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Truth or Dare **
Yet another reminder that the only memorable game-turned-movie is "Clue"! Is it worth $10? No At...
“It” is also new to Blu-Ray this week.
Mention the name “Jackie Chan” to me and I’ll immediately conjure up images of his movies from the 1990s in which the ever-daring Chan would perform his own extremely dangerous—and at times death-defying—stunts, all for the entertainment of his audience. To this day, those movies have some of the most exciting, entertaining, and just plain fun fight choreography I’ve ever seen.
Jackie Chan is still ever-daring as ever in “The Foreigner,” but in a different way. Rather than risking his body and limbs to perform all manner of crazy spins, flips, and tricks, Chan takes a more nuanced approach here. He plays Quan Ngoc Minh, a Vietnamese immigrant living in London. Early on a member of a rogue faction of the IRA (that’s Irish Republican Army for you youngsters lucky enough to not recall when bombings by this political organization were far too common) sets off a bomb on a busy London street and kills Quan’s daughter Fan (Katie Leung). She was his only surviving family member, a fact we find out later in flashbacks about Quan’s past.
Part of the problem with “It” is that it has such an amazingly sinister, tense, and grisly opening that it’s hard for what follows to live up to it. What we get instead are scares that are kinda silly (I laughed out loud when the giant Pennywise came out during the slideshow—I mean, come on) or are just basic and mundane (a scene with a leper plays like something out of a zombie movie). There is a chilling and creepy vibe to some sequences, particularly one that takes place in a maze of underground tunnels, but no scares that shook me and are memorable for being scary.
One thing that has been said about Stephen King’s horror works is that they are so well-written that they don’t even need the horror. This is certainly the case with “It.” I cared about the cast of young characters in this movie, hated their bullies (who were also a bit over the top), and wanted them to stay healthy and alive. I could have watched a pseudo-documentary about these kids hanging out all summer and it would have been entertaining. But “It” is supposed to be a horror movie. As such, it sets a high bar in the beginning that it never lives up to again. Stream it.
More New Releases: “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” about the man behind the “Deep Throat” source that broke open the 1974 Watergate scandal, starring Liam Neeson; and “Bullet Head,” about three career criminals who find themselves trapped in a warehouse with the law closing in and an even worse threat waiting inside, starring Adrien Brody, Antonio Banderas, and John Malkovich.
Andrew Hudak is a lifelong film lover. His column on Blu-Ray new releases appears every Tuesday. He lives in Connecticut.