Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Flint Lockwood has been obsessed with science and inventing since grade school. He lives on an isolated island that has long since lost its vitality when the sardine trade, its major industry, went under. But Flint has a plan that could change all that, with the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator, or, as Flint puts it, FLD SM DFR (flid sim difur) for short. It turns water into food.

The invention accidentally rockets into the stratosphere, where it remains fixed over the island, soaking up the plentiful water from passing clouds. Soon hamburgers begin to fall from the sky, complete with all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame-seed bun. And that’s just the beginning. At first it’s manna—or at least Big Macs—from heaven, but things quickly spiral out of hand. The town’s ambitious mayor starts living large in more ways than one and turns the town into an all-you-can-eat cruise ship buffet.

Coraline Jones is a lonely little girl. She has just moved into a creepy old house, has no real friends, and her parents are so preoccupied with their work on a gardening catalog that they have no time for her. But she soon discovers a small, papered-over doorway in the living room. It leads to another universe—similar to her own but different in important ways. Her “other” parents in that universe are devoted to satisfying her every whim. Her only new friend there doesn’t talk much (actually, not at all), the neighbors who share the old, subdivided house are fascinating rather than merely eccentric, and everything is colorful and fun.

All is not what it seems. Coraline is, at its core, a bloodless horror story. Much like the recent computer-animated film 9 (the first post-apocalyptic sock-puppet movie, and another dynamite audio/video transfer), it gets under your skin in ways that animated fare rarely does and could seriously frighten young children. It also uses stop-motion animation as refined by stop-motion expert Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Monkeybone, James and the Giant Peach).

Sent to the Bolivian jungle on a search-and-destroy mission, members of an elite Special Forces unit now find themselves the target of a deadly double-cross instigated by Max (Jason Patric), a ruthless man hell-bent on embroiling the world in a new high-tech global war for his own benefit. The team must work deep undercover to clear their name and even the score with the evil megalomaniac.

As long as you check your brain at the door, The Losers provides a lot of entertainment, laughter, and adventure. It's based on a DC comic series, and while the plot is hardly original, the cast members never take things too seriously and seem to be enjoying themselves. Furthermore, the movie depicts a lot of violent action, but it doesn't spatter brain matter all over the screen, and I applaud the director's choice to aim for the PG-13 rating. I wouldn't call this a family-friendly picture, but it's not nearly has graphic as it could have been.

Movies: 4/5 Video: 4/5
Audio: 4/5
Extras: 4/5

Movies: 3/5 Video: 3.5/5
Audio: 3/5
Extras: 2.5/5

Movies: 3.5/5 Video: 4.5/5
Audio: 4/5
Extras: 2/5