Tubi Tuesday: Three Films Worth Your Time This Week
Tubi is still the best deal in streaming and it isn’t close. While Netflix and the rest keep raising prices and thinning out their catalogs to fund whatever prestige project is on the docket this month, Tubi stays free and keeps its shelves stocked with the kind of films that made going to the video store worth the trip. Every week I pull three worth your Tuesday night from the catalog. This week we’ve got an adventure film I’ve already reviewed and can’t stop recommending, one of the most intense action thrillers of the 1990s, and a Francis Ford Coppola coming-of-age film packed with more future stars than almost any other movie ever made.
The Mummy (1999)
Action/Adventure • 2h 4m
I reviewed The Mummy earlier this year and gave it four stars, and the short version of that review is that this is one of the most purely enjoyable adventure films of its entire era. Brendan Fraser is excellent as Rick O’Connell, a roguish American legionnaire who ends up leading an ill-fated expedition to Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead, alongside librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her scheming, cowardly brother Jonathan (John Hannah). They accidentally resurrect Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian high priest buried alive and cursed thousands of years ago, and the rest of the film is them trying to stay alive while Imhotep regenerates and works toward bringing about the apocalypse. Stephen Sommers set out to make something in the spirit of Indiana Jones and he absolutely delivered.
What separates The Mummy from the avalanche of lesser adventure films that surrounded it in the late 90s is the cast chemistry and the genuine sense of fun Sommers sustains from beginning to end. Fraser is at his absolute best here, Weisz makes Evelyn a fully realized character rather than a standard love interest, and Arnold Vosloo brings actual tragedy to Imhotep in a way that gives the villain real weight. None of the sequels came close, the 2017 reboot was a disaster, and the original still stands completely on its own as one of the best films of its decade.
Léon: The Professional (1994)
Action/Thriller • 1h 50m
Luc Besson’s Léon is one of those films that earns the word masterpiece without much argument. Jean Reno plays Léon Montana, a professional hitman operating out of a Manhattan apartment who lives a completely solitary existence, cares for a houseplant, drinks milk, and does his job with quiet, methodical efficiency. When his twelve-year-old neighbor Mathilda (Natalie Portman in her film debut) survives the massacre of her family by a corrupt and completely unhinged DEA agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman), she shows up at Léon’s door with nowhere else to go. What develops from there is one of the most unusual and genuinely moving relationships in action cinema history, as Léon slowly opens up to another human being for what might be the first time in his adult life while Mathilda, grief-stricken and furious, pushes him to teach her his trade so she can get revenge.
Gary Oldman as Stansfield is one of the great villain performances of the decade. He plays the character as someone who has completely lost the thread of who he’s supposed to be, operating on pure unpredictable menace, and every scene he walks into crackles with the threat that things are about to go badly wrong. Reno is the quiet center the whole film orbits around, and Portman at twelve years old holds her own against both of them in a performance that announced her as a serious talent immediately. The film has gathered a complicated reputation over the years due to some of the material in the director’s cut, but the theatrical version is a straightforward action thriller and a genuinely great one. If you haven’t seen it, that needs to be corrected tonight.
The Outsiders (1983)
Drama • 1h 31m
Francis Ford Coppola came off The Godfather films and Apocalypse Now and decided to make a coming-of-age film based on S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel, and the result was The Outsiders, one of the most stacked ensemble casts in the history of Hollywood. The film is set in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and follows Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell), a teenager from the working-class Greasers gang whose rivalry with the wealthy Socs escalates into violence, forcing Ponyboy and his friend Johnny (Ralph Macchio) to go on the run. The surrounding cast reads like a who’s who of 1980s stardom: Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, and Leif Garrett, most of them right at the beginning of careers that were about to explode. Coppola shot it back-to-back with Rumble Fish that same year, both adapted from Hinton novels.
What makes The Outsiders hold up is that it takes its characters seriously. This isn’t a film that talks down to teenagers or softens the reality of what it means to grow up without money in a world that has already sorted you into a category and decided your ceiling. The class division between the Greasers and the Socs is the engine the whole story runs on, and Coppola treats it with the same weight he’d bring to any of his other work. It’s based on a book most people were assigned in middle school and never revisited, and there’s a good chance you remember the broad strokes but have forgotten how well the film actually works. Tubi has it for free and it’s worth another look.
That’s your Tubi Tuesday for this week. Three films, no subscription required, and none of them are going to waste your time with a lecture.
Tubi Tuesday runs every week here at Titanquisitor, so check back next Tuesday for three more. And if you’ve got a Tubi hidden gem you think deserves a spotlight, head over to the forums and make your case.
