Identities

The Island

When you add up all the best things about The Island, you might just conclude that there's hope yet for Hollywood's most critically reviled hit-maker, Michael Bay. Recruited by Steven Spielberg to direct this lavish and often breathtaking sci-fi action thriller, Bay rises to the occasion with an ambitious production that is, by his standards (and compared to Bay's earlier hits like The Rock and Armageddon), surprisingly intelligent as it explores the repercussions of cloning in a sealed-off society where humans are cultivated for spare parts, surrogate parenthood, and full-body replacements for wealthy clientele. But when two of the clones (Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johanssen) begin to question their fate and the motives of their keepers, they escape into the real world and The Island becomes just another Michael Bay action extravaganza, albeit an impressively exciting one. With elaborate chase scenes and a high-tech feast of CGI to dazzle the eye, The Island recycles much of the plot from 1979's Clonus while borrowing elements from Logan's Run, Gattaca and Minority Report, and while it's not as smartly conceived as those earlier films, there's no denying that, in many ways, it's Bay's best film to date. --Jeff Shannon

Superman - The Movie

Richard Donner's 1978 epic about the Man of Steel showed how a film about a superhero could be a moving and romantic experience even for people who long ago gave up comic books. Beginning on the icy planet Krypton, the story follows the baby Kal-El, whose rocket ship lands in Smallville, Kansas. He is found there by a childless couple and raised as the shy Clark Kent (the young Kent is played by Jeff East). The film is perhaps most touching in these sequences, with expanses of wheat fields blowing in the wind and with a young man who can't figure out what part in destiny his great powers are meant to play. The second half, with Reeve taking over as Clark/Superman, is bustling, enchanting (the scene in which Superman flies girlfriend Lois Lane--played by Margot Kidder--through the night sky is great date material), and funny, thanks largely to Gene Hackman's sardonic portrayal of nemesis Lex Luthor. --Tom Keogh

Face/Off

At his best, director John Woo turns action movies into ballets of blood and bullets grounded in character drama. Face/Off marks Woo's first American film to reach the pitched level of his best Hong Kong work (Hard-Boiled). He takes a patently absurd premise--hero and villain exchange identities by literally swapping faces in science-fiction plastic surgery--and creates a double-barreled revenge film driven by the split psyches of its newly redefined characters. FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) must play the villain to move through the underworld while psychotic terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) becomes a perversely paternal family man while using every tool at his disposal to destroy his nemesis. Travolta vamps Cage's tics and flamboyant excess with the grace of a dancer after his transformation from cop to criminal, while Cage plays the sullen, bottled-up agent excruciatingly trapped behind the face of the man who killed his son. His attempts to live up to the terrorist's reputation become cathartic explosions of violence that both thrill and terrify him. This is merely icing on the cake for action fans, the dramatic backbone for some of the most visceral action thrills ever. Woo fills the screen with one show-stopping set piece after another, bringing a poetic grace to the action freakout with sweeping camerawork and sophisticated editing. This marriage of melodrama and mayhem ups the ante from cops-and-robbers clichés to a conflict of near-mythic levels.

At his best, director John Woo turns action movies into ballets of blood and bullets grounded in character drama. Face/Off marks Woo's first American film to reach the pitched level of his best Hong Kong work (Hard-Boiled). He takes a patently absurd premise--hero and villain exchange identities by literally swapping faces in science-fiction plastic surgery--and creates a double-barreled revenge film driven by the split psyches of its newly redefined characters. FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) must play the villain to move through the underworld while psychotic terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) becomes a perversely paternal family man while using every tool at his disposal to destroy his nemesis. Travolta vamps Cage's tics and flamboyant excess with the grace of a dancer after his transformation from cop to criminal, while Cage plays the sullen, bottled-up agent excruciatingly trapped behind the face of the man who killed his son. His attempts to live up to the terrorist's reputation become cathartic explosions of violence that both thrill and terrify him. This is merely icing on the cake for action fans, the dramatic backbone for some of the most visceral action thrills ever. Woo fills the screen with one show-stopping set piece after another, bringing a poetic grace to the action freakout with sweeping camerawork and sophisticated editing. This marriage of melodrama and mayhem ups the ante from cops-and-robbers clichés to a conflict of near-mythic levels. --Sean Axmaker

At his best, director John Woo turns action movies into ballets of blood and bullets grounded in character drama. Face/Off marks Woo's first American film to reach the pitched level of his best Hong Kong work (Hard-Boiled). He takes a patently absurd premise--hero and villain exchange identities by literally swapping faces in science-fiction plastic surgery--and creates a double-barreled revenge film driven by the split psyches of its newly redefined characters. FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) must play the villain to move through the underworld while psychotic terrorist Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) becomes a perversely paternal family man while using every tool at his disposal to destroy his nemesis. Travolta vamps Cage's tics and flamboyant excess with the grace of a dancer after his transformation from cop to criminal, while Cage plays the sullen, bottled-up agent excruciatingly trapped behind the face of the man who killed his son. His attempts to live up to the terrorist's reputation become cathartic explosions of violence that both thrill and terrify him. This is merely icing on the cake for action fans, the dramatic backbone for some of the most visceral action thrills ever. Woo fills the screen with one show-stopping set piece after another, bringing a poetic grace to the action freakout with sweeping camerawork and sophisticated editing. This marriage of melodrama and mayhem ups the ante from cops-and-robbers clichés to a conflict of near-mythic levels. --Sean Axmaker

The One (Special Edition)

The One sets a martial arts milestone by pitting action star Jet Li against his greatest enemy: himself. This sci-fi thriller establishes a "multiverse" consisting of countless parallel universes, each populated by variants of every individual. Li plays a renegade from the Multiverse Agency, illegally traveling through "quantum tunnels" to eliminate all versions of himself until only two remain, each sharing the cumulative strength of their "parallel universe versions." This mumbo-jumbo inspires a variety of dazzling special effects, and director James Wong (with cowriter and fellow X-Files alumnus Glen Morgan) injects clever humor into the Matrix-derivative premise. Carla Gugino is wasted as the "good" Li's obligatory love interest, but The One will appeal to action fans with its fast-paced pursuit between the evil Li and two agents (Delroy Lindo, Jason Statham) assigned to stop his trans-universal killing spree. It's a one-gimmick movie, best enjoyed with your brain in neutral. --Jeff Shannon

Double Impact

Jean-Claude Van Damme gets a kick out of himself in this clever if barely competent action thriller, in which the likable Muscles from Brussels plays twin brothers separated at birth by a murderous Hong Kong crime syndicate. While the genial Chad lives the posh life as a California aerobics instructor, his sibling Alex chews fat cigars back in China, running a mahjong parlor and making some extra bucks as a smuggler. A quarter-century after being sent to different corners of the globe, they reunite and decide to seek vengeance against the cartel that killed their parents. From there the story and action set pieces are fairly predictable, but that hardly matters since the film's real appeal is in the amusing way the two Van Dammes deal with sibling rivalry, especially where women are concerned. Van Damme, seeking his box-office breakthrough at the time, might have received more of a commercial boost had this movie simply been directed with greater professionalism. The lighting, editing, and shot selection are often ridiculously below the standard of low-budget features. But Double Impact does have its compensations, especially in the casting of leather-clad Cory Everson and exemplary villain Bolo Yeung as a pair of killers who cross the twins' path. --Tom Keogh

What could be better than Jean-Claude Van Damme in an explosively entertaining action extravaganza?Two of him! There's twice the excitement, twice the mayhem and twice the fun in this turbo-charged adventure that pushes the thrills into overdrive. Van Damme leaps into the dual roles of Chad and Alex Wagner, twin brothers who were separated after their parents' brutal murder. Years later, the two couldn't be more different: Chad is a slick Beverly Hills fitness instructor while Alex isa rough-and-tumble smuggler on the gritty streets of Hong Kong. But when fate throws them together again, Chad and Alex discover that there's one thing they have in common: they're both fighting machines! Determined to enact revenge on their parents' killers, the martial-arts experts kick, chop andshoot all the way to an electrifying final showdown aboard a gargantuan freighter in Hong Kong Harbor.

Desperado (Special Edition)

It's Sergio Leone meets Sam Peckinpah meets Quentin Tarantino in this ultraviolent, mythological shoot-'em-up by auteur Robert Rodriguez. In Desperado, Rodriguez creates larger-than-life, genre-tweaking stock characters and puts them through their paces. As they stride bravely through an Old West lightly dusted with camp humor, they're periodically called upon to nimbly dodge bullets and fireballs through outrageously choreographed displays of Hollywood pyrotechnics. In this bigger-budget semi-remake/semi-sequel to Rodriguez's indie sensation, El Mariachi (made, famously, for $7,000), Antonio Banderas is the darkly charismatic El Mariachi, the Mysterious Stranger in town; Steve Buscemi is perfectly cast as his weasely, motor-mouth Comic Sidekick, laying the groundwork for El Mariachi's entrance by spinning saloon stories to build up his legend; Cheech Marin is a standout as the Bartender, who really knows how to handle a toothpick; and gorgeous Salma Hayek is, well, the Girl--treated to the kind of full-blown, slow-mo introduction the movies traditionally lavish on beautiful new stars. It doesn't add up to much, but it's a kick. Be careful not to blow out your speakers with the DVD's Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. --Jim Emerson

In this continuation of "El Mariachi," a traveling musician looking for work gets mistaken for a hitman and is thereby entangled in a web of love, corruption, and death. This leads to a very high body count, involvement with a beautiful woman who works for the local drug lord, and finally, the inevitable face-to-face confrontation and bloody showdown. Stars Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek. Deluxe Edition packed with special features! Featurette: "Sneak Peak: Once Upon A Time in Mexico. Featurette: "10 More Minutes: Anatomy of a Shootout." Audio Commentary with Director Robert Rodriguez.

El Mariachi (Special Edition)

El Mariachi just wants to play his guitar and carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, the town he tries to find work in has another visitor...a killer who carries his guns in a guitar case. The drug lord and his henchmen mistake El Mariachi for the killer, Azul, and chase him around town trying to kill him and get his guitar case. New film transfer from original negatives supervised by Robert Rodriguez! Featurette: "Sneak Peak: Once Upon A Time in Mexico." Audio Commentary with Director Robert Rodriguez. Featurette: 10 Minute Film School. Featurette: Robert Rodriguez's Student Film "Bed Head."

Twin Dragons

Jackie Chan resurrects the old Corsican Brothers chestnut of identical twin brothers separated at birth who meet up as adults and discover that they share more than blood ties. Poor boy Chan is a mechanic and race-car driver whose black-market activities have made him the target of some nasty mobsters, while jet-setting Chan is a world-famous conductor back in Hong Kong for a concert. In the same vicinity for the first time in years, they can suddenly feel each other's pain, and more. As one Chan jumps a jet boat for a wild escape, the other becomes a spastic victim of the furious ride, thrown around a posh restaurant while drenching his date with drinking water. Though the American cut has been pared of the worst of Chan's incessant mugging (it's about 12 minutes shorter than the original version), it's still overloaded with silly slapstick and cartoonish mistaken-identity gags as the boys swap girlfriends and dance. But wade through the crude comedy and you're rewarded with a gymnastic free-for-all climax in a car-testing workshop, where Chan leaps over, under, and through cars while taking on an army of gangsters before split-screen brothers team up for a bit of marionette martial arts. Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam codirect, Tsui taking the comedy and Lam handling the action, and John Woo makes a cameo as a priest in the wedding finale. --Sean Axmaker

The world's greatest action hero, Jackie Chan (RUSH HOUR 1&2, RUMBLE IN THE BRONX), delivers twice the excitement and twice the fun in this nonstop, stunt-filled comedy thriller! Jackie plays Boomer, a streetwise martial arts expert living in Hong Kong and his long-lost twin brother, John, a classical musician from New York! They've never met ... but when John travels to Hong Kong to give a concert, these total-opposite identical brothers become unwittingly mixed up in a hilarious case of mistaken identity! With hard-hitting martial arts thrills and endless comedy hijinks, TWIN DRAGONS packs everything you've come to love about the wildly popular movies of stuntmaster Jackie Chan.

The Medallion

The inspired pairing of Jackie Chan and British comedian Lee Evans (Funny Bones) gives The Medallion some extra oomph. Hong Kong agent Eddie Yang (Chan) flies to Ireland to track down a very bad guy named Snakehead (Julian Sands, Warlock, exuding his dependable oily menace) who has kidnapped a young boy with the power of life and death. When Eddie dies protecting the boy, the boy resurrects him with a magical medallion--and when Eddie comes back, he's got supernatural powers, much to the befuddlement of his former partner, Arthur (Evans). Along for the ride is Eddie's old flame, Nicole (Claire Forlani, Mystery Men), wearing tight outfits and delivering high kicks. Chan has lost the astonishing elasticity of his youth, but he's still spry enough pull some dazzling moves, and Evans is just amazingly funny. Between the two, The Medallion is far more entertaining than you might expect. --Bret Fetzer

The Tuxedo

Jackie Chan looks spiffy in The Tuxedo, but the movie needs a tailor. No Jackie Chan movie could be a total misfire, however, and he's charmingly self-effacing here as a hapless chauffeur who inadvertently replaces his injured super-agent boss (Jason Issacs) and foils a madman (Ritchie Coster) who plans to infect the world's water supply (!) and reap a fortune selling pure bottled water. Jackie's a bumbling superhero after donning his boss's high-tech, Inspector Gadget-like tuxedo (it even has a "Mambo" setting), and curvaceous co-agent Jennifer Love Hewitt coaches him in crime fighting while closing in on the bad guys. It's all as routinely ridiculous as it sounds--Jackie's faux James Brown act is the only real highlight--and as critic Roger Ebert observed, the climax hinges on an insect queen that doesn't exist in nature! So, while Jackie and Jennifer provide a few moments of stellar stunts and random amusement, you can blame this mess on screenwriters who didn't do their homework. --Jeff Shannon