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Homefront
2.5 Waffles!

This movie is destined be #1, because there are millions of people willing to pay good money to watch Jason Statham beat the living daylights out of James Franco (I still haven’t forgiven him for the Oscars show a few years ago. I doubt Anne Hathaway has either. Or his agent. Or The Academy.).

Statham stars as Broker – a former undercover narcotics officer who tried to take down one of the biggest, baddest biker gangs in Louisiana. They were cooking and distributing meth, and, when the bust went down, it went all sorts of wrong.

Two years later, Broker has taken his young daughter (Izabela Vidovic) to live in the Bayou country where it should be more peaceful and quiet, but the locals haven’t taken too kindly to this new stranger. In particular, Gator Bodine (Franco), is urged into hassling the former detective after a small family feud begins, but even a guy named Gator can figure out he can benefit in bigger ways when this head of a small time meth operation discovers more about Broker and his past (when Gator just walks into Broker’s open, unlocked house and goes through all of his top secret files, which are just sitting in the basement! No one said this was going to be an Oscar award winning script).

Can Gator get rid of a thorn in his side and get in good with the biker gang by alerting them where to find Broker?

Homefront is everything you expect it to be, for better and for worse.

Writer Sylvester Stallone (yes, that Sylvester Stallone, who is also known as Oscar Nominated writer Sylvester Stallone) crafts Homefront to have a very straight forward plot. If you are looking for subtlety and nuance, you have to ask yourself why on Earth you would be looking for subtlety and nuance in a movie like this.

The bad guys obviously and cartoonishly bad.

The good guy might as well be wearing a white hat and telling all of the kids to eat their vitamins and go to school.

And, in the end, Homefront is all about Statham beating up bad dudes, which is what you wanted in the first place.

We’re OK with it because Statham is a great leading man cut from the same mold of Stallone, Bronson, and Schwarzenegger. He’s a wonderful, stoic, moralistic hero who knows how to kick booty when he has to, but also wins over the audience with some charm and tender loving care of a young daughter who needs a good daddy in her life. Anyone who tries to tell you Statham is just an action star who knows some martial arts has never really watched the guy in action.

Statham is so dynamic, so intense and so charismatic you can’t help but like Homefront. We root for him to beat up the bad guys. We enjoy his smart ass comebacks and one liners, and he makes you believe good will triumph over evil (And, because we know in our hearts he will beat the living daylights out of James Franco).

Homefront also has its weaknesses, too. The locals can be silly and stupid beyond belief and it feels like some plots seem to have been cut to streamline the movie, like the burgeoning love story between Broker and the town’s hottie redhead elementary school teacher (Rachelle “Hot For Teacher” LeFevre), as well as the tale of the mysterious small town sheriff (Clancy Brown), who seems a little too interested in Broker’s past. That’s probably for the best, since it gets us to the booty kicking a little quicker.

Homefront is rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug content and brief sexuality.