Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Summer is almost over, so this week is Bro Movie Week. There’s an action-thriller about a driver who wants to get from here to there; a documentary about three mountain climbers who want to get from the bottom to the top; and a romantic dramedy about a guy who wants to help a woman he meets to get home.

Before We Go

Dir: Chris Evans

Nick (Chris Evans) is a bearded busker who’s playing his trumpet in Grand Central Station. He’s in NY City for an important audition the next day – the chance of a lifetime to join a famous jazz band. But he’s dogged by memories of a long lost love. Brooke (Alice Eve) is a well-dressed woman in a hurry. She wants to get back to her home in New Haven as fast as she can. And if she doesn’t get there in time… big trouble.

The problem is she missed the last train, and is penniless and without any ID. Her purse got snatched in a bar that night. So as the station is closing, Nick goes out on a limb for her, and says he’ll help her get home. At first she’s cold and standoffish but soon realizes he’s her only chance. And so they step out into the scary streets of the city that never sleeps.

Over the course of the night, they find themselves in a dangerous den of thieves, performing on a stage at the wrong wedding, and running into lost loves at a party. Will Brook ever tell Nick why she has to get home? Will Nick find closure with his own relationship? And have the two of them forged a new friendship — or possibly a lasting romance — of their own?

Before We Go isn’t terrible, it’s just OK. More meh than anything else. The plot is uninteresting and predictable, and the characters are mediocre. Chris Evans is better known as Captain America so I guess this is his try at directing a movie. Nice try Chris, but try again. I’ve seen Alice Eve in lots of TV shows and movies, but she’s also unremarkable in this one. If you really need to watch a “Night in Manhattan” movie see Martin Scorsese’s After Hours instead.

Meru

Dir: Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

Renan Ozturk, Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker are three American mountain climbers. They’re not ordinary hobbyists. These are the guys with weather-beaten faces you see staring sternly at a cloud on the cover of Outside magazine; or dangling from a sheer face of rock in National Geographic. Climbing is their life. Profession, too. They make a living partly from taking the pictures and videotape of the mountains they’re climbing. But their white whale, their unconquerable peak, is a mountain called Meru.

Meru is a formidable, bare, sheer peak of rock on a snow-covered mountain in the Himalayas. Its top is known as the Shark’s Fin. In comparison, Mt Everest is a popular tourist spot with plenty of sherpas there to help would-be climbers. Meru – at the source of the river Ganges in northern India – is a do-it-yourself climb. Basically, you carry, on your back everything you need to eat, wear or use. You’re on your own. This movie chronicles the two attempts made by these driven climbers to get to the top of the un-climbable Meru.

The photography in this movie is quite spectacular. And some of the incidents caught on film – like an avalanche on a mountain side, or shots of the climbers inside a tent pinned near the top of a peak – is amazing. So if you’re into outdoor or extreme sports, or chronicles of guys who risk their lives climbing mountains just because they’re there, then you’ll love this movie. Otherwise… I think it only has niche appeal.

The Transporter: Refueled

Dir: Camille Delamarre

Frank (Ed Skrein) is a driver in Monte Carlo. He’s known for his unmatched skills in a car. He can get anyone anywhere they want to go, no questions asked. Cops or robbers can’t stop him. So when he’s hired for a large

But there’s more to the story than that. They hire Frank again for another job, and just to make sure he comes through, they kidnap his dad, Frank Senior (Ray Stephenson). And give him a time-release poison to which they hold the only antidote. They want to take down the mob, including Karasov (Serbian actor Radivoje Bukvic). But can Frank’s lightning-fast fighting and driving skills teamed with the vengeance-driven sex-workers defeat the worst gangster-pimps of Monaco?

This is the latest installment in an endless action movie franchise, that starred Jason Statham as the Transporter in earlier versions. It’s dumb and ridiculous, and sexist of course, and riddled with logical impossibilities and melodramatic acting. And the dialogue is atrocious: did they take an already bad French script and feed it into Google Translate? Still, I have to say I actually liked it. The chases, the fights, and the shootouts were all good, and Ed Skrein (Game of Thrones) is credible as the new, artfully-scarred driver. It’s a crime action thriller, a B movie (maybe a C movie), but I still enjoyed it.

Transporter: Refueled opened earlier this week and Meru and Before We Go both start today in Toronto and on V.O.D. Check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com