Howard Wan is still alive

Drive is a very ordinary crime story presented in an oblique, arty fashion. Strip away the excessive slow motion, 80s synth interludes, and interminable static frames of Gosling's ambiguously blank face, and you'd be left with just another a clichéd heist movie. There's barely enough plot here to fill a short film, and yet director Refn has managed to stretch it into a 100 minute feature-length. Drive isn't without its strengths – the violence is nicely executed, for one – but its inexplicable protagonist and unhurried, run-of-the-mill plot makes for a fairly dull time at the movies.

(TWO out of five)

It's somewhat uneven as a film, but taken as a kind of pure action product, The Raid is pretty spectacular.  In this film, pacing, atmosphere, character identification takes a backseat to the sheer visceral exhilaration of watching people beat the shit out of each other for a large part of 100 minutes.

The film doesn't work nearly as well when it slows down for suspense or even basic dialogue, so the density of action is probably for the best.  On the other hand, I can't help but wonder how much better The Raid might be if it had a tighter setup and more interesting characters.  As intense as the action is, there's a point where just watching a three people trade blows for 20 minutes becomes a little numbing — they're almost just going through the motions, because characters don't die until the director decides it's time.

(THREE out of five)

At its core, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is essentially a well-executed murder mystery movie. It's deliciously moody and features an atypical female lead, but the film also isn't without some definite plot and character issues – the most significant being the Girl herself.

Lisbeth is definitely an interesting, weirdly appealing figure (a courageous and likely a career-making role for Mara) but she never seems fully developed as an actual character. Even having spent over two hours with her, I still don't feel like I get a good sense of her personality. For someone described as "dangerous" and "insane", she's remarkably likeable for the most part. Her involvement with Blomkvist also develops inexplicably quickly.

There are other issues: The film's villains have no discernible motivations – they just seem to be evil. A character shows up halfway through the film, dispenses a crucial hint, and is never to be seen from again. A character pulls off a feat towards the end of the film that seems far too incredible to be plausible. Computer hacking also plays a remarkably convenient role in moving the plot along. For a film (and a director) that otherwise demonstrates such close attention to procedural detail, I wished a little more time was spent describing what Lisbeth actually does to break into computer systems.

The more time I spend thinking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the less I feel like the story hangs together as a whole. But I did enjoy the experience of sitting in the theatre with this film, even if only on a visceral, somewhat superficial level. There's something satisfying about watching these actors interact on a screen (Plummer, especially) as they unfold this moody mystery, accompanied by Reznor/Ross' dissonant strains.

(FOUR out of five)

There's something missing in the latest entry in the Mission Impossible series, but I'm not totally sure what that is. Maybe it's the fact that it's starting to feel like a series – formulaic, with interchangeable villains, macguffins, and exotic locales. At least the characters seem to be having fun this time, almost spending more effort trading quips instead of dealing with the situations at hand. It's refreshing to see Director Bird take the series in a flip, more playful direction, but it's unfortunate that a lot of that humour ends up falling flat.

When it's not goofing around, Ghost Protocol is average action movie stuff. Inciting global thermonuclear war is a pretty banal objective for movie villains at this point, and this film's villain is definitely boring. Even more than MI3 before it, Ghost Protocol feels decidedly small scale. The film climaxes with two people punching each other a lot. Ghost Protocol's headline stunt has Tom Cruise scaling a glass building, while MI2 opened with him leaping off cliffs without safety nets. And the spy stuff is convoluted and a bit contrived. (You mean they actually invented a special gadget just to replace the text on a doorplate?) And so on. That's not to say there aren't great moments in the film – the title sequence gave me goosebumps – but maybe if the characters were funnier and the scenes had emotional heft, I wouldn't feel like everybody just went through the motions this time around.

(TWO out of five)

Yawn. X-Men: First Class is preposterous and boring. It's a narrative mess: despite the weird discontinuity issues it creates with the original trilogy, First Class isn't different enough to be a complete reboot. In fact, it rehashes the same themes the originals have already tackled with greater nuance. The entire film is an inferior copy. Even Sebastian Shaw, the film's central villain, is a Magneto-substitute, sharing the same supremacist philosophy, violent proclivities, choice of headgear.

The villain aside, First Class' other characters are equally forgettable. There's too many of them, and without much in the way of personality, the only thing setting them apart is their mutant abilities. And while I understand a certain suspension of disbelief is required in watching a film about mutants with superpowers, the sloppy, over-the-top way the filmmakers handle the powers in this movie seem especially arbitrary and inconsistent.

The film's action scenes turn into meaningless CG pileups. How do sound waves help someone fly? Can you kill someone who can adapt to everything? Does turning into diamond really help you prevent mind reading? Why doesn't Shaw cool his own drink by absorbing the thermal energy? Can Riptide's whirlwinds blow away Havok's energy blasts? Can Angel's fireballs beat Banshee's sound waves? How does anyone take this shit seriously?

(ONE out of five)