Mr. Wydey's Film Guide Letter M

Mad Max (1978) stars an amazingly young EL Gibson (widescreen film hanging off a 4x3 TV). He's a cop in a disintegrating society where scumbags run riot and the crazy cops as as big a danger to the public as the scumbags. Max lives in a nice little house with a nice little family. When the cops help a fugitive scumbag to crash & burn, his pals decide to get Max and the rest of the crazy cops.
Max quits his job after the super crazy Goose is torched by the bad guy bikers. Mrs. Max has a run-in with them, so that's it for the nice little family when the bad guys catch up with it. Max strolls off with the police force's super interceptor.
Max goes after the Toe Cutter & his gang, who are wiped out along the way. The Toe Cutter comes off 2nd best in a head-on collision with a big truck. Then the guy who torched Goose gets the same treatment.

Magma: Volcanic Disaster (2006) Something happens to make the Earth's core expand. The pressure build-up sets off volcanoes all over the planet. A couple of scientists come up with the Exodus Theory to explain what's happening, but their enemy in the US government's scientific establishment rubbishes their theory for his own ends. There are 150 volcanoes in the United States, our hero warns, and the extinction of the human race is just a matter of months away.
The old bloke who came up with the Exodus Theory commits suicide by volcano but his younger colleague persuades the US president to round up the world's nuclear-armed submarines and relieved the pressure relatively harmlessly by using nuclear explosions to set off volcanoes in deep ocean trenches.

Magnum Force (1973) Another outing for Dirty Harry and his black partner.The courts released a scumbag killer so a motorcycle cop stopped his car and blew him and his entourage away. Dirty Harry & his partner were on loan to the Stakeout Squad thanks to Lt. Briggs of Homicide. DH took his partner to the airport for a snack and joined in the operation to counter an attempted hi-jacking.
   DH met 4 killer rookie traffic cops at the shooting range. A killer cop shot up a mobster's swimming pool party while DH was visiting the wife of Charlie, a cop who plays Russian roulette. He returned to a supermarket stakeout for a shoot-up. A pimp murdered a hooker in a taxi so he was blown away in his pimpmobile. Lt. Briggs put DH & his partner back to work for Homicide.
   DH scored with his midget Oriental neighbour then Homicide started watching high-profile bad guys. One of them was zapped and Charlie was also killed just before DH told Briggs that he thought out-of-his-mind Charlie was the killer. DH lost to the rookie Davis in the annual police dept. shoot-out but he blagged a bullet as evidence.
   One of the rookies was killed when bad guys were tipped off that they were about to be busted by fake cops. The rookies told DH they're were just doing the job the courts fail to do. DH got a bomb in his mailbox. So did his partner. DH managed to disarm his bomb. Surprise! Lt. Briggs was the man behind the vigilantes. Then he tried to set up DH for killing the 3 surviving rookies. But DH let him drive off with the mailbox bomb active in his car.

Mammoth (2006) Dr. Frank Abernathy finds a blue-glowing capsule in a frozen mammoth in his museum. He realizes he's missing the birthday of his daughter, Jack, but all electrical gadgets in the area stop working, including cars & phones, and a meteor crashes into the museum. It's a metal sphere, from which a fluid emerges and revives the mammoth, which writes off the museum's guard.
   People In Black (a man & a woman) of the NRO arrive to check out the sphere. Embarassingly UFO-obsessed Grandad lets Jack borrow his car to go to a teenage rave-up with her boyfriend. Meanwhile, 2 dozy cops find a body and stumble into a mountain of mammoth crap in the dark. Then they meet the mammoth, which stomps through the party.
   The PIB tell Dr. Frank that the meteor navigated to his museum, the Man in Black is killed by the mammoth and the Woman In Black tells Frank that if the mammoth isn't neutralized in 10 hours, the government will blast the town out of existence.
   The sheriff and a mad scientist show off a homicidal hand containing another of the blue capsules. Grandad falls about laughing when Frank tells him there's an alien-possessed mammoth on the loose and if they don't catch it, the government will kill them all.
   The mammoth gets Jack's boyfriend. It is lured to a factory where a dose of molten steel doesn't slow it down. The monster is penned, sort of, and Grandad arrives with a tanker of liquid nitrogen. He becomes the host for the alien before being frozen like the mamoth. The frozen mammoth is put back on display and Grandad ends up in a PIB deep freeze capacity until someone can figure out a way to revive him.
   The mammoth itself is in line for an award as the worst special effects creature of the 21st Century.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004 remake) starts with the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait, so the connection to Manchuria is lost right away. The 'Lost Patrol' loses 2 men, fights its way out of a trap and Sgt. Raymond Shaw wins the Medal of Honour and goes on to become a Congressman. But captain, now major, Marco is having dreams about a different scenario, and so is a corporal with a dossier.
   Merryl Streep plays Shaw's appalling mom, who is pushing him forward as a vice-presidential candidate. Marco eventually gets to tell Shaw about the dreams, in which Shaw kills the dead members of the Lost Patrol. The Army tells Marco to drop it and go back on his medication. Meanwhile, Shaw has his brain implant renewed, Marco finds that he also has an implant (but loses it), and he concludes that Shaw has been brainwashed.
   Manchurian Global is behind it. The company employs South African Dr. Noyle, who developed the implants, and it's into supplying private armies to reduce the pressure on the US military. The plan is to get Shaw onto the president's ticket, get Marco to shoot the newly elected president and put Shaw, MG's creature, in the White House.
   Shock, horror! Mom is part of the mind-control conspiracy and she gets her son to kill Senator Jordan, who's a threat to the plan and the father of Jocelyn, whom mom evicted from Raymond's life 15 years before. Jocelyn is killed, too. Luckily, Marco does the right thing when he takes his shot.
   As a general rule, remakes are rubbish but this one works.

Manhunter (1986) Ace profiler Will Graham [a.k.a. Dr. Grisson of CSI:Las Vegas], who was put in hospital by Hannibal Lecter for physical and mental injuries, is recalled to work on the case of the Tooth Fairy, who has a lunar cycle, and there's about a couple of weeks left before he kills another family. Graham visits the mad psychiatrist Dr. Lecter (Brian Cox) to 'recover the mindset'.
   Lecter is corresponding with the Tooth Fairy using personal ads in newspapers and a book code. Graham is used as bait in a trap, which flops. A pushy reporter is grabbed by the mad killer. He's delivered to the National Tattler on fire! Lecter gives Graham's address to the TF and tells him to save himself by killing them all.
   Graham has to admit to his son that he's been in a psychiatric hospital. 6 days to the next killing. The killer takes a blind photographic technician to his weird home and she ends up in bed with him. A phone chat with Lecter helps to put Graham deeper into the killer's mind. He realizes that the sick freak has seen home movies shot by his victims.
   Meanwhile, the killer is writing off a work colleague and playing Iron Butterfly at the blind woman. Graham loads up his superkill teflon ammo when the killer is identified. His killing campaign comes unstuck right away but he does get to blow the killer away; after he's wasted a bunch of cops; and make him bleed out in a Red Dragon pose.

The Mangler (1994) is a film which seems curiously detached from the real world. It is difficult to place it in time – it seems to be set in the 1950s but some people have PCs – and the bad guys tend to look like villains out of a Batman film. There is a laundry containing an evil machine, which chomps people up and leaves a bloody, mangled mess at the far end. A cop and his weird brother-in-law (?) start investigating and the cop is fired.
But he still goes ahead with a plan to exorcise the machine. Which is an excuse for blood and mayhem. And in the end, nothing has changed and the machine is still there, and people who are missing a finger (everyone has to make a little sacrifice) are still in charge. The film turns out to be based on a Stephen King story, which explains a lot.

The Man Who Sued God (2001) features Billy Connolly in Australia as a lawyer turned fisherman, whose boat is sunk in a storm. His insurance company called it an Act of God and refused to pay out, so he takes the company and the Church to court to prove that the insurance company is being unreasonable if not downright crooked. Apparently, this version of the film is edited to remove some of the effing and blinding.

Man Who Wouldn't Die, The (1995) stars Roger Moore as author Thomas Grace and Malcolm McDowell as Bernard Drake, a thief with delusions of being a descendant of royalty. Grace, a New York newspaper columnist, interviewed Drake after he tried to steal the sword of Edward I and he wrote a series of books featuring a 'Moriarty' character called Morrisey and an Inspector Fulbright.
   A female psychic contacts Grace and tells him someone is acting out the plot of the last of the books, in which both Morrisey and Inspector Fulbright are killed. Drake (surprise!) didn't die in a prison fire and he has been acting out the Morrisey part in earlier books, which is why Grace killed off his characters and ended the series.
   The police refuse to believe that Drake is still alive. Grace and the psychic follow his trail and find he's made a bomb. They think the target is Prince David but Drake wants to blow up the city's power supply and create a blackout as a cover for another try at the sword of Edward I, which was brought to the USA with Prince David.
   Drake carries out the robbery disguised as Grace! So the author is arrested clutching the sword. But the one he has proves to be a fake. Grace tracks down Drake to his lair and actually manages to outwit him. So Drake goes to gaol and Grace sets about restoring his shattered finances by writing another book about his adventure.

Marked For Death (1990) is another outing for our pal Stephen Seagal, who plays an undercover cop called John Hatcher. Hatcher loses his partner so, being a good Catholic, he takes his priest's advice and quits. Meanwhile, Jamaicans and Latinos dealers are in a turf war and the Voodoo-ists are busy.
Hatcher and his pal, a school football coach, are in a club when the Yardies start shooting and the FBI barges in. Hatcher sees no point in doing anything – until the Yardies do a drive-by shooting on his sister's house and put his niece in the hospital. Hatcher and the coach gathered up a lot of weapons and go after the Jamaicans, who have marked his family for death.
Head Jamaican 'Scarface' nearly takes Hatcher out, so he recruits a Jamaican undercover cop, as well as the coach, and follows Scarface to Jamaica with an impressive collection of weapons. Hatcher kills Scarface, only to discover that he's battling twins, so he has to do the job all over again! Lots of martial arts, bullets flying, car chasing and bad haircuts, not to mention abundant bad language. Not Shakespeare, but it was never intended to be.

Mars Attacks! (1996) is a cartoonish caper, in which flying saucers surround the Earth and we flip through a gammut of stars in various character roles with lots of snippets of excellent humour. The Martians take three-quarters of an hour to land in Nevada. "We come in peace," they say. Then the shooting starts! The Martians apologize for the misunderstanding and address Congress – and wipe out the inmates. So the President decides to go on TV and spout platitudes.
A Martian infiltrator nearly captures Mr. President. The Martians attack DC and zap Las Vegas. Nukes are useless against them, the hawks in the US military discover. Then the Martians start taking out Earth's landmarks. But they do have a weakness; exposure to yodelling makes their brains explode! So the Earthers survive.

Mask of the Ninja (2008) Detective Jack is in on a drug bust at a club. Elsewhere, Ninjas go after Mr. Takeo and his daughter, Mika, at their palatial home. Takeo doesn't make it and Miko calls her boyfriend, who's involved in the drug deal, and Jack calls on her. Takeo was the boss of a high-tech company, which is under assault by a hacker.
Takeo's head of security and the hacker are taken out by the bad guys. Jack finds a massacre at Takeo Technology. He and Hirohito, Takeo's advisor, get into a rumble with ninjas. Hiro tells him there's been a feud between 2 Japanese clans for centuries. The bad guys are after a chip with weapon data, which Miko has (but she doesn't know it).
Jack tracks down Miko. The ninjas massacre everyone at his police station. Miko realizes the chip is implanted in her. The bad guys grab Miko's step-mom then Miko. Shock, horror! Step-mom is a member of the bad guy clan! But the bad guys, and Hiro, end up hacked to bits.

The Mask of Zorro is like the Three Stooges with two of them missing. The original Zorro is shoved in gaol while the bad guy hops off to Spain for 20 years with his daughter because the bad guy has always fancied being married to Mrs. Zorro. After using the Count of Monte Cristo's method of getting out of gaol, Zorro trains up a young punk as his successor and manages to kill off a whole bunch of bad guys by the end of the film. Not really advertised as a comedy but that's what it is.

Matrix, The (Part 1) (1999) has the well worn plot that everything we see around us isn't real. It's not 1999, it's 200 years later, the human race has lost a war with artificial intelligences and they're using the humans as power sources! A computer expert is woken up and told he's the Chosen One – well, by everyone but the Oracle. Men In Shades, the anti-virus programs of the AIs, pursue him and the other wide-awake humans – and they learn to ignore gravity as the reality they experience ain't real. We had to refill the TV with bullets at one point – after the 'hero' had asked for "lots of guns". And we ended up looking at a probably sequel.
Would The Matrix seem any less unlikely the 2nd time around? No, the idea that machines are using humans as power sources is still silly. There are much more efficient ways of generating power so the whole thing becomes a cartoon with people instead of drawings, and lots of ultra-violence and shooting, with those who believe they're better than the other guy coming out best.

Matrix Revolutions, The (Part 3) (2003) Neo starts off stuck between this world and the Matrix at the mercy of the Trainman, who works for the Frenchman. Lots of shooting and leaping about, some of it in slow-motion, as the Terrible Trio go off to confront the Frenchman in his club. He wants the eyes of the Oracle in return for their saviour, Neo.
The Oracle sees the end coming and Neo is all that stands in its way. Neo takes a ship to the machine city and Trinity goes with him. But first they have to deal with a psychotic stowaway. The machines break through, so a big battle involving clumsy one-man tanks on the ground and machines with tentacles whizzing through the air.
An EM pulse stops the machines eventually and Neo and Agent Smith finish things off with a major punch-up in the rain. "It doesn't make sense," Morpheus complains at the end. "Was it ever supposed to?" the audience replied.

Maverick (1994) stars Mel Gibson as the eponymous hero and James Garner, who played the role in the TV series, as a has-been lawman. There's also a predatory female. The plot, such as it is, concerns Mr. Maverick's adventures on the way to a big poker game on a riverboat, the game itself and the aftermath. Lots of jokes of the cynical or world-weary sort and the film moves along at a decent pace.

Maximum Risk (1996) Jean-Claude Van Damme (a.k.a. the Muscles from Brussels) is written off in the first few minutes of the film. Then he's alive and kicking at a funeral. The first incarnation was Mikhail, his twin brother, who was given up for adoption to a Russian Mafioso. The one still alive is Alain, a former French soldier. He decides to find out what sort of a bloke his brother was.
   The office of the lawyer who arranged the adoption is torched and Alain gets into a punch up with the firebug. Off to New York. Mikhail was in trouble for betraying his Mafia family. Alex, his girlfriend, hooks up with Alain and they are chased by both the Mafia and the firebug. Two FBI agents working with the Russian Mafia are worried about being exposed by Mikhail's documents.
   The Feds tell Alain the documents are in a bank in Nice. He realizes they are crooked. Dmitri, Mikhail's adoptive father, is killed by a rival, Ivan, who is working with the Feds. Alain goes to Nice with Alex as a prisoner of the FBI agents. He has a punch up with the firebug in the bank and pulls off a dramatic rescue of a cop friend, who is a prisoner of the Russian Mafia.
   Ivan has a fiery finish. Then it's off to save Alex from the Feds in a meat processing plant, where the one who plays 'Psycho Bobby' in The Pretender gets handy with a chainsaw before being written off.

The Medallion (2003) is a Chinese fable starring Jackie Chan as Inspector Eddie Yang of the Hong Kong police (with Sammo Hung arranging the fights). There's a legend that a child will be able to unite the 2 halves of a medallion & make people immortal. So an English bad guy hires a gang to get the kid & the medallion. Watson of Interpol makes an ass of himself in Hong Kong and the kid ends up on a boat to Dublin, where Insp. Yang teams up with Nicole and the dozy Watson again.
   After a comedy chase and lots of leaping about, Yang and the kid end up in a container, which goes into the harbour. Yang saves the kid but drowns; only to be revived as an immortal with super powers by the kid. Which gives Watson a fright in the mortuary. Yang can jump to the top of tall buildings and survive being shot & stabbed.
   The kid is grabbed again and taken to Bad Guy Castle. The Head Bad Guy kills himself so that the kid can revive him as an immortal. But the kid has only one half of the medallion. Mrs. Watson proves to be more than a match for the bad guys who invade her home. Another huge chase and the HBG gets the rest of the medallion.
   Lots of kung fu-ing at the castle. Nicole ends up dead next. The HBG is beset by demons and swallowed by the medallion. The kid brings Nicole back to life then he disappears through a vortex into the next universe, Watson kindly explains to the viewers.

Medusa's Child got 2 stars and a kicking from the previewers, just like Omega Doom (see later). The plot is all about a mad scientist, who completes a cancelled US Government project in his barn and builds a Medusa weapon. The idea of this particular atomic bomb is that it releases a massive electromagnetic pulse when it goes off and zaps every electrical system and computer for thousands of miles around. You don't kill the enemy but you trash their lives and their means for waging war and making a living.
So the mad scientist bluffs the bomb onto a cargo aircraft addressed to the Pentagon. But it gets activate in mid-air, not in the Pentagon, and that's when the fun starts. The President is operating by remote control from England, the FBI are paranoid and the military men are up to no good across the board. And our heroes on the plane are stuck right at the heart of the matter.

Mega Snake (2007) is a daft creature-feature starring Dr. Daniel Jackson of Stargate fame. Les and his brother watch their father being killed by a poisonous snake at a ceremony held by a bunch of weird Bible-bashers in 1986. In the present, Les's brother steals a small but mystical snake in a jar from an Injun. Of course, he breaks the jar, the snake eats the family kitten, all the hens and mom, and grows enormously.
   Beau, the dumb sheriff and a rival for Erin, Les's not-girlfriend, puts Les in gaol as a murder suspect. The snake eats a family of picknickers but as the County Fair is due, the mayor won't issue a warning and we're in to the plot of Jaws.
   When a sloughed skin turns up, the sheriff takes a posse on a snake hunt. Bad idea! Two good ol' boys find the dying sheriff and go on a snake hunt with a flame thrower. The Injun reckons someone has to get inside the mystical snake to kill it.
   The good ol' boys become snake food, the snake visits the county fair and bites a few heads off, then it swallers Erin. The Injun is injured, so Les lets the snake swaller him, too, kills the snake and rescues Erin. Then he has to marry her.

Meltdown: Days of Destruction (2006) A crazed Yank project director fires off a 10 magaton nuke at a big chunk of space rock, against boffin Nathan's advice, breaks up the rock and makes a chunk the size of Iceland bounce off the Earth's atmosphere, which knocks the Earth closer to the Sun.
Temperatures shoot up, civilization goes to Hell and a party consisting of Nathan, his TV reporter sister, her cop boyfriend, the mother (whom he never married) of the cop's daughter, the daughter and her criminal boyfriend head north. Cars start exploding so they take to storm drains. There, they meet a crooked cop, who has Nathan kidnapped because one of his pals will be landing at a local airport to pick him up.
The cop and his ladies sort out their relationships on the way to the airport, the plane crashes unseen and there's a big shoot-out. The bad guys are killed or slope off. And suddenly, it starts raining, which is a sign that the other planets have dragged Earth back into its proper orbit and the world has been saved.

Memento (2000) Leonard, an insurance investigator, suffered a brain injury when he was attacked after his wife was raped and left to die with a plastic bag on her head. He has no short-term memory. He can remember everything up to watching his wife die, but he is unable to build new memories so he carries annotated Polaroid pictures of people and places, and he has essential information tattooed on his body, as a substitute for his missing short-term memory.
   The film starts with Leonard killing the killer. Then it goes back in time in segments. The reverse investigation is intercut with Leonard's earlier insurance investigation of someone else with the same condition, which goes forward to its tragic outcome.
   Leonard's main interactions are with Teddy and Natalie. We get back to the murder of Leonard's wife after an hour and a half (including adverts). And surprise! Knowing what has gone before changes each episode, and knowing the beginning completely changes the ending.
   This is a film that requires the audience to pay attention but it works very well.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) is the tragic tale of Nick, a broker in San Francisco, who goes to a boring meeting with a hangover after meeting a blonde lady, falls asleep and ends up invisible after a secret government equipment blows up. A rogue CIA agent tries to capture him so Nick goes into hiding at a friend's holiday home and the blonde lady turns up! The CIA crashes the party, Nick gets away, the CIA agent catches up with him again and Nick tricks him into taking a high dive off a building under construction. Then Nick heads for Switzerland with his blonde lady as he can wear a ski mask all day there and conceal his invisibility.

Memory Run (1994) Andrel Fuller sees his parents murdered by storm troops. Jump forward 15 years and he's a high-tech burglar in a state run by the corrupt Life Corporation. Andre ends up framed for a murder by one of his gang. The LC police stick a probe in his head, edit his memories to create 'evidence' and find him guilty of Murder One.
   At LC's Medical Division, a stroppy patient called Celeste, the woman murdered in the burglary, has a metal pill, a goad, implanted in her brain as a control device. Celeste turns out to have Andre's brain implanted in her body by Dr. Monger. Celeste's bunkmate is killed by the guards, Dr. Monger brings her a goat removal kit but she has to use it herself. Then she escapes.
   LO wants Celeste dead. The bloke who killed her is amazed when she shows up, and even more amazed to hear that he's looking at Andre in a new body. An LO death squad arrives and Celeste gets to kneecap the killer while escaping. She is picked up by a terrorist group called the Union, which is headed by Gabriel, whose girlfriend is Dr. Weir of Stargate Atlantis.
   Lots & lots of shooting, and the girlfriend is written off. Celeste & Gabriel find Dr. Monger under house arrest. They learn that LO is planning to harvest young bodies then go into Phase Two of the plan, moving the brains of ancient LO executives to rejuvenate them. Monger is released, and he decides that Celeste is pregnant (having shagged Andre just before her death).
   Celeste, Gabriel & Monger infiltrate LO, where the chief executive's brain has been transplanted into Andre's body! He shoots Monger so Celeste blasts Andre's body to bits. In the closing shot, Andre as Celeste has had the baby which Andre fathered, and Gabriel is still around.

Men In Black (1997) stars Tommy Lee Jones & Will Smith and includes a couple of TV detectives – Monk and Vince the Nutter from Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Some guys running Mexicans across the border were busted, then the Men In Black turned up to pick a real alien out of the bunch! Mr. Jones retired his partner by wiping his memories of his service with the MIB and recruited Mr. Smith, a cop who did a good job of chasing down an alien without knowing what he was chasing.
   Meanwhile, redneck Vince the Nutter's body was taken over by another alien after it crashed its spaceship onto Vince's truck. At MIB HQ, Smith learned that Earth has become a safe haven for alien asylum seekers and all sorts of well known American personalities are really aliens in disguise.
   Vince had been taken over by an assassin bug. "Bugs thrive on carnage." This one was after a galaxy, which was so small that it could be hidden in an ornament on the collar of a cat called Orion. An alien battle cruiser turned up and threatened to destroy Earth in one galactic week (1 Earth hour) if the galaxy wasn't handed over.
   The aliens on Earth started to flee. Lots of chasing around and bug splatting as Jones & Smith went after the assassin bug, who had kidnapped a female pathologist. The bug was eventually exterminated, Earth was saved, Jones had his memory wiped, and Smith and the lady pathologist took over the MIB jobs at the end.

Mercury Rising (1998) has wimpy Bruce Willis as a burned out FBI agent who is trying to save a 9-year-old autistic boy from the NSA. They developed an 'uncrackable' code and put a geek-test in a puzzle magazine. The kid decyphered it and phoned the number given. So the NSA agent shoot the kid's parents, and the leader of the NSA project, who is on file as having been killed in Beirut in 1982, and set about tracking down the kid and wiping out any of his own people who get in the way. Needless to say, after a fair amount of mayhem, Wimpy Willis manages to fill the bad guy full of lead.

Merlin & the Book of Beasts (2009) Killer butterflies zap an assassin and kill a whole lot of people. There's trouble in Camelot and Galahad goes looking for Merlin with 2 knights and Arthur's daughter, Evelynn, to rid the land of the sorcerer and his army of enchanted beasts. Merlin says no at first but, despite his doddery condition, he joins in a battle to save the others.
Merlin decides that the Arcadian has a bad book of spells stolen from himself and leads the infiltrators into Camelot through tunnels. The bad guy is Mordred, son of Arthur & Morgan Le Fey, and he wants to create a new tribe by breeding with Evelynn, his half-sister. Merlin is no match for him and Mordred puts a drawing of Merlin in the book.
Merlin fights back and Mordred kills him before escaping without the book. But the blood of the Pendragons and the fountain of life revive Merlin. Evelynn retrieves Excalibur from the Lake of Destiny. Mordred captures everyone and subverts Evelynn for a while. But Merlin uses the book on Mordred and gets Evelynn to slay the book with Excalibur, and Camelot is saved!

Metal Mayhem (2000) is an 'enjoyable romp' featuring Jackie Chan as an undercover cop. The FBI brings a crime-fighting robot to an exhibition in Hong Kong. The young Chinese designer of the machine reckones the robot was stolen from him and he hacks into its controls to cause havoc. Lots of shooting and explosions and people feng shoowey-ing one another acrobatically; quite a lot of laughs; a good way to spend an hour and a half in front of the box.

Meteor (1979) There have been lots of films like this recently, so this one provides a good chance to remember how they did it 20 years ago. A Mars probe is deflected to the asteroid belt to watch a comet pass through it – only the comet hits a large asteroid and shreds it. Some of the bits destroy the Mars probe and the crew, and other asteroid bits, including a civilization-killer, head for Earth.
   Sean Canary is hauled off an ocean-going yacht in a race to supervise using Hercules, a nuclear-armed satellite system which he designed, to zap the big rock. He quit NASA 5 years earlier when the US Air Force pointed his space-rock defence weapon at the Soviets. It becomes his job to make the Yanks admit they have Hercules while the Soviets have to admit the existence of their Peter the Great system, which is aimed at the USA.
   Then it is all a matter of co-ordinating the missile firings, which is done with ¾ of an hour of the film left. So cue some disasters from non-lethal rock fragments – an avalanche in Switzerland wiping out a town and a tsunami taking out Hong Kong. The Soviets launch their missiles with the Yanks due to launch 40 minutes later. Suddenly, Jodrell Bank spots a big chunk of rock heading for New York, under which the US missile-firing base is located. So the city wiped out and a muddy escape to the surface for Mr. Canary & the survivors. And they reach safety just as the big rock is blasted to bits.
   Also in the film: Karl Malden plays the NASA boss, who has to put the whole thing together; Natalie Wood does a fluent job of speaking Russian while Brian Keith, playing Mr. Canary's equivalent, struggles; Martin Landau is the demented Air Force officer in charge of the US missile battery.

Meteorites! (1998) is Jaws with space debris instead of people-eating fish. A second comet hits some rocky bits left over from an earlier comet and knocks them onto a collision course with Earth, and their strike area includes a small town with a crooked mayor, who needs a UFO festival to go ahead – like the town in Jaws. The mayor needs to raise $30,000 to pay off a loan but his plan to have his coin collection stolen goes horribly wrong. The 'hero' steers the townsfolk to an abandoned mine but a meteorite blocks the entrance.
He blows the mine open again with left-over fireworks just before the main meteorite shower strikes. And everyone troops inside, not worrying about being entombed by another strike! Best bit of the film – a cynical punk from a tabloid paper standing right in the path of a fiery meteorite and nothing but a pair of smoking boots left after the impact. Clich�s rule, OK!

Metro (1997) stars Eddie Murphy as a Roper, a hostage negotiator, and he manages not to crack wise tediously all the time. Situation number one is a junkie in a bank, whom Roper shot, but only to wound. He is saddled with an assistant and his lieutenant is killed by a diamond thief. Roper's next job is a siege at a jeweller's, where he gets an ear instead of a hostage from the bloke who killed the lieutenant. We have a chase through San Fransisco's Chinatown and fun on a runaway street car. And things get very personal. Of course, the bad guy escapes from custody and keeps on making Roper's life miserable right up to the big kaboom finish – on the day the firemen go on strike, too!

Midnight In St. Petersburg (1995) has an elderly Harry Palmer (of Ipcress File fame) running a detective agency in Moscow. Someone has stolen some plutonium in St. Petersburg and his agency is paid $250K to recover it to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists or a rogue state.
One of his employees is romancing Tatiana, the daughter of an official at the Hermitage gallery in St. Pete. She is kidnapped as part of a plot to extract paintings from the Hermitage, sell them to a crooked American art dealer and use the cash to buy the plutonium. Everything heads for a big shoot out at the old film studios and there's a happy ending for everyone but the bad guys.

Mighty Joe Young (1998) is a remake of the 1949 King Kong spin-off. Poachers kill the mothers of both Joe the gorilla and Jill, and 12 years later, Jill takes 2,000 lb Joe from Africa to the California Animal Conservancy. But the poachers see Joe on TV and one of them, whose finger and thumb Joe bit off, decides to get even. Joe breaks loose at a posh do at the CAC and goes after the bad guy and his sidekick.
Joe is tranquillized and the American public wants him killed. Jill gets her allies to put Joe in his trailer truck but she finds herself in the cab with the 2 bad guys who killed her mom! Joe causes a trailer wreck in L.A. and breaks out to go climbing buildings. He hides from police choppers in the L.A. river channel and lurks around the HOLLYWOOD sign.
Joe rampages at a fairground, the bad guys start a fire, Joe takes out the mom-killer then he rescues a kid from a ferris wheel and dies a hero's death. No, he's not dead and the grateful American public raises enough cash to send him back to Africa to live in the Joe Young Wildlife Park.

Mindhunter (2004) A killer is too smart for 2 FBI agents; but it's only Mr. Harris (Val Kilmer) running a test. He dumps a group of would-be profilers on an island for a final weekend trial. Someone murders a cat 'as a sign of something'. The Puppeteer gives the group a real body and kills the team leader with liquid nitrogen! The phones aren't working and the killer will strike again in 2 hours.
The boat blows up and everyone is knocked out with drugged coffee and there's another body when they wake up. The Feds gang up on a cop, who's there as an observer. He says he's there to investigate Harris. Another death then a DNA test says Sara (the blonde out of Cold Case) is the killer. Of course, she isn't and the survivors go off to hide.
Sara gets the drop on the cop but fails to kill him. The surviving Fed takes him out. Oops! He's the killer and he's a total wack job. But, luckily, the cop was wearing a bulletproof vest and Sarah can hold her breath for about 10 minutes under water, so the killer ends up a good bad guy.

Minority Report (2002) is based on a sci-fi story by Philip K. Dick. Tom Cruise plays Chief John Anderton of PCDC, the Washington Pre-Crime Division. The District has 3 remote viewers, who enable the police force to be on the spot to prevent murders, and there have been no murders in DC for the 6 years of the programme. The people are about to vote on the system and Director Burgess is eager to get them to vote the right way.
   Whitaker, a bozo from the Attorney General's office, provides a vehicle for showing off the pre-cogs. He reckons there's a human flaw in the system. Anderton finds there's a lot of data generated by the pre-cogs missing from the archive. Then a Leo Crow is identified as a potential murder victim and the prime suspect is – the Chief!
   The Chief goes on the run, so lots of fun with flying cops and a chase with the bozo in a car plant. The lady who 'invented' pre-crime tells Anderton that the 3 precogs occasionally disagree but the 'minority report' is always destroyed, even though the people involved in the pre-crime have an alternate future. Anderton realizes that the system isn't as foolproof as advertised.
   Anderton goes for the minority report in his case and concludes he'll have to get it out of the mind of Agatha, the senior pre-cog. He has his eyes replaced to evade the ubiquitious eye-scanners; which leads to lots more fun & games. He removes Agatha from the pre-cog centre but she tells him there's no minority report in his case. Then Anderton finds that Crow is the man who kidnapped his son 6 years earlier.
   Anderton tries to arrest Crow but Crow commits 'suicide by cop' because it's a set-up and he was promised that his family will be taken care of. The bozo tells Director Burgess that Anderton was set up, and Burgess shoots the bozo after he explains how someone got away with a murder. Anderton is busted for the murders of both Crow and Whitaker but his ex-wife learns the truth when the Director slips up.
   Burgess outwitted the system to kill Agatha's mother because she wanted her daughter back. The pre-cogs see Chief Anderton as a potential murder victim when he confronts Director Burgess but the Director chooses to shoot himself instead of the Chief. And as a result of the scandal, the pre-crime experiment is abandoned and all pre-criminals are released.

Mission Impossible, The Movie (1996) A routine mission in Prague turns out to be a trap and most of the IM team, and their suspect, are all taken out in the first 25 minutes. The operation was a mole hunt and the survivor (Tom Cruise) becomes the chief suspect. There is a spectacular flood when he blows up a restaurant's fish tank. Then Mrs. Phelps turns up alive.
After a meeting with 'Max', Mr. Cruise puts together a team of renegades and invades the CIA's HQ at Langley, Virginia. Then Jim Phelps turns up in London! We learn that the TGV goes from London to France (I never knew that!), and some jabroni flies a helicopter through the Channel Tunnel(!), which has side-by-side tracks going in opposite directions (I never knew that, either).
Needless to say, all the bad guys, including good old Jim Phelps and his missus, are zapped in the end – but Jim Phelps, how could you become a baddie? We are totally aghast by the time the closing credits arrived.

Mission Impossible II (2000) What does it have in common with the TV series? Well, it has the same name, and the original theme tune can be heard from time to time. But this is crude smash-mouth stunts with lots of guns and bangs and masks of people's faces plucked out of thin air. There's none of the subtlety and team work of the TV series and very little planning and setting up. And we had to refill the TV with bullets when it was all over.

Mission Impossible III (2006) Ethan Hunt got engaged to Julia, then he was sent to extract Agent Ferris from the clutches of Davian, an arms dealer. She was in Berlin. Ethan & his IMF destroyed a building but Ferris croaked because of a detonator shoved up her nose. Ethan received a posthumous message from Ferris to say Davian was selling the 'Rabbit's Foot' (something apocalyptic) for $850M.
   Ethan & Julia got married then he got involved in a scheme to kidnap Davian from the Vatican. The plan worked, there was a destructive car chase through Rome but when Ethan was in a convoy on what looked like a monster bridge in Florida, the IMF was attacked and Davian was extracted. He then grabbed Julia.
   The boss was Ethan's prime suspect for the leak at HQ. The boss had him grabbed but Ethan had an ally, who helped him to escape to Shanghai. His IMF joined him there to go after the Rabbit's Foot. Ethan ended up Davian's prisoner with a detonator shoved up his nose. Davian shot Julia to get information out of Ethan; only it was a member of his staff wearing a Julia mask.
   Ethan's ally was the traitor! Ethan escaped to be beaten up by Davian, who was creamed by a truck. Ethan got Julia to electrocute him to neutralize the detonator. Then he had to tell Julia what they were doing in Red China.

Mission To Mars (2000) An expedition to the red planet is attacked by an animated dust storm while investigating something strange and only Luke survives. A rescue mission, which includes Jim (Mac of CSI:NY) who would have been on the first mission if his wife hadn't died, becomes another disaster in Martian orbit and loses one of the guys. The other 3; Jim, Phil and Terri, the lady boffin; make it down to the surface.
Luke is still alive but a bit demented. There's a big storm heading for the base. Luke shows the newcomers a giant head lying on the surface. The head plays a sonic representation of a DNA molecule. Jim decides that the sound isn't a signature, it's a test for people who find the head.
Providing the answer to the test opens a doorway in the head. Luke, Jim & Terri learn that Mars was hit by a monster rock and the Martians went out into space. They also seeded Earth with life and one Martian stayed behind. There's a ship in the head and it's counting down to a launch. So Jim goes with the ship and the others rejoin Phil for a trip back to Earth in the ERV.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) John & Jane met in Colombia 5 or 6 years ago, got out of a jam and got married. They are both crack shots and there are lots of spaces between them. And they both kill people for their respective agencies. They both get the same guy, The Tank, as a target, they get in each other's way and the target gets away. Then each gets the other as the next target.
Jane's outfit wrecks the marital home and confiscates John's gear. He makes Jane's outfit trash their own base. John dares Jane to kill him and she tries. They have a confrontation in a restaurant, which ends explosively, as does another confrontation at home. Eddy, John's pal, is offered $400K a head to whack John & Jane, whose house is blown up while they're comparing notes.
There's a car chase and both agencies want John & Jane dead for marrying each other; that's why they got the Tank job – they were supposed to kill each other. But John & Jane decide to fight back and there's a whole lot of shooting. We had to reload the TV with bullets after this film was over.

Mr. Nice Guy (Dir. Sammo Hung, 1997) is a Jackie Chan vehicle, which also features contributions from Sammo from Martial Law in a cameo role. Jackie plays a TV chef, who is caught up in a battle between Giancarlo, a Melbourne drug baron, and a bunch of punks, who steal his coke. There's a huge shoot-out when Giancarlo tries to get it back. Diane, a TV reporter, tapes the whole thing and Giancarlo wants the tape, which is swapped accidentally for a tape of Jackie's show.
Jackie is chased and goes for a destructive ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Jackie, his girlfriend Micky and Diane head for the home of Letice, Jackie's assistant, to hide out. But the bad guys grab Micky. Jackie dumps the cops and goes solo when an attempt to get her back flops.
The bad guys grab Jackie but he escapes in a traffic shambles. Then there's a load of business at a construction site. Jackie, his harem & the coke end up in Giancarlo's hands. Jackie is almost crushed by a monster truck, so he gets his own back by driving it through Giancarlo's palatial home.

Most Wanted was made in 1997, so when they blow away the First Lady, a Hillary Clinton look-alike is wasted. The film got only 2 stars in the Daily Mail Weekend magazine but it deserves an extra star for having as much back-stabbing as a couple of episodes of The Bill during the Superintendent Chandler era.
What is it about? An evil industrialist is in cahoots with a covert military unit to cover up testing lethal substances on American soldiers. The covert military bunch stomps all over civilians, the press and the cops. And the CIA in the background pulls all the strings. Oh, yes; and stunts, and things getting blown up and bad guys getting wasted in large numbers.

Mummy Returns, The (2001) begins in Egypt 5,000 years ago with The Rock (a WWE wrestler with a mobile eyebrow and an attitude) playing the Scorpion King, then on to 1933 and tomb robbers and their horrible kid nicking the scorpion bracelet of Anubis. There is a massive punch up at the tomb robbers' home in England, and the wife is kidnapped after the kid puts the bracelet on, which means that the Scorpion King will awaken in 7 days and destroy the world.
Imhotep is revived. Fun & games on a No. 12 bus. Then the kid is grabbed. Everyone shoots off to Egypt to be attacked by killer Hobbits. Mrs. Tomb Robber is stabbed to death but the kid brings her back to life while the final battle raged on. The film is a load of rubbish but it is fun rubbish.

The Mummy remake (1999) is a fast-paced film with great special effects, lots of laughs and the plot, such as it is, doesn't get in the way of the action. Probably the best new film on telly in 2002 and right up there with Groundhog Day as far as movie excellence is concerned.

Murder At 1600 (1997) Wesley Snipes stars as a Regis, Washington homicide cop, who is sent to the White House when a cleaner finds a body in the toilets. Meanwhile, North Korea has been holding the crew of a crashed AWAC aircraft for 182 and the public are fed up of the president's dithering. And Regis is being threatened with eviction by the city.
   Regis is paired with Secret Service Agent Chance and has to do battle with Spikings, her boss, and Regis was bugged. Carla, the dead woman, looked like she was about to spill beans and do a runner to the Virgin Isles. Spikings tries to frame a male cleaner but Regis becomes interested Kyle, in the president's son, who had had an affair with Carla.
   Chance admits that she had helped to cover up an assault by Kyle on another girlfriend and Regis says he's not going to let the cleaner fry. Meanwhile, the US military wants the dithering president to use force on N. Korea. Kyle tells Regis that someone else killed Carla, and Regis believes him.
   Regis & Chance uncover a plot to use the murder to taint the president. Spikings is taken out and the real bad guy turns out to be his boss, who was Dr. Hawkeye in the TV version of M*A*S*H. Regis & Chance infiltrate the White House through Civil War era tunnels and tell the president he's being conned. Chance gets to take a bullet for the president, the bad guy is killed and everyone ends up a hero.

Murder By Numbers (2002) Two wiseguy school kids plot the perfect murder, a woman picked at random, which is investigated by psychologically damaged Captain Cathy (Sandra Bullock), who is being harassed to testify at a parole board hearing for one Carl Hudson. Justin, the bright one, gives Richard a lecture on police forensic procedures while they burn incriminating evidence. The police question both of them then target their school's dope-dealer janitor, not knowing that he has been set up as the fall guy.
Captain Cathy doesn't think he fits the profile, he's too sloppy, and falls out with her partner yet again. Richard videos himself shagging Lisa, the girl whom Jason fancies, to prove she's a slag. Then he kills the janitor and makes it look like suicide; which convinces Cathy that he's not the ritual killer. Her boss chucks her off the case but she takes no notice. The kids are raked in and the cops tell them how they did the crime, but a lawyer springs them as the cops are trying to get Jason to rat out Richard because they think Richard killed the woman.
Cathy tells her partner that Carl Hudson is her ex-husband, who stabbed her 17 times and left her for dead. Both kids go on the run and Cathy catches up with them at a wrecked building on a cliff top, where Richard tries to swindle Jason in a suicide pact. Cathy makes a bog of the arrest but she gets to toss Richard into space. Jason saves her ass so she makes him admit that he killed the woman. Then she goes to the parole board hearing.

Murder In Black & White (1990) After 3 weeks in his job, Charles Stover, the new (black) police chief, is fished out of a boating lake in Central Park. Was he killed or was it a stupid accident while he was paddling in the middle of the night? Lt. Frank Janek of Internal Affairs gets the case. Meanwhile, another body is found in a nearby garden; a naked (white) doctor. Same cause of death for both victims.
   Janek gets 3 days to crack the case. Someone in the PD is leaking stuff to the press, which conjures up sensational headlines. Black racialists are causing all sorts of bother. The police department tries to fit up a black junkie, who's found with the chief's wallet, etc., as the killer but Janek doesn't buy the railroad job. The other body belongs to a doctor, who was having an affair with a nurse, who is found dead at her home. Her dog is dead, too, and it bit the killer. A neighbour saw someone other than the doctor visit the nurse.
   Martin, the chief's draft-dodger son, returns from Canada and tells Janek that his dad quit the police force after going along with the cover-up of the killing of a black guy by a white cop. Someone slugs Janek and tries to shove him under a bus. The railroaded junkie sues the city for $6M and Janek is chucked off the case. An incident as he's discharging himself from hospital leads him to discover that the shoes found at the boating lake don't belong to Stover.
   That and the stomach contents of the deceased lead Janek to the Japanese restaurant, where Jim, the head of the PR department, is a regular visitor. Janek confronts him with what he knows and asks if he has any dog-bites. Jim, the killer cop who was worried about being exposed by the new chief, obligingly eats a bullet to save the PD the embarrassment of a trial for his 4 murders.

Mystery Woman: Game Time (2005) Sammy, who runs the Mystery Woman Bookstore with the help of elderly black computer expert Toby, gets Mr. Fisk, an unreliable author, to attend a book signing; and he's found dead the next day. Randy, a guy who claims he knows Fisk, is trying to get Sammy to sell his computer game. The police chief is useless and Fisk was poisoned, so Mrs. Fisk, the ex-wife, is busted for buying pesticide.
The chief busts Randy next and Sally's pal Cathy in the DA's office obligingly lets her see all the evidence. Sally is slugged and Fisk's PC is stolen, but the hard drive turns up later. The Russian Mafia is thrown into the equation. It turns out that Fisk wrote the game, for which Randy supplied the graphics, and he was poisoned with DX, which was made by the Russian military.
Randy keeps telling a different story about his relationship with Fisk. Sally gets an armed burglar, who strolls off with Fisk's hard disk, but Toby's copy thwarts him. Mrs. Fisk is busted. But, eventually, Sally gets to boot the real killer in the mush.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) G-Girl foils an armed robbery then returns to being Jenny Johnson. Nerdy Matt Saunders tries to chat her up, egged on by his bozo mate Vaughan, and Matt chases a skinhead, who grabs Jenny's handbag. She's impressed enough to fix up a dinner date. She has to put out a Towering Inferno fire during dinner, and she breaks Matt's bed when they get back to his place.
   Matt is kidnapped by Prof. Bedlam, a super criminal, who's Jenny's rejected school boyfriend. He tells Matt she's G-Girl and she got her super powers from a meteorite. Bedlam has a piece of another meteorite, which will suck G-Girl's super powers out of her.
   Matt sets up a double date with Hanna (the workmate he fancies and who fancies him), her boyfriend and Jenny. Only the boyfriend is a no-show and Jenny has to go off and tackle a missile. She turns nasty when Matt dumps her, trashing his car and his apartment.
   Bedlam gets Matt to help 'neutralize' Jenny, who chucks a shark into Hanna's apartment when she & Matt get together. Hanna & Vaughan crash in but the neutralization begins. But Hanna also acquires super powers and gets into a huge fight with Jenny. Then Matt fixes Jenny up with Barry Bedlam, and he gets Hanna.