Best films on the box: July 14-20

Film and television critic Philip Wakefield assesses the best movies on offer on the box this week, for Tuesday, July 14 to Monday, July 20.

Tuesday, July 14

Ocean's Twelve
2004, AO, 8.30pm, TV2
George Clooney, Brad Pitt and the rest of the gang get back together to rip off the Faberge Egg so they can pay back the casino tycoon (Andy Garcia) they ripped off in the original. Unfortunately, it’s Ocean’s Eleven fans who are ripped off the most: what began as an expedient rewrite of a John Woo thriller winds up so smug, lightweight and self-indulgently Hollywood that it’s hard to view as anything other than a vanity vehicle for its elite stars and director.

Wednesday, July 15

The Karate Kid, Part III
1989, PGR, 8.30pm, C4
Once again, the bumptious do-gooding underdog has all the odds stacked against him when an old foe seeks revenge. It’s more violent than its predecessors but the kidult heroics are just as tepid. John G Avildsen again directs Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita.

Thursday, July 16

Bad Boys II
1995, AO, 8.30pm, Prime
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reunite as Miami vice-versa cops in a noisy, nasty sequel that drips with as much blood as it does production values. It was made eight years after the original and tries to make up for lost time by cranking up the violence, profanity and mean-spirited hi-jinks. What passes for a plot has the odd-couple heroes cracking numbskull banter while nonchalantly cracking bad guys’ skulls in-between dodging bullets, car crashes and crime bosses.

Friday, July 17

I Am Legend
2007, AO, 8.30pm, Sky Movies
I Am Legend is based on a 1954 sci-fi yarn that’s been filmed twice, the last time in 1971 as The Omega Man. It stars Will Smith as a military virologist who’s seemingly the last man left alive after a virus reduces the human race to a handful of walking-dead survivors. Can he cure them before they kill him? Flawed but thrilling and thought provoking. Frances Lawrence (Constantine) directs.

Saturday, July 18

Spanglish
2004, AO, 8.30pm, TV One
Smartly cast and occasionally telling but in revisiting the mother-daughter dilemmas of his Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment, writer/director James L Brooks mangles Spanglish’s culture-clash premise with hollow characters and glib righteousness. About a Hispanic housekeeper’s battle to retain her identity in a dysfunctional LA household, it predictably presents Paz Vega’s Mexican solo mum as beautiful and honourable, Tea Leoni’s career woman as high-strung and neurotic, and Adam Sandler’s doormat dad of a chef as too sensitive and well intentioned for his own good.

Paycheck
2003,AO, 8.30pm, TV2
Ben Affleck plays a "reverse engineer" who hijacks hi-tech by deconstructing and improving upon other people's bright ideas. It's lucrative corporate skulduggery with a catch, however: his memory is "wiped" clean of each theft to protect his employer’s new intellectual property. But not before his last top-secret assignment lets him see the future - and the fact he doesn't have one ... unless he can deconstruct a conspiracy to kill him. It’s an ingenious gimmick that’s cleverly executed with an inspired payoff. John Woo directs, Aaron Eckhart and Uma Thurman co-star.

Apollo 13
1995, AO, 8.30pm, TV3
Tense, exciting yet gracefully heroic account of how three astronauts barely survived a mission to the moon when their rocket proved not to be made of the right stuff. Apollo 13 doesn’t just movingly dramatise their ordeal – it’s also a pointed attack on how quickly the space programme became yesterday’s news. Tautly told, leavened with humour and largely unsentimental, this Oscar-nominee keeps you on the edge of your seat even though you already know the outcome. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon star; Ron Howard directs.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico
2003, AO, 11pm, TV2
Robert Rodriguez rounds up his Desperado gang for a B-grade sequel with an A-list cast and an alphabet soup plot. He shot Mexico as the fourth film in the Desperado series by including flashbacks to a non-existent Desperado 3. Confused? Wait until you try understanding the convoluted, south of the border-drug cartel-military coup-rogue Uncle Sam shenanigans. They unspool as a surreal, kaleidoscopic romp that becomes increasingly cartoon-ish and repellent.

In the Shadow of the Moon
2007, G, 11.05pm, TV3
Nasa nut Ron Howard (Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon) presents an award-winning British tribute to the moonwalkers whose contributions to space exploration have been overshadowed by the Challenger missions. As one of the surviving Apollo astronauts says, “My father was born shortly after the Wright brothers. He could barely believe I went to the moon. But my son was five and he didn’t think it was any big deal.” He will after watching this.

Arlington Road
1999, AO, 11.10pm, TV One
An obsessed Washington DC lecturer in American terrorism (Jeff Bridges) finds the enemy-within literally at his gate when apple-pie couple Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack move next door. Or is he merely suffering paranoid delusions, due in part to the death of his FBI agent wife in a botched shoot-out with suspected terrorists years earlier? Arlington Road is a persuasive, clever cat-and-mouse thriller that quietly builds to a shocking climax few will see coming until a split second before the inevitable.

Sunday, July 19

Adrift
2006, AO, 9.30pm, TV2
This sequel to Open Water also was inspired by a true story, about six friends who find themselves stranded in the deep and unable to clamber back on to their luxury yacht, complete with baby on board. Grey’s Anatomy’s Eric Dane, Jericho’s Richard Speight Jun and Cameron Richardson, who soon will be seen in C4’s Harper’s Island, star.

Gothika
2003, AO, 11.30pm, TV2
Babylon AD director Mathieu Kassovitz’s supernatural thriller entertains with unsettling, old-fashioned finesse, even if it does push plausibility beyond the pale. Halle Berry plays a criminal psychologist who sees dead people after winding up an inmate in the ward where she works, with no memory of her alleged crime: dismembering her husband. Robert Downey Jun co-stars.

Monday, July 20

Shooter
2007, AO, 8.30pm, TV3
Mark Wahlberg plays an ex-Marine "shooter" who’s lured back into service to serve his country by thwarting an assassination of the President only to find he’s the patsy. Director Antoine Fuqua (Tears of the Sun, Training Day) can’t stop Shooter from self-destructing in an overkill of violence, improbability and Bush-bashing but it’s worth sighting for its exceptional action sequences and location work.

- © Fairfax NZ News