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Green Street 2: Stand Your Ground, a review by Rich

Green Street 2: Stand Your Ground



When the top players of the Green Street Elite are imprisoned following a deadly battle with their archenemies Milwall, every day becomes a fight for survival. On the inside, rival firms and prison guards will stop at nothing to make their lives a living hell, leaving the lads with no choice but to stand their ground and fight... So when the opportunity of early release arises, the boys will stop at nothing to beat Milwall to the punch.

This is quite possibly the worst film I have seen for some years. The original was dumb, but enjoyable with a certain element of reality and a decent cast. This supposed sequel doesn't have a single redeeming feature, the violence is pointless and unbelievable, amateurish choreography and B grade casting. The script is ridiculous and totally implausible, with a supposed shortass female prison guard the evil leader of all the wrongdoings. How did this ever get past the scripting stage, and more amazingly who ever agreed to fund it?
Shocking waste of time and money
 

(From Riches Random Reviews on May 17th, 2009)

Limitless, a review by VirtualScot

Starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. Limitless is the story of struggling New York writer Eddie Morra, who is offered a drug that will unlock the full potential of his brain. With a promising story, interesting concept, strong cast and drawing on inspiration from 70's Manhattan based thrillers. It was understandable that i went into this film with reasonable expectations.

But in the end i was left feeling cheated. To start with on a slightly less minor note there are some pretty pointless camera tricks and visual effects. Upside down puke scene any one impressed? No. Cooper and De Niro also seem to be trying to take there characters to another level, than what has been given to them on the script. You really get the impression there caged in.

But i guess the biggest qualm is unlike such films as The Matrix and most recently Inception, which do a fantastic job of making the impossible seem possible. Limitless does a fantastic job of insulting your intelligence. Some of the more striking examples of this would be the supposed IQ of Mr Morra, claimed to be a 4 digit IQ. You wonder then what a person with an IQ roughly ten times that of Einstein would do.

Well it's not coming up with the next E=mc2 that's for sure. No Mr Morra concerns himself with making money partying and having sex. Noble pursuits indeed but a tad one dimensional i thinks for a man with a 4 digit IQ.

But the drug has allowed him to do one thing more intellectually orientated. To master languages with a perfect accent. How is it then an eastern European ganger consumes the pill does he still speaks broken English but with a higher vocabulary?

Overall this and many other holes, lead to the conclusion they where just throwing out half baked ideas in the vain hope they stick. And it's not as if the driving concept behind all this is bad in it self. Indeed in the right hands it would have a lot of potential to be something more intelligent and profound. Something which as the film went on i kept thinking would be done more justice by Christopher Nolan.

For the most part i was thinking the film was talking about the consequences of drug abuse. The ending however seemed to say that drug addicts are winners. Ether way the potential is there to have made something really poignant, in the right hands. But sadly that will never happen and what we are left with is a limited Limitless.

A film with an ironic title.



(From Limitless on March 30th, 2011)

The 2013 Pilot Review, a review by DJ Doena

The Blacklist

The Blacklist @ IMDb
The Blacklist @ Wikipedia

Synopsis: Raymond "Red" Reddington (James Spader, Stargate, Boston Legal) is one of the Top 10 FBI Most Wanted. And one day he simply walks into the headquarters and gets himself "caught". He presents a proposal: He helps the FBI to catch some of the most dangerous people in the world - people the FBI sometimes doesn't even know about - and in exchange he gets to work with a young female FBI profiler of his choosing.

My Opinion: This is the first real hit for me. I only caught wind of the show shortly before the season began. I watched the trailer (see below) and was immediately sold. So far I watched the first three episodes and come to really like the show and its characters.
I used to love puzzles but since TV writers don't really share my passion in the sense of that the final picture must be clear before you start I have given up trying to figure out any long-term mysteries on TV shows, for example what's really going on with Lizzy's husband. If the writers decide to, they will change his background halfway through the season anyway. *
So I limit myself to watching and enjoying one episode at a time and see how the story unfolds.
But there's one puzzle that's caught my attention: The true relationship between Red and Lizzy. It's is so blatantly obvious to any watcher that she is his daughter (whatever her official history says) that I can't help but wonder if it is in fact a red herring.




* Guess which show made me dislike such puzzles: LOST

(From The 2013 Pilot Review on October 9th, 2013)