No. No “ditto.” I’d put off watching this from fear it would, you know, blow dead monkeys and I love Arnie, but I’ve seen every one of his action flicks and I wanted to complete my collection, and this was a kind of bookend to his career. It helped that yesterday I again watched Clint Eastwood in In The Line Of Fire. These 2 movies acknowledge the aging of 2 titans of Action. Clint, of course, is in a different Universe as an actor than Arnie; but, damn it!, Arnie gave us a believable AND LIKEABLE “old Arnie” performance. The wryness was there. The balls and guts were there. The FUN was there. The eye candy was there. The modded ZR-1 ‘Vette was pure motoporn. The ragtag “hick” police force “plausibly” outfitted with outrageous ordinance standing up to an army of mercenaries with a munitions budget bigger than the Vatican was, in the context of a film like this, impressively creative. The casting (Forest Whitaker? Johnny Knoxville? Jamie Alexander? Luis Guzman? Peter Stormare?) was very, very good, or better. The action direction was deft, the editing perhaps better. JCVD, much as I like him, has NEVER been in Arnie’s league in the movie biz: not in budget, not in production value, not in marketing budget. The comparison you try to make is doomed to fail. The formula worked just fine.
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