Brick

2025 Netflix

Rated: TV-MA

Length: 1 hr 39min

Drama ~ Sci-fi ~ Thriller

Directed by: Philip Koch

Starring: Matthias Schweighöfer and Ruby O. Fee

Trapped. Together. Terrified.

FROM NETFLIX:

A couple whose relationship is on the rocks wakes up in the middle of the night to find that they’ve been locked inside their apartment — not by an intruder or a maniacal landlord but by strange black bricks blocking every possible exit. Desperate to escape, they join forces with their neighbors to decode the mystery that’s keeping them trapped. The German thriller BRICK, written and directed by Philip Koch, stars Matthias Schweighöfer (Army of the Dead), Ruby O. Fee (Army of Thieves), and Frederick Lau.

After suffering a pregnancy loss, the relationship between Tim (Schweighöfer) and Olivia (Fee) has been strained. Tim is overly stressed about finishing his work — a video game –– and Olivia feels that he’s been neglecting her. As soon as she calls it quits, however, she opens the apartment door to a solid black wall. Glossy bricks have been stacked up in the entrance and in each window, blocking every chance Olivia has to break away. Now they’re stuck in this together — for better or worse. But they aren’t the only ones: Tim and Olivia’s neighbors are locked in, too. As they traverse the building trying to find an opening, these residents slowly learn that there may be no way out.

THE REVIEW:

I knew going in that this was a German Movie that Netflix had overdubbed. I don’t like Foreign Movies overdubbed with English and I’ll tell you why. It drives me crazy when the words being spoken don’t match the actor’s mouth movements, it really drives me nuts. But I knew that Matthias Schweighöfer and Ruby O. Fee were in it and I really liked them and their chemistry in Army Of Thieves. I was really impressed with the two of them and more so the fact that Matthias starred in and directed the movie. And I have seen a few recent Foreign films Netflix has overdubbed and they seemed like they were getting better at it.

So I was willing to give it a chance and overlook any overflubbing, I mean overdubbing that might be…ummm…..a little off. The overdubbing on this one should be called overflubbing, absolutely horrible. Terrible, the audio was way off from the actor’s actual mouth movements and gestures. In some spots they aren’t even talking and yet you hear them talk………ok, you get the point on the overflubbing, I mean overdubbing. Now on to the acting…….

Terrible, talk about overacting….Frederick Lau as Marvin was horrible, overly dramatic and heavily overacted. Murathon Muslu as Yuri comes a close second to Frederick’s performance. It was all bad acting wise, I give props to Matthias and Ruby, they tried given what they were given to work with. I wanted to give it a better review but as I type this I realize I am just going to beat it up.

There was a scene where Ruby O. Fee grabs a hammer drill, determined to bust through the mysterious black brick wall that has suddenly blocked them in. That scene is the epitome of the fakeness involved. It was painfully obvious that the hammer drill attempt was horribly fake. When they use sledge hammers to bust through the walls between the apartments, the red brick was really fake looking, really bad. And on and on and on…..

I had high expectations of enjoying Matthias and Ruby again but this was not enjoyable, it was painful. And I think this has more to do with direction than anything else. It came off as a B Sci-fi movie, you know the old one with fake props and sets due to a lack of funds. The story was a good premise and showed promise but I think the execution left it all flat…..like a BRICK. Couldn’t resist.

I honestly can’t recommend this one, as much as I like Matthias and Ruby, I gotta say you should avoid this one.

Two Thumbs down, way down.

Army Of Thieves

Army Of The Dead

Heart Of Stone

2023 Netflix

Rated: PG-13

Length: 2 hr 2min

Action ~ Crime ~ Spy ~ Thriller

Directed by: Tom Harper

Starring: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo, and Matthias Schweighöfer.

HEART OF STONE: An unfriendly or unkind disposition. “She had a Heart of Stone.”

Gal Gadot stars as MI6 Field technician Rachel Stone. Rachel and her team are in the Italian Alps to capture Mulvaney, a wanted arms dealer. They are in a casino resort high up on the top of a mountain where there is a livestream of a Navy Seals operation being broadcast. Mulvaney and the other guests are there to place bets on the outcome. The extraction of Mulvaney doesn’t go as planned and a gunfight breaks out. Parker (Jamie Dornan) manages to get Mulvaney out of the casino and into the cable car amidst the fighting and head down the mountain. Stone slips away and contacts………..

Jack Of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer) who, using his very sophisticated extensive computer simulation in real time, guides her down the mountain from his location in London. It is very impressive how Jack of Hearts assists Stone from that far away. It is an action and suspense filled trip down the mountain as Stone deals with every obstacle in her way with Jack’s assistance. As she races down the mountain, the rest of her MI6 team is also trying to get to the bottom to intercept Parker and Mulvaney before a security team reaches them. It is an adrenaline filled race as all three parties try to get to Mulvaney and Parker first.

It is a spy thriller and I can’t talk anymore about the plot without giving things away. Nobody is who you think they are, there are many surprises as the movie unfolds. Stone is called “Nine of Hearts” and referred to as “Heart of Stone” given her cold blooded approach to doing her job. Who does Rachel Stone work for? Does MI6 call her “Nine of Hearts” Who does Jack of Hearts work for? These are questions that get answered as the movie unfolds, and you have to watch for that as it get very tricky following who is who and doing what for what reason. And just when you think you have it figured out…….

I loved Matthias Schweighöfer in Army of Thieves and Army of The Dead, although I liked Army of Thieves much better than Army of The Dead. When I found out that Matthias also directed Army of Thieves, as well as starring in it, I was very impressed and made a mental note to keep an eye out for him. I really like him in this as well, great job, one of my new favorite actors (Top ten lists coming soon!). I just re-watched and reviewed Red Notice and really like Gal Gadot in it and decided to watch her in this movie. Excellent job of portraying Rachel Stone, the bad-ass spy holding her own against anyone in any situation. Kind of like a female James Bond.

It is non-stop action, a tremendous thrill ride full of twists and turns you don’t see coming. It has a lot of modern James Bond type technology that I love to watch and see in a movie. The plot line is a familiar one, but it is what spies do, it is their job to keep the bad guys from getting their hands on things they shouldn’t have and stop them from using them to destroy the world as we know it.

I would DEFINATELY watch this again.

Highly Recommended!

Two Thumbs Up!!

Army Of The Dead

2021 Netflix

Rated: R

Length: 2 hr 28min

Action ~ Crime ~ Horror ~ Thriller

Directed by: Zack Snyder

Starring: Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro, Raúl Castillo, Huma Qureshi, and Garret Dillahunt.

“There’s two hundred million dollars sitting in a vault in the basement of my Casino in the quarantine zone of Las Vegas. Assemble a team and extract it and 50 million of it is yours. What do you say?”

A zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, Nevada has prompted the US Military to surround the City with three layers of shipping containers, effectively containing (Pun Intended) the Zombie outbreak from temporarily spreading. Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) owns a casino on The Strip inside the containment (Again…Pun intended) zone and is asking Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) to assemble a team of mercenaries to extract the money in exchange for 50 million of it. They just have to kill their way through all the zombies in the quarantine zone, make their way to the casino, crack the Götterdämmerung safe, extract the money, revive and repair the dilapidated helicopter on the roof of the casino, and fly away to safety before the military nukes the quarantine zone in 96 hours. Let’s get cracking(Pun Intended).

Scott agrees and assembles a team to execute the mission. The last man they recruit for the team is none other than our good friend Sebastian (Matthias Schweighöfer) from ARMY OF THIEVES. The scene where Scott finds him in the locksmith shop is the very last scene in ARMY OF THIEVES. And Sebastian is ecstatic about getting a chance to crack the Götterdämmerung safe, after having cracked the Rheingold, The Valkyrie and The Siegfried safes in the other movie. So Scott and his team gather and enter the Zombie zone of Los Angeles to extract two million dollars in what looks like a horrific suicide mission. Scott must also contend with his daughter who has forced herself onto the mission against his wishes.

It is everything you would expect from a zombie movie based in Las Vegas. There are lots of Zombies…..Elvis impersonators, waitresses, circus performers, dancers, police officers….even Siegfried and Roy’s Tiger has become a zombie tiger. Anyone and anything in the quarantine zone is now a zombie. There is lots of blood and gore as they eat the flesh of the living and even more as the team slaughters there way through the Las Vegas Strip. It is very realistically shot, you feel like you are in Las Vegas with them as they fight off the horde. There is intrigue, horror, double crossing and the very real fear of getting eaten alive and escaping before a nuclear bomb incinerates the crew.

Matthias reprising his role as Sebastian is just as good and hilarious as in ARMY OF THIEVES. Dave Buatista is good as Scott Ward and the rest of the crew did a good job. I liked Omari Hardwick’s role and the scene in the end with him I thought was really good. Theo Rossi is really despicable as the sexist Burt Cummings. This was the sequel to Army of Thieves even though this movie came out six months before it. It was supposed to be the beginning of a franchise, possibly a trilogy or more, but at the time of this writing Netflix has apparently pulled the plug on any more movies to follow, reportedly due to the disappointing performance of Zack Snyder’s REBEL MOON movies. ARMY OF THE DEAD was a successor to Zack Snyder’s 2004 film Dawn of the Dead, which was a remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (filmed in Pittsburgh and released in 1978).

I thought that ARMY of THIEVES was the better movie. This one was good but just not as good. A long one too, coming in at 2 and a half hours. If you like Zombie movies it’s a good one, well filmed and directed. And if you’re going to watch this one I suggest watching ARMY of THIEVES first, it will give you a better background for this movie. Unless you just want to watch a Zombie movie….but there are zombies in the first one, just not as many.

So that’s a, “Yeah, it was alright. But I wouldn’t watch it again.”, for me…..

No thumbs up, just a wave of the hand as in…So~So

Army Of Thieves

2021 Netflix

Rated: TV-MA

Length: 2 hr 7min

Action ~ Comedy ~ Crime ~ Thriller

Directed by: Matthias Schweighöfer

Starring: Matthias Schweighöfer, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ruby O. Fee, Stuart Martin, Guz Khan, and Jonathan Cohen.

“Want to put your skills to the test? The house at the end of Leipziger Str. Berlin. 8pm. Back door. Password: Götterdämmerung.”

Matthias Schweighöfer stars as Sebastian Schlencht-Wöhnert, a would be safe-cracker with an extensive knowledge of Hans Wagner’s work, currently working as a bank teller in Potsdam, Germany. Hans Wagner was a legendary German locksmith who, in his twilight years, crafted four of the world’s most famous safes based on the four operas of Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, with each safe named after one of the operas: The Rheingold, The Valkyrie, The Siegfried, and The Götterdämmerung. After posting a safe-cracking video on Youtube, he receives a comment on his video asking him to go to an address in Berlin and test his safe-cracking skills. He does and is entered into an underground safe cracking competition where he emerges as the winner. The next day on his way to work, as he makes his usual stop at the corner coffee shop, he is approached by……

Gwendoline Starr (Nathalie Emmanuel) who wants to recruit his safe-cracking talents and extensive knowledge of Wagner’s infamous four safes. The fourth safe’s whereabouts remain a mystery but she and her team have located the first three and plan to rob them all before they are decommissioned in four days with his help. The temptation of being the guy who crack’s Wagner’s safes is too much for Sebastian and he agrees to join “The Crew” consisting of Gwendoline, Korina Dominguez (Ruby O. Fee), Rolph (Guz Khan), and Brad Cage (Stuart Martin). They head to Paris France where the first safe “Rheingold” is the least guarded and the easiest of the jobs.

Unbeknownst to them, they are being hunted by The Interpol Agent Delacroix (Jonathan Cohen) who has been hunting the crew ever since they got away after shooting him three years ago. He is aware of the three safes and surmises that they may be after them and is close on their tail. The ensuing chase, as they hunt the three safes and avoid Delacroix, is a comical thriller full of action, deceit and intrigue against the backdrop of a growing Zombie Apocalypse in The United States. Matthias Schweighöfer stars and directed this movie which is a prequel to ARMY OF THE DEAD, both written by Zack Snyder. Matthias also starred in ARMY OF THE DEAD. They were both written as part of a trilogy with further movies in planning.

ARMY OF THIEVES starts out like a German fairy tale as Sebastian explains the history of Wagner and the four safes. I really like Matthias as the nerdy, straight-laced but very likeable Sebastian. Nathalie Emmanuel is awesome as Gwendoline, the very smart runaway thief with kick-ass street skills. I really like the nerdy but cool swagger of Ruby O. Fee as Korina, the tech wiz kid who writes and records her own music. Guz Khan’s very unique, very British, sandwich eating, getaway driver extraordinaire character is really cool. And Stuart Martin as the very conceited, arrogant and self-centered Brad Cage is well…likeable and hateable.

I love this movie. I love the story and the characters, and the actors that played them. I really think Matthias did an excellent job in directing and acting in this safe-cracking thriller. I had watched this earlier in the year not knowing about THE ARMY OF THE DEAD movie, and after watching that and finding out ARMY OF THIEVES was a prequel I had to watch it again. I have a better appreciation of ARMY OF THIEVES, especially how the story carries over into the ARMY OF THE DEAD. I would suggest that if you were to watch either of them I would watch this one first. That is the timeline order of the story and it leads to better understanding of ARMY OF THE DEAD.

So that’s a yes for me.

Two Thumbs Up!