Posts Tagged ‘ thriller ’

With their premiere film writer/director team Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine gives us a pulse-pounding adrenaline-fueled action thriller starring Jason Statham and Amy Smart that starts with a rush and doesn’t stop that rush until the credits roll in Crank.

Statham plays Chev Chelios, a hitman for a local organized crime gang, who awakens to find that he has been poisoned and the only way for him to live long enough to exact his revenge upon the people who poisoned him is to keep his adrenaline at high levels by ways including fighting, cocaine, sex, injections of epinephrine, energy drinks, high-speed police chases, and more.  Basically, if he slows down, he’ll die and he doesn’t want to do that until he can kill Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) the man who poisoned him.

The movie is action packed and so filled with intensity that the viewer finds themselves feeling some of the same adrenal effects Chelios is trying to achieve.  It is a fantastic film from a team with zero Hollywood experience, but who are now building upon the success of their first film.  Statham is perfect in his performance as Chelios and Amy Smart performs as his slightly ditzy, slow-witted, pot-smoking girlfriend magnificently.  If it isn’t already clear where I’m going with this: see this movie.

Jodie Foster brings a woman living in New York City as a radio personality named Erica Bain with a deeply loved fiance who is brutally attacked in Central Park and almost destroyed as a result of it emotionally in this 2007 Neil Jordan movie.

Matt Reeves‘s much marketed 2008 action/horror/thriller Cloverfield lives up to its hype.  It takes the point-of-view camera technique utilized in The Blair Witch Project and brings it to new extremes as it ekes out a truly creepy and unsettling looking at an attack on Manhattan by what can only be described as a monster.

The duo which brought us The Beach in 2000 now brings to theaters a zombie movie that will ultimately change the genre from one predominated by B-movies to one where humanity is examined after society has been removed to help us learn more about how essential socialization is to humanity. If that sounds like something too profound to be jammed into a mere 113 minutes of film, think again.

Phone Booth is a better-than-average psychological thriller, pitting the voice of “The Caller”, wonderfully played by Kiefer Sutherland, against the life of Stu Shepard, played by Colin Farrell. Shephard is an almost stereotypically flamboyant publicist living in New York with his estranged wife, Kelly, percolating a potentially adulterous relationship with a young actress played by Katie Holmes, and stringing along the most current of a long line of unpaid interns.