punisherversion1 Week 5: Survivor: Tomatometer rating is 9% Directed by James McTeigue and written by Phillip ShelbyHere we have a misguided terrorism thriller starring an evil Pierce Brosnan rarely speaking and viciously killing people. Milla Jovovich works for the embassy that checks applications for visas. She stumbles upon a conspiracy and a world class assassin with a supervillain code name is sent after her to shut her down. From that description alone, you know exactly what is going to happen. It follows down this path and you can predict everything. I'm okay with them using 9/11 as inspiration for why this woman does what she does. It does for a brief moment show the twin towers and it brings you out of the movie a moment. It's not Christmas in Mississippi bad but it is pretty close. It does not stay long and the movie moves right along. This is one of those watch and immediately forget movies. From the director of V For Vendetta and The Raven, this is a mess in comparsion to what he's done before. It also makes one suspicious that maybe these other movies he directed had a different person guiding it throughout. This movie is so flat and so generic, you almost wish Milla would do yet another Resident Evil movie. I can't recommend the movie but it is easily the best of the bunch so far. Not exactly high praise. This is a bland and just dull film. I give this movie a D.

yamagata-45166 The only redeeming feature of this movie is Milla. I bought this movie because she and Pierce Brosnan are on the cover. It also listed Robert Forster (JACKIE BROWN), Angela Bassett, Roger Rees, and Dylan McDermott. I told myself that this has to be a good movie. Well, it is not, because the plot has holes in it that detract from watching the movie. Milla plays an embassy security agent that just got in from New York that is so bad ass that the marine snipers on the roof of the embassy know who she is. She is that hot shot security agent that broke up a terrorist attack in the US. If this is the case, why is she assigned to checking visa applications? The plot is so convoluted that it quickly becomes more and more unbelievable. At a certain point, when she has everyone against her and she infiltrates her way back into the embassy, the person I watch IMDb 250 movies with, demanded that we turn this movie off. He is a Milla Jojovich and Robert Forester fan, but Robert Forester had since exited the film and Milla cannot carry a bad movie all by herself, unless it is a Resident Evil movie. I love Angela Bassett, but the script called for her to play a character that I grew to dislike and hate. All of the characters, I grew to hate, except Milla, but again she could not carry this movie by herself.The plot line involves the use of a weapon that is tested in London, which causes huge destruction. The people take that weapon and smuggle it to the US. In the mean time, the US embassy believes that Milla is the person driving events forward. HOW THE HECK DOES AN EMBASSY SECURITY AGENT assemble and transport a weapon to the US, then set it up for detonation. Then she makes it from London to New York with everyone looking for her, and some how stumbles upon the location of the bomb and foils the plan -- unbelievable. It is more unbelievable that she is not just shot dead by the US anti-terror units. The ending is so contrived and I can only shake my head at how bad it is. How did Milla figure it all out?I went back and finished the movie and looked at the special features on the disk. I found out things, like this movie script has been floating around since the 1970s, which makes all of the sense in the world. No one wanted to finance this disaster -- until now. And the first actress that they asked to consider this roll turned them down, which brought in Milla. If I thought that the movie could not get any worse, I looked at the deleted scenes and I discovered, it could have been. The deleted scenes make for an even worse interpretation of the background, like what the real motivation for the McDermott character's belief structure, which was pure lust, not professional respect.The way the movie ends, the true evil character has not been addressed at all and for all you know is out there, ready to try it all again. In the cut scene, there is an unexplained helicopter that takes him out with a hell fire missile, along with his chauffeur and body guard as he is being driven over a bridge in London. London must have a high tolerance for bomb destruction.

winopaul Stop. Stop the DVD. Stop the stream. Stop the torrent. There is nothing worth watching here other than a waste of acting talent. Instead watch The Shallows. I was lucky enough to have that DVD from the library as well, even though I did not know enough to turn off this crap until after I watched it. Now you know. Spare yourself.There must be a completely clueless elite that produces, writes, and directs atrocities like this. They have no connection to any human behaviors not involving limos and Dom Perignon. They watch other movies and see them succeed. So they make cargo-cult monstrosities like this, aping things like chases and explosion but without understanding. The characters don't behave in any believable way. The "technical" aspects like soldering a blob on a sim card to make a bomb are laugh-out-loud pathetic. Get any tech adviser from his mom's basement and he can come up with something more believable.Some specific objections. It takes an hour to learn what the opening scene in Afghanistan had to do with anything. An ambassador that can order extra-judicial killings in her host country. A high-level chosen-child striver security analysis that has to work the counter. You mind as well make her a heroic DMV clerk. Milla making noises when she is chased that alternate between Frank Zappa's "ice pick in the forehead" and the noises women tennis players make when they hit the ball. We all want to have sex with the nice Croatian girl, but she shouldn't make those noises when she is running for her life. Simple labored breathing would be fine, and probably a lot sexier. About five nondescript middle-aged white guys (NM-AWGs) that I could not tell apart even by the end of the movie. I don't know if the director has a crush on this facial type, but maybe he could cast a few redheads and beards and heaven-forbid, black and brown people. A few more gals might help too. Or just eliminate half the characters.The writer, director, and producer must be some Eloi-class elites that don't know anything about people or things. Maybe they just forgot, we all get old.A lot might have been saved in the editing bay. Open with the art gallery scene, but the owner friend is a guy. There are more straight people than lesbians, sorry, its simple demographics. Then some work boredom. Then the fantastic restaurant explosion. Lose the Afghanistan scene completely. We know there are sociopaths out there, don't remind us when we go to a movie. Also lose the whole McGuffin gas bomb thing. That means all the high-tech gibberish too. Terrorists are stupid savage people. They would use a fertilizer bomb in some unexpected vehicle to kill everybody. Maybe make it a CNN truck so if it blows up or not, its a win/win. Have her save the crowd from that.I was so delighted when a NM-AWG wondered where she would go after the bomb and another NM-AWG said "she will follow Embassy protocol." Gosh where they could have gone from there. Milla pulls out a bus locker key, perhaps from her sweet Croatian vagina. At the locker she gets $20,000, a gun, a passport, and a burner phone. She calls in and now all the good guys know she is on their side. The suspense is having her come in, without getting killed. She would have to have some special info, maybe the after-plastic-surgery appearance of the bad guy. But she gets foiled over and over. So she decides to fly to New York and stop the madman herself, despite just being a mild-mannered albeit sexy DMV clerk.The bones are all there, its just in the arrangement and details that this movie fails so miserably. There was one benefit in watching this dreadful mess. When I did plug in The Shallows, 20 minutes in I got a lump in my throat and jumped up and shouted, "Look everybody, a plot!"

bowmanblue Matt Damon plays an employee of the secret services who is wrongly-accused of a crime he didn't commit and is relentlessly pursued across a major European city by those – supposedly – on his own side. That would be the plot of – pretty much all – 'Bourne' films. Now, if you remove Matt Damon and insert Milla Jovovich in the lead then you basically have 'Survivor.' Having watched the film, I can honestly say I can't think of a single thing wrong with it. That might make it sound good. However, the problem lies in the fact that I also can't think of a single thing that's right with it, either! It's just totally run-of-the-mill and/or by-the-numbers. You could pretty much take any leading star (male or female) and have them chased around a city a bit while they try and prove their innocence and bring down the baddie then you have this.Milla Jovovich starts out like your average office employee (well, average employee of a secret government department). What I'm getting at is that she is never presented as being trained as a special forces field agent. She comes across as little more than a pen-pushing secretary. However, as soon as she's in danger she turns into her 'Alice' character from the Resident Evil franchise and starts kicking the blue blazers out of anyone who crosses her. Apart from Pierce Brosnan. Yes, he's is in it, too. I almost forgot about him. Yes, he's chasing poor old Milla. He's sort of like a less threatening Terminator, only without the foreboding presence of Arnie. He's a charming enough actor if given the right material to work with, however he hasn't got enough to do here to make him stand out.If you like your 'spy' films where the hero has to 'out' the villain in their own organisation and/or prevent some sort of disaster then you should like this. It's one of those films where if you're a fan of the genre and haven't had to actually pay to watch it (I watched it on Netflix, so it's part of my bundle!) then you probably won't feel too ripped off. I'm just sure glad I never paid full price for a cinema ticket to sit through this.