ON television and in movie theatres, the Holiday Season is a time filled with classic Christmas specials, romantic comedies and other heartwarming family fare.
For the action-loving gentleman, it can be a dark, dark time.
But as in any December, this month will see the release of a handful of promisingly destructive and inane pieces of cinema that should sate most appetites for pointless spectacle. Below is a list of one discerning explosion fan's top picks.
I should note here that I haven't seen any of these, technically speaking, but I've watched the trailers, and as everyone knows, the hallmark of a good piece of high-octane cinema is that you don't have to see more than a few seconds of it to know exactly what happens throughout the entire thing.
Dec. 9: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy
This weekend marks the opening of the weakest contender on the list, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, based on the classic John le Carré spy thriller. Judging from the trailer, it appears to be about a British secret agent who is tapped by his superiors to investigate something in the 1970s.
The movie clearly contains certain important ingredients, such as spies and firearms and at least one death, but it's lacking in some key areas: Much of the dialogue is said at a normal speaking level, as opposed to screamed over gunfire or in a collapsing secret headquarters; no one punches anyone on top of a moving train; no one runs away from a fireball; and none of the vehicles appear to plow into anything made of fruit or glass.
Someone does say: "You're not so different you and I," which is a good, well-established bad-guy cliché, and at one point Gary Oldman looks at a gun, but it's clearly low-calibre and he doesn't use it in any obvious way to mete out justice or shoot hopelessly at a fleeing car.
- A cautious recommendation.
Dec 16: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Despite reasonably robust characters and what will likely be a semi-complex plot, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows appears to be the first strong contender for satisfying Holiday blow-'em-up.
According to the trailer, Sherlock Holmes, played by Robert Downey Junior, has to solve some kind of mystery. To do this, he has to stick various clues to a wall and connect them with strings, punch a large number of people and karate-chop at least one soldier in the neck. He also has to ride on a train that gets riddled by machine gun fire and run in slow motion through a forest, which by itself doesn't sound promising, except that in this forest the trees are exploding.
Set as it is in the 19 th century, the movie is limited in terms of car chases and other vehicle-based adventure, but it appears to feature at least one reasonably fast-moving boat.
- Definitely worth considering.
Dec. 21: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Things take a heartening turn for the mindless on Dec. 21, with the opening of Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol. As in other entries in this franchise, Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise, the head of a superelite secret agency that keeps getting "disavowed" by the government. This time, according to the trailer, the problem is that the Kremlin has just been exploded, and to solve that, Tom Cruise hatches a plan on what looks like a giant iPad that involves attending a black-tie party, punching various people, jumping out of several windows and getting someone to rappel face-first down a ventilation shaft. He also has to get answers from the tallest building in the world, which - not surprisingly - he has to climb on the outside.
The movie contains a number of additional elements that are essential to good cinema: spectacular collisions, automatic weapons, someone falling off a building and shooting backwards up that building and someone jumping over the hoods of cars during a chase. Disappointingly, no non-Tom-Cruise character - in the trailer anyway - pulls his face off to reveal that he was in fact Tom Cruise after all. Which is one of the best parts of Mission Impossible.
- No movie is perfect.
Dec. 23: The Darkest Hour
Generally speaking, an action movie's entertainingness is directly proportional to the size of the things that gets destroyed, and in The Darkest Hour, the victim is all of human civilization, putting substantially ahead of its peers. From what I can tell, the movie revolves around a group of attractive people in their early 20s whose New Year's Eve celebration in Moscow is completely ruined when the Earth is invaded by invisible electricity-eating aliens who turn people into what look like clouds of moths.
At first, the attractive people don't know what to do, but then they realize they can track the aliens with light bulbs, which doesn't seem to help at all. At some point they get a bazooka and a flamethrower, which I assume is a step in the right direction, and then a building collapses and a dog also gets turned into moths. Then the main characters get onto a bus, but an invisible alien gets on the bus with them. How will they get out of this one?
Admittedly the trailer is a little ambiguous story-wise, but it makes it clear that the movie is easily awful enough to qualify for this list.
- Hard to think of a better way to spend Christmas Eve-Eve.
July 15 (1988): Die Hard
OK, this isn't technically being released in "the future," but it deserves an honourable mention as the greatest Holiday-themed action movie ever made. Highlights include: German terrorists shooting unsuccessfully at Bruce Willis, Bruce Willis shooting much more successfully at German terrorists, Bruce Willis crawling through ventilation ducts, and Bruce Willis jumping off an exploding skyscraper tied to a fire hose. There's also a pretty good helicopter crash. This can be followed up with Die Hard 2 (1990), also set at Christmas, in which Bruce Willis does the exact same things in an airport.
Movies to watch out for:
A number of intelligent, thoughtprovoking films being released this season that, through deceptive labelling and other means, may lead the hapless action fan to view them by accident. Be aware.
Coriolanus (Dec. 2) boasts a trailer packed with automatic weapons fire and limited dialogue, but is secretly an adaptation of a Shakespeare play. Watch out.
The Iron Lady (Dec. 16) is a political drama that has nothing to do with Iron Maiden - short on rock, long on Meryl Streep. Lastly, Carnage (Dec 16) is a completely non-violent family dramedy. Boo (the disapproving kind of boo, not the scary kind). Consider yourself warned.
Good luck and happy viewing. Ho ho ho.
