Run All Night is good. Maybe I wouldn't be as warm to it if I hadn't seen a series of mediocre films as of late, but its high degree of all around baseline competence in dramatics and action made its formulaic story go down pretty dang easy. Its the kind of film you can watch with your middle-aged Dad. Its maybe even a little square, but it nails the fundamentals of its crime and vengeance story beats, and somebody reminded Liam Neeson that he's a great actor before he made this. Heck, the whole cast is a lot of fun in this, where everybody gets to play a sub-Lumet New York crime drama archetype and seems to relish it. It probably sounds like I'm damming this with faint praise, but there is praise there, and something to be said of low ambitions but having skill in meeting them.
Everly was one of those mediocre films, a movie that's reach waaaaaayy extends its grasp, but for the first two thirds its a lot of fun and even kind of novel. A single location action thriller, wherein sex-slave Salma Hayek keeps fending off waves of attackers from her spacious studio apartment sent by her Yakuza don owner. Hayek remains almost too beautiful to take seriously as a person, but she's more then fine here as the aggrieved ass kicker who keeps out thinking, out gunning, and out fighting all the thugs sent her way. Up until a particular shark jumping moment its mix of extreme violence, black humor, and script that seems adapted from a purile comic book (Mark Millar surprisingly had nothing to do with this) entertain, but once it stumbles it comes down hard, and just keeps shitting the bed until it runs out the clock on an already brief runtime. Its not all bad, but it sure ain't all good.
