Doomsday

0 stars

No… that’s not a typo. I’m really giving this zero stars. No stars. Not even half a damn star. It gets zero. Why? Because it’s unoriginal. I know what you’re probably thinking… “But Brodie, Hollywood has a long history of unoriginality, why is this so special?” Well, it’s so blatantly unoriginal, that based on the trailer alone I picked up on at least 3 movies it ripped off. Actually viewing it gave me a few more.

*SPOILERS HERE IN* Don’t read any further if you really want to see it. But I recommend you read further, because you shouldn’t want to see it.

In Doomsday, the deadly Reaper virus breaks out in Scotland, causing the British government to wall off the small nation from the rest of the world. In the year 2035, a whole generation later, survivors are spotted on satellite photos, roaming around the streets of Glasgow. An elite military team is sent in to the desolate landscape that once was the mighty Scotland to extract any survivors in hope for a cure, as the Reaper virus is now making it’s rounds in downtown London.

And then it gets weird. Because this is when the elite military team comes across the crazy, futuristic cannibal warrior savages that now inhabit and rule the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Taken prisoner, someone gets cooked and eaten, big fight scene… Now they’re on the run from the Warrior-king, with King’s sister who is leading some sort of resistance against both ruling clans. The first obviously ruled by her brother, the second led by her estranged dad, who has set up a nice little Renaissance Fair in an old castle. Military team not welcome there… big fight scene… The escape, and now there’s a big chase scene with a souped up yet 25 year old BMW on the perfectly preserved country roads of Scotland. The cannibals are in this chase in standard post-apocalyptic modes of transportation. Lots of beat up old vehicles adorned with various parts of the skeletal structure. And armed to the core. Which product placement wins in the end?

YAAAWWWNNNNWho cares? Did you count ’em all? We’ve got Mad Max, Escape From New York, 28 Days Later…, 28 Weeks Later…(while we’re at it), Waterworld, Braveheart, Army of Darkness, The Village, James Bond (pick a flick), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and a little Warriors thrown in for good measure.

Admittedly, some of those movies have the benefit of time on their side. The Warriors and Mad Max came out the same year as Alien, Manhattan and Apocalypse Now. In 1979, who would have guessed that in nearly 30 years time, we’d still be talking about the former two, and ranking them up there with the latter three? No one probably. And who knows, maybe in 2035 we’re talking about Doomsday. Most likely cause it actually happened. Hopefully cause it actually happened, because that’s the only way this movie will stay relevant once you’re done reading this review.

Well… let’s move on to the crap production quality, shall we? Where do I start? Is it the complete lack of direction from writer/director Neil Marshall? Yeah sure. That sucked. And I liked his previous effort, The Descent. But this… it’s like he got through the first act and said “Fuck it! You remember Mad Max? Let’s do that for a while.” Then he got halfway through and said “Fuck it! Mel Gibson’s crazy… Let’s do Braveheart for a while. With Malcolm McDowell.” Which is admittedly cool. The Renaissance Fair town is run by Malcolm McDowell, which as a colleague of mine said, “would be a pretty cool Ren-Fair.” But then he got bored with the historical epic angle, and said “Fuck it! Let’s have a car chase.” Can you see why it’s hard to watch?

How about the painfully flat acting of all involved? Including the usually awesome Bob Hoskins. Rhona Mitra, who’s done a few episodes of Nip/Tuck and that’s about it, tries to keep the “Huge star out of nowhere” mojo alive. But… she’s a bad actress. She couldn’t even make the “Fake/Bionic Eye” thing cool. Oh yeah, her character has a bionic eye that she can remove and use as a spy camera. How one royally fucks up the bionic eye/spy camera thing, is beyond me.

I award this film no stars. None. Zero. You go home with nothing. You suck. Do not spend money on this film.

One more thing… if this does actually happen in 2035… could we wall of Wales, instead?

– Brodie

Brodie Fanns!

New review for you. I’m goin’ pre-historic on your asses.

10,000 B.C.

1 Star

So… Roland, if I may call you that. What the hell happened? You had us with Stargate, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. And now this? I don’t even know what to classify this as. It’s barely a step above something the Discovery Channel would put together, only with a Sci-Fi Channel twist.

D’Leh (Steven Strait) is a hunter/warrior from what I only assume is a Sub-Saharan mountain tribe. After his tribal lands are attacked by Egyptian warlords, he embarks on a quest to save his one true love, who also happens to be his people’s saviour. I think. Along the way, he meets up with other tribes who have been attacked by the Egyptians, and they all stage a revolt to free the slaves being used to build the pyramids.

Where to begin with what is wrong with this film? Is it the laughably bad dialog? The maybe dead languages they use? Could it be the very obvious visual effects they use? Or how about the oddly perfect bodies they have? I’m not talking being fit. I’m talking nice skin, well maintained hair, perfect manicure, perfect make-up. On tribes-people.

There was nothing about this production that worked. It’s almost as if they wanted to fall in line with Mel Gibson’s historical epics, but decided they didn’t want to spend a lot of money. And good lord did it show.

And you could tell the actors were of the mindset “This movie sucks, but at least I have one more thing to put on my resume. And a paycheck.” I can’t comment on their performances… because to call what they all did acting is an insult to acting.

I’m being generous with my one star rating, as I usually don’t believe in the “Award for just showing up” philosophy. But come on… they tried.

But really, I can’t recommend this to anyone. Avoid it.

– Brodie

Brodie Fanns!

It’s been a week since I last saw you guys. Seriously, a week. Since the Oscars, really. And there is a perfectly logical explanation for that. That whole live blog thing I was doing, I was doing on 3 different blogs. And that took a lot out of me. It was tiring. Plus I had a few days off work, so I just sat around getting drunk all week.

Anywho!

Here’s a new review-

Vantage Point

3 Stars

It’s a good movie that keeps you guessing, has interesting plot twists and is well acted all around. It’s a bad movie where the plot would have been a really good season of 24.

Vantage Point is told Rashomon style (log onto IMDb and look it up), and we get several interesting perspectives on a terror plot to assassinate the president of the United States in Spain. And thanks to that nice little summary, my blog is now “one of interest” to several government agencies. We get the perspective of Secret Service agents Thomas Barnes and Kent Taylor (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), tourist Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), the terrorists, their pawns, a news crew (Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana and even the president himself (William Hurt). It all culminates in a pulse pounding series of chase sequences, ending in glorious American cinema fashion: dead bad guys, heroically and miraculously alive good guys.

For what comes off as Die Hard meets 24 with a little Bourne Identity thrown in mix, it really isn’t as bad as it could have been. The mixed narrative gets a little annoying because some versions overlap with other versions, so you’re getting the same story over and over, rather than multiple yet separate stories.

I’ve long thought of Dennis Quaid as the poor man’s Harrison Ford. Which I still stand behind. But you have to remember, even if you’re getting discount store Harrison Ford, Dennis Quaid is the Target version- still really cool. At least he’s not Tom Berenger, the K-Mart Harrison Ford. It was good to see Matthew Fox take on this kind of role, as you can see him start to shed the “Jack Shephard” image he’s been relishing in for the past three and a half years. I’m interested to see what he does as Racer X in Speed Racer come May. Edgar Ramirez continues his streak of roles requiring him to be the mysterious Latino with a steely glare. But if I were making a movie that had a mysterious Latino with a steely glare in it, I would pick Ramirez, as he’s not a bad actor, just needs to step out of the typecasting.

As I said before, my interest in the plot starts to fall apart during the first act when they’re constantly re-showing the assassination. Luckily once that’s over about 40 minutes in, we can settle in on some good, old-fashioned, pulse-pounding action fun. And it doesn’t skimp on that. It is an unfortunate page right out of Jason Bourne’s playbook though, and at times, I thought I had been magically transported to the summer of ’02 and was watching Matt Damon speed around a European city.

But while it does draw a lot of comparison to previous works, it still is an enjoyable film. I predict we’ll see some heavy rotation on the USA network in a few years, as this flick seems right up their alley.

– Brodie Mann

Jumper

2 Stars

Ah, the sturdy piece of wood that is Hayden Christensen. Sure, a sturdy piece of wood is good for building a boat. Or a treehouse. But for acting? Not so much. I’m not saying it would have been a better film without him. But it’s a start.

Jumper is the story of a young man, David, who discovers he has the super-human ability to teleport from one location to another. But instead of using it to save the world, a la Spider-Man, he decides to go for personal gain, teleporting into banks and what not, just so he can get some money. There’s even a scene where he’s watching the news, and there are people stranded in a flood, who he could totally save with his ability, but doesn’t. Damn. What a self serving jackass, as the script wants us to believe. Then we get to the action. There’s an ancient brotherhood led by a silver coiffed Samuel L. Jackson who is trying his hardest to both keep the jumpers at bay, and go 2 minutes without saying “motherfucker.” And David is just trying to woo an old schoolmate, who by the way, has been under the impression that David’s been dead for the past 8 years, along with anyone else who ever knew him. The film quickly devolves into an exercise in flashy special effects and even flashier location shooting. Which I will give to director Doug Liman as being pretty cool.

I always kick it off with the acting, so here goes. Samuel L. Jackson is good, as usual. When is he not. I have a theory, that he is the black Christopher Walken. The movie could be absolute shit, but he’ll still be “OK” in it. As is mostly the case with this one. He seems to walk through the role as if it’s just a paycheck to him, which is entirely likely. Diane Lane has become less hit and more miss recently, and this is no exception. And of course the two leads. Christensen. And Rachel Bilson. The only person I can think of with the exact same lack of charisma as Christensen. Put the two together and you get… well.. Jumper.

What happened to David Goyer? He did Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, all of the Blade movies, and coming up he’s got The Flash and Magneto. So promising was his writing career. Then he turns out this P.O.S. that is an hour and a half of plot holes and missed opportunities. And that could be due to Liman not able to work the sci-fi angle. But come on. There could have been great fight scenes. Don’t get me wrong, the ones they had were fantastic. But… there could have been more.

There could have been more exploration into the “Jumpers” vs. “Paladins” (shadowy Sam Jackson organization) struggle. Especially considering how HUGE of a plot point it really is. There could have been more exploration into the whole David being dead thing. I mean… they watch him fall through the ice at the age of 14-ish, he teleports out, never to be seen again. He comes back 8 years later and people treat him as if he just got home from college. What the hell? It makes little to no sense.

The whole thing should have been longer. Should have been more in depth. Should have been better.

Though I will give them credit for doing some fantastic special effects work. The teleporting was magnificent, and they kept the practical science behind it pretty accurate. The replacement of the displaced matter when a Jumper leaves an area was accurate. The comparable velocity law was accurate. Basically it was as scientifically accurate as you would expect a sci-fi flick about young adults who can create tiny black holes at will and travel anywhere in the world through them, to be.

And as Liman demonstrated in The Bourne Identity, he has a knack for doing impressive location shooting. He gets some damn fine shots of Rome, Giza, London, Tokyo and Prague. But I could watch the Travel Channel, and get the same thing. Only no Hayden Christensen. So it’s better.

2 Stars go to this, but only because I’m feeling generous on President’s day, and I enjoyed the special effects. If we get a competent filmmaker behind the wheel, who knows what those effects can do.

Later Brodie Fanns!

-Brodie Mann