We’re always renting movies from Redbox, that little red kiosk on the outside of many grocery stores and pharmacies. They’re $1.50 a night, although we tend to end up having them for multiple nights. There are so many times when we’ve rented great movies that I haven’t heard anything about or terrible movies that got a lot of hype. I thought that it would be fun to do a regular series where I review movies I’ve seen every couple of weeks! “Fortnight” is one of my favorite words and my husband suggested Fortnight Flix, which I thought was almost perfect. And here we are!

Since this is the first installment, I’ll give a bit of background. My favorite movie genre is comedy but I really enjoy action, thrillers, and occasionally horror too. Sadly maybe for many of my readers, I am not into “chick flicks” whatsoever so it’s unlikely that you’ll be reading about any of those here!

After the kids go to bed, especially this summer when just about all of our shows are off, we’ll watch rented or movies On Demand. I’ve discovered a lot of the classics about twenty years too late but I’ll include those too, in case you’ve lived under a rock like me. On the special occasions when we’re able to see something new in a movie theatre or at the drive-in, I’ll be sure to mention them! Some of our family fun nights include movies for the kids too so I will try to share those movie reviews with you. Let me stop the blabbering and get to today’s movies…

Taken 3 ★★★★

At this point, everybody makes jokes about Taken. “What will they take next, his dog?” One would think that every sequel is just going to be Liam Neeson using his “particular set of skills” to track down kidnappers and kill them, but this one is completely different. In this Taken installment, Liam Neeson’s character’s ex-wife is murdered and he gets framed for the murder, fleeing and attempting to solve it on his own. It’s action-packed and has plenty of twists. We both thought it was unexpectedly good!

Run All Night ★★★★

Before watching this one, we joked that it we were going to watch “Taken 4” because the previews did look like Liam Neeson was going to once again use his “particular set of skills” to solve some sort of crime. On the contrary though, in this one, Liam Neeson is almost a bad guy. Maybe more like a bad guy attempting to go through recovery. He is involved with the wrong kind of people but has to choose between them or protecting his estranged son. This one includes one of my favorite, and maybe even underrated actors, Vincent D’Onofrio. The man is everywhere and he rocks at every character he’s played, and yet I feel like I never hear his name!

Kingsman ★★★★

Kingsman is about a secret spy organization and Colin Firth is training in attempt to join. Samuel L. Jackson is possibly the most obnoxious bad guy I’ve ever seen in any movie in my life. Because of the ridiculous villain character, I couldn’t figure out if I was watching more of a comedy than anything but the action was interesting. It wasn’t bad, it certainly got my attention and my husband really liked it. We both were extremely turned off by the dreadful villain but overall it was a decent movie.

Jupiter Ascending ★★★ 1/2

I loved the previews for this movie, I thought it looked so cool and I love sci-fi. Mila Kunis’s character is basically a queen living of Jupiter, living on Earth as a Cinderella-type gal and Channing Tatum’s character brings this all to light for her. I guess it’s kind of like The Princess Diaries meets science-fiction?  I was not a fan of it, I thought it was boring and a little dumb. My husband thought it was pretty good, so I went with a medium+ rating. He was very bored at first but got into it about an hour or so in

Focus ★★★ 1/2

Will Smith has been delivering some mediocre films lately, so you might be leery. If you actually ventured to see After Earth, you may have shut it off like we did. Focus is about a con-man teaching a beautiful woman (Margot Robbie, also in The Wolf of Wall Street) how to do cons. I love con-artist movies and this one was decent. It was a bit slow with not as much action as many of the others of its kind, but it still made you think and had the obligatory twists at the end. Focus won’t make ranking as a favorite for me, but it definitely wasn’t terrible and I would watch it again.

Unfinished Business ☆

Unfortunately, this one is more like unfinished movie… Let me start by saying that I love Vince Vaughn, he’s one of my top favorite comedic actors. I love his fast-talking wit in so many movies and we’ve actually seen him on tour with Kevin James when they were promoting The Dilemma. Unfinished Business also stars Dave Franco, who’s really not bad and in my opinion, a much better actor than his brother James. He plays a character that’s very drab and dumb, named “Pancake”. In short, like my attention span for this movie, Vince Vaughn is starting a business and Dave Franco is one of the people he hires to do sales. Comedies should not be slow. We felt that this comedy was way too slow and brought little laughter in the time-frame we left it on. I wouldn’t recommend this one for most comedy lovers.

The Gambler ★

Mark Wahlberg plays a man with a gambling addiction who, like every other gambling movie, is in over his head with lone sharks. I thought it was okay, I mean, I paid attention at least and that’s more I can say for some movies. My husband called it “a bad movie”, however. I feel like there wasn’t a lot going on and sometimes the dialogue was confusing, but it had its moments. Overall, I would not recommend The Gambler.

Back in the day…

Blown Away ★★★

Blow Away is a 90s movie starring Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones, both are bomb experts but they’re on opposite sides…now. Tommy Lee Jones brilliantly plays an Irish villain out to get revenge on Jeff Bridges and the people he cares about. It’s an original movie, I haven’t seen a lot of ideas like it, and it’s got plenty of action and explosions. It was available on our On Demand and worth watching if there’s nothing on!

Rosemary’s Baby ★★

This one is a classic that yes, I only recently saw for the first time. Keeping in mind that it is a movie from the 60s and among the first of its kind, it really wasn’t bad. If you haven’t seen it, Rosemary’s Baby is about a woman who gets pregnant and unbeknownst to her, the father of the baby is actually Satan. I think that the Satan thing itself is kind of corny (Do people still say corny? I do…) but the way that they executed everything was pretty creepy and kept you guessing. To me, this movie was more like a thriller than a horror but it was interesting and we watched the whole thing. I can see the appeal of it!

 

*Check out all of my other movie reviews here.