Thursday, November 15, 2012

"Lockout" (2012)

Starring Guy Pierce, Maggie Grace and Peter Stormare
Written by James Mather, Stephen St. Leger and Luc Besson
Directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger
Rated PG-13 - Violence, language
Running Time: 95 Minutes
Trailer

In the future, the daughter of the President, Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace) visits a new orbital maximum security prison, looking for human rights violations. During her visit, a prisoner manages to steal a weapon from her Secret Service detail and release a number of his fellow inmates.  Now Emilie is trapped alone aboard a space station full of vicious criminals.

Only one man can save her.

That man is Snow (Guy Pierce), a government agent wrongfully convicted of treason and killing an undercover agent.  The idea of a frontal assault on the complex is vetoed, and the plan is concocted for Snow to infiltrate the base alone in exchange for the chance to prove his innocence.  Luckily, the prisoners don't know that Emilie is the president's daughter, and therefore an extremely valuable hostage.  But that only means that there's limited time before they do find out, and the situation escalates.

Friday, November 9, 2012

"Skyfall" (2012)

Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench and Javier Bardem
Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan
Directed by Sam Mendes
Rated PG-13 - Intense sequences of action and peril, language, sex
Running Time: 143 Minutes
Trailer

James Bond (Daniel Craig) and a fellow agent, Eve (Naomi Harris) arrive at an MI6 safehouse in Turkey to retrieve a highly-classified hard drive containing a list of names of undercover agents in terrorist groups throughout the world.  But they're too late - the agents have been killed, and Bond is soon on the trail of the thief.  Before he can retrieve the drive from the thief, M (Judi Dench) orders Eve, acting as sniper, to shoot, and she accidentally hits Bond, sending him tumbling into a river and losing the mission and the list.

Months later, Bond is living a quiet life of alcoholism and addiction to pain pills in a beach hut somewhere when he sees on television that there has been a terrorist attack on MI6 headquarters.  Drawn back by his allegiance to M, he returns to London and to MI6.  Unfortunately, the loss of the list and now this attack, has brought M under scrutiny by civilian oversight.  Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) informs M that she's being retired, and M vows to complete the mission.

She sends Bond to Shanghai, where he will come face to face with the man who stole the hard drive. But Bond is unable to learn from him who he works for, who is behind the attack on MI6 that seems strangely personal to M, and who is releasing the names of MI6 agents across the world.  With the bodies piling up, Bond comes face to face with Silva (Javier Bardem) a ghost from M's past with a plan for vicious retribution, and the possibility that for all his loyalty to her, M may not be who or what Bond thinks she is.