July

Beat the July heat with the many sequels that are coming out this month!

Even before taking his powers into consideration, Ant-Man is the little guy in the Avengers crew. He's not a trained soldier, he's not a king, he's not a billionaire, he's not a being whose power comes from alien technology. He's just a low-level thief, but he's got a lot of heart and that's why the creator of the shrinking suit, Michael Douglas as Hank Pym, gave it to him in the first film. After causing minor trouble in the first one and big trouble in Captain America: Civil War, he has been ordered to lay low. Of course this doesn't last long and he needs help. That help comes in the form of old acquaintances and Pym's daughter, who dons another suit to make them Ant-Man and The Wasp. In the first we heard of this quantum realm, a dimension you risk entering and never returning when you mess with the powers of the shrinking technology. We find out that Pym's wife has been trapped there and a being known as Ghost has escaped and has powers that let her walk through walls. Can shrinking and flying and utilizing an army of ants help stop a ghost? Well, I can't wait to find out.

It's hard to tell if The Purge series always has political aspirations or if it just fell into that field and rolled with it. The latter makes the most sense and it worked out pretty well as Purge: Election Year was a big enough hit warrant a new Purge movie. The first two showed a world where people took the streets on Purge Night, the one night a year where crime is legal, and wreaked havoc on the less fortunate. The 3rd made it pretty clear that the purge was a way for the rich to rid the world of those they saw as less-than and the hero from the 2^nd movie is now head of security for the one politician who intends to put an end to the cruelty. The First Purge is a prequel that posits the idea that The Purge was a psychological experiment that quickly got hijacked by the government as a political tool and will focus on the citizens who fight back. These movies are dark and violent and it's been an interesting ride seeing this horror series become an action series with a message about fighting the powers that be.

I can't say I'll be going out of my way to see Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, but I do appreciate the fact that they throw in some Dracula lore into this kids series. I'm still not convinced I've seen the first Hotel Transylvania but my wife swears we watched it. I can't tell you a thing about it, or the 2nd one for that matter but best I can tell it's just like any other Adam Sandler movie - an excuse to get him and his friends together and hang out while they make a movie. In this one the whole group of monsters from Transylvania board a ship for a cruise only to find out a descendant of famous vampire killer Van Helsing is on board as has plans for the ships undead and monstrous vacationers.

Dwayne Johnson is too physically big to just play a safety inspector, he has to be an ex-FBI, ex-soldier who lost his leg on a mission and is now a safety inspector. His newest task takes him to the world’s largest, most luxurious Skyscraper and he finds some problems with it. When terrorists kidnap his wife and kids and then set the building on fire and frame him, he's got even more problems. Now this is my kind of movie. It's a disaster movie, it's a Die Hard movie, it's a Dwayne Johnson movie. The director has done comedies up until this point (Easy A, Dodgeball: A true Underdog Story, Central Intelligence) and while Johnson's natural charisma can be humorous this does not look like a comedy at all, just an over the top action summer blockbuster.

Denzel Washington turns in a pretty great performance no matter what he appears in and fortunately for me, he seems to enjoy doing action movies and always delivers a charismatic and/or deep performance. In The Equalizer, he works at a home repair store but uses his skills as an ex-CIA assassin to protect those around him when trouble comes knocking. The Equalizer 2 (squandering an opportunity to call it Sequalizer) finds our hero working as an Uber driver and is again brought out of retirement when and old colleague is killed. In the first one we saw his skills, where he turns household items into tools of death, put to graphic use and I imagine we'll see more of that along with casual Denzel cool guy quips. After working in retail and then as a driver I’m curious what profession he will take up in the Threequalizer.

Iko Uwais should be the star of Mile 22, but he didn't have a hit song in the early 90's so he's not billed as high up as Mark Wahlberg. Uwais is an Indonesian actor and expert martial artist and while he did appear briefly in a Star Wars film, this will be his first big American movie. He plays a police officer with information that makes him a target, so Wahlberg and his team of super-secret agents are assigned to escort him to a location where he can be debriefed. Along the way is a lot of gunfire, car crashes and fist fights. Hopefully there's a lot of fist fights because Uwais fighting on screen is a thing to behold.

From its humble roots as a twisty noirish thriller to the action spectacle that it is today, the Mission: Impossible series has been on quite a journey. It's also been an interesting experiment as each film was directed by a different director.  Since the last one, subtitled Rogue Nation, worked so well the director has returned for the 6th entry, Mission: Impossible - Fallout. The title alludes to a nuclear subplot and to the fact that star Tom Cruise will probably fall out of many moving vehicles during the film’s run time. Cruise's Ethan Hunt has once again gone rogue and put his friends, series regulars Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, in danger but it's not just the bad guys after him. The C.I.A. has sent an assassin after Hunt, played by Superman himself Henry Cavill, it looks like these two will cause a lot of damage.

I haven't seen the Teen Titans Go! tv show but I know this movie refers back to a movie that never was: Superman Lives, which was to be directed by Tim Burton, written by Kevin Smith and starring Nicholas Cage back in the late 90's. Well, that movie never happened but in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, Nicholas Cage will finally portray Superman on screen, even if it's just a voice role it's still something. The film comes out at a time when DC is known for their bleak movies so it's nice to see Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest in a silly movie about a bunch of young superheroes who want to make it big in Hollywood but get derailed by bad guys.