When I do my ratings, I don’t base them on the canon of filmdom, and what my editing boss thinks about the canon of filmdom, I base mine on how much something entertains me and what can I say – I fucking loved it!! Well….. now…. I loved the ACTION and the BLOOD and the BULLETS and the one liners and this took me back to those summers when I was growing up and I’d look forward to the new Schwarzie movie. And we should make no mistake – this is not going to move you to tears or sweep The Oscars or be the catalyst for your epiphany on the meaning of String Theory – this is a fucking action movie with a geriatric Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Johnny Imbecile Knoxville… and Luis Guzman for CHRISSAKES!! What can I say, it was totally fun and everything I wanted.

So honestly, this was just going so-so until this action started up in the pic above. We had all the set ups and a pretty cool “Criminal Escapes” sequence with Forest Whitaker really hamming it up as an FBI agent, there was also a lot of Arnold sitting there drinking a beer, walking down the street, talking to people, etc but once they gear up for the finally 35 minutes, this thing rocked my lame ass! “Welcome to Sommerton…” indeed!!

One thing I really liked about this is that – we all know Arnold is getting old – and so does he and there’s not a bunch of I’m-way-past-my-prime-but-trying-to-be-young shit. He’s old and he knows it and he even says it. And he winces and groans and has trouble getting up after a fall and, in that big fistfight at the end he’s not jumping around and swinging from vines and turning flips, he kind of stands there  and does some punching. Hell – his build isn’t even shown, much less part of the story.

For us horror fans, Jaimie Alexander from REST STOP is in here and she’s actually pretty good. She gets to do a little acting instead of walking around screaming and crying. Re-reading that – good for an Arnold S action movie good. She probably won’t be  bringing home any statues for this role. But she’s fun! There’s also our old friend Peter Stormare in this – his role is the weird dude (as always) and his accent changes from scene to scene but – hey – who cares? This movie is about bullets, blood and beatings, not “is he speaking Swedish-English or is he trying to pull off some thick, displaced-Texan, Southern Californian type of thing?”

There’s also Luis Guzman and Johnny Knoxville, pulling his “I’m a dummy and you can tell because I am wearing a hat with floppy ears, counter culture tee-shirts and pajama bottoms with army boots” schtick. He’s actually not as annoying as he is in everything else I’ve seen him in, but he does put out fair share of his baby talk. Them, Whitaker, Harry Dean Stanton (gets his head blown off), the guy that played Che Guevera in one or two of those Che movies that came out in the Aughts and a couple of other folks hit the scene and make some mayhem and it was all good fun – well mostly – for me.

Would I recommend it? It cost me 7.50 USD to get into the thing and then $17.50 to get: a large diet coke, one hot dog and one medium popcorn, so I spent 25 bucks on this thing. Let me put this in perspective. The wife is down with the flu so this morning I got up and took the dog to the vet: $142.40 to get her ears cleaned and the tubes filled with this waxy compound to keep out infection (she’s a Golden Retriever so she is drawn to water an can’t keep her head out of her water bucket). I then paid $41.40 for an oil change for my truck, $17.50 for a couple of burgers and fries and $50.02 (dammit!!) for almost a tank of gas and all of that took all morning. Yesterday I spent 25 clams, sat in a movie theater with ten other people for two hours and had a good time. I recommend the movie experience, especially if you want something light and NOT Oscar Season depressing or art house pretentious.