I watched three movies recently.

The Dark Knight Rises

Hero defeats Bad Guy. What’s next? Hero fights Son of Bad Guy. Really? Hey, remember when the Joker made the people of Gotham participate in a social experiment game? That was really edgy, let’s do that again! Probably wouldn’t have been so bad with more Batman being cool and less Bruce Wayne moping about.

The Bourne Legacy

Let’s have an operative of a secret government project befriend a lady in distress and run away with her. What really disappoints here is that you only get half a movie. The other half of the time we’re watching news footage about the events of The Bourne Supremacy. Do I care about Pamela Landy climbing into a car? Not in this movie. Then we cut to Edward Norton shuffling some files around on a table to remind us, hey, look how many different secret programs there. See how imaginative we are.

Underworld Awakening

Especially after the third Underworld movie, I think expectations were set pretty low, but as far as sequels go, this is actually pretty good. It introduces new good guys and new bad guys, and they aren’t generic clones of the previous generation. It’s vampires versus werewolves, for sure, and of course the ultimate bad guy is even more ultimate, but now the humans are somewhat involved and they updated the look to a more futuristic urban environment. Also, the occasional daytime scene. More unique ideas here than in the above two movies combined.