After starring in pointless drama roles trying to bridge his career with pointless movies like Man on the Moon and The Majestic, Jim Carrey is back in his top form with Bruce Almighty a funny, yet forgettable film that has Carrey inheriting the powers of God because he believes he can do the job better.

Carrey is Bruce Nolan a TV news reporter who is just having a bad time in life at the moment, forget the fact that Jennifer Aniston is his girlfriend. After being passed up for an anchor position by a slimy, sleazy co-worker Bruce has a meltdown on the air that proves to be one of the films most memorable scenes. Bruce then makes a plea to God on why he is being treated so badly for helping people out, stemming from a homeless man he tried to save from being hassled and got the crap kicked out of him. He makes a mention that he could do the job better so the big guy (Morgan Freeman) grants him his powers until the 7th at 7:00PM to help as many people as possible.

The movie, directed by Tom Shadyac, focuses on God as a general being rather than any denomination’s overseer, therefore pleasing any number of churches who don’t like to be made fun of. For those who see the movie as sacrilegious, they obviously need to take the holy rod out of their holy butt.

Bruce Almighty uses sight gags and a few regular jokes, which seem to cater to the least common denominator when it comes to dogs peeing on furniture or Bruce blowing wind up a girl’s skirt. Yet, you can’t help but be charmed by the very screen presence of Carrey whom we have missed since his days saving animals in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and making the court room funny in Liar, Liar.

The movie does get a bit preachy toward the end where the comedy rollercoaster comes to an almost horizontal flow. As with all funny movies released in recent time (with the exception of a choice few) once you have the audiences attention in the first 30 minutes you slowly wind down the laughs and bring up the drama. While this is to be expected the general tone of this last half-hour is one of the screenwriter and director preaching to the audience about the good inside. If I wanted to see a televangelist spew crap, I could do it for free at home.

Still you have a hard time not liking what Carrey can do on the big screen and many, many people have been looking forward to his return in a normal form (sans the makeup of The Grinch). Bruce Almighty suffers from a few problems but none of them are debilitating toward the likeability of the actors and story. If you can sit through some strange person telling you the way you live your life is wrong, and you want to laugh you butt off through the first half take in Bruce Almighty. If you are easily offended by God wearing a Yankees hat, or the very existence of the fellow in a movie then you need to get a firm grasp on reality and loose-up, possibly by seeing Bruce Almighty.

Legions of fans have been salivating for The Matrix Reloaded for four years since its 1999 debut in movie theaters and now in 2003 we will be given not one, not two, not three, but four new entries into the series in the forms of video games, movies, and animated shorts. Unfortunately those looking to recapture the amazement and magic of the first film won’t find it in this second installment of the series, but we can still hold out hope for the third.

The Matrix Reloaded is not a bad film, far from it in fact, but it certainly isn’t the best film it could have been with the imagination of it’s directors, Andy and Larry Wachowski. The whole movie comes off as a full notch below the original Matrix with amazing fight sequences interspersed between excruciatingly slow story progression and a total disregard for some of the events in the first movie. The MTV Spring Break Rave held in Zion and the “love triangle” only slow down the movie further. In fact the entire first half of the movie doesn’t even need to exist aside from the computer assisted fight sequences and appearance of the uber-cool Agent Smith.

With the addition of new characters and a convoluted storyline, which has more “Huh?” moments than an episode of Star Trek on a techno-babble high, the movie just never catches on with the audience and, instead, throws enough eye candy on the screen to make even the most jaded critic or patron drool on themselves in sheer awe at the physics of these sequences. But it still doesn’t make up for the fact that if you remove the fight and chase sequences from the movie you are left with a mediocre sci-fi film that could pass off as a straight to video release.

Reloaded picks up at an undetermined amount of time after the first movie. After Neo (Keanu Reeves) begins to have disturbing dreams about Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) he awaits word from the Oracle on his next step to save humanity. Just before this, as seen in Final Flight of the Osiris, the machines are drilling from the surface straight down to Zion in order to destroy the last human city. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the gang are employed with the task of finding the “Keymaker” in order to gain access to the matrix’s mainframe and learn the truth about the program once and for all. Without giving too much away, that is basically how the plot breaks down. Sure there are a few twists here and there, but nothing unexpected, and surely nothing overly dramatic that strays from the tried and true methods of sci-fi fare.

As stated the movie isn’t bad at all, and the aforementioned fight sequences are nothing short of spectacular in technical know-how and visuals. Neo’s fight with over 100 replicas of Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) is nothing short of awesome but after the battle is over it feels like it never needed to occur, as with all of the battles in the movie. At the end of The Matrix Neo tears Smith apart, literally shattering his “code,” but through Reloaded his plods in battle after battle as though he is just very good at Kung Fu. Except for his tendency to fly around Neo hasn’t changed very much even though he is “the one.”

The car chase scene, obviously sponsored by GM, is the highlight of the movie as Trinity, Morpheus, and the “Keymaker” escape in a Cadillac CTS on a busy freeway all while being shot and chased by Agents and The Twins who were so hyped and so underutilized you wonder why the parts were even written. As with everything else in the movie these new characters, including the lovely Persephone, bring the film to the least common multiple rather than raising it up to the intellectual superiority of the first film.

Reloaded never really comes into its own for the entire length of the movie. You feel as though you are being stringed along with more and more eye candy to a climatic ending but it never happens because that “climax” will supposedly happen in the third film, thereby taking even more money from the public who went into the movie with such high expectations.

Without the drool-drenched special effects the film stumbles on it’s own two feet as the story becomes so clouded from that of the first film. Maybe a desire to cater to a new audience, or a new found sense of freedom after the success of the first film caused the Wachowski brothers to craft this entry in a different light. Maybe Reloaded is simply a bridge to a much bigger, and better, story that we will see see in Revolutions this fall. Let’s just hope the last chapter in the series is able to rekindle the fire of the first.

Comic book movies are a rather quirky device in Hollywood, because no matter how bad the adaptation is, and no matter how awful the acting, plot, direction, etc. are studios will still make millions of dollars from the die hard fans who have waited decades to see their favorite superheroes on screen for the first time. Enter the curiously named X2: X-Men United as it debuts hot off the heals of Spider-Man’s record breaking opening and following the mediocre showing of Ben Affleck’s dark, yet lacking, Daredevil.

Director Bryan Singer should have a statue at Marvel Studios for what he has done with this series. Bringing the comic book to life with such attention to detail should be inspiring for any director looking to make hordes of fan-boys happy. Singer’s direction is a shinning point burns just a bit brighter than the stellar performances by Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Alan Cumming’s amazingly accurate depiction of Nightcrawler. Singer may have had a leg up on older directors who might of found it hard to go back to a comic book and learn about these characters enough not to be disemboweled by fans after the first screening. Where X-Men set up the stage, X2 brings down the house.

X2 skips all of the mandatory introduction of characters and gets right into the action. After a similar opening title sequence to the first movie, we are thrust right into nearly two hours of violent mutant fighting that had everyone on the edge of their seats and clapping each time Wolverine skewered a soldier with his claws. The movie opens with Nightcrawler attacking the President in the oval office of the White House. Through some amazing special effects the stunt and motion capturing work comes to life with a familiar “BAMF!”

X2 is actually an adaptation of the X-Men graphic novel “God Loves, Man Kills” which was re-released earlier this year in preparation of the movie’s debut. The story focuses on William Stryker (Brian Cox) a military veteran who calls upon the President to authorize an infiltration into Professor Charles Xavier’s School for the Gifted. Here one of the film’s best action sequences takes place as Wolverine battles dozens of commandos who take orders from the very man who could hold the key to his past. Although the attack on the school is not Stryker’s motive, he wants cerebro, or pieces of it, for a master plan to wipe out every last mutant on the face of the planet.

As mentioned before Alan Cumming and Hugh Jackman’s performances are amazing, they take the characters of Nightcrawler and Wolverine, respectably, to new heights as the drawings come to life with indiscriminate accuracy. The entire cast from X-Men is back to reprise their roles, for the most part. Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford) are served up more screen time than in the first movie while Rogue (Anna Paquin), a staple in the first film, is reduced to somewhat of a bit character role. Storm appears on screen with a new wig and minus the annoying accent from the first film, no doubt in part of Halle Berry’s new found ego at the hands of the Academy. Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), although key to the story, plays a smaller role than the first film while Mystique’s (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) screen time is nearly doubled. Cyclops (James Marsden) and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) are also sent to the back while the story mainly focuses on Wolverine’s quest to learn about his past and Jean Grey’s (Famke Janssen) internal struggle with her increasing power. Several other X-Men make cameo appearances. Colossus, Kitty Pryde, and a few others I won’t mention liven things up a bit and set up a number of characters to appear in a shoe-in sequel.

With such an large cast you may think it would be confusing to keep track of them all but for fans of the series you should have no trouble. Although with so many characters and such a wide range of specific powers the script does pigeon hole some of the action sequences to take advantage of a specific mutant’s powers. “We have six kids stuck in a hole and we don’t have a key, who can teleport them to safety?” Stuff like that proceeds through most of the film but it hardly detracts from anything because you want to see these characters use their powers. The film also suffers from a somewhat lack of plot, but you aren’t going to see this for a deep emotional triumph over adversity, you are seeing it to watch mutants with kick-ass powers kick some ass, and you get what you paid for.

X2 is based on the X-Men comic book, but takes a much more violent and darker role along the lines of Daredevil as opposed to Sony’s Spider-Man. Several reports even indicated the film carried an R rating through the first couple of cuts until a few scenes were shortened.

Regardless of your quips on the lack of plot or convenient devices that further that paper-thin plot X2 serves just what you want to see. Lots of cool mutants that you grew up with, on the big screen, and killer special effects realistic enough to make you believe your graphic novel has taken a new home. I know a sequel is in the cards, I just hope it is sooner rather than later, three years is a long time to see a certain character “reborn.”

House of 1,000 Corpse’s troubled past to be released is much like the plot of this movie, jumbled up into a mix that would take a highly skilled scientist to untwine. First Universal came to the table and agreed to release the film, but after seeing and monstrous amount of gore the movie presented they shelved the project fearing the dreaded NC-17 rating which basically tanks your film at the box office without even releasing it.

Next MGM took to the plate, but they bailed out after seeing nearly all of their 2002 movies suck badly at making money, all highlighted by the headliner of crap, Rollerball. MGM also feared the gore and the press surrounding the movie, so they too shelved the film in favor of some more crap. Finally, House was picked up by Lion’s Gate, a group known for releasing films that are usually too risqué for a traditional studio to release, or too surrounded in hype to avoid the free press that would entail such a high profile release.

House of 1,000 Corpses is Rob Zombie’s directorial debut. For those unfamiliar with the artists, Zombie is probably best known for his work in White Zombie before going solo with a string of hit CDs in the likes of Hellbilly Deluxe and American Made Music to Strip By. Sadly, where Rob Zombie’s music comes off as inspired works of art, his first movies falls into mediocrity very, very quickly.

House seems to want to do so much in so little time, and it does all of this without a streamlined plot, or enough believable characters to make you want to even care about them. The plot shapes up as a standard horror fare. Four twentysomethings on a cross country road trip stop off at a hilarious gas station where the proprietor, Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) makes money by selling gas, fried chicken, and taking the interested on a tour of serial killers. While most of the characters lack any sort of dimension, Spaulding is a shining point in the movie. The comic relief that he provides gives the movie a step up from the horror flicks of the 1970s, something Corpses is trying to pay homage to.

When the kids learn about the mystery of Doctor Satan, they set out on a trek to locate the tree where he was hanged and disappeared long ago. Since things never turn-out as planned, they experience car “trouble” and are captured by the most unusual family who celebrate Halloween Eve in the most bizarre ways. Mainly killing cheerleaders and and singing Betty Boop.

As much infused originality in this picture, it is a real shame that you never get the sense it is taking you anywhere. Between scenes you have transition effects that center around one character or are just a twisted jumble of old film clips satirized with different colors, or some of the more freakish characters dancing or murdering people in unusual ways. Every one of these transitions throws the flow of the movie out of sync to the point where you believe you are just watching short clips of a much bigger show. Even with these clips in place the movie only rolls in at 88 minutes. Take them out and your hovering at just over an hour in running time.

Still, as mentioned before, you never latch on to any of the characters, and why would you considering they are nothing more than canon fodder anyway. Yet the genuinely cool imagery and imagination give way to the lack of any plot and 2D characters. Rob Zombie has a gift for making throwbacks to the 1970s cult horror films that inspire the works of directors and writers today, but next time he might want to include something for the audience to follow, and someone for them to feel for.

You know a movie has it’s problems when the best, and most believable, character is only on screen for a mere 20 seconds at the very end. Not to say that any of the characters in Phone Booth are believable adaptations of a real life person, but the Caller (Kiefer Sutherland) is by far the best representation in the entire movie, and many patrons might miss that. Also a notable performance comes from Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of Capt. Ramey.

Phone Booth, itself, is teetering on the side of a short, mediocre film, and a tense, stressful flick that has you anticipating what happens next. I would love to tell you what happens next, but what happened in my brain during the movie, wasn’t the same that was projected on the screen in front of me. The balancing act comes from a movie that gives you everything, and nothing at the same time. You are shown the inner workings of a troubled P.R. associate, but did you really want to know him in the first place?

Phone Booth suffers from not having any characters you want to connect with, even if you were given the chance. Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell) is suppose to be the “good” guy in this movie, but you just assume let the Caller pick him off after hearing him talk for ten seconds. He is the personification of everything you hate in a person. A lying, cheating, cell phone talking, obnoxious fool whom you just assume hit with your Volvo, than have to watch on film for 81 minutes.

As you might have guessed, Phone Booth places Stu in one of the remaining free standing phone booths in New York City and traps him inside when a sniper sets his sights on Stu because of his boisterous activities of invisible infidelity and lack of honesty to his wife (Rahda Mitchell), and his would-be-mistress (Katie Holmes). After picking up the phone, he is unable to hang up, or he will be shot. The highlight of the movie comes when a group of self-proclaimed “escorts” try to pry Stu out of the phone booth so they can “return a call.” This added bit of comedy is a refreshing blast in the beginning of the movie that trails off into mellow-drama towards the end.

The part if found most annoying was the cinematography which appears to have been done by a raccoon with a camera. Director Joel Schumacher (Bad Company) may seem as though he has lifted the split screen technique from FOX TV show “24,” but careful analysis proves that the flick was filmed almost a year before that show debuted, yet, moviegoers who see it now will scream “rip-off” as I did before checking the filming dates. When the the screen isn’t being split into fragments, or being superimposed with other images, you are treated to some of the most jerky camera movements known to man, almost as bad as the miniDV work in Narc that left me reaching for a bucket to wharf in.

Still even with its problems, Phone Booth does come out as an enjoyable, albeit short, film that does have it’s share of tense moments. As previously stated, Kiefer Sutherlands deadpan, dry voice is the highlight of the movie, even though you don’t get to see him for a majority of the film. While Phone Booth may bring Joel Schumacher’s credibility back up a notch, the rest of the cast stands to gain, nor lose, anything by participating in this film.

Mindless fun seems to be the only way to get people into the theaters this year, so far at least, but the trend seems like it will continue this summer where the plot will be as thin as a hair, and plot points will be tied together with seemingly impossible outcomes, but none more improbable, nor mindless than The Core.

And if you take me previous statement into regard as me bashing this new movie from Paramount, don’t, because I had an excellent time watching this flick, even with it’s blatantly obvious holes, and changing scientific notions.

The Core primarily suffers from what will be forever known as the “Armageddon Syndrome” where the film makers take a two hour movie and cram as many traumatic events and problems as they can think of sitting on the toilet and then confine the characters to jump from problem to problem and overcome them. Armageddon featured the space shuttle crashing, the drill locking up, the bomb activating, etc. and The Core doesn’t stray too far away from this formula as characters are numbered for their death order, and when all is said and done everyone learns a lesson.

The Core has a team of six burrowing deep within the earth to reach, you guessed it, the core. It seems as though a secret government project developed by Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci) has stopped the rotation of the earth’s core, breaking up the magnetic field that protects us from the sun’s solar radiation, and controls the environmental variables in the sky, in essence, without the core, the earth will be dead in a year. So the United States (as always stepping in for the world) finances a ship, the Virgil, developed by Dr. Edward Brazleton (Delroy Lindo) to careen to the center of the earth and detonate a nuclear bomb. In theory this will restart the earth’s core, and all will be saved. If it were only that easy.

Along for the ride is Col. Robert Iverson (Bruce Greenwood) and Major Rebecca “Beck” Childs (Hilary Swank) who just recently landed the space shuttle in the L.A. River in a shot that was supposedly under speculation to be cut after the Columbia disaster in February, only a few clips were reportedly cut from the final print of the film. Also on board is Sergei Levenque (Tcheky Karyo, who can’t seem to survive any movie he is in) as the ship’s weapons specialist, and the hero of the movie, Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) who discovered the planet’s problem.

The money shots come in the form of some spectacular CG work. Two notable, and highly publicized, parts are the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the destruction of the Roman Coliseum. These shots undoubtfully took a lot of man hours to produce and it shows, especially the bridge being destroyed.

The Core’s biggest problem is the fact that the science just doesn’t stay constant through the entire movie, if you can even call it science. There are times that had me wondering why they did something, after stating it was impossible, and other times you wonder if the writers had any common sense at all.

The surprising aspect of this movie is how closely it mirrors Armageddon. The Bruce Willis actioner had drilling, space shuttles being destroyed, a nuclear bomb, crystals, and a foreigner who saves the mission. The Core has every one of these, and if you watched the two movies in parallel you would find an amazing amount of nuances that resemble each other. Not to say, once again, that copying a good popcorn flick is a bad idea, you just usually have to give it a few more years before people are able to forget the first one.

The Core does stand out as a decent movie, when I ultimately thought I was walking into a bomb. Even with the forgivable plot holes, uninspired characters, and bad luck event after bad luck event, you really like this movie at the end, especially when watching a very well done credit sequence.

This movie won’t make you think anymore than it does to sort through your ancient collection of Pogs, but it will give you a two hour, explosion filled thrill ride that will keep you entertained and waiting for a big, bad DVD release.

For a movie with so much plot, Dreamcatcher fails to provide any substance to any of the movie’s characters to make anything meaningful or heartfelt. Imagine a gallon jug of water filled up to the brim. This would be a movie with so much plot, it is almost too much, but you know a lot about each of the characters, you know how they feel, why they feel what they feel, and you know why they do things they do. Now image a gallon of water poured into an empty swimming pool, this is how watching Dreamcatcher feels. From time to time you might get wet, but it is nothing more than a puddle at your feet.

I’m reviewing this movie without having read Stephen King’s best selling novel of the same name, but I can only hope that the book is much, much better than the movie, or Mr. King should seriously think about retiring earlier than planned.

Dreamcatcher centers around four friends who are always thinking of each other and share a gift given to them by a mentally handicapped boy, Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) whom they came to the rescue of when they were children. Now they can communicate telepathically, and see things that could happen, as well as pinpointing car keys, interstates, and lost little girls. Hell they even get to have Johnny Smith-like visions a la The Dead Zone. Henry (Thomas Jane), Pete (Timothy Olyphant), Jonesy (Damian Lewis), and Beaver (Jason Lee) make their annual trip to a cabin where they have been coming for 20 years, but when a couple of strangers show up it takes each of them to try and use their gifts and get out of a bad situation alive while an elite combat team attempts to contain a crashed alien spaceship.

The biggest problem with Dreamcatcher is it doesn’t feel original. Previous Stephen King movies have had original thoughts and ideas that gave you something new when you stepped into the theatre. Dreamcatcher feels like a rehash of King’s previous work, namely The Dead Zone, and an added aliens-taking-over-the-world storyline ripped from Signs and Aliens. They even go as far as naming a skin rash caused by this invasion “The Ripley.”

Hollywood must have this thing about not having interesting characters in films anymore, because two of the best, more realistic characters are dealt away with as nothing more than sentimental plot devices, while the third, Owen Underhill (Tom Sizemore) is so drastically underdeveloped he appears as fast as he disappears from the movie.

Dreamcatcher turns into a race to see how many character’s storylines we can throw on to the screen and let the audience un-jumble them before a frightfully anti-climatic climax where nothing is explained and the movie ends. There are a few cool points. The visualization of the “memory warehouse” is nice, and gives you some insight into how your memory can work for, or against, you given the situation. But even this cool visualization, the movie still fails to impress on a higher level.

Somewhere I can see the screenwriter adapting this from King’s novel and thinking that he can easily cram hundreds of pages into a two hour movie that loses it’s wheels in the first half, and completely rusts over in the second as you are left wondering just what in the hell is going on. The entire relationship between troubled commander Abraham Kurtz (Morgan Freeman) and Sizemore’s Underhill is barely touched upon, as well as their pasts, and apart from a few fleeting lines about Underhill’s father, you get absolutely no justification for his actions in the movie.

I could go on, but it would prove useless because I’m trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but Dreamcatcher is nothing but a semi-funny, semi-horror movie that mixes fart gags with big grey aliens and expects us to fill in the blanks for most of the characters. Unexpected, to the audience, these blanks are the size of a Hummer. And unlike a Hummer being filled on the inside with all the amenities you could want while driving, Dreamcatcher is empty with no viable incentives for purchasing, or watching ever again.

The general notion in Hollywood is if you make someone look different than you, it is okay to kill them, or if you make them do bad things, you have all the right to slaughter them uncontrollably. Tears of the Sun plays by both of these rules as the movie starts off on what could be the quickest ending war film in the history of the world, and then takes a trip off the deep end after some “feeling” was interjected into the plot.

The craziest thing about this movie is the enemy. All the director had to do was get a bunch of guys together, slap some berets he undoubtfully bought in bulk at  Monica Lewinsky’s garage sale and gave them guns. Viola, instant, hardcore killing machines chasing our beloved group of refugees and US military personnel through the rain forests of Nigeria.

The movie goes like this. Lt. A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis) leads a group of the elite who are running incursion missions into a mythical ethnic war happening in Nigeria. Since it seems the crazy guys in power don’t like anyone who isn’t of the same faith and/or color as them, an army is sent out around the country to do some ethnic cleansing which leads Waters in to his mission. He is sent in by his Captain (Tom Skerritt) into enemy territory to rescue Dr. Lena Hendricks (Monica Belluci) who spends her free time helping injured people and galloping around in tight fitting tank tops. Through a series of events that will make the viewer cringe in disbelief at just how gullible the United States armed forces can be, Waters agrees to escort a number of refugees to the border with Cameroon even while a large detachment of “evil” beret forces are tailing them.

You really want to go into those movie with high expectations after seeing previous attempts like Behind Enemy Lines and the excellent Black Hawk Down, but you never are able to bring yourself to truly enjoy the movie because it is all based on a stupid decision. If this were the real military, Waters would be discharged so fast the stubble on his face would burn off, but this isn’t the real military, and the entire film sets up for the money shot at the end with a huge explosion you have seen in the trailers.

The biggest hurdle for me was to actually have a sense of conflict. This is the same feeling I had in Black Hawk Down because the enemy is just a faceless group of people who do bad things. The overall conflict is there, and the internal conflict Waters has with himself about his decision just isn’t enough to give the movie any excitement. Truth be told, this is one of the least action packed war movies you will ever see. You may be surprised how many times you check your watch.

It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy the movie, which I did, it just has some glaring problems that bring it to its knees when compared to other movies of the same genre with a much better script and much more developed characters. Of Waters entire team I can remember one persons name, and the rest were just canon fodder.

You find that Hollywood’s attempt to add feeling into a gritty, overly-violent war movie just doesn’t seem to work because of the conflicting emotions. Waters is trying to do a good thing and save people, and members of his team are slitting the throats of Nigerian Rebels. If this is Hollywood’s ideal of feeling the emotional torment our soldiers in uniform have to go through behind enemy lines, then I feel as though I’m going to be sick. See Tears of the Sun to get a glimpse at classic Willis a la Die Hard, but then rent Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down or John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines and see a war movie done right.