Fireballs, Vigilantes, and Righteous Kung Fu: This Weekend’s Explosive New Films

Share on Facebook posted 10-16-09 by Julina Tatlock

Law Abiding Citizen — In Theaters October 16th

Faithful to one of the most enduring action movie cliches, Gerard Butler plays a man who’s had everything taken away from him so he gets his revenge on everyone, in every way, even though he is locked up and in prison. That, and there appear to be plenty of explosions to go around. Now if you think about this movie deeply, it brings up plenty of moral questions and conflicts about what we know as right and wrong. However, if you don’t look deep, it has fireballs and Jamie Foxx. Either way, it is full of win.

Watch Law Abiding Citizen Extended Clip

The Ministers — In Theaters October 16th, Limited Release

The Ministers is a bloody urban thriller that stars John Leguizamo playing both lead roles, twin brothers from the South Bronx with the rather loaded names Dante and Perfecto Mendoza.
His dual roles in The Ministers offer the potential for either double glory or double jeopardy. “When someone’s playing twins,” he told 30 Ninjas this week, “it’s either gonna be twice as good or twice as bad.” The identities of the twin brothers in The Ministers are forged in very different ways in the Infernoesque South Bronx of the 1970s, when they see their parents die in an arsonist’s blaze. The movie, a story of religion-fueled vigilantism, follows the intertwining stories of the brothers and a Latina detective (Florencia Lozano), who becomes romantically involved with one of them while on the hunt for her own father’s killer. Adding a bit of Mean Streets gravitas is Harvey Keitel, as a veteran cop who gives the young detective advice.

Read Exclusive Interview with John Leguizamo

Black Dynamite — In Theaters October 16th, Limited Release

Black Dynamite, which opens Friday, is a completely reverent, completely hilarious, and completely kick-ass love letter to the Blaxploitation action films that thrived during the early 1970s. Shunning the mail-it-in approach of recent retro genre flicks that lamely throw out a stream of hacky jokes in an attempt to — wink, wink — spoof the original material, Black Dynamite is an altogether different cat. It’s a brainy, dead-on, deadpan take on the giant-Afro, chop-socky, supercocky, bad-cop-infested, gun-blazing, grindhouse ’70s features that ran the gamut from gritty inner-city drama to unintentionally funny dreck. Indeed, a good number of the films wore both hats, often at the same time, and often righteously pimped out! This movie is not to be missed.