Frank Dux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is determined to fight in the three-day Kumite to honor his teacher. Unfortunately, the military has determined that they would rather not risk their investment in Dux and send two somewhat bumbling military policemen after him (one of these is Forest Whitaker).

While the story is based on the events of the life of Frank Dux, there is some disagreement if these events actually took place or not in the first place. Nonetheless, the age-old story of a man beating the odds is one that most people can get behind, and when he takes on “the man” in the process, it’s generally fun to watch. This movie is no exception. Just because there is no evidence of an actual event called the Kumite doesn’t mean that there can’t be one in the movies. So let’s move on.

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This movie started in interesting fashion, with a driver picking up a hitchhiker and some relatively minor chit-chat happening until the hitcher asks if the driver is interested in guys (the hitcher himself is a man as well). At that point, the driver kicks him out, and you’re left wondering just what is happening here. But that doesn’t last long.

Next up, the driver pulls his truck over and opens up the bed of the truck to reveal a girl, bound and tied, and we get to see her dig her own grave, before (presumably) being killed by the driver of the truck. This isn’t actually shown, which would probably increase the suspense a bit, but it’s really a bit early on to do much more than whet the appetite. Shift to another car load, and you’re still wondering what’s happening.

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To say that Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, who also wrote and directed) is past his prime is putting it mildly. Adrian is gone – she passed a few years ago from “women’s cancer”, and now each year on her birthday Rocky visits sites where they shared a few special moments. We see her here only in Rocky’s memories and in the name of Rocky’s restaurant, Adrian’s.

But when a television computer projects that Rocky in his prime could beat the current heavyweight champion Mason “The Line” Dixon, something in Rocky’s “basement” (down in his gut) starts to stir. He wonders what it would be like to fight again. Nothing big, but just a few local fights. So he applies to get re-licensed.

When the papers pick up on it, Dixon’s camp gets wind of it and decides it could be the payday that he’s been waiting for all these years.

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On November 14, 1970, as the Marshall Thundering Herd was returning from a football game at East Carolina University, and the chartered plane they were on clipped the trees just short of the runway and crashed, killing 75 people aboard, including most of the football team, the coach, the athletic director, and a number of prominent boosters from Huntington, West Virginia.

Couping this with being kicked out of their conference the year before due to a massive number of rule violations (a fact not exactly mentioned in the movie), school president Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn) considers indefinitely suspending the football program at Marshall. Some students convince him otherwise.

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In the not-so-distant future, the problems of the world’s energy crisis have been solved by the New Economic Block (NEB). Or so it would seem. For once the mining begins, a massive radioactive cloud is released, and that would appear to be problematic. Do you produce a teaspoon of this wonder-fuel, at the cost of lives, or do you stop and look for something else? I suspect you already know the answer.

If you’re the NEB, you continue mining, and do what you can to offset the radiation. But if you’re the rest of the civilized people, you try and stop the NEB, and so war breaks out on Sirius 6B, and in 2078, this war has been going on for some 20 years between the two factions, all of which used to be a part of the NEB. But now, it’s been six months since anyone has heard from the NEB, until one day a lone soldier comes in from the dessert bearing a message…

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Officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) foils the plot of a bomber, and the next day as he gets a coffee, he witnesses a city bus blown to smithereens. Then he receives a call that another city bus has a bomb on it, and when it accelerates to fifty miles per hour, the bomb is armed. If it goes below fifty, the bomb will detonate. Suddenly he has to try to help the people on this other bus. Can he make it in time?

The first task is to find the bomb, and the bomber has determined that this game has certain rules. Of course one of those rules is finding the bus, and in a city the size of Los Angeles, being able to find a lone bus is a difficult task at best, so Jack has a bus number and is told where the bus is. Now he just needs to get to it. This he does.

Since he can’t get to the bus stop on time, he has to catch a lift by taking over a car and driving alongside like a maniac, and eventually jumping into the bus itself, but by then it’s too late. The bus has already hit fifty miles per hour and the bomb is armed. The game is on.

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Claire (Emma Roberts) and Hailey (Joanna ‘JoJo’ Levesque) are two girls coasting through summer vacation with their normal problems – namely that they are younger than all the “cool” kids – until they find out that they are about to be split up forever, and then their problems get much, much worse.

Until a freak storm throws the beach club into complete disarray. That at first seems like a disaster because the end-of-summer party might get canceled. But then something extraordinary happens. They find Aquamarine (Sara Paxton) in the bottom of the pool, along with a bunch of other ocean debris. How did this happen, you may ask? Easy. Aqua is a mermaid. That’s when things get interesting.

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As near as I can figure, Vincent Swan (Dennis Hopper) has two counts against him. The first is that he’s a bit of a relic, and no one really wants him around. The second is that he was involved in something of a questionable incident a few years back when a serial killer was finally tracked down.

It seems that Vincent’s daughter was one of the victims, and perhaps he was a little too overzealous when it came right down to the endgame, so everyone pretty well thinks that he’s burnt out. Most think that he just grabbed the closest thing to a criminal that he could find. But since a fire burned all the evidence – and the perp. Plus, the killings stopped, and Vincent seems to have retired, so no one is complaining too much.

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Life is generally going well for Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford). He’s been running the computer system at his bank for a while now, and it looks like things are on track for the merger to go through, meaning that the small 26-bank operation is about to become part of a much larger company.

The only bad part about that is that it means that he won’t be a part of the day-to-day operations any longer. But it does mean that he can slow down and take some time with his family, and no one will be sad about that. It’s too bad that some other people have other plans for him – and his family – before this can all go through.

It seems that Bill Cox (Paul Bettany) has decided to make a play for some of the bank’s money, and he’s targeted Jack in order to get at it. After all, why go directly to the money, when you can go after the man who protects the money instead?

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Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker (Johnny Depp) and has his eyes set on Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane). This is a problem, because Allison is a Square and Cry-Baby is a Drape. Those two just don’t mix, but Cry-Baby is determined to sing for Allison at Turkey Point.

When Cry-Baby comes to pick Allison up on his new motorcycle, Baldwin, who sees himself as Allison’s boyfriend, decides that something needs to be done about Cry-Baby and all the Drapes, so he and his cohorts, The Whiffles, head over to Turkey Point to teach them a lesson.

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