Red Dawn 2012

            Maybe, just maybe the new Red Dawn will do so poorly that Hollywood steps off the remake bandwagon.  I mean, Total Recall, Dread and Red Dawn were all released to mild or worse reviews and two of them already tanked at the box off.

            So of course they're not going to remake movies like Robocop, Carrie or Evil Dead, right?

            Oh, wait...they are?  And even worse, I'm still going to be a sucker and go watch all of them in the theater?

            Shit.

            On to the review!

            In one word: craptacular.  Yes, Red Dawn was a crappy spectacular.  And by spectacular, I mean it sucked.

            As you may or may not know, Red Dawn has been sitting on shelves for a few years now.  I'm not sure why it finally saw the light of day, but I'm also not sure who thought a knee-jerk movie about kids fighting off an enemy invasion during the cold war needed to be reshot.  I liked the original for its ridiculousness, certainly not for its plot.

            Add that to the fact that the studio gave in to pressure and changed the enemy from the Chinese to the North Koreans, and BAM! we've lost any and all pretense at being interesting or topical.

            So what has changed from the original?  Well, the characters are a lot less likeable.  In fact, there was only one person whose screen presence can't be described with the world 'horrible' and that's only because he wasn't on screen enough for me to hate him. 

            This time there's no Air Force Colonel to help whip the kids into shape, instead we get Chris Hemsworth as Jed Eckert, a Marine conveniently home on leave when the North Koreans raid Spokane, Washington because Spokane is somehow important.  Hell, they actually explain why Spokane was attacked, and I still don't believe it.

            Just like in the 1984 original, a bunch of teens get to the woods and fight back at the invaders.  That's where the similarity ends.  Now they're more like freedom fighters, and because of modern technology and some ridiculous raids, they have access to enough explosives to take out every damn building in the city if they feel like it.  At no point do you believe much will go wrong, and there's just no impetus to root for the kids.

            Sorry, but the Red Dawn remake falls flat on all fronts.  I'm glad that Cabin In the Woods was released once Chris Hemsworth became popular as Thor, because that was a fun film that deserved to see the light of day.

            Red Dawn is not.  Save your money, go see Lincoln.

Conan The Barbarian (2011)

The new Conan movie has a lot going for it.  Like, it exists.  It is a movie.  There are actors, and there are lines, and there was a special effects budget.  After those facts things get a little…..less good.

            Hahahahaha!  Who the hell am I kidding?  The new Conan movie has just won my award for Worst Film of The Summer (So Far).  Since summer is almost over, there’s a very good chance that I can drop the parenthesis very soon.

            I have not read the comics, so I cannot say whether or not the new movie hews closer to its source material, but it sure as hell does not follow the steps of the original film.  This one wastes nearly a third of the movie establishing Conan’s back story, and holy shit does nobody care.  You have to sit through an explanation of the world, then witness an unnecessarily brutal birth followed by twenty minutes of Conan’s youth.  Does anyone really give a shit about the fact that Conan was a badass kid?  If you saw the original, you just KNEW that Conan was a badass from the moment he was born.

            Nope, this time the studios have decided that you will care more about the character if you witness his happy childhood where he single-handedly slays a half-dozen adult warriors, trains with his father a bunch and then witness everyone he loves getting slaughtered at the hands of the big-bad meanie.  Personally, I think they were wrong.  I totally cared less.

I can only fault the actors so much, even if newcomer Jason Momoa does make a terrible adult Conan.  Size aside, he plays the role so seriously that it’s painful.  You could have a serious action flick if you at least made the lines halfway decent.

For example, say this out loud:  “You don’t have to do this I beg you.  Let us turn back.”

Congratulations!  I can guarantee, with every fiber of my being, that your reading was better than the film’s.  In fact, I like to imagine that this would actually make a decent, middle-of-the-pack videogame.  Conan watches his father die at the hands of the evil loser of a Madlibs contest, Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), his crazy witch daughter and his five generals.  I could totally see a game made where you have eight levels, the first being the tutorial where you learn how to fight and the level ends with you watching your village burn.  Then, for each successive level, you kill off a general, then the daughter, then the mastermind.  Simple hack and slash, plus it wouldn’t suck as hard as this film!

The part that really pisses me off is the amount of decent actors slumming it.  Rose McGowan plays the crazy witch daughter, Ron Perlman is Conan’s father, and shit, I actually liked Stephen Lang in other, less craptacular films.  At least in other movies they had more than just throwaway lines to deliver.  Although, I have to hand it to Miss McGowan, she did play a psycho witch who loves daddy a little bit too much (if you know what I mean) very convincingly.

Let’s see…plot….Zym kills Conan’s father to get the last piece of a mask that will let him control the dead, and then he spends the next 20 years searching for the last member of the necromancer bloodline.  Conan swears vengeance and stumbles upon the last member of the necromancer bloodline 20 years after Zym kills his family.  Coincidence!  Then lots of blood happens and it’s all surprisingly boring for an action movie.

Now, I know that this is supposed to be a summer action flick, but the suspension of belief is too much.  You literally have to believe that everyone in the movie is functionally retarded in order to enjoy the action.  At one point a group of slaves pull a boat through a city wall.  That is not a typo.  There was no pitched battle beforehand, and no lookouts or soldiers or anyone happened to notice a hundred slaves slowly pull a fucking BOAT up to and then through a wall.  Although, you gotta hand it to those slaves for having some serious muscle.  After that, everything gets dumber and I would hate to spoil it for you.

I know the movie is going to be a dud because the studio knew it was going to be a dud.  It looks like they’re trying to recoup their money by selling about 45 minutes worth of advertisement space prior to the film.  I counted the number of trailers prior to the flick and came out with seven.  Seven movies that will all do better than Conan The Barbarian are will play their trailers for the 30 people that will go see Conan The Barbarian after opening weekend.  Surprisingly enough, only two people left the theater during the movie, but that did make up about 5% of the crowd.  I would have left too if I thought I could make this shit up.

So do yourself a favor and go watch the original, super-cheesy Schwarzenegger original, or the sequel, or Red Sonja.  Sadly enough, this may actually be better than the Clash of the Titans, but that’s like saying it’s better to have blood in your stool rather than in your urine.

Cowboys and Aliens and Boredom

Trailers I am absolutely sick of:  ‘Mission Impossible 14’ - Tom Cruise still thinks he’s young, and the only reason I don’t vomit when I see this trailer is because the music is actually pretty exciting.

‘The Debt’ - With all this star power, how come you are relentlessly pimping this film before every movie I have seen since March?

‘Immortals’ – One huge friggin’ mess of an action movie, from the guy who brought you some other huge friggin’ messy action movies.

On to the review!

‘Cowboys and Aliens’ has two things that should interest you:  Cowboys, and aliens.  Now, a gritty, relentlessly dark cowboy movie can be really good.  A gritty, relentlessly dark movie about alien invasion can be good.  Making a gritty, relentlessly dark movie about cowboys fighting aliens is actually incredibly boring, especially when you tack on a Hollywood ending and leave no doubt as to how everyone in the movie will fare.

The problem here is that in trying to capture the serious tone of a dark, brooding action film starring a dark, brooding Daniel Craig as our hero with no memory, Jake, director Jon Favreau forgot to add enough detail to make us actually give a shit.  There are some nice scenes later in the film that try to fill out Jake’s life, but by then it is too little, too late.

Harrison Ford actually gets to play the ‘bad guy’ for the beginning part of the film, before the movie forces us to accept him as a good guy who just happens to be a complete asshole with a heart of gold.  His character, Woodrow, is the local rich cattle rancher, and Ford literally phones in his entire role.  Granted, Harrison Ford phoning it in is still better than most people’s best, but you can literally see his ‘not giving a shit’ face in a few scenes.

Sam Rockwell plays a guy named ‘Doc,’ yes, just Doc, and other than Abigail Spencer as the requisite tough lady with a twist, Alice, everyone else in the film exists solely as a plot point.  In fact, I could argue that Alice and Woodrow also exist as plot points, but they at least have a very slight back-story.  I would also like to add that Sam Rockwell is the only guy whose character is asked to do more than brood and look tough.  I would rather just watch two hours of Doc running around, being an actual human being, than sit through the incessant moodiness of Cowboys and Aliens ever again.

The whole plot can be summed up by the title.  Seriously, that’s all you get. You get some cowboys, you get some aliens, and they spend their time fighting it out in New Mexico.  Why New Mexico?  Because the aliens love them some gold.

Yes.

The aliens…a technologically advanced race of supremely intelligent, physically superior creatures, are here to mine for gold.

Who are then defeated by nineteenth century cowboys.

Those are some dumb aliens right there.

I could go on and on about inconsistencies in the plot, the huge differences in acting displayed by much of the cast, or even just how much I now despise it when movies switch from a dark, moody scene to retina-searing whiteness, but I would rather just comment on the theater.

You see, I had the entire week off to go home for the funeral of a loved one.  When I came back on Thursday, I decided to stay home Friday and get some work done around the house.  I took advantage of this free day and caught the cheap noon showing.  The theater was freaking packed, and it was packed with exactly the sort of people you would expect to show up for a movie at noon on a workday.

The couple next to us did not shut the hell up until about fifteen minutes into the film.  Two phones went off and one person was texting while someone else kept checking the time.  There was an actual mentally handicapped person in the theater who, as my wife described it, ‘squawked’ on several occasions throughout the film.  When we first got to the cinemaplex, they had burned the hell out of some popcorn and the whole lobby stank.  While we waited through the credits, the film actually burned up, smoking, and I got to see in person what melting film looks like on the big screen.

None of that was the most surprising.  What really blew me away was that several people actually got up and left during the movie.  One couple walked out the emergency exit a full hour into the movie, and a few people just up and left after the last action sequence, not even bothering to see the actual ending.

I have seen some incredibly shitty movies over the last few months…Zookeeper, Priest, Transformers 3…but this is the very first time I ever witnessed anyone actually getting up and walking out during the film.

As an addendum, it appears my wife really did not appreciate my calling Spielberg’s new movie ‘War Horse’ ‘Glue: The Movie.’  I will be sleeping on the couch if you need me.