24: Legacy Pilot

So I didn't watch 24 from the very beginning. I came into the show around Season 4, went back and watched the rest of it, then finished the show until it completed it's 8th season and its 9th sort of season.  I have been a die hard 24 fan for a long time and while I recognize that the later seasons of the show got a little bit stale especially since they tried to keep alive a political climate that had been outdated when Obama came into office in 2008, I still consider it one of my favorite shows of all time.

I personally think the ending of the 8th season of 24 was fine how it was. It wasn't anything spectacular but it was a good way to close off the final season. And then Live Another Day happened... now I personally don't love the ending to Live Another Day because it didn't feel like a real ending. It felt like a cliff hanger to a future season with Jack Bauer that I don't think is going to happen. But I also said in my review of that ending that I would not support anything 24 related that didn't have Jack Bauer in it... and yet here we are.

24 Legacy takes place three years after Live Another Day and is set in DC. The story centers around a former Army Ranger by the name of Eric Carter (played by Corey Hawkins). Carter was apart of a special forces unit that worked in tandem with Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) that led to the assassination of a high value terrorist by the name of Ibrahim Ben-Khalid. The operation was headed up by the former director of CTU named Rebecca Ingram (played by Miranda Otto). At the start of the show, it is apparent that Eric is having difficulty adjusting to civilian life with his wife Nicole (played by Anna Diop).

The pilot starts with terrorists finding and killing the other members of the Ranger team that killed Bin-Khalid. Soon it comes down to just Eric and another former Ranger by the name of Ben Grimes (played by Charlie Hofheimer). After terrorists come after him and his family, Eric must reach out to CTU find the people trying to hurt him and his wife and prevent a terrorist attack from occurring on US soil.

To start off, I will say that there really isn't any other show that is quite like 24 and it was really good to return to that form and that feel. Maybe it's the real time element, maybe it's just the music of Sean Callery, but whatever it is, it's good to return to this universe and to the high stakes counter terrorist world that was very specific to 24.

I know that everyone is asking how Corey Hawkins compares Kiefer Sutherland as the leading man. Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend like Eric Carter is the hero of 24 we've been waiting for. I don't know how you make a show like this with such an iconic hero and expect to create another hero to match someone like Jack Bauer. You can't. Instead you create as compelling of a character as you can and hope that people still might enjoy him and the rest of the cast.

Now I'm only a few episodes in and it's still very early to figure out who Eric Carter is and if he's a compelling character and it's kind of hard to determine.

Corey Hawkins is by no means a bad actor. Despite the minute fact that he's incredibly skinny, I could believe that he was an Army Ranger and that fact alone is kind of a cool angle. I'm currently re-watching the first season of 24 and Jack Bauer's backstory was pretty generic and definitely not the main purpose of the story. Instead the focus was on his job and his mission to hunt down terrorists and make America safe again. If you didn't know Jack Bauer's backstory from the few hints that they give you in the first season, I would almost say that Eric Carter actually has a more interesting story that Jack Bauer in some regards.

And I will say that the show does give him a couple of genuine moments, as few as they are. There is a pretty good scene where he and his former teammate, Ben are sitting on a train and they're talking about the meaning of duty and what the country owes them or whatnot. It's actually a pretty well done scene.

24 has a knack for reflecting the times we live in and the political climate and outlook towards the War on Terror. Back in 2001 when the show first aired, it reflected the midst of the battle we face against terrorism and the fear we had towards it with the attacks on 9/11 still very fresh in our minds. In 2008 when the Obama administration was coming into office, the background of the season was Jack Bauer testifying in Washington DC and almost being brought to task for the things he did in the name of national security.  And now, Eric Carter is a Soldier who has fought long and hard in a war that has gone on for longer than he expected it and he's trying to figure out what his role is in new conflicts even though he believed the conflict to be over... hmmm ring any bells? America!

I definitely like the rest of the cast. You have Miranda Otto who I really only know from Lord of the Rings, but still enjoy in this show. Then you have Jimmy Smits playing her husband who is a Senator running for President. I'm not totally certain how well he fits in with the rest of the show but I'm willing to give him a shot. Those are the big names of people you see in the show. There's a lot of other characters but none of them are really that interesting if I'm being 100% honest. Perhaps they will be developed in later episodes but they don't really pop out. Instead they more seem like they're there just to fill a role that was vacant from previous seasons.

And that's something that I think 24 suffers from and it's the reason the show was cancelled in the first place. It's how predictable the show can get.

24 gained acclaim when they had a lot of twists and turns and a lot of characters who we thought were good people who turned out to be moles and traitors. In the first few episodes, it seems like the same motifs are still being utilized, and it's not just the idea of traitors and moles.

A couple things you can always count on in 24 is the Jack Bauer character having to work outside the confines of the institutions for a little bit in order to get the job done. Another thing is that behind every stereotypical muslim character, there is a traitorous white character who you perhaps didn't expect because 24 does this weird thing where they think you expect the terrorist to be the middle eastern character when its not, which I guess when it first happened was interesting and perhaps a way to combat islamaphobia but instead just seems predictable now. There are a lot of other examples that I've already seen in the first three episodes, but you understand how this show can be difficult at times. The reason the show got cancelled is because of this predictability. You can only go so many seasons before a terrorist plot to destroy the American way of life is thwarted by a Jack Bauer type.

I'm enjoying the show, but the biggest issue I've seen is that the characters beyond Eric Carter and Rebecca Ingram (and even them to a certain extent) really only seem to be there to fill a character spot that they wiped clean. Jimmy Smits is supposed to be taking over the Presidential role like David Palmer did back in the day. Eric Carter is obviously taking over the Jack Bauer type. You've got David Bucatinsky playing the nerdy computer analyst with glasses. You've got Bailey Chase playing your hard head of operations at CTU. The list goes on and on. None of these characters are over the top interesting (besides Carter and Ingram) and none of them are really compelling enough to say that this is any better than 24 ever was, even in its later seasons. At least in Season 8 you cared about Jack Bauer.

He hasn't shown up yet in the episodes I've seen, but apparently Tony Almeida (played by Carlos Bernard) is supposed to make an appearance in this season and that is something I am actually really interested in. And it's telling that the main appeal of the show is to see how it connects with the earlier seasons.

I'm going to keep watching for now because I do want to see where this show goes. Usually it takes about 4 episodes to really get a feel for the plot of the season and to see where it's all going. There are four episodes that have aired so I think right after this I'm going to watch that 4th episode and that will determine if I'm going to continue watching this season of 24.

Overall, I haven't hated 24 Legacy. I think it's trying to recapture the magic of 24 and in a way it does... just not in a way that I think will be lasting. It's great to have that 24 feeling of a guy single handedly fighting terrorism. It's like Homeland but with more gun play and more fast paced action. There obviously is an audience based on the numbers the show has been pulling in.

Here's the biggest problem I have. The nostalgia factor.

It's kind of strange that in the same year, two shows that I used to watch regularly on Fox are being brought back to continue what seemed to be a pretty concise ending. And it's not just these shows. You have shows like Minority Report, Lethal Weapon, and Taken that really just blows my mind that they bank so much on people's nostalgias that they either continue a show that definitely had an ending and was cancelled for a reason, or they create a show based on a movie that had no business being a TV show in the first place.

I can't speak for all of these shows because I haven't seen all of them. Apparently Lethal Weapon is doing alright as far as viewership goes and who knows, maybe Minority Report, Taken, and Prison Break all have really good premises that they needed to be turned into TV shows.

But when the show is focused more on banking on people's nostalgia for the ratings instead of just creating something with a good story, that's when I get a little bit angry. In all reality, there was not reason they couldn't just create a show around Corey Hawkins doing basically the same thing he's doing in 24 Legacy and call it something different. 24 does not have the patent on going off and fighting terrorists. Sure it might not be in real time, but that's almost a constraint rather than something absolutely essential to the structure of the show. From what I have seen, besides one of the characters being a cousin of one of the previously deceased characters of 24, there hasn't been any connections to the previous seasons of 24 and there didn't need to be a reason to have this set in that universe besides the nostalgic factor of it being called 24.

At the end of the day, I hope 24 Legacy does well. I hope it finds its footing and makes something successful. As of right now, I haven't seen anything that has blown my mind, but I'm open to seeing more. I'm hoping that the characters stick out a little more in the future, I'm hoping that they move away from the conventions that made the original stale, and I hope they utilize the new cast to do something different this time around.

But those are my thoughts on the pilot (and first couple episodes of 24 Legacy. What have you thought? Are you going to continue watching? What're your thoughts? Comment and Discuss Below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for movies and shows I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I wanted to get this out so I could just watch some more episodes... so here's Kiefer Sutherland on Fallon. Enjoy!

Keanu

So it is definitely a thing that some movies are going to be funnier if they are watched with other people. I've seen plenty of movies that people have sworn are incredibly funny and when I watch them by myself they aren't as funny. Keanu was a movie that I started and I didn't think it was that funny, and then someone came in and joined me to watch the last act of the film, and suddenly the movie got a lot funnier.

Keanu is a film starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the duo from the Comedy Central show, Key and Peele. These two play cousins who are very straight laced guys. Keegan-Michael Key plays Clarence, a suburban dad who drives a mini van and listens to George Michael. Jordan Peele plays Rell who is a bachelor who just smokes week and watches movies. He doesn't have a lot going for him until one day, there's a small scratch on his door and a little cat comes into his life.

And yes, I'm not even a cat person and I will say this might be the most adorable kitten I have ever seen in my life.

Rell becomes obsessed with the cat and names him Keanu.

The conflict comes when someone breaks into Rell's house and catnaps Keanu from him. And instead of moving on and maybe getting another cat like a normal human being would, Rell decides that he and Clarence are going to find Keanu and bring him home.

In order to do this, they find their way into the lair of a gangster played by Method Man and through a case of mistaken identity, the two of them are mistaken for hardened criminals and are told they need to go on a couple of drug missions for Method Man in order to get Keanu back. All the while they are being hunted by a pair of shady criminals who look strangely like Key and Peele as well.

What I'll say is that for a movie called Keanu, the actual cat is not in this movie as much as I initially thought he was going to be. This could be a good thing as the movie would be different if they had to take care of a cat the entire time. Instead, this movie throws these straight laced guys into a world where they need to act like hard gangsters.

The focus is mainly on these two and a lot of the humor comes from their different personalities. Keegan-Michael Key can be pretty loud and boisterous and definitely carries a lot of the film. But Jordan Peele plays off of him pretty well too. He's more quiet but he does have some funny lines and reactions throughout the film. It's to be expected, especially since these guys work together on their TV show that they would have chemistry. That definitely carries over to the film as they play off each other really well and it really does feel like one giant Key and Peele sketch. '

Now, like the show, some of the sketches are really funny and some of them are not. The same thing goes for this movie. You have moments that are really funny and then you have moments where the jokes fall flat. There's a cameo from Anna Faris in this movie that is actually really funny and then there's the two assassins that are also played by Key and Peele and that isn't always funny.

Overall, I liked Keanu. It's not the greatest comedy of 2016 but overall I just liked the premise. It doesn't feel overly generic like other comedies I saw in 2016. I think it was a good idea to give Key and Peele some movie credits and I'd definitely like to see more films centering around these guys.

It doesn't need to be a Keanu sequel, but I would like to see these guys do more comedy.

But those are my thoughts on Keanu. What did you think? Did you like it? Would you want to see more of Key and Peele on the big screen? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should be reviewing in the future? If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I wanted to find at least one Key and Peele sketch. Enjoy!

Triple 9

So I'm realizing this has become a thing. A year of movies happens and there are a list of movies I wanted to see. There are those movies that are higher on the list that I definitely see in theaters. Then there are the films that go straight to streaming services in the same year and I see them pretty quickly too. Then there's movies like Triple 9 where I wanted to see it when it came out in theaters, never made it out, and I end up catching up on these films the following year.

The movie begins with a heist being carried out by a team led by Michael Atwood (played by Chiwetel Ejifor) He is a career criminal and is supported by his friend Russell (played by Norman Reedus), Russell's brother Gabe (played by Aaron Paul) and two corrupt cops, Marcus and Franco (played by Anthony Mackie and Clifton Collins respectively). They pull off a job for the wife of a Russian mobster (played by Kate Winslet) but she pulls them in to do one more job and threaten their lives if they choose not to. Their plan is to spark a 999 police code which means an officer is down in order to distract the police away from the heist. And in essence, that's the movie.

Casey Affleck plays the partner of Anthony Mackie's character. He's a new cop but he's a straight laced one. Woody Harrelson plays the uncle of Casey Affleck's character and he's also a cop. And then Gal Gadot plays the sister of Kate Winslet's character and Chiwetel Ejifor's character's ex-wife who plays a part in the whole criminal organization.

The first thing to say about this film is that when there is action, the action is good. There are a couple of heist scenes in this film and they are pretty good scenes as a matter of fact. I enjoyed the movie a lot when there was action on screen and I was wondering if these heists were going to go down the way they thought they were going to.

On top of that, you have a really good cast. This is a pretty stacked cast with some really power house actors and actresses. I think if I had to choose a standout it would probably be Casey Affleck and Anthony Mackie. I was the most invested in their story and their relationship throughout the film and that was supplemented by their performances.

I by no means think anybody gave a bad performance in this film.

The biggest issue I have with the film is when I feel like a lot is happening and yet nothing is happening at all. And this mainly happens because there are so many characters and they're trying to give justice to every one of them and then they end up not giving justice to any of them.

Like I said, Casey Affleck and Anthony Mackie give pretty good performances because there is that duality that Anthony Mackie brings to it of being a corrupt cop. And again, since both these actors are really good, I am interested in their character.

But then we have Chiwetel Ejifor's story with his son, and then you've got Aaron Paul and his shitty situation, and then you've got Woody Harrelson investigating the heists that have happened with a really interesting cameo by Michael K Williams. But overall, a lot of stories are happening and yet I had moments where I just had to ask, what the hell is happening?

It's interesting because this movie reminded me a lot of the 2nd season of True Detective that nobody really liked (I was gonna do a review on that a while ago now that I think about it...). The film was centered around the subject matter of bank heists, organized crime, and police corruption.

I actually think that this movie could probably have made for a better HBO TV show than a movie because I do want to see what's the deal with Woody Harrellson and the conversations he has with Michael K Williams in Drag. I do want to see Chiwetel Ejifor deal with his mobster in-laws and the balance between taking care of his son and living a life of crime.

Hell, Kate Winslet and her role as the wife of a Russian mobster is actually really interesting and could make for a Netflix series on its own.

And this is not to say I didn't enjoy the movie. I just thought that it had points where it was pretty boring and just didn't go anywhere. The story was so spread out among a really strong cast that it wasn't able to really center in on the things it needed to and in total, the movie just didn't really live up to my expectations.

I was really hoping that this movie was gonna be good. I don't think there are enough good crime thrillers these days and I don't think that enough of them do Heat level bank heists. Triple 9 doesn't even come close, but there were a lot of good elements about the film that I enjoyed. The action was good. I'm not going to say anybody in this film did a bad job, I just think they were under utilized.

I think this probably should have been a TV show or a third season of True Detective. But as is, it's an alright movie. Nothing spectacular but nothing horrible as well. Just meh.

But those are my thoughts on Triple 9. What did you think? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twtter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. Triple 9 just reminded me of True Detective and reminded me of the opening number. Enjoy!

X2

So, there are a couple of things I should get out before I start this review. First off, you might have noticed that I haven't been posting a lot this month. That is because I have been on military training for the past 3 weeks and haven't had a lot of time to both watch movies as well as write about them. I can tell you that there is a good chance that this sporadic posting might be a thing for the next month or two. These are the realities of having a real person job and not getting paid to write these reviews. I am going to do my best to keep watching films and writing reviews where I can, but I wanted my readers to know that if the number of reviews I put out goes down, there is a reason for it.

I write this review with a little bit of hesitancy because I have not re-watched the first X-men and I don't really like reviewing movies out of order. The way that I rationalize this is that the X-men franchise has a problem with consistency in their timeline. At the end of the day, while I like this movie, I'm not totally sure how it connects with the larger timeline if it does at all. The good part about this is that it gives me the opportunity to look at this movie on it's own merits as a solo film. And on it's own, this movie does a pretty good job.

X2 begins with a really cool action scene where a mutant by the name of Nightcrawler (played by Alan Cumming infiltrates the White House and tries to assassinate the President in the middle of a politically charged time where mutants and human relations are not that great. The attempt is unsuccessful, barely, but it underlines the foreshadowing and set up this film does really well that there is a war coming and it's going to be messy.

The movie then goes to Charles Xavier (played by Patrick Stewart) and his school for gifted youngsters and informs the audience how things have been going since the last film. Their nemesis Magneto (played by Ian McKellen) is locked in a metal-less prison for the crimes he committed in the first movie. Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman) has returned from an abandoned research facility that he believed to have the answers about his mysterious past. Rogue (played by Anna Pacquin) is adjusting nicely to the school and she has a boyfriend in Bobby Drake, or Iceman (played by Shawn Ashmore).

In response to the assassination attempt on the life of the President, the US government authorizes the operations of a mysterious Colonel William Stryker (played by Brian Cox). Styrker has a mysterious relationship with mutants like Charles Xavier and he definitely has a connection with Wolverine. He has a thing against mutants and kidnaps Charles and Cyclops (played by James Marsden) and the X-men must hide from him and discover the true nature of his plot against mutants.

The first thing I wanna mention with this movie is that it was concise and deliberate of who to focus on and who not to focus on. X-men films have always been movies with a large cast. But they also have a tendency to have shameless cameos of random mutants just to show off their power. This was not the case in X2. The cast of this film seemed like it had a purpose each character needed to be there outside of Wolverine. Jean Grey (played by Famke Janssen) was there to find her husband and allowed the movie to further explore the forbidden attraction between her and Wolverine. Rogue was actually a bit of a badass in this movie and wasn't just there to be the little girl who needed to be saved. Even Magneto and Mystique were essential to the plot and it made the team up that happens later in the film make sense. Now I think Magneto has been overused in later films such as Days of Future Past where he didn't really need to be in the film because it was so obvious he was going to remind us all he's the bad guy by the end of the film, but in X2 it just seemed nature for Magneto to be there and for them to have an uneasy alliance form in order to stop William Stryker's plot.

There are supporting characters like Nightcrawler, Storm (played by Halle Berry) and Cyclops who take a backseat in this film and don't have a huge role, but their interactions are pretty limited and I never thought any of them were wasting my time.

Then you've got William Stryker.

Now having never seen this movie before, I never saw Brian Cox's Stryker. The only exposure I had of Stryker was that of Danny Houston from Origins: Wolverine and Josh Helmen in the new films. From those films, I definitely knew who William Stryker was but I guess I never knew exactly how much of an appeal he had until I saw this film.

Brian Cox gives actually one of the best military villain performances I have seen in a long time. He's actually the epitome of the non-mutant threat that the X-men would more than likely face and he does it so very well. And yet there is a personal aspect about his character that is really tragic and really compelling.

And because he's so compelling and the story brings him in on such a personal level, the entire film is actually very small if you think about it. I mean his overarching plot is pretty large in scale but the execution and the entire plot of the movie maintain it in a very small capacity. The story is personal and closely knit, making for less grandiose action, but for better performances and a better story.

 I heard it a lot prior to watching this film and not that I've seen it, I one hundred percent agree. X2 is probably one of the most underrated superhero films, especially prior to the creation of the MCU.

The movie is so personal and centered on building up and developing these characters that I understand now why people were so disappointed by what was supposed to be the final chapter in a trilogy that had two really great installments before Last Stand.

One minor critique with the film having seen all three now and having watched Last Stand before this one, it does do a lot of set up. There's a lot of things that this movie is doing to point towards the final chapter. But here's the thing, it's done in a way that it doesn't take away from the movie as a standalone film. The fact I was able to watch this film and enjoy it on it's own merits as opposed to the other Marvel films where a good portion of the viewing experience is based on your knowledge of the characters and the requirement of watching previous films in the franchise. X2 was definitely a sequel, but it wasn't trying to be the next installment in the X-men franchise, it was continuing the story set up in the first X-men movie.

Another surprising thing about X2 was how well it showed off the X-men's powers. I feel like we live in a world where super powers are not anything new and we need something huge and epic to show off super powers. X2 came out in 2003, CGI wasn't what it is today, and yet I still was amazed at the way they displayed people's powers in this film. Again, I feel like everything was pointing back towards the story and everything served the purpose of the plot, not the spectacle.

X2 isn't my favorite superhero movie of all time because in all honest, while I enjoy the personal and small scale of the story, I felt like it was a little bit forgettable and that's why it's a little bit more of a hidden gem these days. However, it is a strong film. I think it's probably one of the best, if not the best X-men film and it's because it's building off what the original movie gave, pointing towards a sequel but not relying on the hype of that movie to propel this one, and it's its own condensed story that is great to watch on it's own. You don't need to marathon the X-men movies to watch this one, you can watch it on it's own and it will still be a strong film.

X2 is a different breed of movie from a different time. It has the feel and quality of the superhero movies of today, and yet it feels more like a movie as opposed to a comic book movie. You look at movies like X-men Apocalypse and you look at the way this franchise has changed. Now I think this movie benefits from utilizing the themes and ideas that came out of the X-men comic books before they became over used.

X-men has always been used as a metaphor for anybody disenfranchised or in the minority. There's a scene in the film where Bobby actually "comes out" to his family as a mutant and it's actually done really well.

These are themes that have been used over and over again since this movie came out and having never watched this one until now, I guess I watched the lesser tellings of those themes. Again, because this is so personal, because this is told in such a three act story telling way, I really enjoyed it a lot more than any of the other movies and their attempts to tell the story of the X-men.

Again, I don't think this is my favorite superhero movie of all time because I've seen movies tell personal stories and be more epic than this movie was. But this was the first time I had ever watched X2 and it already goes pretty high on my list of superhero films.

But what did you think? Where does X2 rank against the other X-men films? Where does it rank in all the superhero movies of all time? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I mentioned the exposition of mutant's powers earlier. I was thinking about posting the opening scene with Nightcrawler but this shows off the raw power of Magneto that I think we've gotten from Michael Fassbender but I hadn't really seen from Ian Mckellen until now. Enjoy!