Reviews

The Raid 2 suffers from the same advertising blunder as Hard Boilded.

Although a great action film, as soon as manufacturers plastered "Better than 300 Die Hards" on it's cover, Hard Boiled was ruined.

Likewise, the moment producers of The Raid 2 called it "the best action film ever made" it set the bar of expectation too high.

Simply put, it's not as good as the first movie, never mind the best of all time.

The first movie stuck to the plus points of the actors and stunt men involved. Story was kept pretty thin, and it focused on some genuinely breathtaking fight choreography and making fantastic use of claustrophobic situations.

From the opening sequences of The Raid 2, we experience a few different emotions.

During the first 15 minutes you'll experience glee at the first sign of any physical contact, purely for the fact that you are anticipating more of what you saw in the first movie.

Then it kicks in....

There is far too much "story" put into here to get us to the final situation in which Rama has to work his way up a building again. Far too much. And it is not acted out well enough to compete with other movies.

The action is tremendous, of course, and saves it every single time. However, rather than benefiting from the open world environment it actually suffers for it. Instead of making use of the limited environment they had in the first movie, we get mountains of fight scenes against goons who all dress the same and put up no resistance, which quickly becomes repetitive.

You'll also be amazed by the lack of guns. To the point where it starts to irritate the life out of the movie. It ruins the movie and makes it silly.

The Raid 2 does go on to redeem itself, however.

The two well built-up "boss fights" deliver on all levels and display the kind of ingenious fight work we saw in the first movie in spades. The second of which may just go down as the single greatest martial arts fight ever recorded on film, it is literally perfect.

The problem is it's very easy to spot who these "bosses" are the moment you lay your eyes on them, because they are the only characters in the entire movie (apart from the two lead actors) who look different and stand out.

Iko Uwais needs to learn from the mistake of Tony Jaa and make at least a partial transition into western cinema now.

Is The Raid 2 "the greatest action movie ever made"?

No. Absolutely not.

But it is certainly one of the greatest martial arts movies ever made.

Something happened to Lee Evans between 2003-2004. He matured incredibly as an on-stage comic, toning down his often immature sets into a highly polished show which the audience would find themselves being able to associate with the jokes he told as opposed to just enjoying his madcap antics.

When he released 2005's "XL" he rose to a level he'd never previously experienced, a truly remarkable show peppered with great gags and revealing a lovable warm side which was previously buried underneath his nonstop action mannerisms. It was fair to say few expected he'd be able to top that with a follow-up show but, to my surprise, he did it and he did it well. "Big" is Evans' finest show to date.

We still get a couple of sections we could do without (such as the over-long Date sketch to close out act one, but these sketches are part & parcel of Evans' longterm show) but once he gets into gear he lands some cracking jokes. This has to be among my favourite comedy shows and is one I can happily watch time and time again with my partner.

Longterm fans will note that Evans usually features his best material in the 2nd half of his show, and "Big" follows suit. In fact, the moment Evans begins talking about the male/female relationship we know we're in for a great act two, for this is one area of his comedy he has really nailed over the last few years. Anyone in a couple will find themselves in stitches of laughter as he plods through the oddities of marital life and the sheer lack of understanding that men have for how women think.

I wrote this review after reading one on here which said he found the show too predictable.... and it made me wonder if they had seen a Lee Evans show before or not. Anyone who watches Evans knows he's a fan of the old-style comedy, classics and slapstick, if it's unpredictable jokes which wind on for years which take twists and turns that you're after, you are not going to get that from a Lee Evans concert but, quite honestly, you never were, and he's never made any attempts to be anything other than what he wants to be.

Lee Evans was already a very good comic, with "XL" he elevated himself onto the big stage, and with "Big" he cemented himself as a GREAT comic by delivering another great show. The older he gets, the more middle-age takes hold of him, the more long-term marriage gets him down, Lee Evans gets better and better as a stand-up. What was once a young, action-packed slapstick comic without any real direction, is now becoming a 'grumpy old man' who feels left behind by the technological world and it suits him perfectly as a stand-up. I for one cannot wait for his 2011 show, we're not a couple for going to comedy shows but a testament to how funny this DVD is (particularly act two) could be said that we are actually going to buy tickets for his next gig when the time comes around.

My 4 year old loved this DVD. Perhaps even more than the Cars movie itself. It's far more fast-paced and slapstick than the full movie, that's for sure, and the main character switches from Lightning McQueen (not played by Owen Wilson here) to his Cars sidekick Mater.

The lovable truck tells all kind of far fetched stories which had my son laughing along all the way, each one adding the twist when McQueen said he didn't believe the story he would get dragged into the fantasy by Mater who would play mind-games with McQueen and make him think he was there when it happened. That could have got repetitive, but my son loved it every time, especially when he knew it was coming towards the end of these shorts.

Great DVD, and gives good hope that the upcoming Cars II will be a lot more fun than the first one. Not that it was a bad film, but at times it was incredibly slow for a children's movie. This is a wonderful purchase.

I know, I know, every 007 game since Goldeneye of the old N64 has sucked big ones. It's like the law. Oxygen is a must, Water is needed, and Bond games after Goldeneye are terrible, you know...? I must admit, I gave it a miss upon it's release, thinking it would be awful but my partner bought it for Xmas and I gave it a fair chance. I went into this one expecting it to be the same old but was pleasantly surprised.

I'm a big fan of FPS games: Black on PS2, Call of Duty 4 was the daddy but the servers have become noticeably poor since they released COD5, which, despite it's superior graphics and great gore, is sadly held back by it's WW2 weapons and setting(it's just not as fun, guys!), not to mention the MASSIVE maps online meaning it's harder to find the opposition and leads to endless running around. Farcry II has possibly the best graphics I've ever witnessed, but again the online play kinda sucked a bit, I dunno, something was just missing for me, and the story mode spoiled by too much real-time driving (fun for the first play then it so drags the game down)... The likes of Resistance 2 sucked for me also, poor graphics and aliens never really were my thing to be honest.

I, like many other PS3 owners, just want rid of all the aliens/WW2 nonsense and to have, for a change, a good old-fashioned Rambo style one-man-war mowing people down action game.

So Bond wasn't really expected to match up to any of them, and boy did it. The story mode is better value than the COD games, it is longer, although I ain't seen the movie so was left a little confused by all the twists at times.The action is the best thing I've played since Goldeneye, bar possibly COD4 when it was first released. Sure, the graphics are great in places but on the whole they aren't in the same league as it's other competitors, however, the game's main strength lies in it's sheer fun.

The cover system is a cool add-on which I think most FPS games could benefit from adding in in the future. The likeness to Daniel Craig is fantastic. The 007 pistol with silencer makes you FEEL like you're James Bond. For instance, if you're playing, say, Call of Duty online and you run out of bullets and are left with just a pistol, your first thought would probably be along the lines of "Stick a fork in me, I'm done" but as Bond you don't mind, it's actually quite cool headshotting your totally unaware victims with a silencer whilst in cover haha! For me, this is the best online game out there since COD4. Even more impressive when you take into account that there is no gore at all (NONE!!!), there is not even a ranking system (???wtf???), there are less than 100,000 players on the whole leaderboard, the environments are non-destructible and the cool spy-like mêlée scenario you can do in the story has been replaced by a kinda lame rifle-butt strike for the online modes. There is just something about the pump-action shotguns, p99 silenced pistol and big-ass Rambo guns that make this game a hell of a lot more fun than all those big name titles I listed above, I don't know how they've done it, but Treyarch have taken a franchise that everybody had written off as irrelevant and they've produced one of the finest games they possibly could have done, and I for one will be playing this game from now on until Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 comes to us. Shove your Resistance, mate.