Ten Statements About....G.I. JOE: RETALIATION (2013)

"What does it say about you that you prefer hanging out
with me instead of Seinna Miller, mate?"

"Drive it like you stole it!”
“Dude, as your friend, I’m telling you...you need a new catchphrase."

1) Oh, Lord, is this film soulless and without anything resembling life.  What little energy this film has comes from the performances of people like Dwayne Johnson, Jonathan Pryce and Walter Goggins.  Without those performances, all we have is a string of place settings designed solely to get us from one 3-D set piece to the next.

Which is doubly puzzling considering how poor the 3-D transfer and the action sequences are.

2) For a film that really, really wants to be a twisty comic book action thriller, there’s very little plot getting in the way of the narrative.  So much is made of the action sequences that the quieter moments seem forced.  There’s a definite sense of  director Jon M. Chu dancing around in an effort to hide the fact that there’s nothing inside this film other than big shouty things and explosions.

3) The MacGuffin that the film is built around--a way to wreck nuclear-weapon-level havoc without getting nuclear-weapon-level fallout--is potentially really good, but it’s wasted pretty badly.  Far too little attention is given to the build up to the launching of the devices (that actually happens off-screen) that when said device is finally utilized, we almost forget that it was an element in the story.

"Forget about the star--check out THE TOY!"

4) Is it just Fox not wanting to pay out the sequel clause that led to them pretty much discarding a number of the characters from the previous film?  I’m sure, for example, that Rachel Nichols couldn’t have been too much more expensive than Adrienne Palicki, and we would have had the previous film to give us the sense that there is still characterization going on.  Without anyone but Channing Tatum (who’s gone at the end of the first act) on the heroes’ side that we’re familiar with at he beginning of the movie, there’s no way for the viewers to follow the plot.

5) And since we’re on the subject of returning villains--why did they bother bringing back Arnold Vosloo at all, given he literally gets about a minute of screentime by himself, forty seconds of which is silent?

6) The sheer fact of the matter is that the characters, both Joes and Cobras, are ciphers.  Sure, Palicki gets something akin to a speech explaining why she became a Joe, and there’s a big ol’ expository dump that explains what Elodie Yung’s Jinx is doing hanging out with Snake Eyes, but mostly it’s just actors striving to be two-dimensional.  Hell, Flint is such a non-entity that the hinted at romance with Lady Jaye never gets past the hints we see.  It’s as if the movie assumes that we will fill in the blanks because Jaye and Flint were romantic interests in the cartoon.

7) I don’t know which is worse--that the film couldn’t be bothered to be consistent with the first film when it shows the no longer destroyed Eiffel Tower, or that a major country is flat out obliterated and never really mentioned again.

"So that's where all our characterization went!"

8) You know, RZA, I understand you love martial arts and probably enjoyed being the leader of the clan that Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow and Jinx belonged to...but you’re not very good.  And given how much expostory dialogue you’re given, being good is kind of a prerequisite..

9) Even though Ray Stevenson attacks his role as Firefly with gusto, I really have to wonder why he is here instead of, let’s say, Destro or, especially, The Baroness (you can’t tell me that Stevenson in a grungy mask is preferable to Sienna Miller in tight leather).  It’s not like Firefly is as well known a character as the other Cobra villains he replaces.  Plus the script plays outside the box with Firefly, giving him these robotic napalm bombs in the shape of...fireflies!  Get it?  Get it?

10) You know your movie is sucky when Walter Goggins is killed off as the warden of the high tech penitentiary that houses Cobra Commander and Destro (who is written out in a lame and half-hearted way)...and you kind of wish that he a) survived and b) was the real hero of this film.

There's a reason I didn't mention Bruce Willis in this
review...he doesn't deserve it.

Overall...a prime example of fan service over story, characterization or anything that makes a film a film, this is a sad, sad, sad sequel that manages to be bigger and stupider without being anywhere near as good as the original.  Now if they want to spin off Walter Goggins in his own movie....

I saw this at The Atlas, mainly because my Regal Crown Card coupon for free popcorn was about to expire.  Apparently, as the actual mall is expanding (they’ve finally found an anchor store in Century 21), the theater has cut down on its staff.  This resulted in many of the previews and the first two minutes of the film being out of focus due to a misalignment in the 3D projector.  Among the notable trailers was another, story intensive one for Iron Man 3 (THE FREAKIN’ HULKBUSTER ARMOR!), one for Star Trek: Into Darkness that continues to make me think that the Roddenberry version I learned to respect is gone for good; and a thoroughly confusing one for World War Z that pretty much hides that there are zombies in this film at all.

Ten Statements About....FAST FIVE (2011)

"Hey!  The audience is getting bored--let's jump out of this car!"

"This just went from Mission: Impossible to Mission: In-freaking-sanity"

1) Even though this is undisputably a Fast and Furious film, it's nice to see that the caper flick has survived beyond last year's glut. Hell, there's a decided whiff of The Italian Job at points. That being said....

2) Chris Morgan's script tries so hard to make sure every one of the film's massive cast of characters a story arc that the movie ends up at times with a sense of diffuseness. In particular, the second act feels like so much running around trying to convince us meaningful things are going on.

"Okay..here's the plan...I act all bad-ass...and
you, you distract Diesel with your tiny ta-tas."

3) Elsa Pataky's Elena is arguably the most ill-served by this desire to give everyone something uniquely theirs to do. The script sets up an interesting back story for her, gives her some motivations...and then she does nothing much save give Diesel's Dom someone to look at meaningfully. The resulting romance just doesn't have the right feel to it..

4) I don't buy where Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs ends up in his story arc. Considering how much time is spent convincing us that he is truly hardcore ("Real Old Testament," if I recall Paul Walker's Brian saying)...then has him stepping back and pretty much letting our heroes get away because they helped him avenge his team.

5) Jordana Brewster's Mia's main story arc effectively takes away the one thing that makes her uniquely suited for this franchise--namely, that she is overpoweringly sexy when driving a fast car. Sitting at a computer screen and giving instructions over a headset...not so much at all.

6) You gotta give this movie credit for playing thoroughly fair with the big twist of its climatic heist. They lay out the clues, but manage to misdirect us with key lines of dialogue.

7) You know, given how easily Brian and Dominic escape from Joaquim de Almieda's Reyes in the first act, and how they manage to elude him and overcome the obstacles he puts in front of him with inpunity...well, he's a pretty crap bad guy. And no amount of him telling stories about how the Portuguese conquered Brazil will convince us he has more than one dimension.

"What...you can't judge me...you did The Tooth Fairy, damnit!"

8) But then...these movies aren't about vivid bad guys. They're about big-ass stunts, and the film manages to give us something exploding, flipping over or flying into the river every ten minutes or so. And on that level, it is a success.

9) I sincerely doubt the physics that allows our heroes to use precision driving moves to manipulate a ten-ton safe as if it was a mace...and the damage to property, vehicles and--yes--life reaches Bad Boys level of ludicrousness. But it did look cool.

10) I am so happy that this film doesn't forget anyone who was anyone who appeared in the series to date--as the final stinger after the cast credits attest.

Overall...taken for what it is, it works. As a movie, it's a little too convoluted in its desire to make sure everyone gets a chapter in this film's book.

Since I was treating my mom for Mother's Day, we headed out to MovieWorld in Douglaston, to my knowledge one of the very, very, very few independent movie theaters left in NYC--this place still practices a $6.50 matinee on Sunday before 5p.m. Yeah, the place still has a cheesy 'trapped in the 80's' feel to it, but the sheer friendliness of the staff makes up for it. The trailers included The Hangover II, which seems to want to make me not want to see this movie every time I see it; Transformers III: Dark of The Moon, that made my eyes glass over with boredom...and ones for X-Men: First Class, which emphasizes the relationship between Xavier and Magneto and makes the film look even better (and Hell, as a Banshee fan, I marked out seeing him flying across The Bay of Pigs) and Cowboys And Aliens, which reveals more of the plot and is getting me all the more jazzed for this.

Ten Statements About....YOU, AGAIN? (2010)

Yeah, I'd be crying if I was caught in Romcom Hell, too, Kristen...

1) Poor Kristin. Poor, poor Kristin. Although it's obvious she knows she needs out of this romcom spiral she's in judging from her campaigning to get a Veronica Mars movie going (and for the record, I did not pay for this--I used my free admittance slip from Machete).

2) This is one of those films that follows 'The Script' so closely that it doesn't bother to, you know, give any of these characters any character. Bell's Marti and Odette Yustman's Joanna seem to have jumped immediately from high school to the weekend this film takes in, and that's more than any of the other characters get.

3) This is also one of these films that is built on a co-incidence so back-breaking its not funny--okay, I could have accepted that Yustman and James Wolk's Will never met in high school...if he wasn't the star basketball player while she was the head cheerleader. There's no way they couldn't have met!

Betty White gloats over the face she has the best career
of all the people in this picture....

4) Two thing that just Aren't Funny Any More are Kids With Smart Mouths and Grannies With The Hots For Anything That Moves...and we get both! Thanks, Movie Gods!!!

5) I have never, ever seen a film so clearly demarcate its acts in a long time...to the point where you can see the exact moment when everyone has to stop acting like petulant madwomen and start bonding. And the way the script hewes so tightly to that three act structure produces a film where everyone, but everyone acts like a monster that until it's time for the message section of the film.

Dear Hollywood...this is how you cast people to be family members

6) It's really, really weird that Yustman and Sigourney Weaver's Ramona look more like mother and daughter than Bell and Jamie Lee Curtis' Gail...and Yustman and Weaver are supposed to be aunt and niece. The sad fact is that Bell's movie family looks exactly like a mismatched bunch of actors thrown together for name value.

7) It's also weird--although prolly their skills as actresses rather than the strength of the script or the characters provided them--that the film's message about how it's the sum of all your experiences that make you who you are, even the bad ones is driven home much, much better by Weaver and Curtis than by Bell and Yustman.

8) Oddly enough...the few moments of grace come from the smaller roles, especially the slightly-larger-than-a-cameo appearance of Dwayne Johnson as a federal marshall who gives Bell some good advice, and especially Kristen Chenoweth playing the too-fabulous wedding planner. On the other hand, Kyle Bornheimer's Tim is truly irritating, and the cameos by Patrick Duffy and Cloris Leachman are lazy and rely solely on the audience recognizing them as the actors and not the characters.

9) ...and speaking of lazy...this is one of those pictures where, when you see Kristin accidentally spills her lunch on Sean Wing's Charlie, you know that he is The Designated Love Interest--even when he has less than twenty minutes of screen time, and doesn't have a single scene of more than five lines with her.

A reminder...THIS is the only reason I saw this film...this,
and the fact that my free movie pass was expiring that weekend...

10) Boy, does John Oats look even goofier without the mustache.

In short--one of those bad, bad movies that walks The RomCom Script like a prom date trying to prove he's not drunk to a highway patrolman...and thus doesn't realize they've created unlikable, unsympathetic characters behaving like lunatics. But at least Kristin Bell looked cute in her Nike Dri-Fit top and sweatpants in Act Two (Not so much the sweats in Act Three that keep slouching around her hips)

Incidentally, the trailers were similarly terrible--the worst of which was Gnomeo and Juliet, a version of the Shakespeare classic played out by garden gnomes that was so hideously ill-conceived my mouth hung open, and yet another showing of that abominable looking Life As We Know It trailer that just reinforces how unappealing the two 'appealing' leads are, and does the trailer script of handing us a two to five minute summary of the film from beginning to end. I should prolly also mention Burlesque, a backstage melodrama that's being sold as a vehicle for Christina Aguilara and features Bell as her frenemy...but the sight of Cher's overtly-plasticed body still scares me.

Ten Statements About....FASTER (2010)

Now this...this is the stuff....

1) Welcome back to where you belong, Dwayne Johnson. You were sorely, sorely missed.

2) The influence of a number of things is very evident in the script by Tony and Joe Gayton--I detected whiffs of Donald Westlake, Brian Garfield and a whole slew of 70's action revenge flicks. Hell, the only name we know Johnson's character by is Driver, which I swear is a reference to the Ryan O'Neill vehicle The Driver, because we don't even know if this is Johnson's name or his role in the bank job that caused his prison stay.

3) At first, I thought the smallish role by Better In The Dark Hottie Hall of Fame Inductee Moon Bloodgood was gratuitous, and her suicide attempt nonsensical...but once the connection between two of the characters becomes revealed, it's obvious that the Gaytons intended this as a significant clue.

4) Similarly, another clue is laid right out there in the very beginning as to what is really going on with the three leads, but the acting on one of those leads obscures the fact that he's not what he pretends to be.

5) If there's one biiiiig problem with Tillman Jr's direction is that sometimes it's too stylish for its own good, like when he inserts a sideways angle (it's so vertical it's Dutchness is phony) in the middle of one of the major suspense pieces.

6) I thoroughly respect how nowhere are we asked to consider Driver a hero. We are asked to show sympathy for him, but never condone his actions (although I really felt the closing song touting 'there's no room for a good guy,' was laying it on a little thick). Hell, even when he does positive things, like saving a young girl from the sleazy second man on his list or sparing another man who attributes his participation in Driver's Brother's murder to his finding god and becoming a pious man, it's never glorified.

6) It's interesting how the people who murdered Driver's brother start out as cookie cutter stereotypes--we know nothing about the first one--but they gain more depth the lower down the list we get...until, when we hit the person who should be on the list, but isn't, he's the most well-defined of all.

7) I was surprised at how invested I was in Killer, the hired gun who's assigned the task of killing Driver. Even though he's given enough quirks to count for overkill, Oliver Jackson-Cohen's performance sells me on the fact that this could actually be a real person. But then, seeing him interact with his fiance' wife, Maggie Grace's Lilly, helps a lot. In one sequence, they almost make me wish the film was about them.

Carla Gugino and...I don't know...just...Carla Gugino

8) Carla Gugino....I just wanted to mention Carla Gugino, because she is her usual volcanic self.

I like Carla Gugino.

Carla Gugino.

9) This is a hard R film...and yet, it dances around the proclivities of the second target on Driver's list, referred to in the credit as The Old Man. We see him feign weakness to lure a teen girl into his apartment, see him dose her with a paralytic...and yet the script hints at, but never explicitly says that he's either a serial killer, a serial rapist or an amateur snuff film producer. Sometimes, it's just better to out and out say what you want to say.

10) It's interesting how, even though there is a definite fetishization of cars in this film, the only real chase scene happens in flashback toward the end of the first act--a successful way of having your cake and eating it, too.

In short--there are loads of positives, and yet I'm not sure it adds up to a great picture. Maybe if the film was a bit more streamlined, it might have been more effective and well-paced.

It's fascinating, incidentally, how the trailers before this film included one for the Jason Stratham/Ben Foster remake of The Mechanic, which seems to have less kinship with the original Charles Bronson starrer than this film did, and Drive Angry, which seems to be the Bizarro World version of this film, with the back-from-Hell Nicholas Cage driving a wicked car to destroy the cult that killed his daughter. There was also a trailer for The Rite, which soooo wants to be The Exorcist it isn't funny, and The Eagle, which seems to be telling the same story as Centurion....only, you know, with Channing Tatum and now wacky gore.

Oh...and a trailer for Season of The Witch, a ludicrous looking period-set Nicholas Cage horror flick that asks us to buy Nicholas Cage as a medieval knight transporting a witch to her trail, and has been 'coming soon' for over a year.