Olympus Has Fallen has one of the higher body counts of a film that doesn’t take place on the beaches of Normandy that I’ve ever seen.

It starts right out of the gate: Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is in a motorcade taking President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his wife (Ashley Judd) to a fundraising event on Camp David. Ominously, it is snowing. (And because Olympus Has Fallen has all the subtlety of a WWE Pay-Per-View event, anything that appears ominous IS ominous.) Yup, the cars skid off the road and crash—the First Lady’s head is smashed (gorily) into the window and she’s trapped in her seat belt, as the car dangles over a cliff. When the car begins to fall, Banning can only save the president, who watches in horror as his wife (and the two agents in the front seat) plummet to their deaths. Because Banning assured the president he would save his wife, he is now a broken shell of a man in need of a redemption arc. Which leads to a few thoughts:

1. Is this officially an Ashley Judd cameo, or has her career really come to playing doting wives who die in the first five minutes of the film? (All of this will be a moot point of course, when she becomes the next...

Considering it’s in 3D, Oz: the Great and Powerful falls surprisingly flat. Obviously, it’s always risky to mess with a classic, but Wizard of Oz origin stories have worked before: Wicked re-imagined the relationship between the Good Witch Glenda and the Wicked Witch of the West as a feminist fairytale, Thelma and Louise in pointy hats—and, in doing so, became one of the most popular musicals of all time.

So why not explain how an ordinary man came to be the feared and awesome Oz, the man behind the curtain? Why not address the always intriguing dynamic between would-be messiahs and those who desperately want to believe them?

But if Wicked was a work of inspiration—built out of a righteous need to take back a destructive archetype and reinvent it for a new generation of young girls, the inspiration for Oz: The Great and Powerful seems to be this: Oz would sure look cool in 3D! (And it barely does that, by the way. Technically, the film is unimpeachable. As a work of imagination, it has all the visual flare of a cereal box.)

The film follows certain Wizard of Oz protocols, because, well, that’s what you do. So it starts, naturally, in black and white: Oscar “Oz” (James...

Last year, I wrote a column bemoaning the fact that, thanks to social media and blogs devoted exclusively to Academy Award prognostication, the Oscars have lost all their suspense.

Oh what a difference a year makes!

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the Oscars are a veritable free-for-all this year. Oh sure, there are a couple of locks: Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor and Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress are “bet the ranch” type material. But everything else feels gloriously, uncharacteristically up in the air.

The weirdness of this year’s race started when the nominees came out and both Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were shut out of the Best Director’s category. Since Argo and Zero Dark Thirty were at the time seen as legitimate Best Picture contenders, it sent the whole race into a tailspin: Wait, how can either of those films win Best Picture if their directors weren’t seen worthy of recognition? (Yes, films have won Best Picture without the director getting nominated before—Driving Miss Daisy was the most recent one—but it is a rare feat.)...

The Bourne films have been called America’s answer to Bond, but that’s not quite accurate. There’s nothing quintessentially American about Jason Bourne. More accurately, John McClane is the American corollary. Instead of an international spy, he’s a New York cop. He’s not glamorous, he’s rough-around-the-edges. He doesn’t drink martinis, he chugs Budweiser (presumably.)

Which begs the question: Why is the Die Hard franchise so unsustainable (i.e., bad) when the Bond one never seems to grow old? One reason is obvious: They cycle in new Bonds every few years, so the franchise isn’t reduced to one big “I’m too old for this sh-t” joke.

But it’s bigger than that: There are endless ways to spin a tale of international intrigue and adventure. There are only so many ways a working class cop can get entangled in life and death scenarios without it just seeming ridiculous. The Die Hard franchise passed ridiculous three movies ago.

So what do they do this time? They essentially turn John McClane into an accidental version James Bond. Bad idea.

McClane travels to Moscow (so retro!) because he finds out that his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney, a kind of poor man’s...