Posts tagged Mark Wahlberg
Lone Survivor – Movie Trailer
Feb 1st
LONE SURVIVOR, starring Mark Wahlberg, tells the story of four Navy SEALs on an ill-fated covert mission to neutralize a high-level Taliban operative who are ambushed by enemy forces in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. Based on The New York Times bestseller, this story of heroism, courage and survival directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) also stars Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster and Eric Bana.
“Lone Survivor” Interesting and Exhausting
Jan 22nd
“Interesting and Exhausting”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
LONE SURVIVOR is based on the true story of a military operation in 2005 in Afghanistan that went terribly wrong.
Mark Wahlberg stars as Chief Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell, a member of Navy SEAL Team 10, which took part in the operation after which Luttrell wrote a best-selling book about his experience.
The film and the story also have a Colorado connection, as one member of the SEAL team on the ground, Danny Dietz, played by Emile Hirsch, grew up in the Denver area.
The team was charged with capturing or killing a top Taliban leader named Ahmad Shah, who was known to be responsible for the deaths of many Americans in the military.
So, a team of four men are dropped on the ground in Afghanistan, and we hear the radio signal from the command plane above them say, “We’ll be with you for the next six hours; have a nice walk.”
Unfortunately, events begin to go wrong almost immediately when they get into position and an old man and two boys herding some goats stumble upon their location.
The team captures the goatherders, but their rules of engagement prevent them from harming unarmed prisoners, and when the team can’t communicate with their commanding officer back at base camp about what to do, after some disagreement among themselves, they let the three prisoners go unharmed, and now that the operation is compromised, they head for higher ground.
Then an army of Taliban soldiers finds them and engages them in a firefight that essentially is the rest of the movie.
There is an attempt to break up the nonstop bloody action with a couple of side stories about an Arabian horse wanted as a wedding present and the harassment of a new member back at base camp, but essentially the movie consists of the combat fighting between the team and the Taliban as the team is cut down to its title character.
How he survives after the fighting is over on the mountain is of interest and points out a culture clash, but at this point the audience is probably exhausted from everything that leads up to it.
As a story, the movie is interesting, but as a movie, it is exhausting.
LONE SURVIVOR leaves it up to the audience to decide whether to be interested or exhausted.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“2 Guns” Has More Than 2 Laughs
Aug 10th
“More Than 2 Laughs”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
2 Guns stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg as 2 guys who appear to be partners, but both of them have a deep undercover secret from the other one.
In fact, for the first half of the movie even the audience doesn’t know if they are cops, crooks, or both.
Washington plays Bobby Trench, sometimes known as Bobby Beans, and Wahlberg plays Michael Stigman, sometimes known as just “Stig.”
When the movie opens they rob a bank in Tres Cruces, Texas, even though Bobby has told Stig the advice of “Never rob a bank across from a diner that has the best doughnuts in three counties.”
And Bobby tells Stig that advice while they are sitting in the diner across from the bank before they rob it.
But then something happens that they didn’t expect, and we get a flashback to one week earlier in Mexico when a drug deal they were involved in didn’t turn out the way they expected, either.
The drug deal gone bad is their motivation for the bank robbery, but whereas they were expecting to steal $3 million of the drug lord’s money, they discover $43 million in the bank, and they don’t know whose money it is. Of course, they don’t really care.
Well, that much money can make you do crazy things, and Bobby and Stig do, which are also unexpected.
Also, the people whose money they stole want the money back, and they will do anything to get it back.
Anything.
And then we get double crosses, murders, shoot-outs, car chases, kidnapings, more murders, and more double crosses.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Mexico, Bobby and Stig even get caught in a cattle stampede, and they are given a deadline of 24 hours to turn over the money.
Only problem is, they don’t know exactly where the money is.
However, Stig tells Bobby, “I got a plan,” but when it appears that the plan didn’t work, Stig says that it was a brilliant plan if nobody expected it.
This excellent movie even has a Mexican standoff in it.
2 Guns ends with 2 good laughs, and a sequel might even already be in the works, which would be called 2 GUNS 2 or maybe 3 Guns if Bobby and Stig can find another partner that they don’t trust, either.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”