Among Jason Statham movies, Homefront is right above the middle: It does what you’d expect, but it does it a bit better than what’s been done before.

Statham is Statham, so he’s the secretive outsider with his own code of ethics, and everyone around him is obsessed with violating that code. It’s not much different from The Transporter series or Parker, which came and went without struggle earlier this year in that it provides a venue for Statham to whollop, whomp, blow up, and canoodle with the film’s other residents. He still has his accent. He still kicks ass. He still has that weird charisma that really has yet to be explored.

Specifically, here he has a hit put on him by the drug-lord father of a kid who died in a DEA raid on a meth lab. Even though Statham was clearly trying to keep the kid alive, and the father watched as everyone but Statham gunned his son down, Statham has the rotten luck of being the one marked for death. Go figure.

I’ve had, for some time, the suspicion that the current comedy troop of Rogen, Hill, Cera, and Franco would eventually get to the point where, instead of a script, they would just sit around and talk. Now we have This Is the End, and if this isn’t the logical conclusion of the gang’s comedy, it’s damn close.

The premise is that Jay Baruchel is in LA to visit his friend Seth Rogen. Their friendship has been on the skids, and Rogen’s insistence that they attend a party at James Franco’s house instead of, I don’t know, hang out and smoke weed. doesn’t help. At Franco’s they meet up with Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, and several others within or slightly out of their group’s ever-expanding radius, such as Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Martin Starr, Chritopher Mintz-Plasse, and now, I guess, Emma Watson.

Freak disruptions start to occur all over the place — sinkholes swallow up many of the party-goers, others are lifted to heaven in columns of blue light, fires explode across Hollywood, and the five find themselves barricaded in Franco’s house — until Danny McBride shows up and makes their sixth.

April Fools Day is usually a day that brings tons of fake news, including trailer releases (like that Legend of Zelda trailer that will never be made into a movie *sadface*). But this year, April 1st was the release date of the red band trailer for the unbelievably star-packed action comedy This Is The End starring James Franco (who has had an already packed 2013 with the release of Spring Breakers and Oz The Great and Powerful), Seth Rogen, Emma Watson, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, and that’s just the supposed “main cast.” From just watching the trailer, expect appearances by Michael Cera, Rihanna, Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, Jason Segel, Paul Rudd, Mindy Kaling, and more. Holy freaking casting!

The main plot of the movie is simple: James Franco is throwing a kick-ass party and invites all his friends (because celebrities always party with tons of other celebrities) to have a crazy good time. Until the apocalypse happens. Los Angeles is engulfed in fire and brimstone, monsters and aliens are running rampant, people are looting and killing, mass hysteria basically.

Eventually, the main cast barricade themselves in what’s left of Franco’s house and try to survive. At one point, Emma Watson breaks in with an ax (a freaking AX) to try her hand at some looting, which looks to be successful based on the apparent self-testimonial video that is shot by the guys who are documenting what’s going on during the end of days.

Lest we forget, Spring Breakers writer/director Harmony Korine is the guy who got his start writing Larry Clark’s Kids, a film whose characters drank, did drugs, had sex, beat up strangers — all very adult things — and was slapped with an NC-17 rating and a heap of controversy because its characters were all, well, kids. Eighteen years later, the kids aren’t much older, they engage in the same activities, and yet it’s a comedy.

Apparently Korine decided to write and direct a movie about Spring Break because he missed out on it in his youth. So why the sudden change of opinion? Is it because Spring Break is just that — a break from real life where we can expect, if not forgive, hedonistic expression and temporary neglect of duties and responsibilities?

For the kids in Kids, every day of their lives was Spring Break, and if it’s the only thing you have in your life, its consequences are going to be catching up very soon. However wild the girls may go in Cancun, there’s at least some grudging respect for responsibility. Or maybe Korine is aging in reverse?

At 18, when he wrote Kids, he was just coming out of his teens, and being that close to the source, he ws tired of it, ready to take it down. Now he looks back on it with a sense of nostalgia, trying to relive all those moments he missed out on, perhaps.

Whatever the reason, Spring Breakers is just a lot of fun.

Coming as a surprise to no one, Oz: The Great and Powerful has come in first in the weekend box office for a second weekend in a row. The film is performing strong as the first blockbuster of the year, even if it is not reaching Alice in Wonderland or Hunger Games heights.  Still the film should get well over $200 Million domestically and exist as another nice win for Raimi and Disney.

In second place, the Halle Berry thriller The Call had a surprisingly strong debut. The film brought in just over $17 Million and is one of the stronger Halle Berry starring openings in quite a long time. The movie was cheap to make and easy to market so this is a really solid early year win for all of the people involved.

The winning stops at number two as the opening of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is anything but incredible or wonderful. Apparently the film is less funny than my word play and connected with audiences thusly. Comparing the film to other high concept comedies it falls fall below its peers. In fact it barely made 2/3rds of what the Will Ferrell bomb Semi-Pro made a few years ago.