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....LEGION (2010)

"Raaaar!  I's A monsta!  A MONSTA!

1) Wow....Dennis Quaid playing a folksy patriarch type that made mistakes but loves his son....I haven't seen him play that before....rolls eyes

2) There's nothing quite so annoying to me than a stupid film that keeps insisting it's smart.

3) That being said, there are moments where I can envision that this was a smart script early on (very early on) in the pre-production. But along the line whatever smartness got trimmed out in favor of more gunfire and fighting and CGI special effects.

4) Wow...Charles S. Dutton playing an older black man with a strong spiritual side...I haven't seen him play that before....rolls eyes

5) When I first saw the trailers, I worried that this was going to be a bald-faced, Micheal-Bay-ized rip-off of The Prophecy. In retrospect, the producers were too busy ripping off Night of The Living Dead and Terminator to care about a lesser film like that.

6) There is no sense of these characters having any life outside the movie proper. No one here has a personality, they have 'types' that are differentiated by the types in other films by traits...but those traits are never explained. For example--why is Dutton's Percy missing one hand? It was set up to be a character beat, but ended up never being explained.

One of the actors discovers one of the gaping plot holes just
over the horizon....

7) If there's a flaw that, if corrected, would have lifted this film up from being just mediocre, it's that screenwriters Peter Schink and Scott Stewart just asks us constantly to 'go with it.' It's not just enough that we're told Adrienne Palicki's Charlie is about to give birth to a child that will save humanity; we need to know (much as Sarah Conner is told in Terminator) how he's going to do it. It's not just enough that we're told that Jeep (Lucas Black) has to find 'The Prophets'; we need to know who here prophets are--and telling me to buy a comic book isn't going to work. These might be the parts that were trimmed to make room for the punchy-punchy-run-run.

I am the overkill of The Lord!

8) Okay, let me get this straight--these Angels have razor-sharp wings, fight like freakin' Neo, and have this Swiss Army Mace that does everything, including spins like a top? I know the producers must have thought it was cool...but when that thing starts doing its julienne impression, I couldn't stop laughing.

9) The sudden re-appearance of one character thought dead at the climax effectively stops the character arc of Jeep (Who calls their son Jeep, by the way?) dead. His journey is never finished, which makes the final scene of him and Charlie playing at being Sarah Conner at the end of Terminator ridiculous.

10) You can take John Tenny's Howard, bite out his throat, snatch him away, and nail him to a cross before giving him his ticket out of the movie...but it in no way distracts from the fact that the two people who definitively die first are the only two people of color in the movie.

Overall...mediocre, mediocre, mediocre. It's a dumb film that mouths bullcrap about 'faith' in an attempt to convince you it's smart, asking you to just 'go with it' rather than work out the mythology that should be a major element of any film like this.

Other than enduring this, the other moment was cringing through....grumblemutter.....Regal's Firstlook when it gave me a chance to preview When In Rome. At one point, Kristen Bell describes her character as a 'workaholic with no time for romance'--at which point we cut to a scene where Bell's character describes herself to a friend as 'a workaholic with no time for romance' in almost the exact same terms...and my heart froze a little. I fear Ms. Bell may be lost to us.