'This Is The End' & 'Man Of Steel' Reviews

This Is The End is an apocalyptic comedy from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. All the actors in the film play themselves and the story revolves around a party thrown by James Franco that is interrupted by the Rapture. Things unravel and the result is a mismash of zombie, action, horror, and disaster movies through a comic lens.

The performances are joyful, the jokes are funny and non-stop, and the premise is a simple but crazy avenue for us to see these comedians do what they do. Not a whole lot to the film, about what you'd expect from the title and a brief plot description, but it delivers fun and laughs in spades.

See It.

Man Of Steel is the current Superman franchise reboot. The film starts off great, it takes a page out of Batman Begins playbook and tells the story of Clark Kent's birth on Krypton, adolescence and adulthood through a series of non-linear flashbacks establishing Russel Crowe and Kevin Costner as his two interstellar daddies. The journey of how Clark Kent/Kal El becomes Superman is engaging and the performances given by everyone in the film are spot on.

The film takes a turn once Kent/El dawns the suit and fights the bad guys. What follows is a gratuitous 50 minute action sequence with so much collateral damage it forces the viewer to tune out. It goes on for so long, so many buildings are destroyed and presumably thousands of people killed in those buildings that you de-invest and are just waiting for it to be over. The script also suffers periodically with cliched dialogue and religious symbolism. The film also clock in at 150 minutes making the long boring parts unbearably so.

Half a great movie, half a bad movie. The result: a mediocre movie.

Rent It.