The World’s End
I treated myself to something special for this film. One of our local theaters was hosting the Cornetto Trilogy, which was Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and then the World’s End and I loved every minute of it (plus they game me a free t-shirt. Wish I knew were I could get more cool nerd t shirts. Oh, wait. I do). I wish to hell Hollywood would take a lesson from Simon Pegg and figure out that big stars and massive gun battles (well, except for Hot Fuzz) are not what’s needed in a good movie.
Yes, another film I rolled in to with a predisposition, thus making my unbiased reviewer qualifications suspect. I am a fan of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and love all their films (even Paul). I expected this one to be amazing, and am pleased to announce that my expectations were met. I am sure a less generous (cough cough fan boy cough cough) reviewer might find things to take issue with, but overall I enjoyed this film immensely.
What’s neat is once again Simon has taken a nerd trope and made it cool again while reinventing his and his friends characters into something completely different. Nick Frost is no longer an unemployed pot dealing loser or half assed cop but rather a high powered and very responsible lawyer (at least until he gets five shots of whiskey into him). Simon Pegg is the loser in this film, a barely adult who has never let go of how cool he was back in high school and yearns for those days all over again (like most of the idiots I spoke to at my reunion. As for me those four years are in my past and if I could call in a tactical air strike on the section of my brain that remembers high school I would (along with my alma mater. Burn in hell SCHS)).
And of course where would a Simon Pegg movie be without a campy action sci fi component. Paul was aliens, Hot Fuzz was cops, Shaun of the Dead was zombies, and the World’s End is all about robots (and sort of aliens). There was also a very cool Invasion of the Body Snatchers component that I enjoyed a great deal. I actually believe a robot uprising to be even more possible than a zombie apocalypse (and if you know how much I believe we are due for zombie apocalypse then you understand how likely I consider the robot uprising) and therefore makes for a great story premise.
It kind of makes me wonder why we don’t have more robot themed movies. Last one I can think of would have to be I, Robot and it really didn’t do very well (to be fair, it was kind of a crappy adaptation of a really good book). I think the issue is most people kind of understand that if there ever were a robot uprising we the human race would be royally boned. Just like it’s hard to have a superhero who is too powerful to compete against (Superman, for example) you can’t have a villain (or villainous force) that the heroes can’t really compete with. It is difficult to imagine fighting something you will break your hand punching in the face. In movie fantasy everyone likes to see themselves as a hero cutting down dozens of bad guys with their machine gun or ninja sword, not one of several thousand faceless BBS’s (Basic Bullet Stoppers) assigned to climb onto a robot tank in order to break it’s suspension with the combined weight of their corpses.
This film manages to get away from that by making the robots old school G.I. Joe style, where the heads and limbs come off easier than a Mr. Potato Head with an M-80 in it. I don’t want to start finding reasons to give black holes, but if I were going to use robots to take over the world I would probably make them at least tough enough to go mano a roboto with some out of shape middle aged drunkards.
So the World’s End. The film starts off with Gary King (Simon Pegg-not going to bother with film credits. If you don’t know who he is get off my blog) recounting the greatest night of his life when he and his four best friends from high school attempting the Miracle Mile-a route planned out to hit 12 pubs in one evening ending up at the World’s End in Newton Haven. He then goes around trying to convince his now grown up friends to recreate the trek and actually finish it this time. They are all grown up and have responsible lives and little interest in a night of alcoholic debauchery. For the record they are Any Knightly (Nick Frost-same as Simon), Peter Page (Eddie Marsan-Snow White and the Huntsman, War Horse, the Best of Men), Oliver Chamberlain (The Hobbit: and Unexpected Journey, Pirates! a Band of Misfits, Sherlock Holmes), and Steven Prince (Paddy Considine-Now is Good, Girl on a Bicycle, Submarine). (See what they did with the names?)
Anyway, Gary bullies, lies, and cajoles them all to join him and they all return to their home town of Newton Haven, a quaint old fashioned burb that I guess England is loaded with and reminds me of a lot of small towns in New Hampshire. Andy is now a teetotaler (what does teetotaler mean? It means you should have stayed awake more in school). They hit the first couple pubs and notice odd things, like no one seems to recognize them. They run into Olivers sister Sam (Rosamund Pike-you know she is really very attractive and an accomplished actress but her filmography reads like a skunk/steamroller mass murder crime scene-Johnny English Reborn, Jack Reacher, Wrath of the Titans. Those three films garnered a total of sixteen black holes from yours truly (granted, Wrath earned most of them but none of them were in the positive)) who Gary did back in the day but Steven has always had a thing for.
Gary gets into a fight with a kid in the mens room and accidentally knock his head off, discovering the awful secret of Newton Haven-most of the town has been taken over by robots. He and his chums mix it up with more and take them all down. They decide the best way to survive is to finish the pub crawl to avoid suspicion (this part didn’t sit great with me, and here is where I show you all what a hypocrite I really am as I have tossed films I cared less about down multiple flights of stairs for plot holes less weighty than this). Gary seems the most interested in finishing it as he appears to have nothing else in his life.
So the film progresses. Things get weirder at each stop as they discover the secret of what the robots are after. The story gets super cool at the end and then hokey again.
The stars.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Two stars. Robots. One star. All the inside jokes that only a fan of the Cornetto series will get are in full force. One star. A surprise appearance by some very cool stars. One star. Seeing Nick Frost go on a berserk rampage. One star. A film that manages to use the story and action to show the development of relationships between characters rather than treating character development like the muck you pull out of your rain gutter. A true buddy film in the sense that friendship triumphs in the end. One black hole. Free t shirt (which I am wearing right now). One star. Some very cool camera work (as per one of these films) and excellent pacing. One star. No need to bring in huge Hollywood names based on the mistaken belief that people will go see it just because of the star (cough cough Ben Affleck Batman cough cough). One star. Overall an excellent movie experience. Two stars. Total: twelve stars.
The black holes.
I really don’t wanna, but I suppose my much abused credibility needs a bone thrown to it once in a while. The fact that the robot costume I made with a cardboard box, some silver spray paint, and duct tape in 3rd grade had more strength and durability than these robots. Also what was up with the hand thing they all kept on trying to do? When you see it you will understand. One black hole. The logical reason to keep on with the pub crawl was tenuous at best and was literally the turd in the punch bowl for a big chuck of the film for me. One black hole. Total: two black holes.
A very grand total of ten stars. Yes, you should go see this. Yes, you should watch Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz again before seeing it. I’ll say this film was on the level of Hot Fuzz but not quite as good as Shaun (but remember also I have a love of zombies, making that opinion suspect too). See it in a theater and pay full price as a means of telling Hollywood what we, the unwashed nerd masses, want from our films. Date movie? Of course. If the girl you are seeing isn’t turned by a good Pegg/Frost film drop her off at the bus stop and give her a buck for fare as you will never find true happiness with her. Bathroom break? Hell no. Hold it for 109 minutes. Either that or get one of these portable Pit Stops before heading in.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see something else tonight and write it up tomorrow. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu and like us on Facebook please. If you have a comment on this film or my review post it here, and any off topic questions or suggestions can be sent to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
Sea of Suck.
One of the may lies I tell myself frequently (along with I am not a self delusional megalomaniac and the only reason I am still single is I haven’t met the right girl yet) is that I am actually impartial in these reviews and allow each film to stand on it’s own merits regardless of how much it’s predecessor, director, or source material may or may not suck.
Like most of my comfort lies this is sort of true but sort of not. I do try to stay impartial, but when handed a film by Lucas, McG, or anything with sparkly vampires I tend to show up at the theater with my canines sharpened, salivating at the smell of fresh blood in the air. At this point I when I start off a review with something like this I usually say something like “But this one surprised me and made me ashamed of my natural predilection” but honestly, my instinct was pretty spot on. There was blood in the water and when I followed the trail I found a fat, badly wounded sea lion to chomp on.
My predispostion stems from making the mistake of watching Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. That movie also suckled at the suck teat, but honestly it was a more solid effort than this garbage. At least all the actors made an effort and tried to look like they cared. In this film the actors all looked like they had been rejected by a Thunderbirds casting call. I honestly can’t imagine any director going with the performances delivered. The whole thing had a very Ed Wood style to it. “Act scared! More scared. Too much scared! Now act sad. Cut! That’s a wrap! Next scene!”
So this movie is left with all the crap that clogged down the last film (the story equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a horse, a base premise that suspends your disbelief so high it needs oxygen masks, and a desperation to be the next Harry Potter so tangible you can almost hear the director demanding that the prop guy design some Greek flying brooms) without any of the parts that made the first movie not quite a grilled cheese and razor blade sandwich. Normally to get a shift in acting talent this severe you have to go with a new cast, but it looks like the crew took one look at the script and opted to do the whole movie on dog tranquilizers.
Speaking of Harry Potter (and attempting to recreate that magic) they cast a new guy as Percy’s brother who looks like his real brother was Ron Weasley. Honestly, that’s just pandering. They kind of missed the point of Harry Potter and the humor level in those films when they opted to add in slapstick humor with metronome-like regularity. I also had a nice reminder of the difference in movie ratings. It’s often you will find me railing at a PG-13 when the action pretty clearly called for R, but this movie had me yearning for the good old days of PG-13. I’ve seen more violent and dangerous pillow fights.
I do feel like a bit of an ass bitching about too much deus ex machina in a movie about gods, but it looks like the writer learned about deus ex machina but was never told that it is a lazy writers tool to move the story along and therefore bad. It’s like if you house trained your dog by giving him a treat every time he craps on the carpet. The crew needs to find a mysterious island and has no way of finding it? Let’s have three blind witches give them literal map coordinates. Scooby Doo would be embarrassed by that. They need to get from a dock to a ship out at sea? They pray to Poseidon and he sends a giant water horse to carry them. I have never seen it so blatant before. In the great words of Gunnery Sergent Hartman from Full Metal Jacket “If God would have wanted you up there he would have miracled your ass up there by now, wouldn’t he?” In this case the god did want them out to the ship.
Sigh. I could go on, so I will. The special effects ranged from halfway decent CGI to mediocre CGI all the way down to a corpse puppet that looked suspiciously like the Cryptkeepers wife (I’m not kidding). At some point they ran wanted to spice up the scenery so when they got to the mythic island where the cyclops guarding the Golden Fleece (which, by the way, is actually a fleece, not a gold threaded baby blanket) they find…an abandoned amusement park (again, no joke). The writers must have hit a “Buy one cliche, get 49 more free” sale and spent their life savings (including the inevitable trope of having the black guy dress up in drag). The villains plan was so painfully stupid you pitied him more for his learning disability than hated him for being evil. The CGI characters who spoke must have had the voices done by whatever jackass was hanging around the studio that morning. I think subconsciously the director understood what he was creating because at one point he had the main characters get sucked down in what can only be described as a giant toilet.
I really don’t want to do the story recap so I will buzz through. Percy is living at Camp Half Breed (isn’t the term Half Breed racist? I thought it referred negatively to a half Native American) with the other demigods, being annoyed by some new chick who is the daughter of Mars. The magic tree that protects the camp gets poisoned and a mechanical bull (looking extremely like one of my beloved Juggernauts from Warhammer) breaks in. Turns out they need the Golden Fleece to save the tree or be killed by something (apparently everyone in the universe that isn’t a part of their super guy camp hates them (including me)). The Mars chick is sent out but Percy, the blond girl from the last one, the black Satre, and Percy’s Ron Weasley looking Cyclops half brother (apparently if a god has sex with a nymph you end up with a cyclops. Does that mean that all cyclops’s are demigods?) go after it themselves. The Satre gets kidnapped by the bad guy from the last film leaving Percy, Ron, and the chick to complete the task (why does that party mix sound so familiar Harry?).
The bad guy’s plan is to use the Golden Fleece to resurrect Chronos, the original Titan known for eating all his children and have the guy destroy all the gods of Olympus and the world too (I guess the dude thought Chronos would stop at his grand children. See what I mean about a stupid plan?). They travel the world (where they apparently have friends in every city in the universe) and eventually end up on the amusement park island where they play keep away with Fleece from a cyclops who speaks like an Oxford don. Eventually Chronos is raised, only to be killed like 30 seconds later by Percy (why were they all afraid of this guy again?).
The stars.
Really there is only one, and that is Nathan Fillion as Hermes. I’m not sure what the hell he was doing in this film but seeing him was like a breath of fresh air after spending all day trapped in a rancid sewer (Nathan image courtesy of the Firefly T Shirt category). One star. Total: one star.
The black holes.
Being slapped across the face over and over again by the hand of god. One black hole. Acting like everyone was sleep deprived. One black hole. A plot that can be called a story only because we don’t have a word stupid enough to accurately describe it. Two black holes. Harry Potter rip off. One black hole. All those little things I listed four paragraphs ago. I count five items, with a bonus for the amusement park. Six stars. All the horrible comedy bits, especially the three blind sister taxi drivers. One black hole. I especially hated the new cyclops guy and wanted to see him die. One star. I didn’t talk about it much, but this film is kind of a step backwards in terms of racial equality as well as loving yourself for who you are (the cyclops seems really concerned with hiding his one eye instead of ever embracing it). One black hole. Total: fourteen black holes.
So a grand total of thirteen black holes. Not an auspicious number. Is there anything worth seeing? No, not really. I can’t even comment on the hotness of the girls in this film as a draw. I’ve seen nuns show more skin. This film is tanking at the box office and it’s easy to see why. I’d say give it a pass. Date movie? If your date is or has the mentality of an eleven year old girl maybe, although please go to jail. Bathroom break? There is not a single second of this film that is not an excellent time to run out and take a dump, so if you have the trots this might be the perfect film for you.
Thanks for reading. Headed to Vegas tomorrow so nothing going on blog wise until Thursday when the new Simon Pegg film comes out. Looks good. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu, like me on Facebook, and if you have a comment for this film or my review post it here. Feel free to email me with any off topic questions or comments to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Kick Ass 2 Movie Review
Pretty much lives up to it’s name.
Yes I’m still sluggish getting these out. Saw this movie Thursday night but honestly if you saw the amount of work I have piled up (literally) you would understand.
So I enjoyed this film about as much as I expected to (something of a singular event these days). Fortunately I expected to enjoy it a lot. This film follows the typical sequel pattern of a kick ass first movie (haw!) followed by a sequel that is about 80% of the first one. However, when you have a movie as good as the first Kick Ass 80% of it make it as good or better than all the Ryan Reynolds films put together.
The film definitely had a different tone. I would have to say this one was darker, grimmer, and lacking in the cuteness of young Hit Girl. Her assault down the hallway in the gangster penthouse (with Bad Reputation by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts playing in the background) is one of my personal favorite action scenes of the last ten years. She is an iconic character and based on the number of HG costumes I saw at Comic Con a popular one.
Hit Girl is back, but now is cursed with all the teenaged angst that they seem to hand girls on their first day of high school. Due to the nature of the story she is in the film less and fight less, at least until the last 20 minutes, and her fights are just not as super squirrelly as they were in the last one. Her best fight she is not even wearing her HG costume, although that was the fight that most reminded me of the last film.
On the other hand Kick Ass is back and faces some interesting comic book-ish issues, such as why he even became a super hero and what he hopes to accomplish from it. A lot of this movie is taken up with him and Hit Girl in street clothes trying to figure out what they should be doing in life, which tended to make the film less cool and exciting but added a nice note of realism and drama otherwise missing from the last one.
The story starts off with Kick Ass (Anderson Taylor-Johnson-Kick Ass, Savages, Nowhere Boy) back in high school with Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz-Dark Shadows, Hugo, Let Me In), except Hit Girl has been cutting class to train. She gets Kick Ass (yes, I know his character name is Dave and Hit Girl’s is Mindy. I just like calling them by their superhero names) to join her and they start fighting some crime. During their first caper she gets caught by her now legal guardian Marcus (Morris Chestnut-the Call, Boys in the Hood, Identity Thief) and he gets her to promise to stop with the Hit Girl thing. She does out of respect for her father.
Meanwhile Kick Ass has a taste for the action and looks for other super heroes to team up with. New York is now lousy with them and through a guy called Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison-Scrubs, Remember the Titans, Clueless) he meets up with Justice Forever, a team lead by the psychotic Col. Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey-Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, The Truman Show). One of his fellow team members Battle Guy is his old friend Marty (Clark Duke-Hot Tub Time Machine, A Thousand Words, the Croods) 
and a hot chick named Night Bitch (Lindy Booth-Wrong Turn, Relic Hunter, Dawn of the Dead (image courtesy of the Zombie T Shirt category)). They run around the city doing public service and catching bad guys.
Meanwhile Kick Ass’s old enemy Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse-Superbad, Role Models, Pitch Perfect) is back. He has kind of lost it and is now a super villain named the M-F-er whose sole purpose is to cause pain and suffering in order to destroy Kick Ass. He recruits a bunch of other psychopaths and they go berserk.
I’m going to blow off the rest of the story mainly because it’s late and I always find the story recap to be the most boring and arduous part of these reviews. A movie like this I expect any of my readers to see so the recap is redundant anyway. Sufficed to say crosses are doubled, stuff gets blown up, and a lot of asses get kicked.
The stars:
Hit Girl is awesome again. One star. The evil team the M-F-er put together was also pretty awesome, especially Mother Russia. One star. I expected all the new super heroes to suck (except for Col. Stars and Stripes) but in fact they were each cool in their own way. One star. All the acting was dead on perfect. One star. The story delved deeper into the angst of being a super hero than most films bother to. I thought it was neat. One star. The fight scenes were all really cool and fun. One star. Comic book movie. One star. Over all a fun, exciting film. Two stars. Total: nine stars.
The black holes:
Honestly I’m at a loss. I could give one for there being less action and more character development, but I just gave the film a star for that a in the last paragraph. Pacing slugged up at times but overall felt right. I’m going to have to do my very rare no black hole reviews. There wasn’t anything I wish they did differently.
So a total of nine stars and my hearty endoursement of this film. Not better than Kick Ass, but worthy be being mentioned in the same sentence. Please see this film in a theater. We need to encourage quality film. Date movie? Meh. Romance was kind of limited to Kick Ass knocking boots with Night Bitch in a bathroom, so not really. Plus if are a Hit Girl fan you might end up looking kind of creepy. Bathroom break? Depends on what you are here for. If all you want is action that kicks ass (that’s the last one I swear) I’d say go in any of the scenes where Hit Girl is trying to convince Kick Ass to put on his costume or Kick Ass is trying to do the same for Hit Girl. If you like the characters and angst involved go during any of the action scenes. (Or if you are a true fan just hold it. It’s only 103 minutes long).
Thanks for reading. I’ll see something tomorrow for sure, but have another trip to Las Vegas that I leave for Monday so I don’t know if I will have time to write it up. Sorry. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. By the way it would be very cool if you liked us on Facebook. If you have comments about this film or my review feel free to post a comment here. Off topic suggestions and review can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Elysium Movie Review
Not really District 9. More like District 3.
Once again I must apologize for not getting this done sooner, or not posting at all for like a week. I am now way behind on movies and will try to get at least three done this weekend. I was at the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas all weekend and enjoyed it immensely. Unfortunately I was so busy selling Star Trek t-shirts I never had a chance to write it up.
That’s not entirely true. I did see this the night it opened (for the record the theater at the Palms is really nice) and probably could have ground it out one of the evenings. The fact is I was kind of disappointed by this film and just not really motivated to write this up.
This is another case of me still not learning the important lesson of never expecting movies to do anything but suck. If I had approached this film with that attitude I would have been pleased enough to give it a modest thumbs up as a relatively decent sci fi film. However the fact is I am a huge fan of District 9 and as such expected this to at least blow one of my socks off. Instead I got pretty formulaic Hollywood pap and glitz without the gritty, engaging story that made District 9 what it was.
I now believe the weight of working with major Hollywood stars and operating under the thumb of an actual Hollywood studio crushed Neill Blomkamp’s creativity and caused him to push out this very pretty and expensive by-the-numbers BM (either that or given three and a half times the budget of his first film he suddenly pulled a Lucas and thought that cool CGI makes up for lame story. God I hope not). While this film had it’s moments and were it of a lesser pedigree I might give it a pass it really didn’t feel like it was made by the same person.
I think the best way to explain my issues is to talk about what made District 9 great and how this one failed to live up to that legacy. In his first film Blomkamp took a total nobody protagonist and a sidekick that looked like a seven foot tall bipedal potato bug and managed to make us not only like but care about them both. The social issues addressed made sense and seemed like a potentially realistic approach when dealing with a mass immigration of blue color alien bugs. The villains were motivated to do what they thought was best for their society rather the just plain evil, and the denouement, while opening the door to the potential of conflict resolution, managed to avoid the Disneyfied “all must be right in the world by the end of Act III” rule that is the Black Plague of Hollywood scripts. The CGI and science fiction were tools to tell a great story and engage the audience with cool characters.
In this film the main character is the very human Matt Damon, who is motivated by the simplest and most inane of reasons to do bad, explosive things. His character develops only in the most tertiary of manners, and all of the supporting characters looked like they were created by a supercomputer designed to create the greatest stereotypes of all time. The villains seemed to be in a contest to see which of them could be the most evil for evils sake: the brutal, exploitive capitalist who treats his workers like expendable slaves (to the point that he kicks Damon out of the infirmary in order to save the cost of replacing the hospital bedding), the bitchy, callous, power hungry security director who wants to be the Hitler of space or something, and the psychopathic South African mercenary who apparently gets his rocks off killing and raping everything he comes across. It was like they all went to the Dr. Evil School of Super Villainy and graduated with comical honors. The story lacked any kind of real drama or arc (anyone else remember the slow and methodical way that Wikus Ven De Merwe changed his attitude towards the aliens even as his body changed?) and naturally since this is a big budget Hollywood film we have to pull out the inevitable MacGuffin that will save the world. Throw in a ton of unnecessary action to appease the unwashed masses and I guess we have a film.
Sigh. I will give this film props for some of the action being both believable and cool, and also for not feeling the need to explain how the science of a ring world works. I guess Blomkamp assumed we had all read Ringworld or played Halo once or twice in our lives. I guess it was pretty and the CGI flawless. If you ever wanted to see every villain from Snidely Wiplash to Khan Noonien Singh distilled into a potent evil serum and injected into three otherwise talented actors than I guess this would work for you. As a movie it’s not awful, just mundane. It’s just that I expected so much more.
SPOILER ALERT. Skip ahead a few paragraphs if this puts you off. The story starts off two hundred years in the future. The Earth is pretty much permanently screwed thanks to our pollution and overpopulation. Like all problems money is the answer, so the rich of this future have all moved to a ring world called Elysium that closely resembles a less crowded Newport Beach in orbit around the earth . Max (Matt Damon-Good Will Hunting, The Bourne Identity, Inside Job) is an ex-con trying to go straight at a dead end job manufacturing the very robot drones that are used to keep him and the rest of the population under suppression (um, could I get an extra helping of irony with my movie please?). Meanwhile, dragon lady Elysium defense director Delecourt (Jodie Foster-the Silence of the Lambs, Contact, Panic Room) has the job of shooting down ships filled with families trying to escape Earth to Elysium, a job she appears to approach with the same relish that a dingo would working as a guard dog at a pre school.
In the future they have medical tanning beds that will cure all diseases in like three seconds, but of course the super rich being intrinsically evil and selfish keep them for themselves and leave the rest of us to pound sand. Max gets his arm broken by the very robots he is building (ironic!) and while at the hospital runs into childhood friend turned hot nurse Frey (Alice Braga-I am Legend, Repo Men (no, not Repo Man. Repo Men), City of God). She has a child dying of leukemia (Emma Tremblay-no other film credits).
Max gets back to work where he is forced to enter a chamber to fix something and receives a lethal dose of radiation (OSHA apparently ended in the mid 21st century). The owner of the company John Carlyle (William Fichtner-Black Hawk Down, the Dark Knight, Contact) is a billionaire Elysium resident and all around dick. He kicks Max out of the infirmary in order to save on the laundry bill (he has nothing better to do with his time?).
Meanwhile on Elysium Delecourt is in trouble for her shoot-first-ask-no-questions approach to security. She is called to the carpet by the president (Faran Tahir-Star Trek (2009), Charlie Wilson’s War, Iron Man) and then decides the only thing she can do is stage a coup and take over entirely. She recruits Carlyle who writes a program to basically rewrite everything in the Elysium system.
Max now needs to get to Elysium in order to get cured. The only way he can do that is to do a job with local crime kingpin Spider (Wagner Moura-Elite Squad, VIPs, Romance). Spider wants to kidnap some Elysium resident and steal data from his brain, and naturally Max chooses Carlyle. In order for Max to operate in spite of the fact that he is dying they graft a powerful exoskeleton to him (the exoskeleton was pretty cool, and probably my favorite part of the movie). They get Carlyle and the data turns out to be the very program needed to completely fix the world.
At that point all hell breaks loose. Delecourt unleashes psychotic mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley-believe it or not this is the guy who played Wikus in District 9. I’m still not sure I believe it. Also the A Team, Europa Report) who uses some fairly cool high tech tracking techniques to hunt down Max. Stuff gets blown up, people get killed, and there are like five double crosses in the last ten minutes of the film.
The stars.
Most of the hard core sci fi was pretty cool. The robot police, the actual ring, the medical beds, and a lot of the technology was in the very cool category. One star. I have to give a bonus for the grafted exoskeleton. I really want one. One star. Each of the actors played their fairly one dimensional characters as well as could be expected. Someone told Sharlto to play a crazed psychopath and he ran with it. One star. Action was pretty good, and nothing in this movie strained my sense of disbelief too far. One star. CGI was flawless and used in the right proportion to actual sets and actors. One star. Total: five stars.
The black holes.
Unfortunately a lot of these are going to stem from comparisons to District 9, but I can’t stop myself. The story was extremely linear, with character motivations being delivered with all the subtlety and depth of a mackerel slapped across your face over and over again. One black hole. In spite of the fact that all the characters were human I couldn’t generate 1/4 the caring that I did for any of the Prawns. None of them drew me in and the film gave me no reason to care about them in the least. One black hole. The villains were evil for no apparent reason and by the end of the film were more comical than serious. One black hole. In spite of the coolness of the ending in D9 Blomkamp obviously caved in to the studio and came up with yet another Save the World MacGuffin for this one. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So one star. I suppose I could have been kinder, but I have seen and been excited by the trailer for this film for months and to be this disappointed just feels crappy. If you have never seen D9 I suppose you will enjoy it, as long as you just want sci fi action. If you have a decent sized TV it’s worth seeing on DvD or NetFlix. Date movie? Meh. No reason not to bring her along but it won’t impress her. Bathroom break? Honestly nothing springs to mind. Maybe any of the scenes with Frey and her daughter. Not a lot going on there.
Thanks for reading. I will try to get some more going on soon. Now that my show season is more or less over I can concentrate on doing more of these. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have a comment on this review or the movie feel free to post them here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Have a great day.
Dave
Turbo Movie Review
Sigh…
This may come as something of a surprise to any regular reader but the fact is in spite of my incessant bitching about the sewage outflow that passes for Hollywood mainstream movies I am a fan of film. Movies are my escape from reality into worlds of wonder and excitement. I love theaters, and find the whole cinema experience magical. I even love popcorn.
Even bad movies have their place in my heart. A bad film gives me perspective, and occasionally takes the audience in a hilarious new direction that the writer and director never saw coming. Those films are the crown jewel of bad films, but even the mediocrely bad films can at least claim Bedazzler rhinestone status.
The point is it’s extremely rare that I come across a film that for all its merits or detractions feels like a complete waste of my time. Unfortunately Turbo has fallen onto that rare precipice. It is hard to put my finger on what makes it feel so worthless, but that is the ethereal nature of such films. 
It is easy to pick out the details that make a great film great or a bad film bad, but when faced with a truly worthless film it seems like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal is the rule of the day (Heisenberg image courtesy of the Funny T-Shirt category).
This film tanked as hard as a film can and is causing the bookkeepers at Dreamworks a huge number of problems (such as their printers can’t print pink slips fast enough). If anyone at Dreamworks is still puzzled by that failure in spite of a massive marketing campaign I have a few thoughts that may help solve the mystery:
1. The movie is about a SNAIL THAT WINS THE INDY 500! The tragic assumptions made here is that kids really are that stupid. Kids are inexperienced and ignorant, but for the most part they tend to be pretty quick on things they understand. The idea that snails are slow and race cars are fast is a concept absorbed by kids by kindergarten age. Thinking back to my own childhood (chronologically a long time ago, but mentally shorter than most of my acquaintances would assume) I really think presented with a movie concept like that I would find it pretty stupid. I see this as a sign of secret contempt for the audience on the part of the studio.
2. The main character is a SNAIL! Look, I know the Little Mermaid opened the door for invertebrate cartoon characters, but every kid knows that snails are gross slugs with shells and leave icky trails where ever they go. As a kid I can remember going outside after a rain storm and almost throwing up after accidentally stepping on a snail. I honestly can’t think of a worse kids character than a gastropod, unless they wanted to do a film about a cute, cuddly family of parasitic worms (and honestly I think I would by one of those plushy’s for my kid before a snail).
3. Kind of tying into the last point, when a kid sees a movie he or she wants to be one of the main characters. Girls want to be Ariel and boys want to be Woody or Buzz Lightyear. If there is a kid out there who dreams of being a snail I foresee major self esteem issues in his or her future.
4. All those issues that I just listed go tenfold for the parents who have to sit through this dross. Creators of kids film sometimes forget that there are adults who are forced to watch these films with the kids and if the film is painfully stupid or gross then they are very likely to just bust out a Incredibles DVD and call it an afternoon.
I am going to stop harping on Ryan Reynolds. Two bombs back to back is tough for anyone to take, and even I get tired of clubbing baby seals after a while. Honestly there is very little you can do to hold a voice over actor responsible for a films performance. Either they are truly brilliant (Mark Hamill) or at least average. Unless he or she has some kind of speech impediment there isn’t much you can do to screw up. I keep waiting for Ryan to do something amazing to help make up for the Green Lantern, but instead I think I am just going to stop out of pity.
On the other hand with his looks and fame he can probably score with more hot chicks in a week than I will in my lifetime, and he still has a ton of money (broke again this week. Top Ramen city for me!). Suck it Ryan Reynolds!
The story. Turbo (Ryan Reynolds-R.I.P.D., Safe House, the Change Up) is a garden snail who dreams of going fast. He got the idea by watching footage of Indy racer Guy Gagne (Bill Hader-Superbad, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) on a TV in the garage next door. His brother Chet (Paul Giamatti-Saving Private Ryan, Rock of Ages, the Ides of March) advises him to keep on working in the humble tomato factory but his dreams power him on. He falls into an intake manifold and he gets injected with nitrous oxide, making him glow blue and be super fast (as well as develop a radio, headlights, backup lights, and other car paraphernalia). He gets caught by local Mexican stereotype Tito (Michael Pena-End of Watch, Shooter, 30 Minutes or Less) and entered into the snail races. He discovers his power and wins big.
Meanwhile Tito’s brother Angelo (Luis Guzman-Carlito’s Way, Boogie Nights, the Last Stand) has a taco stand (really?) that is in dire need of more customers. Tito comes up with the idea of entering Turbo into the Indy 500 based on the tried and true principal that if something is not specifically outlawed than it must be legal (for the record, the rules for vehicles entered into F1 competitions are extremely specific and exacting. Also just because something is not illegal does not make it allowed. I doubt there is a specific rule against having sex with a train car coupling but I really wouldn’t want to explain that to a judge). He cajoles the rest of the stereotypes in the crappy strip mall his brother shares into coming up with the entry fee.
Honestly, if you have a brain you know how this goes. Gagne turns out to be a secret jerk. Turbo enters the race. I am not going to spoil the film by giving away the ending but if you thought it might be interesting to see a film that highlights the concepts of a noble effort that still fails a la Rocky or the Bad News Bears prepare to be disappointed.
I don’t do stars and black holes for kids movies but instead judge it by the kids in the audience. Unfortunately the theater I saw it in was kind of a ghost town with not a kid in sight so I am going to have to channel my inner child and say that I thought the film was visually stimulating enough for a toddler but otherwise too dumb for anyone old enough to speak in sentences. A kid might enjoy this film but it will not stand out as a cherished childhood memory. Parents bringing kids to this film should pack extra gauze for when their brains start dribbling out their ears.
Thanks for reading. I’m headed to Las Vegas Tuesday morning and while out there will try to see and review Elysium, but really won’t have a lot of time. If you are going to the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention please stop by my t-shirt booth and say hi (6’5″, dark hair, goatee, strong dislike of the JJ Abrams Trek films). If you don’t feel like telling me what kind of an idiot I am to my face feel free to post comments here regarding this film or my review. Off topic questions or suggestions can be sent to [email protected], and you can always follow me on Twitter for the 2-4 Tweets I do per week (I suck at social media). Talk to you soon.
Dave
2 Guns Movie Review
Huh?
That’s pretty much what I was saying through most of this film. “Huh? The US military is involved in stealing money from drug cartels inside our borders?” “Huh? The CIA feels comfortable running around killing and torturing Americans inside the US (for the record the CIA’s remit is specifically operations outside of the US borders but a pertinent fact such as that would require like at least 30 seconds worth of research. Google doesn’t type questions in itself).” This wasn’t a movie about lots of little plot holes. This was a movie about a few massive, huge plot holes that made the entire film seem dumb and worthless.
I see this as symptomatic of the lowering of standards for movie writing. It’s like if you are building houses out of bricks and only use the highest quality materials, but once in a while a brick made out of dried cow dung sneaks in. At first you worry about lowering the quality of the house but you soon realize that you make the same amount of money off houses with a few crap brinks in it as you do with a complete brick home, and you figure out that dried cow dung bricks are both easier and cheaper to use so you start increasing the ratio of excrement to bricks leading us to the inevitable conclusion: a complete bulls@&$ house.
For those of you slow on the uptake or were sick on the day they did analogies in school the dung bricks are the plot holes in a movie. Never let it be said that I am not clear in my writing.
(Actually this is my pleasant, relatively naive theory. My darker theory is that Hollywood has done market research and somehow figured out the you, the mouth breathing audience, feels some kind of pleasant sense of self worth every time you spot a plot hole in a script and now they are stuffing them in on purpose in order to appeal to the general population. If this is true than we have no one to blame than yourself and I secretly hate you all for it.)
The other ugly trend I am noticing is how these days every modern film villain inevitably has to be a rogue American military or spy element. The reason for this is clear: if Hollywood is going to maximize its profits (the number one goal of every filmmaker in the world. Creative vision and artistic integrity? File those with petticoats in the list of things relevant today) they need to appeal to the foreign markets, and the only villain countries like China find acceptable is Americans. Of course, we can’t have America portrayed as the villain (you know, pre-emtively invade a country looking for non-existant WMD and then have the companies that supported the President make billions exploiting it) so the only choice is left is crazy or greedy Americans (or countries that don’t actually watch our films. Helloooo, North Korea!)
I have traveled around and enjoy meeting people from other countries, but as movie goers they are a plague of locusts so thick that they have clogged up all the breathing holes in Hollywood and cut of oxygen to the studios brains. Can’t you find some kind of local entertainment to occupy yourselves with and let us go back to making movies that don’t have to be 90% visual and specifically don’t suck? (yes, there are older movies that sucked but at least they never had a multi million dollar marketing campaign pushing them, unless you count Godzilla 1999).
Anyway, 2 Guns. I don’t think this movie is really going to be seen by a lot of people so SPOILER ALERT. Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington-Training Day, Flight, Man on Fire) and Michael “Stig” Stigman (Mark Wahlberg-Pain & Gain, Ted, Broken City) are two criminals casing out a bank robbery. There is a flashback to they dealing with a Mexican drug cartel and not getting the cocaine they wanted. Instead they opt to rob a bank that the cartel uses to store $2-3 million.
At that point we learn that both of them are agents of some kind or another. Trench is a DEA agent and Stig works for Navel Intelligence (??? The list of issues with this is staggeringly long. The Navy does not work on drug trafficking, does not have intelligence operations inside the US, does not rob banks, does not kill DEA agents, and pretty much does not let commanders run around doing whatever they feel like. During the course of the movie you do not see the ocean once. It all takes place in a desert, pretty much making it the one place the Navy has no reason to visit. In fact, this is where you would go to get away from the Navy). Trench is trying to bust the drug Cartel and Stig’s commander wants them to rob the bank in order to use the money to fund other operations (??? Jeez). Trench is helped by his DEA controller Deb (Paula Patton-Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Deja Vu, Precious) and Stig by his a-hole commander Quince (James Marsden-X-Men, Superman Returns, X-Men First Class).
They are going to go through with the robbery but Trench wants the DEA to bust them. The DEA doesn’t show up for mysterious reasons and the two get away with all the money. They double cross each other and Stig gets away after realizing Trench was DEA. Quince gets pissed off because Stig did not obey his order and kill Trench and tries to kill Stig.
At that point the best character in the film shows up in the form of CIA Agent Earl (the great Bill Paxton-Weird Science, Aliens, Titanic. Alien image courtesy of the Sci Fi T shirt collection). Turns out there was a lot more money in that back and it all belonged to the CIA as a slush fund they collect by delivering drugs for the cartels (???). His character was comically over the top but Bill played it so well that you can’t help but love him. He pretty much stole every scene. Anyway, he’s pissed about his money and starts torturing and killing people to get it back. The story gets a little convoluted at that point. Earl blackmails Trench into helping him recover the money. Stig want to clear his name. The local cartel kingpin gets involved, certain people are betrayed, and like all modern movies it all boils down to a multi-bad guy gun fight at the end where Stig shoots down a helicopter with a pistol.
The stars.
I thought Bill Paxton was awesome. One star. I am a Denzel Washington fan, and enjoyed Mark Wahlberg as well. One star. The action was decent once it got started. One star. Nice little nude scene in the first 1/3rd of the film. One star. The movie was cool with being rated R and never felt like they either ramped anything back or injected anything in just to cater to the MPAA. One star. Pacing was decent, and they at least made an attempt to have a fairly complicated plot. One star. Total: six stars.
The black holes.
The whole premise was a massive plot hole that sucked the rest of the film into it’s event horizon. One black hole. All the other plot holes did not help. One black hole. As much as I enjoy Denzel Washington I look forward to the movie where he does not just play his Training Day character. One black hole. The opportunity to make the plot twists extra cool was missed on several occasions as they did not even try to keep the secrets. One black hole. The film suffered from a lack of a tone. At first it was supposed to be a buddy comedy action film, then it turned into a dark crime film where people get executed, and in the last fifteen minutes turned into a different kind of buddy comedy action film. Two much gear shifting burns out the clutch in my brain. One black hole. Total: five black holes.
A grand total of one star, which puts this film firmly in the “Meh” category. The potential for greatness was present but missed like my high school guidance councilor telling me I should become a farmer. Worth seeing if you are bored and just want to be mindless entertained with the emphasis on “-less”. The plot seems complicated enough but if you try to suss it out you will just realize it’s all pretty dumb. Date movie? Another “meh”. Nothing here will lower her inhibitions but at the same nothing should increase them, unless she has a thing for smooth ruggedly handsome black guys in which case bail. Bathroom break? Nothing jumps out at me. Maybe the scene where the kingpin has the guys tied up with the bull. You’ll know it.
Thanks for reading. More coming soon, although I leave Tuesday for Las Vegas and will unfortunately be there at the Star Trek Show when Elsyium comes out. Talk about ironic. I have been waiting for that movie for a while (on a side note, if you work for the studio and can get me an advanced screening please contact me. I tend to be more kindly disposed towards films I don’t have to pay for and/or see in advance, I swear). Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Comments on this review or the movie you can leave here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
The Wolverine 3D Movie Review
Better than I expected.
Trailers are a problematic phenomenon in that they either give you the entirety of the film in 30 seconds or leave you wondering what the hell the movie is about. This is an issue I deal with pretty regularly and have come to grips with. The real issue I have with trailers is when I see them over and over again for weeks prior to the film I tend to show up with a preconceived notion about how good or bad the film is.
The best case scenario is one in which the movie more or less matches the quality implied by the trailer. In less optimal situations the people responsible for creating the trailers are really good at their job and like a pedophile luring small children into their vans with candy tend to make the film look way better than the actual reality of the movie going experience. Depending on degree this is the equivalent of going on a date with a hot girl only to find out she just broke up with her boyfriend and was only looking for someone to share the excruciating details of what a jerk he was for hours on end before telling you that she is going to switch to women and besides she thought you were gay anyway (no personal experience used there. I swear).
Once in a while you get the other extreme, where the people responsible for the trailer obviously never bothered to actually watch the film and have been on the hot new “Lead Paint Chip Diet” for the last 35 years. In this case the trailer manages to hang suck all over the film like a legless dog trying to mark its territory. Seeing this film is the equivalent of every porn movie ever written where a guy goes in to do something lame or horrible (root canal, fix a clogged toilet, tax audit) only to find the dentist, homeowner, or bookkeeper is a hot girl who just broke up with her boyfriend and wants to sex up the first Y chromosome she stumbles across in revenge (definitely not delving into personal experience there, damn the luck).
Not to say that the trailers for The Wolverine made the film look bad. Just that it laid the groundwork for some definite suck potential. The idea that a guy with super powers sees it as a curse and wants to lose it is about as dumb as the idea that vampires are kindly sizzle chested man/boys who sparkle in daylight. The trailers managed to inject that idea into my perception of the film with a fire hose, making me secretly dread this movie.
The movie doesn’t actually take that direct approach (again implying that the trailer makers didn’t actually see the film) and instead came through with a decent comic book style film with some pretty cool action and a ton of Hugh Jackman shirtless for those of you into men. That’s not to say this was a great or even good film, 
unless you are comparing it to X-Men Origins Wolverine in which case this movie is the deep fried bacon sushi of film (Deep Fried image courtesy of the Cheap T Shirt category). The film had it’s weaknesses which I will get in to shortly, but overall was an exciting, quality experience.
I will say there were a number of plot holes and logical failure that managed to clog up my enjoyment pipeline a few times. It seems Hollywood feels plot holes are like ants at a picnic; unless you go to exorbitant lengths (in other words, put some effort into your writing) you are going to get them, so let’s just add enough explosions and action to make the cake so big and appealing that the audience doesn’t mind eating a few bugs with the frosting.
This film also suffered immensely under the crushing weight of the PG-13 rating. I know that all the X-Men have gone for this rating, but the fact is Wolverine is in the comic world a brutal, bloody figure and every fight scene felt like a campfire with a wet blanket thrown over it. I’m not going to start a campaign for an R rated Marvel film (Punisher War Zone was rated R and sucked at the box office. I, however, liked it a lot as it stayed true to the character. Frank Castle isn’t the Punisher if he is not punching someone’s eyeball out) but I will say that this film would have made for a better viewing were it not for the need to cater to the freaking kiddie winks (does Hollywood really thing an R rating will keep kids from seeing this film?).
Anyway, the story (lots of spoilers incoming, so SPOILER ALERT). Logan (Hugh Jackman-the Prestige, Z-Men, Les Misérables) is living in a cave in Canada. He is haunted by the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen-Golden Eye, X-Men, Taken 2) and has frequent nightmares about her. He also dreams of being at Nagasaki when the bomb went off and saving the life of a young Japanese soldier Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi-the Life Aquatic, Push, the Way Back). He goes into town and mixes it up with some local color before being picked up by a hot chick super ninja Yukio (Rila Fukushima-first real acting role. Hope to see her on more). She tells him that Yoshida wants to see him and thank him before dying.
They fly to Japan where Yoshida is dying, attended by hot blond endocrinologist Viper (not her doctor name, I guess, but that’s how she’s credited. Svetlana Khodchenkova-Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mala Moskwa, Blagoslovite Zhenshchinu) and his hot daughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto-no other film credits. She is a Japanese super model and it’s easy to see why). Yoshido tells Logan he can “gift” him with mortality and wants his healing properties for himself. Apparently you can’t just copy super powers they have to be transferred. Logan refuses and the next day Yoshido dies.
His son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada-the Last Samurai, Twilight Samurai, Rush Hour 3) wants control of the company but Yoshida has left it to Mariko. Logan goes to the funeral where he fights a bunch of Yakuza and rescues Mariko. They flee but are pursued by Viper, the police, the Yakuza, and some ninja guy who used to be childhood friends with Mariko (Will Yun Lee-Total Recall, Die Another Day, Electra). At that point it is a convoluted James Bond plot. Viper is a mutant and wants Logans DNA or something. Shingen wants Mariko dead so he can have the company. Honestly it bogs down pretty heavily until the big “reveal” at the end (which I managed to predict about 40 minutes into the film. Me so smrat!).
The stars.
Comic book movie. Two stars. I am a huge Wolverine fan, and love Hugh Jackman as Logan. He really nailed it again. Two stars. Action was good, especially the bullet train scene. One star. With one exception I liked all the supporting characters and their portrayal by the assorted actors, especially Yukio. Two stars. Camera work and CGI were for the most part excellent. One star. Pacing and editing were dead on. 126 minutes that felt like exactly the right amount. One star. Overall a fun time watching. Two stars. Total: twelve stars.
The black holes.
The villain Viper was the weakest character in the film by a lot. I just couldn’t buy her as anything serious at all, and she barely had the level of menace I normally feel for any hot woman (which is considerable, but not in the same way you want a villain to be menacing). One black hole. While none of the plot holes were gargantuan, they were frequent and annoying. One black hole. I had a hard time discerning the motivation for any of the characters other than Logan to do anything at all. Most of the characters were supposed to be loyal to Yoshida but changed sides so frequently I felt like I needed a score card. One black hole. For all the hot Hugh Jackman shots (he spent a lot of time with his shirt off or in a tight wife beater) there wasn’t much eye candy for the suffering straight men and lesbian women in the audience. The women spent most of the movie dressed like it was the 1800’s and exposing an ankle was enough to send men into a sex frenzy. One black hole. Of all the films I have reviewed this one probably compromised it’s action the most in order to get that precious PG-13 rating. The action felt really unfulfilling. Two black holes. Total: six black holes.
A grand total of six stars. Very good, and like I said better than I expected based on the trailers and last film. I just feel like with a little more effort this could have been a classic X-Men movie instead of just another lead up to the next blockbuster. Worth seeing, and worth spending money for a big screen. Date movie? Hugh Jackman will get any woman’s heart beating. However if your own midriff bears a stronger resemblance to a keg than a six pack you might suffer in comparison. Approach with caution. Bathroom break? Hmm. The quality of the editing doesn’t really leave a lot of dross lying around. There is a love scene in the last half that could be missed, especially given that the you somehow manage to see less of Tao Okamoto than you do when she is fully clothed. Also most of the dream sequences with Jean Grey are kind of repetitive. You could skip one pretty easily.
Thanks for reading. More to see this week. Now that I am back from all my trips I want to get caught up on all the films out there. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. If you have comments on this film or my review feel free to post them here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be sent to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
R.I.P.D. Movie Review
Rest in Peace Division? I certainly found the parts I dozed off in restful.
I consider this review a testament to how much I love you, my beloved readers, and writing these blogs. You see, I spent all last week at Comic Con (awesome, BTW. I’ll try to write up something on it later this week) and just arrived back home yesterday afternoon to unload the hundreds of nerd t shirts I brought down there for the show 
(if you are curious, this Havard Law shirt was pretty much the best seller we had down there) and pack up all the orders that piled up while we were in geek heaven. Then, rather than rest, eat, or take a much needed shower I opted to go see a crap movie in order to give you all something to read this night.
Of course, I had a sneaking suspicion that there would not be many people in the audience to be offended by my stench (I like to think of it as a manly musk) and as it turns out, I was right.
It looks like the make up, facial hair, clothing, and personality worn by Jeff Bridges in the movie True Grit have become permanently attached to his body and soul as that now appears to be the only role he can perform. This film is a clear rip(d. Haw!) off of Men in Black and Ghostbusters with a bad buddy cop overview involving Rooster Colburn and Martin Riggs. The thing with rip offs and fusion films is they can be quite good if you take the cool, functional parts and meld them into a decent story and good characters. Classics are classics for a reason.
Unfortunately this film did none of those things. I often talk about Frankenstein movies where the parts of other dead films are sewn together and animated with electricity into something that moves like a live movie and occasionally does something really amazing. If this film were the work of Dr. Frankenstein however it looks like he was getting over a long crystal meth bender and just stuck all the dead movie parts into a meat grinder in order to form them into a giant man shaped meatball that he stuffed into the nearest microwave and went to go pass out. The only thing this film is good for is decay and collecting maggots.
I should probably find something good to say before Universal sends a hit man after me. I guess the reason Jeff Bridges keeps playing Rooster Cogburn is he is a cool and interesting character, and this movie milks that for as much as it is worth. This film does nothing to alleviate the burning hatred I feel for Ryan Reynolds for his butchering the Green Lantern, at least it did nothing to bury the needle further. At least he wasn’t playing his odious Van Wilder character (again), and he and Bridges managed to generate a little chemistry together. I have always had a weird thing for Mary-Louise Parker, and her looking like an uptight school principal was kind of lighting my fuse the whole time (take that for what you will).
The story is of Nick (Ryan Reynolds-the Green Lantern, Safe House, the Change-Up), a Boston PD officer. He and his partner Hayes (Kevin Bacon-Sleepers, Mystic River, X-Men First Class) stole some gold in a drug bust. Nick feels guilty and is going to turn his share in. Hayes opts to shoot him in the face during a bust.
Nick flies up to some ill defined afterlife in the sky (Heaven? Why do parts of of look decidedly Hell-ish? Reminds me of the last trip I took to New Jersey) but at the last minute gets pulled into an office with Proctor (Mary-Louise Parker-Weeds, the West Wing, Red), one of the heads of the Rest In Peace Department. They go out and capture spirits who have skipped out of judgement (no clue how this is done) and are hiding among humans. She offers him a job and he takes it.
He then partners up with Roy (Jeff Bridges-True Grit, the Big Lebowski, Iron Man), a cantankerous old West guy who fell out of the stereotype tree and hit every branch. They go out looking for bad Deado’s using Indian food and assorted spices. Meanwhile Nick is obsessed with his living ex wife Julia (Dinner for Schmucks, We Bought a Zoo, the Devil Wears Prada) but to the living he appears as a creepy old Asian man (James Hong-Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China, Mulan).
Roy’s physical appearance is that of a super hot blond chick (Marisa Miller-Victoria Secret, Entourage, just generally looking hot I guess). Trust me when I say the incessant jokes that situation raises gets old so fast I think it bent time.
Anyway, the two come across some gold similar to what Nick stole and it leads them to a plan to conquer the world or something. Nick deals with his own death and the loss of his wife while Roy orneries things up.
The stars.
I guess I like Jeff Bridges and his Rooster character. I just hope he doesn’t purposely typecast himself. One star. Umm. I guess I liked Mary-Louise Parker and her character. One star. Total: Two stars.
The black holes.
Bad rip off of several different movies. Two black holes. The rules of being dead were never really defined. They don’t have any sense of taste but they do feel? Do live humans see them as monsters when they get released? How does one avoid being sucked up into the sky? Can dead people kill live ones? The questions keep on coming. I suspect these questions don’t really occur to someone who has read the comic book, but to me they were like cinder blocks tied to my body for a swimming lesson. Two black holes. The whole structure of the RIPD is never defined, and nothing was done to establish it. One black hole. The story was lame, predictable, and meandered back and forth like watching back to back Scooby Doo episodes. One black hole. The whole thing felt really unfinished, especially the characters and their development. The entire film felt rushed. One black hole. Pacing was weak. It definitely dragged pointlessly at points. 96 minutes that felt like three hours. One black hole. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the main bad guy hoped to accomplish. One black hole. Once it was established that the main characters were effectively indestructible the action got painfully boring. I literally was struggling to stay awake. The curse of the PG-13 gremlin did not help. One black hole. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this, but the CGI was like 10 years ago. They tried to speed up the action in order to hide that fact that we were seeing cartoons on the screen, but there wasn’t much hiding it. One black hole. Total: eleven black holes.
A grand total of nine black holes. Not really worth spending money on IMO. If you are bored on a Tuesday night and have a box of wine to kill this will help fill up the time. Date movie? Hell no. Odds are you shouldn’t see it solo. Bathroom break? Given that Jeff Bridges was probably the most entertaining part of the film ironically you can easily miss any of the action scenes without hurting your viewing experience. However, since I expect most of you to see this at home just hit the pause button (or fast forward, if you know what I mean).
Thanks for reading. I am on a business trip right now but will try to see something else this week. I also will try to post something on Comic Con. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Post any comments on this film or my review here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Pacific Rim 3D Movie Review
Giant robots and Godzilla movie rejects? Sign me up!
It is rare that a movie trailer gets me excited to see the actual movie. I see so many of them (and usually the same ones over and over again) that they tend to loose all impact. They usually to do one of two things for me: either they help me compose a mental shopping list of upcoming things to see or perform the same function as my doctor telling me in excruciating and graphic detail (with visual aids) exactly what to expect during my upcoming colonoscopy during a big anesthesia shortage. Basically a list of upcoming work and/or unbearable dread.
This film broke that mold in that every time I saw it I got more excited to see it. I mean, it’s a movie about giant monsters fighting giant robots! Based on that description alone I could be suffering from simultaneous projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea and I would still enjoy it (I can’t really say how the other audience members would feel in those circumstances however). I mean, how badly can you screw up giant monsters and robots?
Well, yes. Gozilla 1999 and most of Transformers. I suppose it can be done. However, I have faith in Guillermo del Toro. This is the man who did Hellboy, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Megamind, and Pan’s Labyrinth. Some of these movies might not have gotten critical acclaim, but they rank up there as personal favorites. My faith in him was justified in this movie.
I don’t want to say this film is the Citizen Kane of science fiction films. It was chock full of plot holes, scientific “facts” that would have my eighth grade science teacher beating his fists raw against the wall in frustration, and acting so robotic I was partially convinced the actors were miniature Jaegers with tiny humans inside controlling them. In a film that wasn’t about giant robots and monsters this would have been the equivalent of a cow walking up to me in a slaughterhouse and handing me a sledgehammer. However, if you are going to this film for the story, scientific content, or acting you must be the type to order a lobster at a restaurant and proceed to eat only the shell. I was also comforted by the fact that every time I thought to myself “Wow this acting is wooden” or “CO2 slows down acidic reactions???” in a few minutes I was going to see giant robots fighting giant monsters.
The good news is I don’t have to worry too much about spoilers as if you have seen the trailer and have an IQ in the mid-80s you should be able to discern the entirety of the plot as the opening monolog is rolling out. That being said SPOILER ALERT. I was pleased during this film as it game me a chance to practice my burgeoning powers of psychic precognition. As soon as I saw that the first Jaeger pilots were two brothers I said “One of these two guys is going to get killed and the new pilot the surviving brother has to team up with will be a hot chick” and by Nostradamus’s sack was it so! A while later when I realized the only black guy in the whole movie was a retired Jaeger pilot I said “Yep. That guy is going to have to come out of retirement at some point and will end up sacrificing himself for the greater good” and once again gave myself a gold star for pattern recognition.
Because I enjoyed this film a lot I am not going to harp on the bad science and plot holes, but I have a few questions that kept popping into my head. The main one was are the Jaegers piloted by neural interface or not? They spent a ton of time talking about it and how the two pilots “drift” into each others memories and minds in order to control the Jaeger (and how it is almost impossible and brain damaging to try to pilot one solo) yet they spend the entire time in the Jaegers strapped into full body analog controls. What’s the deal here? Also, if the aliens want to conquer the planet why do they keep sending the big monsters through one at a time? I’m no brilliant tactician but it seems the trick would be to save up like 20 of them and send them through at the same time.
How does the scientist guy keep a monster brain chunk alive in a tank for months and connect his brain to it and then 30 minutes later be presented with a very recently killed intact brain and tell everyone they have five minutes until the brain is too dead to connect to? For that matter why does he act like monster samples (for the record the monsters are called kaiju) are rarer than a piece of the true cross when each one weighs a couple thousand tons and they have killed dozens of them? They should be up to their giant robot asses in kaiju parts. Why would the military opt to abandon the Jaeger program just because they are losing a few? Why not build bigger and better Jaegers? Or for that matter more of them? Instead of sending one Jaeger out after one big kaiju why not send out like 10? And their plan is to defend the world with a giant wall? How does that kill kaiju’s? You see this is one of those situation where the great military/industrial complex would actually be to our benefit. Why do jet pilots feel the best way to kill a kaiju is to fly into tentacle range? How did the commander keep the Jaegers running after he got his funding cut? Those things do not look cheap to keep fueled.
For that matter how does a local crime lord have the resources to harvest a kaiju faster than the military, as well as more knowledge of kaiju’s than the world’s leading scientist? Also last time I look the Pacific Ocean was thousands of miles across, yet as soon as they detect a kaiju at the breach they have like five minutes before it gets to a big city. I understand that the cities on the Pacific Rim are the ones being attacked, but other than that the movie really had no reason to be called Pacific Rim. Also if kaiju only attack cities on the Pacific Rim why doesn’t everyone just leave? Personally I would be parked on the right side of the Rocky Mountains.
Ok, I feel better for getting that out. Let’s get into the movie, shall we?
The film starts off with a monolog explaining how giant monsters come through the breach on the floor of the Pacific and attacking cities. In order to beat them we had to make giant robots. Skip forward a few years and Jaeger pilots Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam-Sons of Anarchy, Cold Mountain, Deadfall) and Yancy Beckett (Diego Klattenhoff-After Earth, Unconditional, Falling Skies) go into battle against a biggun and more or less get their asses handed to them. Yancy dies. Skip forward five more years and Raleigh has quit the Jaeger program and now works on the big wall that is supposed to save us. He gets recruited back into the program by Marshal Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba-RocknRolla, 28 Days Later, Pandora) and meets the only female in the film Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi-the Brothers Bloom, the Sky Crawlers, Norwegian Wood). He needs to be paired up with a partner and after a long and pretty unnecessary selection process (in spite of needing to fight together it all boils down to a fight against each other) ends up paired with Mako. Meanwhile dorky scientists Newt (Charlie Day-It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Horrible Bosses, Monsters University) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman-Layer Cake, Torchwood, the Dark Knight Rises) argue about which scientific approach to take. Gottlieb thinks the magical power of statistics will do something while Newt wants to hook his brain to one of the kaiju.
Mako bones up the first test run in the Jaeger and they get taken off duty. The plan is to sneak a nuke into the breach and blow it up from the other side. Two huge kaiju attack and kill two of the four remaining Jaegers and disable a third one. Mako and Raleigh jump in the last one and save the day. At that point Stacker climbs into his Jaeger for his meet with destiny and he and the other Jaeger grind the story to an ending so pat and happy it’s at Cheese Level Limburger.
The stars.
Duh. Giant robots fighting giant monsters. Three stars. The Jaegers were so freaking awesome the only way they could have been cooler would be if they each had giant breasts and created deep fried bacon wraps as a waste byproduct. 
(Bacon image courtesy of the funny t shirt category). I know what I’m building first after I conquer this pathetic planet. Two stars. The kaiju are also extremely cool. One star. The action was super good. If there is any move better than hitting a monster in the head with a cargo ship I don’t know what it is. Two stars. Pacing was generally good. One star. Film work and CGI were great. Two stars. The crime lord in charge of the black market kaiju parts was Ron M-F-ing Perlman. One star. Total: twelve stars.
The black holes.
This film suffered from the same issue that continues to plague the Transformers series and that is too much humans, not enough robots kicking ass. One black hole. That laundry list of questions I had a few paragraphs ago, plus another science fiction movie that treats science like fiction. Two black holes. The Jaegers generally emoted more than the humans. One black hole. The story was about as predictable as watching the floor lights light up sequentially on an elevator ride, and if it weren’t for the whole robots/monsters thing would have been painfully cliche. One black hole. Total: five black holes.
A total of seven stars. A decent score, but honestly it and my recommendation are completely irrelevant. If you think giant robots and monsters are cool you will go see this and love it. If you want character arcs, complex stories, and human actors you will not. Go with your instinct when you first saw the trailer. I will say this movie absolutely needs to be seen on the biggest screen you can find, so don’t wait for it to come out on DvD or NetFlix. Date movie? For the love of all that is holy no. If you don’t go see this with a bunch of your guy friends and then go home and play manly video games and drink beer afterward check under your pillow to see if the Testicle Fairy left you a pair of quarters. Bathroom break? Any of the scenes with just humans in it are fair game. I think the couple of scenes where Raleigh tries to convince Stacker that Mako is not incompetent are particularly good.
Thanks for reading. I won’t be doing much for the next couple weeks as I have a big Warhammer tournament this weekend, Comic Con next weekend (and the week leading up), and a business trip right after that. I will be posting notes and images from Comic Con on my Twitter account so follow me @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments on this film or my review feel free to post them here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
The Lone Ranger Movie Review
I kind of wish I had been wearing a (sleep) mask while in the theater.
This film was clearly crafted in the Frankenstein mode: if they just stick enough body parts into it eventually lightning will strike and the monster will rise from the slab and terrify the local villagers (I mean excite the audience. Frankenstein image courtesy of the Horror Movie T Shirt category). This approach was clearly and unabashedly lifted from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Unfortunately what works for pirates apparently fails to work for Old West outlaws, especially when working with a character no one cares about at a time when cowboys just aren’t really that popular (go back in time to 2001 IMO).
This film tanked horribly at the box office and I’m not surprised. I think it fair to say I see a lot of films and with very, very few exceptions manage to stay awake for the duration of all of them good or bad. In this one however I was struggling to keep my eyes open. The worst part is after the third or fourth time I caught myself nodding off I realized I probably could take a 20 minute nap and not miss much (of course I would never do that. I have my “professional” pride to consider). This showing wasn’t even that late for me.
I think this movie is a good example of Disney really believing they can force out a new movie franchise if they just push hard enough. I’m glad to see it has failed in the past (cough cough John Carter cough cough) and seems to be continuing to do so. Don’t try to tell me what to like. I will say that I have seen the trailers for this about 1,000,000 times and if you go by the rule that the more the studios market a film the more likely it is to suck than it was inevitable that this movie be awful.
If grinding movie progression were an Olympic event this film would win gold, silver, and bronze by beating it’s competition to death at the finish line with a lacrosse racket. It goes a whopping 149 minutes (that’s 2 hours and 29 minutes) that feels like six hours. Each scene was padded and paced in order to be as long and agonizing as possible, with tons of long, panning shots of nothing interesting, guys riding horses, inane flashbacks, and character development that couldn’t be more predictable or boring each scene had been delivered via semaphore a day after you watch it. The Frankensteinian nature of this film comes from about 14 completely unnecessary subplots, about 800 leftist social commentary messages, and a plot that meanders back and forth to no real purpose.
The real failure of this film (in my less than humble opinion) is the lack of a clear, appealing villain. The obvious villain is outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner-Black Hawk Down, the Dark Knight, Contact) but his is so cartoonishly evil that you can’t take him seriously. If you have to make your villain a cannibal to paint him as even more evil you just might be trying too hard. About halfway through the movie (you know, at the three hour mark) the villain stops being Butch and somehow turns out to be a railroad guy (and by extension the evils of the industrialization of America). This shifting of villains can work well in a well written, complicated story but in a simplistic action movie (you know, kind of like Pirates of the Caribbean) use the K.I.S.S. principal: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
At this point in one of my reviews that bears closer resemblance to clubbing a baby seal than offering constructive criticism I find a couple of redeeming qualities in a film if only to assuage my own guilt, so here goes. I thought Johnny Depp did his usual stand out character portrayal (on the other hand if I were a Native American actor I might have issues with this film). It is hard to not like him in almost any role. Armie Hammer did as well as could be expected with his role. Unfortunately the writers painted him into a really bland, formulaic corner.
The story. The whole thing starts out in 1933 at a fair. A dopey kid is checking out a Wild West exhibit wearing a Lone Ranger costume and comes to what appears to be a stuffed Native American. The guy turns out to be an ancient Tonto (Johnny Depp-Edward Scissorhands, Benny and June, Sweeney Todd). This ham handed plot device leads to Tonto telling the kid the story of the Lone Ranger (Princess Bride style. This film does not hesitate to rip off movies other than Pirates). John Reid (Armie Hammer-Mirror Mirror, the Social Network, J. Edgar) is traveling back to his home town in Texas to become a Federal prosecutor. On the train is villain Butch Cavendish, headed to the same town to be hung. In the same prisoner car with Butch is Tonto, being transported for some reason(?).
Butch managed to find a gun hidden on the train car and is rescued by a gang of outlaws (if you like stereotype soup you are in for a treat). John gets caught up in the escape and ends up surviving the crash with Tonto. He heads out with his brother (James Badge Dale-Iron Man 3, the Departed, World War Z) and the posse to recapture Butch. They get ambushed and all killed. Tonto shows up to bury them all but a magical white horse compels him to resurrect John (or maybe the horse did it, or the magical spirits. This film suffers from a paucity of details). He wakes up and Tonto convinces him to wear a mask for no real reason.
Honestly, this is about when I started to doze off and a lot of the actual plot details might be missing (you aren’t going to suffer for the lack of them). Since each of these little plot devices is akin to a boring mini movie unto itself I will just spout out the ones I remember fire hose style. The head railroad guy has a creepy attraction to John’s brother’s wife and kid. The wife secretly has always loved John. Butch is actually working for the railroad guy. The railroad guy wants to transport tons of silver that he stole from the Native Americans and use the money to buy out control of the railroad. Butch was hired by the railroad guy to attack small settlements in order to get the US Army to attack them and negate some land treaty. Tonto thinks Butch is some kind of evil spirit that is causing nature to unbalance, manifesting in the form of jack rabbits that are turning into viscous carnivores who specialize in eating scorpions (no joke). The Native Americans attack the army and are slaughtered to the man. Butch turns out to be the railroad guy’s brother (Tom Wilkinson-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Batman Begins, Shakespeare in Love). Johns horse is magical and may or may not be able to fly. The kid and mom get kidnapped by the railroad guy or something. Tonto is suffering from PTSD from some childhood thing. The railroad guy gains control of the railroad at gunpoint. Large amounts of explosives are apparently stored at the bank and Tonto and the Lone Ranger need to rob it or something.
See what I mean about Frankenstein?
The stars.
Johnny Depp was as good as you would expect. One star. Armie Hammer was decent too. One star. Hmm. Is that it, really? I guess so. Two stars.
The black holes.
The pacing on this movie was slow and painful, like being dissolved in a vat of acid. Two black holes. No good villain to give this film some focus. One black hole. So chock full of sub plots and social commentary you have a hard time seeing the actual story. Two black holes. A bonus black hole for the killer rabbit sub plot that was introduced and then blatantly ignored. One black hole. The action was comically stupid. One black hole. There was nothing in the movie to make me care even a little. The only character worth anything was Tonto and we see him alive and well fifty years later at the start of the movie. The plot had no hook. One black hole. Throw in a hot chick somewhere. I am a fan of Helen Bonham Carter but she does not incite my libido, especially when her character has a prosthetic leg. One black hole. Another attempt by Disney to force feed us a franchise. One black hole. The ending was a gigantic trite sandwich served with a side of trite potato salad. One black hole. The entire main plot was a long deus ex machina party where the only music was an old REO Speedwagon CD. One black hole. Total: twelve black holes.
So a grand total of ten black holes and based upon the box office sales I’m not alone in my assessment. Perhaps it is not as horrible as that but it has been a while since I saw something that really sucked and I guess I felt the need to tear something apart. Also since Disney is not hurting for cash I don’t have to feel bad about dumping on someone’s livelyhood. Worth seeing at all? Not really, unless you are having trouble sleeping. If you like Johnny Depp see Benny and June. If you are at all like me you will be bored in the theater. Bathroom break? The one nice thing about a movie made up of dozens of stupid sub plots is you can break any of them off and not really hurt the film much, so take your pick. If I had to choose one scene I’d say the railroad board meeting. It’s in the last 1/3rd of the film and by that point you will need to relieve yourself.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment on this film or my review here. If you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon.
Dave
