Xbox 360 Review: Fast & Furious: Showdown

Fast and Furious: Showdown begins with you driving a car through a lifeless city, smashing into every other vehicle you see without any repercussions whatsoever. When the cops show up, you begin flipping them with your … car-flipper device, all the while continuing to race through city streets that feel increasingly confining. At some arbitrary point, the screen will display the phrase “Busted,” meaning you have failed your mission. Now confusion sets in. What the hell did you do wrong?

I was able to complete the mission on my second try (without making any changes), and then I was rewarded with some horrendous cinematics featuring talent-less D-list actors, all doing their best to mimic the character’s from the movie, with absolutely no success. It is then that things just continued to spiral downhill without ever letting up, and I began to realize that playing this game was a terrible mistake.

Movie Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is now a shadow of his former self. He’s overwhelmed by the reality of seeing aliens; he’s struggling with the fact that he nearly died during Marvel’s The Avengers; and he can no longer seem to to put himself in his Iron Man suit. He’s a manic, depressed man, suffering from crippling panic attacks and insomnia. Even his relationship with the woman he loves, Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow), is on the rocks. This should have been the most interesting take on Iron Man ever: Tony Stark in denial that he’s a good person, obsessed with making sense of the inexplicable things he’s been through over the last few years, and coping by constantly trying to improve his Iron Man alter ego.

But this is not the most interesting Tony Stark we’ve seen – far from it. With one line of dialogue, Tony is reminded he is a “mechanic” who fixes things, and all of a sudden he goes from being in desperate need of therapy to a competent hero in seconds. And herein lies the problem with Iron Man 3 – none of its good ideas ever seem to pan out into anything substantial, making this outing feel hollow when compared to its predecessors. This is a bad way to start off the second round of Mavel films, which presumably will culminate in another Avengers' flick sometime in the future — and that future is looking bleak.

Movie Review: The Evil Dead (2013)

When I heard 1981’s The Evil Dead was being remade, I was livid. I put on my Army of Darkness shirt, sought out Internet horror forums for a little bias confirmation -- and it worked. I was ready to oppose any remake of the Sam Raimi classic on the basis that the unique appeal of the low-budget original could never be captured again. The fact that the creators behind that first trip to a cabin in the woods were producing this new version didn’t seem to reduce my level of outrage. After all, so many horror classics have been butchered via modern Hollywood remakes that I had valid reason to doubt Evil Dead would be anything other than just another casualty.

Movie Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

When I was a kid I could play with my action figures for hours, developing simple stories in my head, all in an attempt to make sense of the smashing and gun noises that would accompany the battleground on my bedroom floor. And you know what? It worked.

I didn’t need a great script as long as I was able to give the fun I was having a little bit of foundation. I think the filmmakers behind G.I. Joe: Retaliation could learn a thing or two from childhood me – you need to give all of the explosions some context, but the end product should exist solely to provide the viewer with some entertainment.