Tag Archives: Action

Warcraft review

18 Saturday Jun 2016

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It’s more fun than spending weeks, months, and years playing a videogame while your real life wastes away. Barely.

by Thom Yee

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Warcraft images courtesy of Universal Pictures

Objectivity is a funny thing. Actually, it’s not funny, that’s what makes it objective.  When it comes to important matters, objectivity is something we strive for in order to reach the most informed, most balanced, and hopefully best conclusions we can. Objectivity can save us from making poor decisions and it can ensure that the paths we choose are the best ones for all involved. Last weekend, not a lot of people chose to go see Warcraft, and though many based that decision at least partly on the most objective data available, critic scores, many more made that decision on some fairly conventional wisdom: Videogame movies are never good. Continue reading →

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows review

11 Saturday Jun 2016

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Since when were ninjas so bad at hiding?

by Thom Yee

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

I don’t know what kids today do after school, what with their STEM programs and their social responsibility and their parents who actually pay attention to them, but back in my day, a lot of us kids took martial arts classes after school, and no matter what our parents may have thought about us getting good exercise or developing a hobby built on a system of discipline, respect, and honour, most of us were only taking those classes for one reason: To beat up other kids.

The thing you have to understand about being a kid in the early ‘90s is that we were coming up only in the afterglow of the truly great action movies of the ‘80s, and so that spirit of almost mindless killing was slowly being eroded while also being finely tempered against the more spiritual elements of what we assumed was the Eastern philosophies of violence as a last resort.  For kids who took martial arts, that usually still meant a lot of fighting, just not fighting with the intent to kill. Continue reading →

X-Men: Apocalypse review

04 Saturday Jun 2016

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Let slip the dogs of war, and just cry, Havok

by Thom Yee

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X-Men: Apocalypse images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Sometimes I still can’t believe what a genius thing that early ‘90s X-Men cartoon wound up being.  It’s not like it was all that good (in fact it was laughably bad on a regular basis) but it ended up being an unexpectedly strong introduction to many of the bigger, crazier concepts and tropes of superhero comicbooks, and for a generation of ‘90s kids (like me), it was the key gateway to all the time-bending, cosmos-spanning stories that comicbooks, and the X-Men especially, specialize in. In many ways it laid the foundation for the superhero movies we’ve, by and large, enjoyed in the 21st century.  Plus, that theme song: Continue reading →

Legends of Tomorrow – Legendary recap

20 Friday May 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Brothers Television Distribution

1×16: “Legendary”

One of the things that got me most excited about Legends of Tomorrow was seeing all of these different superheroes and villains working together, unfettered, in the series’ first teaser trailer. As a comicbook fan whose introduction to the medium was through big, sprawling, and, frankly, confusing books like Crisis on Infinite Earths (a twelve-issue maxi-series that starred multiple iterations of the same character in a story about the destruction and reformation of the DC Universe’s multiverse into one single Earth), I developed an early appetite for gigantic collections of heroes in massive group shots working together against a common bad guy as drawn by classic artists like George Perez, so scenes involving almost all of the Berlanti-verse heroes that have developed over the years in raids on bad guy compounds or flying at top speed through the sky hit right where I live when it comes to this genre. Continue reading →

Captain America: Civil War review

14 Saturday May 2016

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Spoiler alert: Cap never once takes his shirt off

by Thom Yee

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Captain America: Civil War images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

A man, any man, may appear without aggression, at least may seem without aggression at first. Whether a man loses his sense of aggression without proper outlet, whether a man learns that society would sooner reward reasoned thought than barbaric action, whether a man’s natural aggression is sapped from him as he finds that only quiet conduct has been deemed acceptable, a man is told to be calm and collected and apply his other talents to win the day. But deep, deep down, down inside, a man knows that whatever the situation, even if the other man has more money, wields more power, or has reached the adulation that can only come from a celebrated status, a man knows that the only thing that ever mattered and ever will matter was that he would win in a fight against the other man. That’s what makes a man a man. Or an Iron Man. Or a Spider-Man.

Continue reading →

Legends of Tomorrow – Destiny recap

13 Friday May 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Brothers Television Distribution

1×15: “Destiny”

If you look at everything that’s happened on Legends of Tomorrow as the story of Leonard Snart, from cold-hearted thief to reluctant teammate to eventual hero, and you look at it only from that perspective while willfully ignoring most everything else that’s happened (especially anything having to do with Kendra), things look kind of okay from there.

Kind of.

Otherwise, what a f*cking mess. Continue reading →

Legends of Tomorrow – River of Time recap

06 Friday May 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

1×14: “River of Time”

I just realized that — in Rip Hunter, Carter Hall, and Kendra Saunders — Vandal Savage has three mortal enemies. That’s kind of a lot, even for an immortal dictator. And it fractures the story.

Like it or lump it, if you’ve stuck with this show this long, you should be able to overlook the flaws in Kendra and Ray’s romance, but with the way they just keep throwing it in our faces, it’s impossible not to keep picking it apart. And that’s a bad thing. The Kendra-Ray relationship is underdeveloped, oversimplified, boring, and unconvincing, and in thinking about it for as long as we’ve had to, I think finally I realized what the writing on Legends of Tomorrow reminds me of: Fanfiction written by an average thirteen year old. If you view “River of Time” through that lens, it doesn’t make the episode good, but it does help to make it slightly more acceptable. Continue reading →

Legends of Tomorrow – Leviathan recap

29 Friday Apr 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

1×13: “Leviathan”

And now… the real game begins. Or at least that’s what I thought was happening.

In travelling forward to the one time the legends know they can find Vandal Savage — just before the precise moment they’ve been trying to prevent this whole time — we find a future ravaged by war with only a few refugees of Savage’s population-decimating virus remaining in rundown camps. With danger approaching the refugees, Professor Stein finds himself unable to ignore their plight, taking the entire camp aboard the Waverider while they form their plans for taking Savage down one last time. Continue reading →