Tag Archives: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Nov 12 2025
Leave a comment
Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “The Running Man”

Glen Powell has a blast running in the long shadow of Arnold Schwarzenegger in this bang-bang, boom-boom remake of the ’80s cult classic

The Running Man
Starring Glen Powell, Josh Brolin & Colman Domingo
Directed by Edgar Wright
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 14

Glen Powell is running for his life in this slam-bang dystopian drama about a futuristic TV game show in which contestants are hunted down for the thrill of the kill.

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s a remake of the 1987 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role, based on a story by Stephen King. (Watch closely for a nod to Ahh-nold in the early minutes of the new film.)

Powell stars as Ben Richards, a distraught dad who auditions for a spot on The Running Man, TV’s hottest property—and its riskiest. Almost no one survives. But if they do, they’ll win a whopping billion dollars. And even if they don’t, they can still make some serious jack just by hanging on for as long as possible (and killing a hunter or two along the way). Richards desperately needs the cash to get his family out of the slums and buy medicine for his ailing daughter.

But he’ll have to dodge a lot of bullets and bombs first. And rappel down the outside of a hotel, outrun a fireball, leap off a bridge and fight for his life inside a high-tech V-plane (with six toilets, we learn). Meanwhile, ordinary citizens—and TV watchers—are encouraged to report him. He dons disguises and takes on fake names. Drones track him. It’s a high-stakes, life-or-death game of hide and seek.

As in the original movie, woven through the gauntlet of boom-boom and bang-bang, there are overtones and undercurrents about our escalating appetite for extreme entertainment, and how media can manipulate and mislead us. It even addresses the growing use of AI, with videos that look real, but aren’t. As Ben becomes a reality-TV superstar, his righteous anger pumps up the show’s ratings. At one point, he fatefully crosses paths with another reality TV show, a spoofy sendup of The Kardashians called The Americanos. The movie suggests that TV can be toxic to our health, in more ways than one.

Josh Brolin (above) plays the smarmy exec behind the show. Dominic Colman hams it up as the host (the role originally played by Richard Dawson). Micheal Cera is a rebel leader who becomes Ben’s ally. William H. Macy is an underground arms dealer. Katy O’Brien plays another contestant.

British director Edgar Wright (whose previous films include Last Night in Soho, Baby Driver and The World’s End) throws a lot into the story, and onto the screen. Some of it sticks, but some of it doesn’t. This is his “biggest” movie, by far, with dozens of characters and wide-ranging sequences shot in Bulgaria and Scotland. But its high-octane mix of satire, drama, cautionary-tale messaging and expensive, explosive action doesn’t always mesh. It sometimes feels like Blade Runner crossed with Mission: Impossible and Survivor, with a razzle-dazzle-y dab of America’s Got Talent.

And Powell, who made females in the audience swoon last year in Twisters, is clearly the star of the show. Come for the action, stay to see him lounging around a hotel room wearing only a towel. He’s a marquee name now, for sure, no matter what he’s wearing. In this movie, that includes a priest’s robe and a nerdy pair of glasses.

“You want a show?” Richards asks his rabid TV audience at one point, in a live video. “I’ll give you a show.” And in this stylish new spin on an ‘80s cult classic, Powell certainly does just that.

—Neil Pond

Tagged , , , ,
Jul 07 2015
Leave a comment
Movie Reviews, Movies

Robo Reboot

New ‘Terminator’ bangs, bams, crams and slams across the years

Emilia Clark, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jai Courtney

Terminator Genysis

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney and Jason Clarke

Directed by Alan Taylor

PG-13

“I’ll be back,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg promised in the original Terminator, back in 1984. And now Ah-nold, THE Terminator, is indeed back, and he’s the biggest, baddest and best thing in the new reboot of the iconic sci-fi franchise.

That Terminator envisioned a near future in a ruined, post-apocalyptic world run by artificially intelligent machines battled by a hearty group of human resistance fighters. Schwarzenegger was cast in his first blockbuster role as a virtually unstoppable assassin “terminator” sent back in time to kill the mother of the child who would grow up to be John Conner, the fiery leader of the resistance, before he was conceived, ensuring the opposition could never take root.

Three sequels and a TV spinoff played off that premise. And now, 31 years later, Terminator Genysis backs up and takes another run at it.

Emilia Clarke

This time around, rebel leader John Conner (Jason Clarke) zaps his young protégé Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) into the past to intercept and destroy the terminator that’s already there, programmed to kill his mother. British actress Emilia Clarke (dragon mistress Daenerys Taegaryen in TV’s Game of Thrones) does a commendable job as the young firebrand Sarah Connor. But the big bang here is the return of the former two-term governor of California, with a now-familiar terminator twist: Schwarzenegger’s cyborg is Sarah’s guardian, not her killer, protecting her from other terminators.

Characters meet up with themselves coming and going across the decades, in overlapping timelines. At one point, Schwarzenegger’s terminator battles the younger version of himself, thanks to modern-day special effects, right out of a scene from the first movie. Oscar-winning J.K. Simmons plays a police detective who remembers the characters from one of their previous eras.

As they zip back and forth through time, our heroes outrun fireballs, shoot and blast shape-shifting, liquid-silver pursuers, throw around phrases like “mimetic polyalloy” and “decay algorithms,” try to shut down a “cloud”-like operating system that will eventually quash all living things, and eventually dangle over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge in a hijacked school bus.

Left to right: Emilia Clarke plays Sarah Connor and Jai Courtney plays Kyle Reese in TERMINATOR GENISYS from Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions.

It’s all very complicated and convoluted, a muddled sci-fi haystack of past, present and future that looks even denser and darker—as many movies do—in 3-D. Thank goodness the characters seem to know what they’re doing and where they’re going, because not only did I get lost, I lost my patience trying to sort through all the bangs, bams, crams and slams—and the echoes and clangs of previous Terminator movies ringing in my ears and through the years.

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator in Terminator Genisys from Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions.

For all its motion and commotion, however, nothing can compete with Schwarzenegger’s iconic star power, even when he’s standing still and not saying a word. The 67-year-old actor seems to be having a ball back in the swing and stride of his venerable trademark character. There’s even a running joke about the mileage on his terminator’s odometer. “I’m old, not obsolete,” he says.

Too bad the rest of this time-crunching, overstuffed, underwhelming Terminator installment doesn’t quite feel like it’s aged nearly so gracefully.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Aug 15 2014
Leave a comment
Movie Reviews

Old Soldiers

Stallone & Co. are showing their age in third testosterone fest

The Expendables 3 - Final One Sheet

The Expendables 3

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger & Mel Gibson

Directed by Patrick Hughes

PG-13

In the opening scene of this slam-bang, testosterone-fest reunion of aging action-movie icons, Sylvester Stallone’s character points to a frankfurter-sized finger of his meaty fist and a skull-shaped glob of silver—his Expendables “lucky ring.”

The Expendables franchise, about a group of super-covert, battle-scarred warriors hired to do the U.S. government’s dirty work, has indeed been lucky for Stallone. He’s had both his bank account and his ego fed by the success of the previous two movies, which he also had a big hand in either directing or writing.

In the movies, his team is “expendable” because their work is so dangerous, and their missions so secret, no one knows—or can afford to care—if they live or die.

How ironic—since the Expendables don’t seem expendable at all. They just keep coming back, again and again, and Stallone and his co-stars are a veritable, tried-and-true Hollywood guy-movie who’s who. These are some “dependable” Expendables.

BRAY_20130830_EXP3_6082.dng

Sylvester “Rambo” Stallone (left) and Arnold “Terminator” Schwarzenegger are the alpha males in “Expendables 3.”

And if anything, they just keep getting more “expandable.” In this excursion, the grizzled, gung-ho wagon train links up former E-team stalwarts Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Wesley Snipes, Jason Statham, Randy Couture and Jet Li with new add-ons Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Kelsey Grammer (yes, Dr. Crane from Cheers and Frazier!) and Antonio Banderas, and a group of younger Expendables-in-training—Kellan Lutz, Glen Powell, boxing champ Victor Oritz and mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey, the sole female invited into the boys’-club sandbox of bullet-spraying machine guns, missile-launching bazookas, exploding trains, airborne boats, dive-bombing helicopters and ka-booming army tanks.

DSC_9578.jpg

Mixed martial arts fighter-turned-actress Ronda Rousey is the only female invited to play in the boys-only sandbox.

There’s a wisp of a subplot about the old-school Expendables (with their knives and guns) vs. the new young high-tech Expendables (with their computers and cameras and drones). But now, four years and three movies into the franchise, the just-plain-old Expendables are beginning to wear visibly thin, the plots have ground down to near nothingness, the wisecracks aren’t wise or crack-y anymore, and the original stars mostly lumber around like middle-aged slabs of spa-toned beefcake. And this movie, in particular, is so bloated with actors, there’s not much space for any of them. Some, like martial arts champion Jet Li, are relegated to little more than a cameo.

When the first movie came out, in 2010, it was an homage to Hollywood’s long tradition of Dirty Dozen-style, action-caper, military-mission flicks, as well as an adrenaline shot of career-rejuvenating mojo for Stallone and some of his action-movie pals from the ’80s and ’90s. Now, as Neil Young’s “Old Man” plays and Stallone’s character proudly watches his young protégés carouse in a barroom, it seems like the original Expendable is thinking about finally easing out of the picture—or at least making much more room for a younger, leaner, greener set of espionage and counter-terrorism experts.

At one point, Trench (Schwarzenegger) tells Barney (Stallone) he’s through. “I’m getting out of this business,” he says, “and so should you.” Maybe it’s finally time for Stallone to take that Expendables advice to heart.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,