Charlie Murphy | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Foreigner [2017]

2017/10/122020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

Trust or fear. I like a good action thriller without a clear target because it allows the story to develop where cat and mouse chases usually reside. Martin Campbell‘s The Foreigner is a good example as it shows what happens when a sharp plot is made paramount. We know who the bad guys are—a group of young IRA rebels rekindling a fight long since dormant—but not their identities. So distraught dad Quan Ngoc Minh (Jackie Chan) must improvise along his quest for vengeance after his daughter is killed in a…

REVIEW: Hall Pass [2011]

2011/02/222014/06/07 Jared Mobarak

“Anyone thinking chocolate chip cookie dough on a waffle cone?” It’s a shame that Peter and Bobby Ferrelly never realized their time had come and gone by 1998 with Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There’s Something About Mary—you don’t get much better in the stupid comedy field than that trio. 2003 gave hope they might have found a way to balance their crude, crass, potty humor with comedy’s new, more subtle 21st century ways as Stuck on You was surprisingly good, but, alas, hope died. And now the brothers try…

REVIEW: Our Family Wedding [2010]

2010/03/112011/08/24 Jared Mobarak

“You know you just said that out loud” And then the bottom drops out. All paint-by-number comedies of this ilk eventually hit the point where everything appears to be destroyed. Relationships are ended, love gone in a flash, and those who were thick-as-thieves are now unable to look at each other let alone speak. A film like Our Family Wedding can’t come to a resolution unless the story hits so far down on the depression scale that the inevitable across-the-board reconciliations can culminate into nothing but a climatic moment of…