Installation_At_Orsk Reviews

Extreme Ops (2002)

An action thriller (without action or thrills)

[2/10 · 30 April 2024]

Extreme Ops is a movie that is interesting in one way only: it does so many things wrong you'd think its makers had never watched a film before.

Problem 1: it doesn't have a protagonist. Devon Sawa's Will gets top billing, but he's mostly along for the ride rather than his actions advancing the story. Everything that happens is shared out thinly between several characters, most of whom are annoying, and all of whom are one-note stereotypes.

Problem 2: it doesn't have a plot. Well, *technically* it does, but it doesn't kick in until halfway through the film, and it's only in the last 30 minutes (of this slim 90-minute movie) that it really starts moving. So the hour before that is spent listening to annoying people blathering inanely, or watching long scenes of them snowboarding to early 2000s techno.

Problem 3: it doesn't have memorable bad guys. Apart from the main villain's psychopathic son (who is killed off almost as soon as the action finally begins), the antagonists are interchangeable bald Eastern European thugs who can't shoot straight.

Problem 4: there's no excitement or suspense. When the action finally does start, any potential thrills are immediately undercut by dismal attempts at humour. A woman is dangling precariously upside-down from a cliff - but whoops, her rescuer accidentally pulls off her trousers, revealing her panties to their mutual embarrassment! What is this, Benny Hill? And ironically, considering that in the story the team went to the Alps to film people outrunning an avalanche without horribly obvious greenscreens and CGI, the climax involves... well, you can probably guess.

The one thing the film has going for it is that it has some impressive mountainscape photography and extreme sports footage. If those aren't of interest, you're going to have an even more underwhelming time watching this movie.

CQ (2001)

Charming homage to two faces of a cinematic era

[7/10 · 24 October 2022]

Paris, 1969: young American film editor Paul is working on troubled French-Italian sci-fi thriller Codename: Dragonfly, while at the same time 'borrowing' film and equipment to make his own personal piece of cinema verite. But when a clash between the producer and director over the ending gets the latter fired, and the flamboyant replacement director promptly breaks a leg in a car accident, Paul is thrown in at the deep end with the task of finishing the shoot and coming up with an ending - in just two days. On top of that, he's falling in love with the lead actress... or is it the character she plays?

CQ is an homage to a distinctive period in European cinema; the most obvious references are the kitschy, OTT likes of Dino de Laurentis' Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik, with actor John Phillip Law in all three movies. But it's also influenced by the French New Wave and the other films it inspired like the 1967 mockumentary David Holzman's Diary - the actor who played Holzman appears here as one of a Greek chorus of imaginary critics offering commentary on Paul's creative efforts. (Other clear links are Paul secretly filming his girlfriend Marlene in the nude as Holzman did, and her blunt response when he tells her he wants his movie to reflect the truth of his life: "What if it's boring?")

Paul is pretentious, self-absorbed and passive, all of which lead to the end of his relationship with Marlene. But despite that he's not unsympathetic; he's also insecure and uncertain, desperately wanting to tell a story without yet knowing what, or even how. Ultimately the film lets him tell two: its events enable him to devise an ending to Dragonfly that satisfies its producer's desire for action but also surprise, which in turn gives him the confidence and the industry foothold he needs to complete and release his personal art film.

The ultimate irony of CQ is how Paul is always overshadowed by another director, Jason Schwartzman's scene-stealing and Austin Powers-ish Felix DeMarco. Felix is Paul's diametric opposite - extrovert, loud, flashy, impulsive and ignorant of the technical aspects of moviemaking in favour of brash, cheap spectacle, but also successful - and as such earns his begrudging admiration and low-key loathing simultaneously. When Felix's own foolish actions take him off the picture, Paul finally gets his chance to prove himself as a filmmaker, first on Dragonfly and then his magnum opus, 69-70. But even then, he can't escape comparisons to his rival, in a moment of deadpan, crushing humour.

The film as a whole isn't biting enough to be a satire, funny enough to be a comedy or serious enough to be a drama. But when viewed as a love letter to a distinctive period of cinema, filled with detail and affection, it succeeds. You don't need to have seen Danger: Diabolik or know the background of the New Wave to appreciate the recreation of the era. CQ is ultimately as gently enjoyable and mellow as its soundtrack - appropriately enough, by a band called Mellow!

Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 (2020–2022)

Have my eyes been hacked? This story lacks focus...

[5/10 · 15 August 2022]

I can't help thinking that a lot of the negative reviews here come solely from outrage that "They've CHANGED things! It's not exactly the way I think it should be! How DARE they!"

My prior knowledge of GitS comes from the original manga and the first movie, so I can't comment on how things have changed from the earlier Stand Alone Complex series. But I can say that if you're willing to accept the differences between manga and movie (which are considerable, especially regarding Motoko's character), why not here? Is it just that the new series uses CGI animation rather than hand-drawn?

Because the CGI is really the stand-out part of the series. Expansive hyperreal environments are combined with characters that are stylised just enough to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect, and the use of motion capture gives everything a sense of both solidity and fluidity. The action is really well done too: it often involves cyborgs fighting robots and effectively superhumans at breakneck speed while doing impossible stunts, but at all times it's perfectly clear what everyone is doing - a nice change from modern stroboscopically-edited live action movies!

Where the series falls down is the story. It only has a limited number of episodes to play with, yet it dawdles, gradually introducing a plot element here, a character there, and detouring into vaguely explained pseudo-philosophical musings on the nature of memory and consciousness. There's little urgency about dealing with the threat of the 'posthumans', even after one of them has directly attacked the heroes on their home turf - and it takes until the second season for that to happen! The first season is effectively setup, and the payoff in the second is... well, disappointing and somewhat confusing. Things go badly - except they don't. Or do they? Ultimately, everything comes down to whether or not Motoko pulls out a plug, and even then the outcome is ambiguous.

Motoko herself is probably the series' biggest weak point, because... she doesn't DO anything! Yes, she fights various opponents in some spectacular setpieces. But between them, she spends 90% of her time standing with her arms folded gazing off into the distance as people tell her things. It's not until the very final episode that it feels like she's expressing her true emotions or engaging fully with any other characters, and by that point she's literally deciding the future of humanity. There's almost no sense of her as a person - ironic, since despite being a cyborg, in the original manga she was very much a lively, complex human.

Still, as I said the action sequences are done well, there's an impressive sense of scale to the whole thing, and the Tachikoma robot tanks are funny and endearing (which makes it all the more unnerving when one by one they're swayed to the posthumans' cause at the end). It's just a shame the story was so unfocused, because it could have been genuinely spectacular.

The Treachery Game (1981)

Game over

[5/10 · 14 July 2016]

The success of 1980's The Assassination Run led the BBC to make a sequel the following year, with the same production team and largely the same cast. Ex-assassin Mark Fraser and his wife Jill are holidaying in France when a biochemist is murdered nearby - and Fraser's car and fingerprints are found at the scene. The couple go on the run to find out who has framed them and why before agents of various countries can hunt down and eliminate them.

The Treachery Game is watchable, but doesn't work as well as its forebear. It suffers from the need of a sequel to up the stakes, so the investigative cat-and-mouse of the original is supplanted by helicopter chases, gun battles and drive-by Molotovings - which on a BBC budget are less than impressive.

Another problem is the plot itself. The first time around, the Cold War shenanigans were convoluted but ultimately paid off when the true nature and motives of the forces behind the Frasers' tormentors were revealed; here, it involves brainwashing and mind control, which even with an attempt to link it to the then-topical revelation of the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme is still portrayed in a way that now looks laughable.

At the end, the villain's unmasking is more a case of having exhausted every other possibility from the cast than deduction on Fraser's part. As for why the bad guys used such a complicated plan to frame Fraser when they could have simply shot Dr Aird (played in a fleeting cameo by Sean Connery's brother Neil) and walked away leaving the authorities in the dark... well, the only possible explanation is that if they hadn't, it would have been a very short series.

As before, it's not really an acting showcase. Malcolm Stoddard's Fraser is if anything even more stoic about the situation he's been thrown into, and Sandor Eles's Grigor - previously an amiable opponent - is much more short-tempered and a lot less likable. The standout character this time is Ben Aris's hapless MI6 officer Frank Lloyd; while competent enough on his own turf, he's nowhere near as capable as Fraser, Grigor or the other players in the field, and as a result feels very human as he's left floundering and blustering in their wake. (That doesn't mean he lacks resourcefulness at crucial moments, though!)

Disappointingly, the resourcefulness of Jill this time around has been curtailed. Her repeated escape attempts in The Assassination Run made her more than a mere helpless victim, but here Fraser flat-out tells her that if she stays with him, she's a liability. As a result, she spends a lot of the story waiting for him in various less-than-safe houses, being drugged or threatened by bad guys who regularly drop in like unwanted relatives. It's a let-down to see her so passive - though she does get a quite shocking scene in the final episode when she shows her true steel. She also has moments of anger at and doubt about her husband - is he lying to her about having retired? - but ultimately they come to nothing because there's never a suggestion that Fraser is anything other than a patsy.

Director Hannam makes good use of his French locations, the blazing Spanish sun of the earlier show replaced by golden landscapes and moodily-shot catacombs. There's a nice bit of serendipity when a cloud shadow whips away to catch Fraser in the sun like a spotlight just as a pursuing helicopter appears, something that would probably cost directors today a small fortune in CGI to duplicate. But Hannam is trying to make a feature film on a TV budget, and whenever he pushes too hard the tightness of the purse strings shows. The opening credits of the first episode include clips from pretty much every action scene in the whole series!

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

A Bad Film To Sit Through

[4/10 · 23 February 2013]

This is the first Die Hard movie that was originally written *as* a Die Hard movie (DH1 and 2 were unrelated novels, DH3 was a script called Simon Says and DH4 was developed from, of all things, an article in Wired magazine)... yet ironically, it's the least Die Hard-like of the entire series.

The things that made Die Hard distinctive - McClane's wisecracks and vulnerability, the way he gets under the skin of the villain, his exploitation of space to gain an advantage - are all gone here. McClane is reduced to being Mr Generic Action Hero, leaping into every battle or off every tall building without the slightest fear of getting hurt and barking "I'm on vacation!" (which he isn't; he went to Russia to see his son be put on trial for murder! Not exactly a holiday) whenever the script calls for a one-liner. Change a few character names, and it could have been Salt 2 or xXx 3 or Mission: Impossible 5 or 24: The Movie.

That's not to say that those films would necessarily have been bad - but they would given the same writer/director combination. The script is nonsensical (there's a big twist that director John Moore admitted in an interview was made up during filming, rendering a major character's storyline pointless while not even making sense; and what on earth was Jack's original plan to get Komarov out of the courtroom?), while Moore's list of directorial tricks is exactly two items long: SHAKE THE CAMERA and SMASH SOMETHING. His action sequences don't build, but start at full intensity and continue without change or relief or remorse for numbing, camera-jolting minutes before abruptly and arbitrarily ending.

Even the cinematography is unpleasant; it's an ugly film. Early on, a TV news ticker tells us that it's 24 degrees C in Moscow, but it looks a cold and sickly blue-grey... until at random moments everything turns dazzling orange as if the sun just exploded.

Bruce Willis seems bored by the whole affair, rarely rising above a monotone and displaying only a fraction of the charm and wit he did in the previous films, even DH4.0 - his now-infamous appearance on the BBC's The One Show, where he seemed half-asleep and totally uninterested in anything the presenters said, pretty much sums up his performance. The actor playing his son is just as one-note but in a different way - jaw-clenching anger - and none of the other characters even register.

That last is perhaps the film's biggest failing, and the reason it seems so un-Die Hard-like; there's no memorable villain. One of the main bad guys never interacts with McClane, and the other is revealed (in the aforementioned ridiculous twist) too late in the day to have any impact. Hans Gruber, come back, all is forgiven! (Hell, come back Colonel Stuart, or even Thomas Gabriel!)

Jason King (1971–1972)

Not nearly as fancy...

[3/10 · 2 September 2012]

I enjoyed Department S when I discovered it on DVD, so decided to give its spin-off series a try, even knowing going in that it was not as well-regarded. I very quickly found out why!

What made Jason King (the character) work in Department S was that he had two relatively normal sidekicks - who appear here only in the briefest of stock footage flashbacks in one single episode - to bounce off, making him seem like an eccentric in a more or less everyday world. Given his own series and shorn of anyone to keep him in check, however, Jason becomes absolutely ludicrous, a camp comic-book creation with barely even one toe in reality. That he's at all bearable to watch is entirely down to Peter Wyngarde's charm, as the scripts frequently make him casually sexist and even racist in a cringeworthy 1970s way. (One episode actually has him say "Ah so, dlagon rady" to a Chinese woman... a Chinese woman played by a British actress in yellowface and false eyelids. Horrible!)

The stories are also bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Since he's no longer part of a law enforcement agency, every contrivance imaginable is needed to force Jason into the plots. He unwittingly uses a codeword meant to identify an arms dealer. He's hypnotised. He's mistaken for a hit-man because he's carrying a rose. He picks up a hitch-hiker involved in a crime. He's impersonated (twice). He's blackmailed by MI6 (several times). He's kidnapped (repeatedly). In the laziest example, he just so happens to know *three* different people - from different countries - who are trying to obtain a stolen statue, none of whom have any connection to each other.

The scripts are not the only thing that were cheap. To pay for location shooting in Europe (Jason visits Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, Venice and other cities - mostly wandering around in front of famous landmarks just to prove that yes, they really sent their leading actor there for the day) the show was shot on 16mm film rather than ITC's usual 35mm, and it looks terrible. 16mm can be decent quality - look at the restored DVDs of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who - but here everything is muddy and astonishingly grainy. The same sets appear over and over (every rich character seems to share a room with a blue domed ceiling), as do even cars. There's a silver Vauxhall Viva that follows Jason to almost every country he visits!

Amazingly, a halfway-decent story does occasionally manage to force its way through the dross; 'As Easy As ABC' sees two criminals using the plot of one of Jason's own novels to carry out a robbery and frame him for it, 'To Russia With Panache' plays like a lost Department S script as Jason investigates a bizarre murder in the Kremlin, and 'Wanna Buy A Television Series?' amusingly bites the hand that feeds it by ridiculing the same US TV networks that ITC depended upon to fund its shows. But most of the episodes are empty, silly and, worst of all, *boring* nonsense that not even Wyngarde's charisma can save.

Department S (1969–1970)

Fancy!

[7/10 · 16 July 2012]

I had never seen Department S until fairly recently when Top Gear did its spoof Sixties show "The Interceptors", which used the Department S theme music. Because I have a liking for the spy-fi shows of that era, I tracked down the DVDs of the series out of curiosity.

And I'm glad I did, because while it's no classic and falls some way short of the likes of The Avengers and The Prisoner, it's still lively and entertaining thanks to the interplay of its three leads. Joel Fabiani's Stewart Sullivan is largely the straight man and muscle, but still maintains a deadpan humour - with a righteous anger whenever politics interferes with justice. Rosemary Nichols' Annabelle Hurst has a flirty relationship with Stewart, and while something of a computer nerd is still more than capable of taking care of herself in the field.

Then... there's Jason King. Jason is the character known even by people who've never seen the show, simply because he's so outrageous. A chain-smoking dandy and fop who drives a Bentley even when trying to be inconspicuous and more often has a glass in his hand than not (he starts drinking when most people would be having their morning coffee and must surely be pleasantly buzzed, if not outright drunk, for 90% of his screen time), he's also arrogant, egotistical, rude, self-centred, lazy, hedonistic, snobbish, bitchy (poor Annabelle takes most of his cutting put-downs), a smarmy lech and is constantly outclassed in fights to the point where Annabelle chastises him for getting "knocked out AGAIN!" in quite an early episode. Yet despite all that, he's still utterly charming and magnetic because of Peter Wyngarde's effortlessly suave and confident performance. Played by anyone else Jason would seem like a buffoon - he was, after all, one of the inspirations for Austin Powers - but Wyngarde gives him class even at his most ridiculously pompous.

The actual stories are mixed; some of the mysteries Department S are called upon to investigate are genuinely clever, while others (mostly those written by Philip Broadley) are bog-standard ITC crime plots involving bank robbers, smuggling rings or the Mafia with a 'bizarre' opening slapped on them to fit the format of "crimes too weird for the normal police to solve". Watching on DVD, ITC's penny-pinching also becomes evident - the same locations and sets appear again and again with only slight changes (watch for the corridor with a distinctive illuminated ceiling, which appears in almost every episode), and if you ever see anyone driving a white Jaguar, you know it's going to go over a cliff! ("Toonces, look ouuuuuut!") But overall it's a fun, lightly tongue-in-cheek adventure show that gets by on pure charisma.

The Assassination Run (1980)

Cruelty To Rental Cars

[6/10 · 19 June 2012]

I first saw this back when it was originally broadcast in 1980, and recently bought it (on VHS!) for nostalgia.

Time hasn't been kind to it in some ways, I have to admit: it's not exactly Bourne. But then, giving it the benefit of the doubt, it is a BBC show rather than a big-budget action movie. And at the time, simply being shot in Spain made it enormously exotic! It's very much a Cold War piece, with the KGB and a West German communist terror group on one side, and the harrumphing upper-class Englishmen of MI6 on the other, with retired assassin Mark Fraser and his kidnapped wife Jill caught in the middle. But why are the KGB apparently trying to help Fraser get his wife back from the terrorists?

So it's intrigue and conspiracies and double-crosses, punctuated at regular intervals with violence, all filmed against attractive Spanish scenery. By modern standards it's slow-paced, but it rarely gets boring - it has almost a proto-24 feel, as whenever things get draggy new characters deliver plot twists and push Fraser to sunny new locations.

Mary Tamm as Jill does a good job as the far-from-helpless heroine; if not for the plot requiring that she isn't rescued until the end of the story, she would have escaped all by herself early on! Of the other characters, Fraser doesn't have to do much more than be determined, while KGB colonel Grigor is an amiable not-quite-adversary.

It's a product of its time; if remade today, there would be a lot more angst from Fraser about being dragged back into the world of espionage, and Jill would probably be far more shocked to learn about his unsavoury past! But it's still a watchable piece of old-school spy action.

Prometheus (I) (2012)

Great looks, no brain

[5/10 · 11 June 2012]

Prometheus is more disappointing than it would have been had it not been an Alien prequel directed by Ridley Scott himself, because it raised expectations so much higher.

There's nothing to fault in the areas where Scott is famous for excelling - cinematography, lighting, production design, the overall look and 'feel' of the worlds he's created. It's magnificent to watch. The problem comes when you start to engage the spongy thing *behind* your eyes, because the script is garbage.

It became clear that the writer (Lost's Damon Lindelof) wasn't paying attention very early on, when a character says the ship's journey took (paraphrasing) "Two years, three months, five days, thirty-six hours." Did we change to metric time in the future? Don't you mean "six days, twelve hours"? And from that point on, it becomes clear that nobody cared about the story making sense.

You'd think that the people hired for a trillion-dollar mission would be the best of the best, but instead we get: an archaeologist who becomes almost suicidally depressed when he finds out that the aliens are long dead (if he wanted to meet other cultures when they were alive, maybe he should have become an anthropologist); a biologist who interprets a snake-like creature hissing, rearing up and baring its fangs as a sign of friendship; a guy in charge of mapping the site who gets lost (despite having a PDA on his arm showing the map!); a captain who abandons his post and leaves two of his charges alone in a hostile environment while he goes and has sex with his boss; and a supposedly deeply Christian person who somehow reconciles the Bible with "God is a space alien who wants us to come visit his home planet!" based on nothing more than ambiguous cave paintings. Add to that scientists who don't realise that just because air is breathable doesn't mean it's safe to do so (and then make a point of sniffing alien corpses and ignoring quarantine procedures), pilots who accept kamikaze suicide with a bored shrug, and someone who can only run in a straight line across an open plain even with a giant bagel rolling after her, and there is only one conclusion: these people are morons.

Because all the characters are stupid, inconsistent and/or cardboard, it's impossible to care about them. (Ironically, the only interesting character is a robot.) And if you don't care about them, why should you care about anything they experience? Not that it matters, because nothing they do experience makes sense. Take the black goo: it variously breaks down living tissue into dust within moments, turns worms into giant snakes, mutates people into contortionist zombies, makes tendrils pop out of people's eyes, impregnates women with squids and causes fully-grown not-quite-Xenomorphs to burst from "alien" (well, 100% human according to their DNA, despite their being blue, ten feet tall and having totally black eyes) bodies. It's not a mystery to blow the audience's mind; it's just a random MacGuffin to provide another squicky scene.

And that's the film's problem. It claims to be (and may even think it is) profound and mysterious and deep with mythic resonance, when it's really schlock with ideas above its station. It's one hour and 63 minutes of gorgeous disappointment.

Gor II (1988)

So who's the hero?

[7 August 2011]

I was shocked to find that this was made in 1989; it felt more like an early '80s Conan rip-off. It also probably means that Jack Palance went straight from the mega-bucks production of Batman to slumming it in a desert with a bunch of Italian non-actors.

The oddest thing about this movie is that it has no hero. Yes, Cabot may have the camera pointed at him most of the time, but he does absolutely nothing to affect the story's outcome. He doesn't kill the evil priest (someone else does that), he doesn't turn the people against the evil queen (someone else does that - with just one line of dialogue! These people are easily swayed) and he doesn't even kill the evil queen (someone else does that too). He might as well not have been there. For about the last 20 minutes, he just gets repeatedly beaten and whipped: it would be The Passion Of The Cabot, if anything approaching "passion" were in the actor's repertoire.

Cabot's wormy friend is also one of the most annoying and punchable "comic" sidekicks in movie history.

The Final Destination (2009)

Cheesy trash, and it knows it - and revels in it

[7/10 · 31 August 2009]

The Final Destination (apparently a definite article is classier than a number - does that mean we'll be seeing The Rambo next year?) has no socially redeeming qualities whatsoever, is populated by mostly third-rate actors portraying characters so cardboard some of them don't even qualify for real names but instead are credited merely as 'Racist' or 'MILF', and has less a script than a series of 3x5 cards with gory deaths on them.

But the thing is, the movie *knows* it's trash, and it doesn't care, because it also knows that by this stage in the series, audiences know exactly what to expect - so it gives them just that. In 3-D. (And let's face it, did anyone *really* care about any of the characters in the previous FD movies? Was anyone moved to tears when Stifler had his head sliced in half by a piece of flying metal, or when Timmy got smushed by a huge pane of glass?)

No, this film is entirely about wild, grotesque, outrageous death scenes, and that's exactly what it delivers. Whether by Chuck Palahniuk-influenced swimming pool malfunctions (which prompted a couple of walk-outs in my cinema) or an agonisingly drawn-out sequence at a beautician's, where every scrape of sharp metal against toenail and click of scissors was accompanied by an expectant group cringe from the audience, you're rarely more than five minutes from another spectacularly gory (and often twistedly hilarious) demise.

It's not *good* by any means, but it's dark fun, and the 3-D is worth an extra star. (If you know the series, also watch out for all the little background references to the previous movies.)

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

Nothing but darkness and dullness

[1/10 · 1 August 2009]

There's never been a darker movie than this. And I don't mean 'dark' in the 'downbeat and disturbing' way, but in the literal, 'I can't see a damn thing' sense. Even the scenes set in the middle of the day are hard to make out, the film seemingly underexposed and the contrast ramped up so high that the slightest shadow becomes a solid swathe of black. Once night falls, the movie might as well be a radio play - all you can make out are occasional glimpses of slime glistening in the all-swallowing darkness.

However, I wasn't missing anything by being rendered night-blind, as the script is utterly bland and banal. There are no interesting or sympathetic characters, no memorable dialogue, no thrilling set-pieces, no cleverness or imagination involved at all. People bumble about, an Alien/Predator/Predalien bursts out of nowhere and kills them, repeat. Even the gore, which was supposed to set this film apart from the neutered PG-13 original AVP, fails to startle because it's lost in a sea of darkness and quick cuts. (The 'uncut' version was given a 15 certificate in the UK - exactly the same as its predecessor.)

In fact, AVP2 is so bad it makes the first AVP look like a worthy successor to the works of Ridley Scott and James Cameron. I never thought I'd say that.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

The same... only more so

[5/10 · 20 June 2009]

You pretty much know what you're going to get with a Michael Bay movie by now. It's HUGE! Everything EXPLODES! The camera SPINS! It's LOUD! Revenge Of The Fallen takes this to the logical limit with two and a half hours of EXTREME BAYHEM! But bigger isn't necessarily better.

The first Transformers movie has grown on me over time - there's a lot wrong with it, and some of its flaws (like having far too many obnoxious 'comic relief' characters and some borderline offensive racial caricatures) are admittedly dealt with the second time round. But it had a relatively straightforward plot, and underlying it all was a Spielbergian "a boy and his..." story, in this case his first car. The sequel, on the other hand, is about, er...

That's the biggest problem with Revenge - it's just a MacGuffin hunt, but in this case each MacGuffin leads only to another MacGuffin. The shard leads to the symbols which lead to the Sector 7 files which lead to Jetfire who leads to the Pyramids which lead to the Matrix which leads back to the Pyramids which contain the... There's no ingenuity in following the trail, either - Sam and co make arbitrary deductions that of course turn out to be right, are flat-out told what to do next (Jetfire is by far the most entertaining character in the film, but he's also lumbered with a colossal amount of exposition) or, laziest of all, make crucial discoveries by sheer accident.

The same applies to the various battles; baddies turn up, are dealt with using big guns, bigger baddies turn up, are dealt with using bigger guns, and so on. No tactics, no using an enemy's weaknesses against him, no tricking him into making a mistake - just more and louder bang-bang. I generally love Big Dumb Action Movies, but after a couple of hours of this I was just numb to the whole thing - and there was still half an hour to go before the climax!

The returning characters are actually *less* developed than in the first film because they pretty much have nothing to do except follow the clues, run and/or fight. Other than Jetfire, the new characters fare even less well. The Twins (who act and sound like Master Shake and Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force) accompany Sam for about a third of the entire film, but there's no real reason for them to be there other than bicker like idiots. And the title villain, the Fallen, is a generic growling bad guy who wants to destroy the world basically because he's a jerk. Most of the other new Decepticons don't even get names.

Like the first movie, this will probably be easier to follow on a smaller screen because the robots are again shot too close and cut too fast. On the big screen, scenes like the forest battle are blurs of pixels with the occasional moment where the action slows to show off a money shot, then goes back to being a whirling mess of metal. (Still, on the plus side at least it's not shaky-cam.)

The whole thing is impressive in that every penny spent is up there on the screen, and some of the visuals are pretty spectacular (though oddly, the gimmick of the title - that the robots can transform into vehicles and back - feels downplayed this time. Optimus and Bumblebee have a couple of hero transformations each, but there are no real jawdroppers like Blackout or Bonecrusher in the first film). Sam's parents are a lot funnier and less annoying than before, and Megatron and Starscream's master/servant relationship is also quite a laugh. But beneath all the gloss, there's no heart, no soul and no brain. Like a robot... in disguise.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

Wait, what? This was actually... okay!

[5/10 · 7 March 2008]

I really, *really* didn't like the original Resident Evil movie, so quite why I decided to pick up a DVD triple-pack of all three movies in the series I'm not sure. Perhaps I was in the mood for something stupid; real MST3K fodder for a boozy weekend. Or maybe it was because it was cheap. Either way, I knew what to expect from rewatching the first film (basically, nothing) and had even lower expectations for the sequels.

So I was rather surprised that I quite enjoyed Resident Evil: Apocalypse. It's not *good*, not by any stretch of the imagination. Like the videogames on which it's based, 'cheesy' would be as good a word as any to describe it. But the difference is that the games took themselves fairly seriously, whereas Apocalypse knows exactly what it is - a big dumb action movie based on an entertaining but rather silly series of horror games - and embraces it. So it's filled with references to the games, but unlike the first film's tenuous background nods they actually play a part in the story... which is just as nonsensical as the games themselves, but knowingly so (and thankfully lacking in fetch-quests for emblems!).

Witt doesn't really bring anything especially interesting as a director (Paul WS Anderson, here only writing and producing rather than directing, may not be a great storyteller, but he at least has some visual flair) and the 15 certificate saps any impact from the action - like the original, it's a zombie movie with very little blood. But overall it's a definite improvement on the first film... which places it squarely in the 'average' category.

Will I be surprised again by Resident Evil: Extinction? I guess I'll find out soon enough...

xXx: State of the Union (2005)

The Next Level... of SUCK!

[2/10 · 26 November 2007]

I caught this on TV last night, and found it so hilariously bad that I was almost entertained by it. Almost.

Firstly: Ice Cube. Not so much attitude as FATtitude. I don't recall ever seeing a more portly action hero.

Secondly: the effects. The original XXX might have used a fair amount of digital enhancement, but there were at least real stunts behind them. In this, everything seemed to be shot against a greenscreen. And if a 1996 movie (Mission: Impossible) could put a near-perfect CGI bullet train and helicopter chase - in broad daylight - on screen, why couldn't a similarly big-budget movie made almost a decade later do even a tenth as good a job with a similar scene at night? It honestly looked like something from a video game, nearly as bad as the climax of Torque.

Thirdly: the story. It was so ridiculously implausible that it felt completely detached from anything resembling the real world, to the point where if dragons and zombies had appeared I wouldn't have been all that surprised.

Director Lee Tamahori proved with Die Another Day that he's mediocre at best when it comes to directing action, and XXX 2 somehow manages to be even duller. All the big scenes provoked nothing more than a 'meh' from me; there was less excitement in the entire film than in a single minute of any action sequence by Spielberg or Cameron.

The only reason I rated this movie higher than a 1 was for its sheer unintentional hilarity as I wondered if things could possibly get any more inane or fake-looking... and they always could.

30 Days of Night (2007)

All that setup, but no payoff

[5/10 · 8 November 2007]

'Slow-burning' horror films, where the audience gets to know and care about the characters before the blood starts flowing, are rare these days. So with 30 Days Of Night taking its time to get started, I thought it might turn out to be something good.

Unfortunately, it just turned out to be slow. The characters are so sketchily drawn that despite all the time spent with them early on, you never get to find out anything interesting about them. Similarly, the '30 days' gimmick is totally wasted - probably half the film takes place on the very first night, then after that the only indication that any time has passed is an on-screen caption and the growth of Josh Hartnett's comedy beard. There's no sense at all that two weeks may have passed between scenes, no cabin fever or paranoia or people cracking up under the strain of hiding out from merciless vampiric killers. All you get are - again - sketches of scenes, leading to someone making a stupid decision to go outside and whoops, another one dead.

The vampires don't make much sense, either. They massacre almost the entire town on the first night, and then... what? Are they playing cards somewhere, waiting for the handful of survivors to show their faces? If they're hunting the humans for food, they're doing a sloppy and wasteful job of it. (Also, while the idea of vampires taking advantage of the perpetual night of winter above the Arctic Circle is a good one, what do they do during the summer when it's perpetual daylight? Do they sail their ship to the South Pole?)

Some iffy editing (there was one scene where a character appeared to be attacked by a vampire, only to reappear moments later without a scratch) and trendy-yet-hard-to-watch strobing shakycam during fight scenes didn't help either. All in all, if you want to watch a *really* tense and scary horror film about a group of people trapped in the snow by monsters, look no further than The Thing.

Transformers (2007)

Mechs and violence

[5/10 · 22 July 2007]

I've never watched an episode of Transformers, never owned a Transformers toy, never sung along to 'You Got The Touch'. The main reason I went to see this film was... well, my inner 12-year-old wanted to see giant robots fighting each other and smashing stuff.

My inner 12-year-old left mostly satisfied. Giant robots do indeed fight each other and smash stuff. But my adult self was somewhat less easily entertained, and left feeling disappointed by a messy script full of holes (what happened to Barricade, the Mustang Decepticon? As far as I could tell he vanished right after the start of the freeway chase), unnecessary story lines (the hackers could have been removed entirely just by giving the line about how Sector 7 find Sam to another character) and action sequences that turned into nothing but a big blur.

Probably the most irritating aspect of the film was that it was full of annoying characters who did one-note comedy 'schticks' rather than behaving like people. Having a comic-relief character is one thing; in Transformers, it seems practically *every* character was there to deliver unfunny one-liners or sight gags. Sam's parents, Sam's friend, Sam's teacher, Bernie Mac, his grandmother, Anthony Anderson, *his* grandmother, his cousin, Agent Simmons, his sidekick, the Indian guy on the phone... Nor were the robots immune, as Frenzy (the boombox Decepticon) was a straight-out 'wacky' character, and even Optimus Prime ended up doing slapstick!

Michael Bay is a director I have mixed feelings about; he's done some movies I really enjoyed (The Rock), and others I hated (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor). What I find ironic is that his earlier films, when he was a relative unknown and was working on smaller budgets, did a much better job of delivering thrills and excitement, probably because he was forced to use real cars and real people shot by real cameras on real locations. Now, every action shot in his movies seems to involve some CG vehicle whipping past a (simulated) millimetre from a wildly shaking virtual camera. Everything becomes indecipherable streaks of light and colour. It's not thrilling, or exciting - just confusing.

The Transformers themselves are impressive to look at, but they would be even more so if I could actually see what they were doing. All the publicity has gone on about how many millions of parts and zillions of polygons the CG models are built from, but on screen they just become a whirl of silver and coloured body panels. The only robots who were easy to identify in the finale were Optimus (blue and red) and Bumblebee (yellow). All the others were just shades of grey and black running around and somersaulting like speed-crazed acrobats. Sometimes I could only tell if I was looking at an Autobot or a Decepticon by the colour of their eyes (blue=good, red=evil).

There were some odd directorial choices as well. If I hadn't known in advance that Jazz would die by being ripped in half by Megatron, I would never have realised that was what happened! Instead there was just a flurry of movement in long shot, then a cut to something else. Come on, one of the good guys has just been killed! Where's the shock? Where's the horrified reaction from his friends? Where's Megatron taking a moment to gloat, even?

So ironically, in a film about giant robots, I felt as though I didn't get my fill of giant robots. If the film had been 20-30 minutes shorter - take out the hackers, take out the Secretary of Defense fighting Frenzy, take out the pointless sitcom-level minor characters like the surly cop or the fat dancing cousin - and at least the proportion of mechs to meatbags would have felt more balanced. The movie is called 'Transformers', not 'Annoying People', after all...

Where Eagles Dare (1968)

The most entertaining war movie ever!

[10/10 · 21 June 2007]

It's inaccurate in details, the heroes survive cataclysms with barely a scratch that in the real world would kill them a dozen times over, and the triple-cross on which the entire plot hinges makes the Nazi masterminds seem like drooling three-year-olds in terms of gullibility when you stop and think about it. But who cares, when it's all so much damn *fun*?

Where Eagles Dare is surely the ultimate "war as big boys' adventure" film, full of derring-do, narrow escapes, sinister villains and legions of incompetent cannon fodder to be mown down like swastika-sporting weeds. Clint is, of course, Clint - taciturn, deadly and effortlessly cool, but for once he's, if not upstaged, at least matched by another actor in the star wattage stakes. It may not exactly be an acting showcase for Richard Burton, but he still makes the enigmatic Smith completely riveting with his effortless command over everyone he encounters - and there's also a very human moment, completely in keeping with the Boys' Own feel of the story, as he takes a moment to chuckle gleefully at the massive destruction he's just caused.

There are flaws, yes - it's overlong, has some blatant continuity errors and obvious dummies (sometimes in the same shot!) and plot holes abound. But in this case... so what? The film is a romp, plain and simple, there to do nothing more than deliver thrills and spills with great efficiency. Which it does.

One interesting point is that even though Alastair Maclean wrote both the screenplay and the novel, he also knew the different markets well enough to tailor them. In the book, Smith and Schaffer are essentially on a stealth mission, going out of their way to minimise even German casualties. In the film, however, they kill practically every Nazi in a 50 mile radius!

The Hitcher (2007)

Better than expected... just

[6/10 · 7 June 2007]

Police cars flipping and tumbling and disintegrating in slow-motion... it's easy to tell that Michael Bay had a hand in this!

I went into this remake (of a film that only came out in the same year as Aliens and Top Gun - what's next, remakes of those too?) without high expectations, or even moderate ones, but was actually slightly surprised by what turned out to be an efficient - if unremarkable - little horror thriller.

What the remake lacks compared to the original is a compelling villain. Sean Bean doesn't have Rutger Hauer's creepy intensity, coming across instead as just another grungy movie madman. Oddly, the actor playing the cop in charge of the investigation - with his blond hair and piercing stare - seems far more like Hauer's Ryder. Maybe the roles should have been reversed.

The trailer gave away another role-reversal (this time of gender) regarding the eventual fate of one character to anyone who'd seen the original, making it clear that Sophia Bush's Grace would turn out to be the one to confront Ryder at the climax. I wasn't previously familiar with the actress, but she delivered a decent performance as her character transforms over the course of the film in the Ripley/Laurie Strode/Sarah Connor tradition... while wearing a far shorter skirt than any of them. Again, it's easy to tell that Michael Bay was involved!

Sunshine (2007)

Sunburned

[4/10 · 9 May 2007]

Considering the pedigree of the filmmakers, Sunshine should have been something quite special. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

Since 'thoughtful' science fiction films (such as the remake of Solaris) haven't of late set the box office alight, it's perhaps not surprising that Boyle and Garland (and quite probably backers Fox) decided to insert some more traditional action-adventure moments to back up the psychological and metaphysical aspects of the story. The problem is that to allow the action scenes to take place, the supposedly 'best of the best' crew have to make really stupid decisions that place them on the same intellectual level as any random doomed teenager from the Friday The 13th films.

So the navigator forgets to account for the Sun - the Sun! The huge glowing thing that's the entire point of their mission! - when he makes his course-change calculations. Nobody can stop the computer from taking back control even though this will kill one of the crew outside. Capa doesn't think to use the sunshield control that's right next to him to darken the room when he encounters Pinbacker. Nor does he alert the rest of the crew to the fact that there's an intruder aboard. And so on.

Essentially, the film wants to be 2001 or Solaris, while it's actually more like Mission To Mars meets Event Horizon. And at least in Event Horizon, it was possible to see what was supposed to be going on in the final act, rather than every frame being warped or blurred or over-exposed to no effect other than annoyance.

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Utter nonsense that even Sandra Bullock can't save

[2/10 · 4 April 2007]

I caught this by chance on TV and rewatched it for no reason other than the presence of the usually entertaining and endearing Sandra Bullock. But not even she can stop this ship from crashing!

The scriptwriter(s) must have had the easiest time of their lives writing this. Every other line seems to be characters describing what's just happened. A huge digital display shows that the ship's slowing down: next line, "We're slowing down!" A character fires a spear gun at a plane: next line, "He's firing at the plane!"

Willem Dafoe seems to be on board the project solely for a nice Caribbean holiday - his boggle-eyed psycho is a joke, ranting and raving and cackling manically like someone from a cartoon. Jason Patric, normally a fairly decent actor, is out of his depth with lines that are mostly monosyllabic gems like "Stop!" or "Look out!" or "Down here!" Even Sandra Bullock takes her 'sweet and quirky' role from the first film and overplays it, turning Annie into a hyperactive idiot who needs everything explaining to her, even concepts as simple as 'crashing the ship will be a very bad thing'. Despite Bullock being the star, poor Annie is reduced to 'The Girl', incapable of doing anything without a man's help - a horrible comedown from Speed where she performed heroically under pressure.

Not even the effects can save it; the CG ship that so much time and money was spent on creating a decade ago now looks like a plastic toy by modern standards, no more realistic than the models seen briefly in a clip from 'The Enemy Below'. (Filmmakers should always be very careful about referencing a much better film in their movies, as comparisons *will* be made!)

Die Another Day (2002)

Drivel Another Day

[1/10 · 20 September 2006]

The worst of the Bond films by far, and considering that list includes such 'classics' as Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker, that's quite a feat!

Brosnan sleepwalks through the whole film, disinterestedly delivering his 'quips' (which are about on the level of Finbarr Saunders And His Double Entendres) with an audible sigh and practically rolling his eyes after each one. Halle Berry is utterly atrocious (apparently all the credit for her Oscar should go to the director of Monster's Ball, Marc Forster) as the obnoxious smart-ass Jinx, Rosamund Pike, while strikingly beautiful as an ice queen, is little better and even the likes of Judi Dench, Michael Madsen and John Cleese just phone it in.

But aside from the actors, blame must be shared between director Lee Tamahori (who seems to be treating the film as an overblown and brain-dead dress rehearsal for XXX 2), screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (for devising a witless and nonsensical script that mashes together elements from about a dozen other Bond films and throws in gadgets more suited to the Adam West Batman TV series) and the visual effects team (who seem to be under the impression that the 'C' in CGI stands for 'crappily').

Bond has done science fiction-y stories before (like You Only Live Twice and Moonraker) but Die Another Day's invisible car, orbital pie-plate of death and that ridiculous power suit worn by the sneering ginger fop passing himself off as a villain take things into outright fantasy. It's hardly surprising that the series is being rebooted for Casino Royale - shame they can't wipe everyone's memory of this pathetic debacle while they're at it!

Open Water 2: Adrift (2006)

Sinks without a trace

[3/10 · 10 September 2006]

Apparently I have been misinformed. Corpses do not float in water - instead they sink gracefully to the depths of the ocean as if lead weights have been tied to their feet. And drowning victims have a serene expression following death, rather than panic or terror as you might expect. So I learned from this movie, at least.

I saw this under its UK name of Adrift, and started to get a little worried when the biggest 'name' in the credits was Eric Dane, whom I only knew from his role as a smug, arrogant egotist in Charmed. Here he plays a smug, arrogant egotist in a boat - sorry, "yacht". Big stretch.

There's nothing wrong with a cast of more-or-less unknowns per se, but having already seen Dane's 'acting' I didn't expect much from anyone else either. And I was right. While the actress who played Michelle was the most annoying, with her shrill, whiny voice, and the others were just bland, Dane was by far the worst performer in the cast. His 'big moment', when he breaks down at the realisation of everything that his arrogance has caused, is laughable.

Nobody else fares much better, but the script doesn't give them much to work with apart from either angry or panicked shouting. They're not helped by the idiocy of the characters. One of the men has a knife. There is a large, plainly visible hatch in the side of the boat. Yet it takes seemingly forever before anyone gets the idea of bringing these two facts together. And then when someone finally does... somebody else immediately ruins the plan and makes matters ten times worse!

The film also suffers from 'James Bond gadget syndrome' - ie, something can only be used once. Try again with the rope, maybe using the clothes that Amy is still wearing (despite having been asked to strip) and her life jacket to extend it? Nope. Hold the phone above the water and try calling again? No, throw it away in a fit of pique. Send the lightest person up the rope instead of the heaviest? No, that would be far too logical!

The premise was good - sometimes the simplest ideas can be the best. But Adrift/Open Water 2 sinks without a trace in its execution.

Firefox (1982)

"You must think in Rrrrrrussian!"

[7/10 · 12 August 2006]

I took my username from this movie, so I guess I like it...

I like it more than I should, though. The Craig Thomas novel it's based on is tense and exciting, a cat-and-mouse game between Gant and the Soviet authorities both on the ground and in the air, but despite much of the dialogue being taken almost verbatim from the book the movie is sluggish and decidedly lacking in thrills. The first half of the film drags terribly, and Clint is a granite-faced cypher who displays none of the fear and tension felt by his character's literary counterpart.

The Firefox itself is an interesting design (to which the planes from Stealth bear more than a few similarities despite the 20+ years between the two films), but apart from a handful of shots the special effects looked dreadfully fake even back in the Eighties, never mind now. (The best special effects are ones that very few people will ever notice - *all* of the Soviet helicopters seen in the film are models.)

So why do I like it so much? Probably because it's one of very few true technothrillers to reach the screen. There are no romantic interludes or comic-relief sidekicks or any other distractions of the type so often forced in by studios - it's all about the mission. Get in, steal the plane, get out. The grim, monolithic, paranoid nature of the Soviet state also comes across well, giving the film a distinctive atmosphere. Gant enters a grey, joyless world where everybody is watching everyone else, the first flashes of colour coming - intentionally, I'm sure - when he finally steals the Firefox and soars away into the dawn sky.

One amusing note is that the film's most famous line - Baranovich's exhortation, in echoing flashback, that Gant must "Think in Russian!" was added after shooting - along with the previously unmentioned 'rearward missile' - because test audiences didn't understand what the Rearward Defence Pod was, despite it having been used earlier in the film and even described by one of the Russians!

Poseidon (2006)

Glug glug!

[1/10 · 8 August 2006]

A friend and I went to see Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Unfortunately, the screening was sold out. So we saw Poseidon instead.

Big mistake.

The 'characters' were literally nothing more than log-lines of the kind you'd find in a movie's press release. 'Kurt Russell is a former firefighter and the ex-Mayor of New York.' 'Josh Lucas is a professional gambler.' 'Richard Dreyfuss is a gay architect.' That's *all* the characterisation you get. And if there's nothing to interest you about the characters, why would you care about their plight?

The film was an overblown, soulless and - worst of all - *dull* waste of everybody's time and money. The visual effects may have been computer generated; so, apparently, was the script.