TheRetroCritic

We discuss the possibility of a live-action Cowboy Bebop TV series on The Big Rewind .

It's a fine line between a good thriller and a silly one but the first John Wick movie walked that line effortlessly delivering a tongue-in-cheek action flick with the perfect balance of cool and goofy. The film gave Keanu Reeves the comeback he deserved and a sequel soon followed. John Wick: Chapter 2 picks up roughly where the last film left off with John Wick facing the Russian mob in order to retrieve his beloved black Mustang. Of course, this leads to a big fight scene where John Wick goes around punching, kicking and shooting anything that moves in a parking garage before calling it even with Peter Stormare's mob boss. There's a short cameo from John Leguizamo, who played Wick's mechanic friend in the first movie, and the plot finally kicks in. This time, John Wick is forced to pay back his debt to an ex-assassin colleague when the latter blows up his entire house after Wick initially refuses to help. Pissed off but looking to quickly end this, Wick promptl

In this live stream, I talk all things Keanu. More specifically: John Wick: Chapter 2 .

The 90's were a great decade for action films. Simple premises with dumb yet memorable concepts and loads of explosions being the key factor for many of them. Also Dennis Hopper turning in increasingly hammy performances as awesome, if cartoonish, villains. Speed , of course, stars a young Keanu Reeves as a cop who becomes the target of a madman's dastardly plan to blow up a city bus in exchange for a silly (and oddly specific) amount of money. He is told the bus can't slow down below 50 mph or it'll blow so the plan becomes to try and outsmart Hopper's cola-drinking baddie by trying to stay one step ahead somehow, despite the fact that he is keeping track of everything that's happening with his finger firmly placed on the detonator. You wouldn't think that a film about a city bus would be this entertaining and relentless but it certainly lives up to its title and we're given little time to rest in this intense race against time. Sandra Bullock

Keanu Reeves is back with John Wick , a new thriller in which the titular badass comes back for one last revenge mission against the mob after the puppy his late wife gave him posthumously is brutally killed. Yes, I said puppy. Not his daughter, not his wife: a puppy. It's almost like the movie itself isn't taking its own genre seriously. And that's what's so refreshing about John Wick: it wants to have its cake and eat it too and... it kinda does just that. Effortlessly, no less! While the puppy thing and the fact that Wick is such a myth that everyone is terrified at the very mention of his name are obviously tongue-in-cheek pokes at the revenge thriller clichés, the film never flat out makes fun of its main character or turns into a spoof. In fact, you do get attached to that darn puppy and its relationship with Wick so when it does check out early, you do feel for the guy. It helps that Reeves gives a genuine performance and nails the more emotional moments

After travelling through time in order to ace a school assignment, Bill and Ted are back and, this time around, they're not so much time travelling as they are dying and coming back to life, like a couple of rock Jesuses. The plot, this time, is much more intricate (well, for a Bill & Ted movie, anyway) as an evil baddie from the future (Joss Ackland) sends back a couple of Bill and Ted robots to kill off the original Bill and Ted, take over their lives and ruin the battle of the bands they're meant to be participating in thereby denying the world of a hard-rockin' future. Everything goes according to plan as the dudes are disposed of and their "princesses" are tossed aside by their evil counterparts. The duo's adventure then mostly takes place in the afterlife where Bill and Ted foil Death by giving him a "melvin" (wedgie), hang around as ghosts for a while then try to escape from Hell, attempt to break into Heaven and challenge Death to a

Some movie concepts are just too good to pass up. Nicolas Cage as a weatherman, John Travolta as an overweight woman, Keanu Reeves as a samurai... Thank goodness for 47 Ronin for suggesting the latter! Unfortunately, the film ended up costing nearly $200M and it's looking like 10 people went to actually see it, and that's including me. Problems between the studio and the director causing the budget to inflate ridiculously due to endless reshoots and stuff like that. Unlike flops like, say, John Carter or The Lone Ranger , you really can't tell where the money went with 47 Ronin, a film which looks like a $10M flick with some decent effects and some really awful ones not exactly helping justify the huge budget. The film doesn't look that great and is more akin to a B-movie like Season Of The Witch visually, which is not a good thing. Another issue is the ridiculous marketing which accompanied this movie: Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays the real main character in t

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a weird one. Thinking back to it after having not seen it in a while, I always remember really awesome visual stuff and isolated iconic moments crossed with key silly things like Keanu Reeves' entire performance. Having finally re-watched it, it's just as "varied" as I recalled: stylish and inventive yet wacky and flawed. I probably shouldn't like this movie as much as I do but... There's a charm to it that's almost impossible to ignore. For one thing, director Francis Ford Coppola really went for it, never sugar-coating anything and, in the process, brought to the screen a bold version of Bram Stoker's classic novel no-one else could have possibly made and which certainly leaves its mark when you first see it. The film's main arc involves Vlad The Impaler's (a genial Gary Oldman) undying love for his late bride who happens to have a descendant/lookalike (played by Winona Ryder) in 1897, which is when mos