Review: Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

Reviews

Review: Taken

The stink of producer/co-screenwriter Luc Besson permeates like Roquefort

By BRETT MICHEL | January 27, 2009

1.5 Stars

VIDEO: The trailer for Taken

Pierre Morel's talents as an action cinematographer served him well when he directed District B13 (2004). But here the stink of producer/co-screenwriter Luc Besson permeates his film like Roquefort.

Like the cheese, Morel's latest will have its admirers (those with a nose for fast-paced action), but it's another pungent release from Besson's EuropaCorp (responsible for the Transporter series) that biliously plays into America's perceived prejudice toward all things French, Arab, and . . . Albanian?

Liam Neeson (whose gravitas exists in a different orbit from the weightless script) is Bourne again as Bryan Mills, a retired (and oddly Irish-accented) American spook with no qualms about killing anyone who gets in the way of his finding his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), who's been kidnapped within minutes of setting foot in Paris. Goodbye City of Love; hello to, in Besson's purview, Sex-Trafficking Central.

Related: Review: From Paris With Love, Review: Chloe, Review: District 13: Ultimatum, More

Review: From Paris With Love
"God, I love the French," bellows the American ambassador to France.
Review: Chloe
One of the more ambitious genre filmmakers around, Atom Egoyan bravely takes on tawdry tales and tries to subvert them.
Review: District 13: Ultimatum
In 2004, Luc Besson's District B13 [ Banlieue 13 ] wall-jumped its way into our hearts by thrusting the urban acrobatics of parkour onto the big screen.
Review: Clash of the Titans
It takes a lot of movie magic to reduce some 3000 years of mythology to piffle. After watching this farrago produced by state-of-the-art 3-D and CGI, I’m all for the return of the oral tradition.
Review: Ponyo
In a film like Spirited Away (2001), Hayao Miyazaki takes flight and creates his own seductive animated universe. When tied to a Disney fable about the environment and true love, he lurches from cliché to myth to things that just leave you shaking your head.
Review: Five Minutes of Heaven
It's easy to see what attracted Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt ( Bloody Sunday ) to Prime Suspect veteran Guy Hibbert's screenplay: it's an actor's showcase.
Review: The A-Team
This fun big-screen reboot takes the quartet of fugitive vigilantes-for-hire into the digital era, and it succeeds because director Joe Carnahan doesn't let technology overpower personality.
Review: The Next Three Days
More gripping and less pretentious than Crash (2004), Paul Haggis's remake of Fred Cavayé's Pour elle (2008) remains an implausible exercise in contrivance and bogus irony.
Review: The Grey
At the center of this superior stranded-men-picked-off-by-external-threat thriller is Ottway, an anguished loner powerfully played by Liam Neeson.
Review: Stonewall Uprising
Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, the talented indie documentarians who made last year's Waiting for Armageddon , seem confined by the strictures of PBS's long-running American Experience series in their straitlaced ode to gay liberation.
Review: Trash Humpers
A gang of elderly morons have sex with garbage. What more can I say about Trash Humpers ?
Less

Topics: Reviews , Liam Neeson, Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, More

| More

See more deals

view all

[ 02/16 ] Third Annual Providence Children's Film Festival @ Cable Car Cinema

[ 02/16 ] "Dana Levin: A Classical Realist In the 21st Century," an exhibit of paintings @ Bert Gallery

[ 02/16 ] Mary Poppins @ Providence Performing Arts Center

ARTICLES BY BRETT MICHEL

REVIEW: THIS MEANS WAR | February 16, 2012
What promises to be a modern Jules and Jim (until you realize it's directed by a 43-year-old who calls himself "McG") quickly devolves into Spy vs. Spy territory, only with incompetently staged and edited action and little of that ol' Mad magazine zing.

REVIEW: THE VIRAL FACTOR | January 17, 2012
Made for a modest budget of $17 million — and feeling like it (who needs convincing explosions in an action movie?), Dante Lam's latest still gets the job done from a run-and-gun standpoint.

REVIEW: EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE | January 17, 2012
Too soon? For Stephen Daldry's 9/11 drama, the right time is "never."

REVIEW: THE DIVIDE | January 10, 2012
Many a teleplay for The Twilight Zone threatened atomic Armageddon, and though Frontier(s) director Xavier Gens nukes New York in the opening shots of his latest thriller, he finds more inspiration in the horrors of human nature as seen in the old TV show's episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."

REVIEW: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL | December 20, 2011
Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) returns to the screen in dramatic fashion as new teammate Jane (Paula Patton) and the returning Benji (Simon Pegg) break him out of a Russian prison.