Filmsy - Movie Reviews Blog

The Hulk: Review

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HULK Slap!

Marvel was having a good streak of movies beginning with 2000’s X-Men and reaching its climax with 2002’s summer slobberknocker, Spider-Man. In fact, the teaser trailer for Hulk debuted with Spider-Man and floored audiences with the prospect of seeing the angry, timid Bruce Banner finally revealing his cinematic colors.

hulk.jpgIt’s just a shame that this movie sucked the way it did. You thought Daredevil was bad? This movie makes Daredevil look like an Oscar winner.

Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) adds definite star power as the director of this Geek Tragedy. Forget Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, and Sam Elliott: this movie has that dude who directed that Chinese movie with the flying monks and the shallow love story! It’s too bad that most audience viewers didn’t know that the reason Ang Lee is here is because Chinese cinema has been using over-the-top special effects and roof-jumping superhumans for years now: Ang Lee was so low on the totem pole that he had to come here to make it seem new and innovative. His directing style leaves something to be desired, but for Hulk he does manage to toy with the self-awareness that this is a comic book movie. The entire movie utilizes shots that involve side-by-side panelling (like they did in the 60’s and 70’s, though this time it’s supposed to mimic the panel work in comic books) and the clever use of cuts and sweeps to transition from one scene to the next. It is entertaining for awhile but gets annoying rather quickly… that is, until Josh Lucas gets blown up and they hold his impacted body in a freeze frame for all of us to laugh at.

Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly have great chemistry and Sam Elliott is great as always, but their performance is lost in the ridiculously confusing storyline. As we all know, scientist Bruce Banner was caught in a blast while testing a bomb in the desert and was bathed by gamma radiation. Whenever he gets angry, he turns from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and morphs into the unstoppable, mentally retarded, destructive green machine known as the Hulk. Simple enough? The makers of this film thought that this was too archaic for modern sensibilities, so they decided to give it the same tune-up that was given to Spider-Man in 2002 (if you remember, Peter was bitten by a genetically altered spider instead of a radioactive one). In this modern spin, Bruce Banner has always had a messed up past and weird flashbacks. He’s experimenting with radiation and Nanomeds (?) to accelerate the healing factor in animals and something goes wrong, bathing him in gamma radiation. He’s not killed, though, and the rest is history… until we find out that Nick Nolte’s his dad, that he was experimented upon years ago in the desert, that daddy still loves him, that there’s killer Hulk dogs after him, that the military wants to stop him from jumping all over the American west, and yeah, the film gets pretty weird after that. The last twenty minutes have the most overly dramatic, forced dialogue I have heard in the last five years and is utterly painful to watch. And Nick Nolte as the Absorbing Man? Ugh.

The special effects are decent but not perfect, as the Hulk still runs like a green Roadrunner and stands out as a saturated behemoth framed against a stark desert background for most of the scenes. When the movie does shine, it’s due to the empathy we feel for the Hulk as a gentle giant, not due to clever special effects or an opportunity to present a comic book movie as a work of cinematic brilliance. Too bad we’re going to have to wait for a remake before we can see the Hulk finally made right.

Acting: B
Effects & Entertainment: B
Storyline: C-
Recommendability: C

Final Destination 3

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A Co-Op Critics Review!

Player 1: OnePumpedNinja

With a self-contradicting title like Final Destination 3, there is little more to expect than what you expect to expect from the expectations of the previous films. It’s the same old tale with fresh new faces to get smoked in the most morbidly creative ways imagineable on film.

It is the same plot as before: a group of high-school teenagers celebrate their seniority at an amusement park and something goes terribly wrong with the roller coaster. The yearbook photographer Wendy (Mary Winstead) and a couple of students escape death thanks to a premonition of things to come. As before, the Grim Reaper is seriously pissed that those pesky teens escaped his ingenius death trap and hunts the survivors down in the order of departure that they were supposed to be in.

I am assuming that you have seen this film (or are going to see it) because you like horror and not because some jerk boyfriend or freaky girlfriend is going to drag you to see it. In that case, we can forget the question of “is it scary?” and head to the meat of the film: the deaths. The appeal of watching any of the links in the Final Destination chain is that the setup for each cannon fodder teen’s demise is an elaborate, dark contraption reminiscent of some diabolical version of the board game “Mouse Trap.” The more creative, the better. Not that I am advocating torture and death as acceptable (though the killing off of two bimbettes in tanning beds is grimly funny), but in the context of these films it is obviously intended to be dark humor. Final Destination 1 had its plane crash and Final Destination 2 had its interstate pile-up. Here, we have a haywire roller coaster and yes, people get flung off. There’s a guy who dies by weight lifting and those tanning bed chicks I mentioned awhile ago. Need I continue? It gets mind-numbingly entertaining when you consider the fact that these kids know that the Grim Reaper is after them and still place themselves in stupid situations like operating a nail gun and skill saw. The film is as entertaining as a dumb kid who touches the stove even when his mom tells him not to.

Final Destination 3If you’ve seen the first two, you will not be disappointed. If you’re new to all this, you’ll either be terribly offended or guiltfully amused.

Final Destination 3: Not as fresh as Saw, but more entertaining than Hostel.

Player 2: DrSpengler

If there is any horror franchise that could conceivably continue onward into the distant future, it is Final Destination. The concept is fresh, unchallenged by knock-offs (so far, anyway) and so long as the sequels fulfill the requirements of the franchise, you’re guaranteed an intensely entertaining horror film. Maybe nothing that will ever escalate to “classic”-status, but something fun, gory, surprising, intriguing and satisfying all the way around.

The concept of the Final Destination franchise is constant through-out all the films; a group of people survive a horrible demise because one of the would-be corpses foresees the event, freaks out, and accidentally saves them all. However, you can’t cheat death no matter how hard you try, and one-by-one the survivors perish in gruesome, ironic “accidents” in the exact order in which they would have died earlier. And in the case of Final Destination 3, a group of annoying teenagers survive a nightmarish rollercoaster fiasco only to fall prey to Death-itself shortly afterward.

The concept is interesting enough, but that’s not what makes these movies so entertaining. It’s the WAY these people die that either shocks the crap out of you or leaves you in stitches. The deaths rely on a series of coincidences to cause more coincidences which eventually end with the designated teenager meeting a spectacularly painful demise. The coincidences build-up and build-up, for minutes at a time, leaving you hooked to see how one affects the other. The only comparison that can be made is to a Rube Goldberg Device. You know, like when a bowling ball falls onto a scale, the scale tips and the elevating tray taps the tail of one of those drinking toy birds, the bird dips into a bowl of water, the ripple causes a tiny toy sailboat to float to the end of the bowl and bump into a piece of cheese that was sitting on the table, the cheese falls to the floor where it intrigues a mouse, the mouse goes to the cheese but also has rabies and bites you in the leg on its way toward the cheese. Then on your way to the doctor you get hit by a semi.

Something like that only way cooler with ten times the gore and violence.

And Final Destination 3 provides lots of gore. I don’t want to ruin too much for you, but the brutality of the deaths surpass those in the first two films. Particularly what happens to the roid-raging black dude. In your FACE!

As far as a grade is concerned, on The Relative Grading Scale of Inappropriate Cartoon Snowmen, a BAD grade would be…ohhh…”Slushy the Slush-Packer”. However, since this was a GOOD movie, it rates a “Frosty the Pedophile”.

So if you want to see a horror movie that fits all the criteria to be entertaining, but isn’t anything that’ll make the history books, then check this movie out. It’s original (or as original as a sequel can get), gory and very fun to watch.

Lord of War: Review

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War Kicks Ass

If you have seen the trailer for Lord of War, you have a pretty fair indicator on what to expect from Andrew Nicol’s latest. The movie is evenly split down the middle as an exploration of one man’s morality and an amusing, almost educational look at the history of warfare within the last twenty years. There are also three and a half pairs of boobs.

Lord of WarNicholas Cage is Yuri Orlov, an immigrant from the old country whose family pretends to be Jewish in the Breighton Beach area of Jersey to avoid persecution from the Russian mob. Bored with his rather mundane life, Orlov reaches an epiphany after witnessing a gunfight between a mob boss and his would-be assassins: just as restaurants exist based on the principle that all people will have to eat, gunrunners live by the principle that there will always be war. Orlov and his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) fly to the Berlin Arms Fair in 1983 and begin their business of blood.

The film is masterfully crafted with amazing visuals and scenic locales. Told almost entirely through narration, the viewer is guided by the hand through Yuri’s world and through the rise and fall of the Cold War from a gun trafficker’s perspective. Because the story is admittedly “seen” through Yuri’s eyes, this allows for frequent yet subtle comedic moments such as a slow-motion shot of an AK-47 being fired, every discharged casing echoing the ring of a cash register. Jared Leto is endearing in a sleazy sort of way as the good-for-nothing brother who is kicked out of the business early on for developing a nose-candy habit (he loves it so much, he even drew a map of the Ukraine in cocaine). And Bridget Moynahan greatly accentuates the moral aspect of the tale as Yuri’s beautiful wife who feels that she has never done anything worthwhile as a human except for being born beautiful but resolves to succeed at being human.

Yuri is a brilliant liar and businessman. Both are seen in this film to be essential to be a successful gunrunner. The morality of Yuri is never excused as he proceeds to also engage in coke-use and admittedly cheat on his wife at every possible moment (except when he may be in danger of getting AIDS in Africa). Unlike tragedies in which a character’s morality is inexorably tied to his line of work or duty, Yuri’s trade and his moral disposition simply run parallel to each other and intersect at all the right (or wrong) points. The film is not necessarily political because it insists on painting war as neverending: no nation is above another in its propagation of war. As such, the film treats gunrunning as a necessary evil and the sell of weapons as just doing business. While some may disagree with this cynical point of view, one should agree that the movie never tries to say that guns are good. Quite the opposite.

Lord of War is an excellently taylored film that, while not being award-worthy material, is nevertheless entertaining and worth its weight in bullets.

Grade: B+

Legend of Zorro: Review

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The Legend of Zorro Is a Myth

In a sense, Martin Campbell’s The Mask of Zorro (1998) put forward the potential of comic book lore as a movie genre. Though Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) was the forerunner for the modern day comic book movie, it was merely treated as an inevitability just as Superman was back in 1978. These two pop culture icons had not died over the course of half a century and were long overdue for a movie treatment. With Zorro, however, the name had stuck in most households but never found the broad fanbase that its caped predecessors had. The Mask of Zorro reinvisioned the Zorro story and continued it. It made it appealing to viewers by the fine craftsmanship of movie editting and delivering the usual over-the-top heroics that is expected of both a comic book movie and a summer blockbuster. Most comic book movies now follow this same formula. And who can blame them? The Mask of Zorro was a really good movie for its time and is still immensely enjoyable.

Legend of ZorrpAnd like all good summer movies, especially comic book ones, you expect a sequel to keep the continuity going. We like to see our heroes return. The same can be said of Zorro. It’s just a pity that his latest movie is absolutely horrendous.

The Legend of Zorro is nowhere near its predecessor despite retaining its primary cast and director. How could this movie have gone wrong, having had more than six years to prepare? Maybe they wanted to do something different. Perhaps Antonion Banderas learned a thing or two from Spy Kids. Or perhaps the script writers are ages 6 and 7, respectively. Who knows? The point is, this is not your daddy’s Zorro. The script is clever in a Disney sort of way with dialogue that is Gilmore Girls-witty at times, but it is no great Shakes. It definitely lacks the passion and echoing heroic monologue that the first movie had. The action is not grounded in reality and takes liberty with frequent jumps, flips, and spontaneously convenient actions (such as Zorro throwing his hat like a frisbee to smack some guy in the neck). Might I also take this opportunity to point out a very “what the f*ck” moment in which Zorro’s kid, Joaquin, gets into an extremely choreographed ruler-fight with his Jesuit teacher. Corny scenes like this serve to widen the gap between this film and its forerunner.

But maybe this comparison is unfair. Can The Legend of Zorro work as a film independent of the first? Yes, but only if one has come to expect a Shanghai Knights level of calibur and not a Tombstone one. The plot does not really advance the Zorro legend in the way Spider-Man 2 did for its respective franchise and could easily be dismissed as an inconsequential side story. Basically, Alejandro de la Vega (Banderas) has been asked by his wife Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) to give up the Zorro mask for the sake of their misbehaved son. Zorro just can’t do it and quickly finds his wife missing. It turns out that she’s working with the U.S. government and that the divorce papers are just a ruse for her cover as she tries to infiltrate a clandestine world cabal that is intent on using the glycerine in soap to blow up Washington (no, I am not being funny, this is the real plot). There is a lot of teaming up with his annoying kid and a lot of drinking. This Zorro is nowhere near the heroic moralist that he was transformed into by Anthony Hopkins in the original Zorro: he’s a bit of a boor and seems to do the Zorro gig for kicks. I honestly can’t tell if this movie was supposed to be farcical, being as campy and detached from its progenitor as it was.

If you lower your expectations, you may find The Legend of Zorro to be a decent way to waste 2 hours of your life and may even get a chuckle out of it. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Grade: D

Fantastic Four: Review

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The Fantastic Bore

The movie isn’t really boring, I just thought the headline sounded clever. But like a boring movie, this movie sucks.

You would think that with films like X-Men, X2, Spider-Man, and The Punisher that Marvel would be able to play it safe and stick with a template that works, a template for comic book movies that people would actually want to see. Sure, it doesn’t work all the time (like in the case of Daredevil) but it is a much better bet than having total flops such as The Hulk. With that movie, the problem was that Marvel tried to overshoot its boundaries by hiring a big name fru-fru director whose vision for their character, it was thought, could push for a grander, more transcendent big green monster whose appeal is the ability to jump a lot and smash things. With the Fantasic Four, we get the opposite problem.

Fantastic FourNot being a fan of black culture movies, I have never seen Tim Story’s Barbershop. But I have seen Taxi. Taxi is a lot like a Paul Anderson movie without cool characters. You could say that it sucks. And considering that none of the members of the Fantastic Four are black or cool, well, this movie was essentially doomed the moment they hired Tim Story as a director.

What went wrong? Let’s see… Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards? That doesn’t even work from a visual point of view. Jessica Alba as Sue Storm? She may look great, but she can’t act to save her life. Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm? This had potential, but too bad the script writers thought it would be great to have the Thing spend most of his time bitching about how ugly he is. Chris Evans as the Human Torch? Ok, now I can give some credit: he fits the character well. That is, he plays an egocentric jerk magnificently. And last but not least, Julian McMahon as Victor Von Doom. What? You have your choice of eurotrash actors to play the Darth Vader of comics and you choose the chubby-cheeked dork from Nip/Tuck? He doesn’t even sound menacing! By the time he puts on the mask, you’re expecting some major whoopings and all we get is this little whiney voice coming out of a pretty sweet helmet. Very anti-climactic.

And the story? Heavens, I’d rather spend 2 hours trying to translate Advent Children into decent Engrish before trying to justify this story. Something about a solar storm turning four dudes into superheroes and one jerk into a superjerk and how they’re trying to turn themselves back. Meanwhile, the guy who got turned into a walking pile of rocks bitches a lot and walks into a bar. The bartender says “what’s wrong?” and he says “God… He must hate me” and suddenly a blind black woman turns around and says “SHE doesn’t hate you!” I wish that were a joke, but it’s not. The movie doesn’t even try to be halfway decent. I felt like I paid $6 to be offended for 2 hours. Oh wait, I didn’t pay for it, I let some girl pay instead.

If you like wiping your butt with DVD’s, you should pick up the Fantastic Four. Otherwise, just wait twenty years till they remake it as the Fantastic Four Begins.

Grade: D-