CHiPs , starring Michael Peña and Dax Shepard as two California Highway Patrol cops who take on a mysterious gang of thieves and corrupt police officers. When FBI Agent Castillo (Peña) is sent undercover to help solve the aforementioned case, he finds that getting along with his partner Jon Baker (Shepard) might prove to be the real challenge. The latter is a down-and-out ex-motocross champion with a crumbling marriage and metal plates keeping most of his limbs in place and Castillo is a playboy with little patience so they obviously can't stand each other initially but eventually learn to work together and make a great team. This is pretty standard cop story stuff complete with the obligatory yelling chief, epic car chases and obvious bad guys so don't expect anything ground-breaking or completely unpredictable. The film was universally trashed by critics who seemed to be disappo

BRIGHT - REVIEW

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This year Netflix released Bright , a fantasy cop movie starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, the latter playing an Orc of all things. Directed by David Ayer, the film quickly became a popular target for everyone to trash and make fun of. Set in an alternate present where elves, fairies and other creatures live side-by-side, the film sees human cop Daryl Ward (Smith) reluctantly partner up with an Orc as they spend a whole night dealing with dirty cops, protecting a powerful magic wand and running away from the likes of evil elves, Mexican gangsters, Orcs and the Feds. It's been compared to Alien Nation and, indeed, there are obvious similarities but the film is so derivative that it somehow comes back around to feeling rather original and fresh. There's definitely a heavy-handed message about racism in there that, while relevant, is hard to take completely seriously when everyone's talking about magic wands the whole time. Bright wants to be a lot of things but it n

LETHAL WEAPON 3 - REVIEW

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Having proven themselves to be an action movie duo worth sticking around for, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover joined forces again for Lethal Weapon 3 in 1992 and the film did reliably well at the box-office but how did the film compare to the franchise's previous two outings? It's easy to forget how serious in tone the first Lethal Weapon was, with Martin Riggs (Gibson) having suicidal tendencies and all, but if you were to skip the sequel and watch this third instalment right after the original you'd probably think you had somehow stumbled onto a live-action cartoon version of Shane Black's cop movie classic by mistake. Indeed, while Lethal Weapon 2 pushed the comedy aspect of the two main characters' unlikely friendship a tad more, this movie is mostly a straight-up lolfest with the exception of a couple of more emotional scenes. By giving Joe Pesci's mouthy informant/real estate agent Leo more screen-time, the film runs the risk of turning the character in

SUPER TROOPERS - REVIEW

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These past couple of weeks, which saw the Broken Lizard gang start a campaign on Indiegogo.com to produce a sequel to their 2001 cult comedy Super Troopers , certainly showed that the film definitely did have an audience as the comedy team reached their £2M goal within only a day. So, before Super Troopers 2 gets truly underway, I thought I'd look back at the first film to check that it does still hold up. Alright meow, first things first, while the film could most definitely be described as a stoner cop comedy, its writing is sharp and funny enough to work as just an all around great comedy so if drug humour and/or you're not a Police Academy superfan, fear not: you're in safe hands. The plot sees a group of goofy, juvenile state troopers face off against the local police department (led by the late, great Daniel Von Bargen) when a potential weed-trafficking ring is discovered in Vermont. The state troopers' Captain (a perfect Brian Cox) informs them that any