JJ Perkins, Author at Critic Speak

Review: “Maleficent”

JJ Perkins — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 03:22:20 +0000

In sports, there is nothing as singularly saddening as watching a fiery and determined star athlete try to singlehandedly save a game—or a season—from the failings of the lackluster team around them. Kobe Bryant puts up 40-point games almost just to spite the mediocrity he has recently been forced to deal with; Tom Brady throws […]

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Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

JJ Perkins — Fri, 16 May 2014 22:53:31 +0000

One of the worst things a superhero movie can do is gobble up its running time with multiple under-realized plots, included to cram in as many odds and ends of the source material as possible, that scramble to amount to something substantial in the final minutes. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”—or “We Already Remade One Sam […]

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Review: “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”

JJ Perkins — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 03:29:06 +0000

Marvel Studios, under the direction of Kevin Feige, has discovered the ideal mold with which to make a superhero movie. Sure, things were rough in the beginning: While “Iron Man” was a rousing success, “The Incredible Hulk” and “Thor” were ambitious messes at best, and “Iron Man 2” was a very high-profile black mark on […]

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Review: “300: Rise of an Empire”

JJ Perkins — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 20:39:47 +0000

Would you like to see a sequel to a film that concluded with the vast majority of its principal cast ending up, rather unquestionably, as nourishment for fowl? Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures sure think so! The fact that there is a follow-up to “300,” the film that cemented Zack Snyder as the premiere director […]

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Everything you need to know about the R-rated version of “Anchorman 2”

JJ Perkins — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 19:44:24 +0000

With the re-release of “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” in a new “Super-Sized R-Rated Version” complete with “763 new jokes,” we at Critic Speak thought it would be appropriate to interview one of the film’s cast members and have them convince us why we should spend our hard-earned money to go see a film we […]

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Review: “The Lego Movie”

JJ Perkins — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 08:00:02 +0000

Can an advertisement be entertainment, or even classified as art? Consumers are likely to find ads of any form or length to be somewhere between innocuous and deserving of extreme cynicism, save for those precious television commercials that are interrupted by some dumb championship football game. It is widely believed that in an ideal world, […]

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Streaming Pick: “Man of Tai Chi”

JJ Perkins — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 20:15:20 +0000

Let’s not bury the lede here: Around the 57-minute mark of “Man of Tai Chi,” Keanu Reeves hisses like a dragon, mouth agape, straight into the camera, framed in close-up. If you can’t handle the intense lunacy of this moment, never add “Man of Tai Chi” to your Netflix list, never buy it on VOD, […]

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Streaming Pick: “The Hunt”

JJ Perkins — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 02:47:30 +0000

Mads Mikkelsen has made a career out of playing monsters. His two most prominent roles (especially to American audiences), the “Casino Royale” villain Le Chiffre and the titular character on NBC’s “Hannibal,” have offered Mikkelsen opportunities to play all sides of the sick and the ruthless. As Le Chiffre, Mikkelsen was presented with an opportunity […]

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Streaming Pick: “Drinking Buddies”

JJ Perkins — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 21:14:14 +0000

To exist is to crave companionship. From the earliest stages of our lives, we witness and are told explicitly and implicitly—by our parents, our neighbors, Disney films, television commercials—that to find a soul-mate, someone who you can share the whole of your being with, is what humanity has come to accept as the meaning of […]

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Streaming Pick: “Dredd” (2012)

JJ Perkins — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 07:57:55 +0000

Contemporary mainstream action cinema is hurting. From the redundant stunt-casting of “The Expendables” franchise to the thirty-years-too-late Cold War thriller-aping antics of “Salt,” the genre has succumbed to the run-of-the-mill. But “Dredd” exists in direct opposition to this string of mediocrity. While there are other exceptions to the rule like “The Raid” (which bears more […]

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