Old franchises never die. They just get rebooted, re-imagined, re-cast or re-”Bourne.”

Matt Damon’s first two “Bourne” adventures were a breath of fresh air for a stale action genre, even if they helped bring the Shaky Cam Era into the 21st century. But that third installment, 2007’s “The Bourne Ultimatum,” made it clear the franchise needed to end.

Nuthin’ doing. Hollywood simply found a new actor to take over.

Jeremy Renner,  the steely presence in “The Town” and “The Hurt Locker,” officially becomes the face of the franchise in this summer’s “The Bourne Legacy.”

No Damon, no worries if this clip is any indication. But we’re still looking for a reason to keep the franchise alive.

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The latest “Mission: Impossible” film, an enormous piece of product said to have consumed some $140-million on its way to an IMAX pleasure dome near you, has one idea, and you already know it. The idea is: Run for your life!

In “Ghost Protocol,” the fourth installment of this 15-year-old franchise, Tom Cruise—short of hits in the five years since the last film in the series—returns as Ethan Hunt, star agent of the Impossible Mission Force, that U.S. government espionage squad dedicated to squashing colorful malefactors in picturesque locations around the world.

This time out, Hunt has a new team: brainy-hot Agent Jane Carter (Paula Patton, smart choice); displaced intel analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, over-qualified for this sort of exercise); and, also back again, tech wiz and comic-relief specialist Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Their target: nuclear terrorist Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist, of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” movies), whose rather Bondian ambition is to destroy the world and then rebuild it into a new, improved, presumably more Hendricks-centric society.

The story begins inauspiciously. Hunt is confined in a Moscow prison, for reasons we don’t learn till much later. Carter and Dunn bust him out, and they all set off in search of the nuclear launch codes that are a key component of Hendricks’ scheme.

Read the full review at Reason.com

In the aftermath of the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group’s successful raid to take out Osama Bin Laden last week, I feel privileged to be covering the only film festival in the world to feature films about the military. The Washington D.C. based G. I. Film Festival runs from today through Sunday, May 16 at both the U.S. Navy Memorial at 701 Pennsylvania Ave and the nearby Canadian Embassy. In five short years this outstanding collection of films about the American military experience has became the quality venue for films portraying our troops in a positive light. The festival features everything from combat intense dramas, to personal stories of military families, feature documentaries and shorts to historical epics. This year’s Wounded Warrior night film is the exciting medieval themed epic Ironclad about the brutal aftermath of the signing of the Magna Carta. Through the generosity of corporate sponsors, wounded service men from Walter Reed Army Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital will be hosted by the festival for that evening.

Various Hollywood professionals who support the military like actors Robert Duvall Jeremy Renner, Kelsey Grammer, Rick Schroeder, Glenn Close and JAG’s Karri Turner, as well as directors and producers like Ron Maxwell and Lou Reda, are often in attendance. CSI: New York and Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan,  Academy Award-nominated Gary Sinise, will host a reception for Congressional members who have served, or who are currently serving in the U.S. Military. With veterans on both he and his wife’s side of their families, Sinise has been an active supporter of the festival since its inception, as he has of so many other pro-military causes. This year actor William Devane will premiere the drama Flag of My Father at the festival’s Hollywood Patriots Night and a salute to International Warriors will host military films from several other countries.

Last year at I wrote a piece for Big Hollywood highly critical of box-office and morale-killing Hollywood military films like The Green Zone that have dominated movie screens. Well, the G.I. Film Festival has been out front in the battle for positive depictions of the military since it started back in 2007. Festival creators, husband and wife Brandon Millett and Major Laura Law-Millett, first created the festival to combat the continuing inaccurate and negative stereotypes that Hollywood has so often fostered about the United States Armed Forces. In an interview with the Washington Post during the launch of the first G.I. Film Festival, Major Law offered up that, “In movie after movie all you see then was soldiers raping and killing. We want to show something more positive.”

Her husband Brandon emphasized that, “We wanted to do something to focus public attention on the courage and selflessness of the American soldiers.”

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Joining the family business – whether following in a parent’s footsteps as a doctor, lawyer, plumber or tow-truck driver – is a frequent American tradition. But for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of men in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, the family business is robbing banks.

The FBI has singled out Charlestown and its one-square-mile radius as the area of America that has produced more bank robbers than any other place in the nation. And in his new movie “The Town,” Ben Affleck plays Doug MacRay, who leads a gang of thieves even as his conscience gnaws at him and makes him want to walk away from the thug life. Yet, it’s the only life he knows, since his father (played by Chris Cooper in a harrowing one-scene cameo) is rotting in prison on five life sentences for crossing the line by killing a guard on one of his own robberies.

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Seeing his father waste away and watching his best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) walk ever closer to the edge of killing innocent victims himself, Affleck is working up the nerve to get out once and for all when Jem takes a young bank executive named Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage amid the film’s opening heist. The gang later learns she lives smack in the middle of their neighborhood and fear that she might recognize them, so Doug volunteers to test a meeting with her and see if their masks were effective.

Seeing her shaken by the traumatic aftereffects of the robbery, and realizing she doesn’t know he was involved, Doug starts to hang out with her out of genuine interest and soon falls for her. Dreaming of finally having someone to run away with, Doug is ready to make his stand – until twist after twist after twist start to unfold and unravel his best intentions.

Coming within a month of the wildly entertaining “Takers” and the brutally realistic French double-feature gangster epic “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” and “Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One,” it’s easy to think that “The Town” is just another product of the Hollywood assembly line. Yet as good as the other three heist films are, “The Town” has far greater ambitions and, with Affleck at the helm as director and co-writer, it achieves every one of them. (more…)

The Hurt Locker is not about Iraq, why we went there, what we did when we got there, or whether we should have gone in the first place. It is not about American foreign policy or domestic disagreement over that policy; it’s not even about soldiers or their qualities or character …  it’s not about politics at all.

The Hurt Locker is about an adrenaline junkie who gets off defusing bombs.

Sgt. Will James is very good at this narrow work. He is occasionally a fool who takes unnecessary chances. Far more often he is an expert who enjoys that his wisely bold tactics occasionally make him appear a fool—because a fool’s luck has nothing to do with his success. Early in the picture and after much prodding, Sgt. James admits to a superior officer that he has defused “873 bombs, counting today.” (more…)

Katherine Bigelow’s direction of “The Hurt Locker” is masterful and might very well place her back where she belongs, at the top of anyone’s list looking for a top-shelf action director. But that’s not enough to save the film from episodic plotting, jarring and unnecessary political statements, a troubling depiction of our troops and an even worse portrayal of the Iraqi people. This is a movie you want to like, but an unsettling after-taste lingers long after the thrill of the set-pieces fades.

Produced and scripted by Mark Boal (who embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad operating in Baghdad), the year is 2004 and Iraq is a country under siege, thanks mainly to determined insurgents and roadside IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that seem to be everywhere and frequently come with nearby triggermen lying in wait for the opportunity to do the most amount of damage, preferably to American servicemen and women.  Charged with the dangerous and technically complicated job of defusing these bombs is a three-man EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team led by Staff Sergeant James (an excellent Jeremy Renner) and his squad mates Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). (more…)

I jumped at the opportunity to join “The Hurt Locker” press junket. The film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow (“Point Break,” “Strange Days,” “Blue Steel”), has been a favorite of mine since catching a 3 a.m. Cinemax screening of “Near Dark” some twenty-five years ago. No director — not the Scott brothers, not Michael Bay or even Clint Eastwood understand or are able to get inside the skin of driven men of action like Bigelow. This makes even her rare misstep like “K:19 The Widowmaker” much more watchable than it deserves to be (actually, I watch it all the time).

The junkets are simple. You sit in a hotel room with other writers and one by one the film’s participants stop by for a few minutes. So, in no particular order, as a group we had the chance to interview Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal (“In the Valley of Elah”), who researched the film in Iraq, and actors Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty.

All were charming and personable to be sure, but whenever politics or previous Iraq War films came up, things would get a little tense and surreal as each responded by assuring us they weren’t worried because “Hurt Locker” wasn’t at all political. Again and again, the film was described as a straight-forward war picture that just happened to be set in Iraq. (more…)

For those who’ve agonized over Hollywood’s portrayals of the Iraq War, I give you “The Hurt Locker.”

The film’s second trailer hit the Internet today and, as I sit here wearing my (apparently passe) Camp Liberty t-shirt, I must say it looks pretty good.

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YouTube "Hurt Locker" trailer 2  

Billed as the “first non-political Iraq War film,” “Hurt Locker” follows the story of Staff Sergeant William James, a maverick bomb removal expert who leads a team trying to save lives – including their own.

It was directed by Kathryn Bigalow, who is herself something of a maverick.

Bigalow has made her name in Hollywood as one of the only female directors of action films. Her credits include “K19: The Widowmaker,” “Point Break” and “Strange Days.” (more…)