The Wolverine (2013)

You Have Struggled Long Enough.  I Can End Your Eternity…

I was very excited to see today’s movie, but I was also a little suspicious.  There is a person at my job who I constantly engage in conversation about comic books movie, and I found myself shocked by the fact that she did not intend to see this movie.  But I also understood her logic.  The previous movie for this character was the ass.  I found it to be one of the most irritating comic book movies in recent history because of how poorly they handled some of my favorite comic book characters.  That being said, my argument for her was that none of these problems tied into today’s movie.  None of the same writers or directors were involved in this movie, so I had no reason to believe they’d make the same shitty choices.  And I never had a problem with the person playing the main character.  He’s played this character in five movies previously, and the greater majority of those movies were good, and he was good in all of them.  So I still had high hopes for The Wolverine, written by Mark Bomback, Scott Frank, and Christopher McQuarrie, directed by James Mangold, and starring Hugh Jackman, Haruhiko Yamanouchi, Rila Fukushima, Tao Okamoto, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Hiroyuki Sanada, Will Yun Lee, Brian Tee, Famke Janssen, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart.

In 1945, the mutant known as Logan (Hugh Jackman), also known as Wolverine, saves the life of an officer named Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi) from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.  Years later, Yashida sends a precognitive mutant named Yukio (Rila Fukushima) to bring Logan to Tokyo to give Yashida the chance to repay his debt to Logan before he dies.  His offer: to negate Logan’s healing abilities so that he can finally live life as a mortal man.  Since that offer is so goddamned stupid, Logan refuses, but Yashida’s nurse, Dr. Green (Svetlana Khodchenkova), introduces something into him that negates his healing anyway.  And then Yashida dies.  Now Logan must try to protect Yashida’s granddaughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto), from Yakuza and Ninjas without the use of his healing abilities until she is put in charge of Yashida’s company, as Yashida’s will states.

Sadly, I found myself pretty disappointed with this movie, but it did have its charms that elevated it far above Wolverine’s previous outing.  So it was an improvement and a disappointment simultaneously.  The story of the movie was fine, but I had problems with a lot of the writing.  There were so many occasions where they had the opportunity for a great line, but the one they chose just fell flat.  Like the part where the Yakuza guy tells Wolverine that he never talks.  That’s perfect for a great line!  Instead, Wolverine just stabs him and he talks.  And later when someone says, “Don’t hit my friends.”  That’s such a weak line where such a potentially great one could have been.  Instead it sounds like an elementary school student standing up to a bully.  Later, when someone asks Wolverine what kind of monster he is and he throws back, “The Wolverine,” I know what they were going for.  I assume they wanted me to get all excited because I had seen that on the poster before I came in, but I just wanted more.  They were able to set up fantastic lines, but completely unable to deliver them.  I found it to be quite a bummer.

I guess I was okay with the rest of the story though.  I was worried about the premise of the movie as I knew it going in.  All I really knew was going to happen in this movie was that Wolverine would lose his healing abilities.  That made me nervous that he wouldn’t be able to be as badass as I needed him to be.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected.   He was noticeably diminished, but he maintained a great enough deal of badassitude.  His friend Yukio could’ve been a little more helpful though.  I mean, she was precognitive, but was never really forthright with her information.  She tells Wolverine that she has some important information for her, but is cut off when he says she needs her to drive him somewhere, and then she tells him after they arrive.  You showed us some of that long car ride.  We know you had time to tell him.  That was information he could have needed.  As for more information that someone could have needed: we later find out that the Silver Samurai is made mostly from adamantium.  If only he had known that before he chose his name.  There were also a few things that I need to say, but I need to hide them in a ::SPOILER ALERT::  When Yoshida says that Wolverine should not look so shocked that he was in the Silver Samurai outfit, he was right.  No one should have been shocked by that.  Also, the movie bummed me out by not giving Wolverine his adamantium claws back by the time the movie ended.  The bone claws are lame.  I don’t want him to have to start another movie with those.  Couldn’t they just have decided that Mariko used the company’s obvious knowledge of how to shape adamantium to give them back?  It’s not like they didn’t have some spare adamantium lying around after the Silver/Adamantium Samurai was destroyed.  ::END SPOILER::  I would have to say that I liked the after credit sequence, and that you should make sure you stick around for it.

The cast in the movie was very strong.  Especially Hugh Jackman.  He looked so goddamned strong in this movie.  There was not a vein in his body that was not on display.  At least not north of the belt line.  He was awesome though.  Maybe not the most awesome person though, and I’m basing that mainly on his relationship with Mariko.  I know Wolverine has the tendency to knock the bottom out of some lucky lady, but this girl was already married AND in love with that Japanese Hawkeye guy, and Wolverine still had to get his dick wet.  And right after that came another problem: why does anyone ever sleep next to Wolverine?  He has the terrible habit of stabbing people that sleep next to him.  He stabbed Rogue in the first movie, almost stabbed his girlfriend in Origins, almost stabbed Mariko, dream-stabbed Jean Gray.  Stop sleeping next to him!  If you want the sex; get it and get out!  After him, I didn’t really think that much about anyone else in the cast.  Hiroyuki Sanada was fine.  Tao Okamoto was cute and did well.  Rila Fukushima caused no complaints.  I guess I was never really on board with Svetlana Khodchenkova’s performance.  Just didn’t do it for me.  She was hot though, so she doesn’t really need to act that well.

The Wolverine disappointed me with a decent story riddled with mediocre dialogue that could’ve (and should’ve) been so much more awesome than it was.  But I felt like the action was able to keep a good enough pace even though Wolverine himself was diminished by the story elements for a good part of the movie, and the performances mostly did a great job.  Overall I suppose I’d say that I enjoyed the movie, and certainly a lot more than I liked Wolverine’s previous outing, but I just wanted this movie to be more.  Definitely worth watching, but you can probably wait for a rental.  The Wolverine gets “Is that all the men you brought?” out of “It’s an honor to meet the Wolverine.”

WATCH REVIEWS HERE!  YouTube  OTHER JOKES HERE!  Twitter  BE A FAN HERE!  Facebook  If you like these reviews so much, spread the word.  Keep me motivated!  Also, if you like them so much, why don’t you marry them?!

Taken 2 (2012)

Listen to Me Carefully, Kim.  Your Mother is Going to be Taken.

It’s been a while since I was last inspired by a RedBox.  You’ll eventually come to find that the two movies I picked on this day were not inspired, but were picked with a shrug.  And that hurts me to admit about today’s movie.  This movie’s predecessor was the tits.  It smacked you in the face with its penis and downright dared you not to like it, but you still could not. At least I could not.  I loved the first movie so much that I instantly became excited when I saw that IMDb said they were making a sequel when I was writing the review for the first movie.  But then doubt began to sink in.  What if this was just a money grab?  This was a dangerous situation, and one that demanded caution on my part.  So I gave it some time after it came out, only to find that fans and critics alike did not seem to be enjoying the sequel.  In despair, I waited until the movie finally found its way to a RedBox before I was willing to give it a shot.  This movie is Taken 2, written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, directed by Olivier Megaton, and starring Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace, Rade Šerbedžija (one of few names I’ve had to copy and paste to spell correctly), Leland Orser, Jon Gries, D.B. Sweeney, Luke Grimes, and Kevork Malikyan.

After the events of the first movie, the Albanian mob find themselves a little sore over how many people Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) awesomed all over.  They set their mind on taking revenge, but ONLY if coincidence brings him and his family onto their continent.  Thankfully for the mob leader Murad (Rade Šerbedžija), Bryan is going to Istanbul on a short assignment and he’s invited his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and their daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) out for a vacation.  Oh man!  Someone is about to get taken up in this piece!  Hell, maybe two!  …Oh yeah, there’s also some shit about Kim failing her driver’s test, and also she has a boyfriend that Bryan doesn’t like.  That is probably also as crucial to the story as the taken stuff.

What Olivier did to the Taken series really was like dropping a 10 Megaton bomb on it.  I winced when I thought of that.  Then I decided to share it with you.  This movie was disappointing.  It didn’t manage to capture a sliver of the awesomeness of its predecessor.  It tried to compare itself to the original by not really changing the story at all, and did the dumbest version of amping it up I’ve seen in a while.  The story for the first movie was never that complex, but you can’t just say, “This time, TWO people get taken.  That’s why we named the movie Taken TWO!  We are the most clever mother fuckers that ever were!”  But at least the first movie knew to take their simple story and slap some awesome on it to overcome their problems.  In this movie, the dumb daughter is saving Liam?  Fuck that!  Liam does the saving in this family!  They also really seemed exhausted by the possibility of writing dialogue in this movie.  They’d get started strong and then fall asleep before the sentence ended.  Like when Kim was talking to Bryan about what Lenore said about when they met.  She said, “When you met, it was … super special.”  That line was super special.  That’s like fuckin’ poetry.  Emily fuckin’ Dickinson over here!  …Is that a poet?  The biggest problem I had with the movie was, sadly, the premise for the entire movie.  The villain’s motivation made no sense, but it’s also something you see a lot in action movies.  Obviously, if you kill a mobster’s son, he’s coming after you.  That seems logical.  But where’s the logical side of his brain when it comes to the reason this guy killed his son?  He killed your son because your son was going to sell his daughter into the sex slavery trade.  If I had a kid and he was killed trying to do something horrible to someone, I’d say, “Well, that’ll happen.  Now no one will know what a shitty job I did raising the boy.”  I guess that wouldn’t have made for a very interesting movie, and they even point out that break in logic in the movie, but the mobster is having none of that.

The action of the movie was okay, but I never really felt that thrilled about it.  I didn’t even like looking at most of the movie.  For some reason, they decided that the only proper way to display this movie to us was to crank the saturation of it up to 11.  I don’t remember the first movie being so ugly that I didn’t want to even look at it.  They did a few vaguely clever things in the movie – such as Bryan telling Kim to set off grenades so that he could count how long it took for the sound to reach him – but they also did some dumb things.  I know that Movie Making 101 says that when someone hangs up a phone, the other person hears the dial tone so that they can stare at the phone and look morose.  But this is the smartphone generation and iPhones don’t do that.  The fisticuffs in the movie didn’t happen nearly often enough for my liking, but when they did they were mostly fine.  The last fight was the one that caused the most problems for me, but mainly just because I didn’t know how Bryan ended it.  He was fighting what was basically the Albanian version of him, and they were going punch for punch for the majority of the fight, but then Bryan dropped him on his back and slid him down into a seated position.  Did he just knock the wind out of him so well that he never got it back?  ‘Cause that dude was dead from something the Three Stooges used to do every day.  If you want to say that Bryan slammed the dude down on the corner and broke his neck or something, then I’m going to have to ask you to show your work.  Did you learn nothing from math class?

The cast in this movie did a fine enough job, but most of the characters got on my nerves.  Maggie Grace as the daughter most of all.  First of all, her memory is super short term.  Right in the beginning of this movie, she gets all pissy with Liam because he interrupts her boyfriend trying to get to second base with her.  Have you already forgotten that he also interrupted a Sheik making you the Thursday wife in his harem?  I think he’s got a bit of a head start on you ever getting angry at him again for his fatherly duties.  I also felt like she brought a lot of the stuff to the movie that I felt was wasted space, such as her driving test stuff and the stuff about her boyfriend.  Also, at the end when you have your boyfriend come have a milkshake with the family, the line, “Don’t shoot this one,” was maybe in poor taste.  Liam might take it poorly because his daughter thinks he’s a mindless killer, and the boyfriend probably wants to keep the fact that Liam will literally kill the shit out of him out of his mind for as long as possible.  Liam brought as much awesome as he could to the movie, but there really wasn’t much he could do to salvage it.  I did think that a good father and driving instructor would have told his daughter good job on outrunning that train, but that she should never do that again.  Famke had a pretty easy job on this movie because about halfway in she got really drowsy and spent the rest of the movie half asleep.  But the worst performances in this movie were definitely the Albanian mobsters.  They’re trying to sneak up on the ex-CIA guy that killed the shit out of all their buddies, but their idea of incognito is to be the only people in all of Istanbul wearing track suits like they were a uniform.

Taken 2 was not a good movie, but I’m still excited for the possibility of a Taken 3.  Taken was awesome enough to give them a third chance.  The story was the story from Taken, amped up in the most unimaginative way it could be, and it didn’t even have good enough action to counter-balance that.  You could say that the first movie set the bar too high, but I feel like this movie would’ve sucked with or without the comparison.  There’s no good reason to watch this movie.  Taken 2 gets “Hey Dad, please don’t shoot this one” out of “When a dog has a bone, the last thing you want to do is take it from him.”

WATCH REVIEWS HERE!  YouTube  OTHER JOKES HERE!  Twitter  BE A FAN HERE!  Facebook  If you like these reviews so much, spread the word.  Keep me motivated!  Also, if you like them so much, why don’t you marry them?!

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

Whatever You Do, Don’t Eat the Fuckin’ Candy

It had started to occur to me that I had not actually made it to the theaters this year.  There were movies out that I wanted to see, but I either never had the time or it just slipped my mind.  There’s also a chance that I was too busy making love to beautiful women all month to get to the theaters.  That one seems like it’s the most likely.  Having pleased enough beautiful women to meet most men’s lifetime quota, I finally decided to take a little me time and go to the cinemas.  I was shocked to find that the cinema I usually go to had been purchased by another theater company, but thankfully they still do movies for $5, enabling me to make a double feature out of my day.  Unfortunately, the two movies that I was able to catch in the time I had allotted were not Zero Dark Thirty.  That will have to wait.  For now, let’s talk about Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, co-written and directed by Tommy Wirkola, co-written by Dante Harper, and starring Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton, Famke Janssen, Pihla Viitala, Cedric Eich, Alea Sophia Boudodimos, Thomas Mann, Robin Atkin Downes, Derek Mears, Peter Stormare, and Rainer Bock.

Two children named Hansel (Cedric Eich) and Gretel (Alea Sophia Boudodimos) are abandoned by their father in the woods.  They make their way to a gingerbread house where they are captured by a witch who intends to eat them.  They manage to throw her into the oven.  But we all knew that part.  What we may not know is what happens later.  Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) grow up to be famous, witch-specializing bounty hunters.  They are hired by a town called Augsburg, and arrive just in time to prevent Sheriff Berringer (Peter Stormare) from wrongly executing a woman he believes to be a dark witch.  Hansel and Gretel then set about discovering the reason behind the disappearance of six boys and five girls, and sightings of a Grand Witch named Muriel (Famke Janssen).  Also, I’m not positive, but I think a Grand Witch is the female version of a Grand Wizard.

Can I paste my review for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter here and call this a day?  Truthfully, this movie was much better than AL:VH, and much less crazy of an idea, but they do seem comparable to each other in title at least.  I guess the premise of the movie isn’t nearly as crazy since it seems to be a possible future for Hansel and Gretel to grow up to hunt witches and no one in their right mind would make the leap from Abraham Lincoln to vampires.  And just as it wasn’t a difficult leap to make to have Hansel and Gretel grow up to be witch hunters, the story of this movie made no difficult jumps.  It was all pretty standard.  The story serves mostly as a way to get from one silly situation to another bloody fight until the filmmakers have blown their load and lit a cigarette in celebration of their mediocre performance.  I can relate to that.  But, even though the experience is relatively unsatisfying either way, at least with me it can be a little bit of fun.   It had a bit of laughs to it, but nothing worth watching it for.  Now I’m not sure whether I’m still talking about my penis or not…

The look and the action were altogether unimpressive.  They had a lot of blood, but nothing interesting making it come out of the bodies.  Fist fights were really average and the gun stuff was simply aim and shoot with no flare.  The troll in the movie looked pretty goofy in daylight, but it also was the only thing in the movie that had a good fight in daylight, so I’ll call the troll a “push.”  There was a broom race through the forest at the end of the movie that reminded me of the scene on Endor from Return of the Jedi.  Also, the music that opened the movie seemed like it was ripped straight out of Sherlock Holmes.

The performances were mostly okay.  No one blew me away, but they didn’t suck.  I did think of questionable things about them though.  First off, Jeremy Renner as Hansel is a diabetic?  Is that really going to be a pointless subplot?  They don’t say he’s a diabetic, but he got it from eating too much candy and he has to inject himself whenever the movie realizes that it forgot about that subplot or else his foot falls off or whatever happens.  Also, you’ll come to find pretty quickly that Jeremy Renner loves to pose with his gun resting on his shoulder.  It’s like his favorite thing.  Gemma Arterton is fine, it’s true, but she perhaps needs some more practice before playing an action character in the future.  She threw some pretty unconvincing punches.  I also thought Famke Janssen was a pretty useless addition to this movie.  She also did a fine enough job, but why make her a witch?  I’m sure there are people that are cheaper to get into your movie than Famke and, when you get her, she spends the greater majority of the movie all uglied up and witchy, completely unrecognizable.

I felt like this movie was either going to be nothing to write home about, extremely lame, or fun and awesome.  Unfortunately they chose the former.  It’s okay.  It has a super basic story, limited amount of laughs, and unimpressive action.  This movie could’ve been more fun with a little more comedy and some better choreographed action.  It’s not a bad movie, and one you wouldn’t be too bad off if you rented, but there’s not really any good reason to go to a theater for it.  Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters gets “I say burn them all!” out of “Cutting off her head tends to work.”

WATCH REVIEWS HERE!  YouTube  OTHER JOKES HERE!  Twitter  BE A FAN HERE!  Facebook  If you like these reviews so much, spread the word.  Keep me motivated!  Also, if you like them so much, why don’t you marry them?!

Lord of Illusions (1995)

A Man Who Wanted to Become a God … Then Changed His Mind.

I really haven’t received too many legitimate requests for horror movies to review in my October Horrorthon, but I shant let that sway me. I suppose I don’t really need too many requests because I have a Netflix queue full of shitty horror movies to knock out, and probably even a few good ones. On this day, I picked a movie from my Instant Queue at random. I know the writer/director of this movie pretty well and figured, if nothing else, the movie would prove to be good joke fodder. But Clive Barker is also one of the biggest names in the horror genre, so there was a chance that the movie could be awesome and I just never got around to seeing it in my youth. Only one way to find out! And that brings us up to speed on the reason I chose to watch Lord of Illusions, written and directed by Clive Barker, and starring Scott Bakula, Kevin J. O’Connor, Daniel von Bargen, Famke Janssen, Barry Del Sherman, Joseph Latimore, Sheila Tousey, Susan Traylor, Vincent Schiavelli, and Joel Sweto.

In 1982, four former members of a cult – Philip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor), Quaid (Joseph Latimore), Jennifer Desiderio (Sheila Tousey), and Maureen Pimm (Susan Traylor) – confront their former cult members and the leader of the cult, a man with the ability to conjure genuine magic named Nix (Daniel von Bargen), in order to save the life of a young girl he intends to sacrifice. They barely manage to “kill” and bind Nix with an iron facemask and bury him deep in the ground. Thirteen years later, a private detective named Harry D’Amour (Scott Bakula) comes to Los Angeles to investigate an unrelated case, but starts to get caught up in this other story when he witnesses the murder of Quaid by Nix’s assistant Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman). As he’s dying, Quaid warns D’Amour that Nix is returning, and D’Amour must investigate the matter to stop it.

I was actually fairly surprised to find that I kind of liked this movie. It was in no way mind-blowing, but it had a lot of things going for it, and I’d say I enjoyed the experience altogether. The story of the movie was actually pretty strong, and it was executed pretty well also. It came off as about half noire detective movie and half monster movie. It seems like a strange idea, but it actually works for the most part. There was a pretty good cult part to the movie as well, and those are always creepy because there are actually people crazy enough to join those things. One thing about it got me wondering though, and then I realized that it’s true for the most part in real life as well, but why are white people the only ones stupid enough to join cults? I started thinking this movie was racist because there were no black people, Asians, or Mexicans in the cult, but I don’t think they tend to join cults that often. Stupid honkies. But I still liked the story of the movie overall, even with the couple of things I found irritating. The ones that I specifically look for while watching a movie so that I can have stuff to make fun of. The first thing was that they really beat the shit out of the word “illusion” in this movie. They used it all the time. I know what I’m watching, Clive! You can chill out now. After they first defeated Nix, they all agreed that they would bury him so deep in the ground that no one would ever find him. That is apparently 2 feet in the ground because, when they dug him up later, that’s where his body was. I’ve buried dogs deeper than that!

The look of the movie was pretty solid, and impressive in comparison to what I expected while going into the movie. The visual effects were good and the violence, while not being over the top gory, was pretty convincing when it was there. I noticed that Clive Barker seems to have something against what is apparently called the thenar space, or the webbing between your index finger and your thumb, because a couple of people in the movie took some damage there. I don’t really have much to say about that, but now you know that’s called the thenar space (according to 13 seconds of Google research), so you can’t say you never learned anything from my reviews. There were a couple of funny parts that related to the VFX, though they were not bad themselves. Take, for instance, the part where a clearly see-through monster was attacking them (the one that looked like one of the Scoleri Brothers from Ghostbusters 2) and it took them about a minute to realize it wasn’t there. And then slightly after that when Bakula decides there’s no better or more covert way to turn that hologram off than by shooting the camera that was playing it. You’re trying to leave no trace while sneaking into this place! You couldn’t tape a piece of paper over it, or just ignore it now that you know it’s not real? Also, when you later get attacked by a ball of flame, shooting at it probably is not the smartest thing in the world. It’s fire. Bullets will probably go right through it. The thing I took the most issue with visually in this movie was Nix’ face at the end. In the beginning he wasn’t wearing any makeup and was just pulling off creepy with his own performance. After being buried for 13 years with that facemask apparatus on, he emerged with discolored parts on his face that made him look like a sickly Darth Maul.

I was surprised by the performances in this movie, but not generally because of quality. I was more just surprised to see them. Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Scott Bakula have all had some decent movie careers and, seeing as I did no research for this movie, I had no idea any of them were in here. I don’t really have anything to say about any of their performances though. They did fine. That is it. Daniel von Bargen did a pretty good job being creepy as Nix, but I think Barry Del Sherman took most of my attention as Butterfield. First off, Butterfield is the worst name for someone that’s supposed to be an intimidating character. He did what he could to bring some intimidation to the character, but his wardrobe took a lot away from that. We first see his character wearing daisy dukes and a halter top, which I do not find very intimidating. But I get the feeling the character was supposed to be gay even though it was not really said, so it kind of fit. I reached that assumption later when he was typically wearing skintight yellow spandex pants.

I was admittedly surprised to find that I thought Lord of Illusions was a pretty solid movie. I liked the greater majority of the story and found it interesting that it combined elements of a noire detective movie with a horror film, the look held up pretty well, and the performances were not really worth mentioning beyond who was doing them. But overall it was a decent enough watch and you could do much worse in the horror genre. I streamed it from Netflix, if you’re interested. Lord of Illusions gets “Death. It’s an illusion” out of “I was born to murder the world.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people. Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense. Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated. You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter. Don’t forget to leave me some comments. Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Taken (2008)

I Told You So!: The Movie

After the last three movies, I didn’t feel like I needed to clean my brain with a good movie, or a meaningful movie.  I needed to clean my brain with an awesome movie.  I had originally seen today’s movie in the theaters, knowing nothing about it and expecting nothing out of it.  Later, when it came out on DVD, I bought that shit post haste.  I’ve seen it a few times since then, but I have not reviewed it yet.  And I had a hankering for this movie for a little while now so I figured now was the best time to sate my need for it, and knock a review out while I’m at it.  This movie is Taken, written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, directed by Pierre Morel, and starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Xander Berkeley, Nicolas Giraud, Arben Bajraktaraj, Gerard Watkins, Olivier Rabourdin, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Katie Cassidy, and Holly Valance.

Retired CIA agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is trying to build a better relationship with his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), but it’s made into an uphill battle by her bitch ass mom, Lenore (Famke Janssen), and her rich, one-upping stepfather Stuart (Xander Berkeley).  Knowing that Kim wants to be a singer, he gets her a karaoke machine for her birthday, and tries to get her in with pop singer Sheerah (Holly Valance) while on a job with his former colleague Sam (Leland Orser), but she shuts him down.  Well, she does until Bryan saves her life with extreme prejudice from a knife-wielding assailant.  She responds by offering to pay for a singing coach for Kim and get her in touch with an agent.  Bryan goes to lunch to present Kim with this good news, but Kim and Lenore confront Bryan with Kim’s desire to go to Paris with her friend, Amanda (Katie Cassidy), to look at some museums.  Bryan’s hesitant, knowing what kinds of dangers face young girls on their own overseas, but they lay the guilt trip on him so thick that he relents and allows her to go, as long as she keeps him up to speed with what’s happening.  When she gets to France, she meets a nice boy named Peter (Nicolas Giraud) who invites her and Amanda to a party, but changes his mind and tells the Albanian Mafia to come and abduct them and turn them into prostitutes.  Kim watches it go down from a window while talking to her dad, and he leads her through the situation, but tells her she will be taken.  But Bryan has a particular set of skills that means a lot of people are going to get injured until he finds his daughter.

This movie is the tits.  The big fat floppy tits!  This movie might not be the smartest movie I’ve ever watched, but it would arguably be one of the most awesome.  The story of the movie is nothing special, but it’s still very satisfying.  The story is a pretty simple situation of someone being abducted and someone going to rescue her, with a little bit of the classic coming out of retirement story in there.  I found some of the dialogue in the movie blunt and unimpressive, like the scene at the barbecue and the scene where Bryan is playing poker with his former colleagues.  These scenes are very obvious exposition scenes, with them saying things along the lines of, “Remember that time when we were in the CIA and you were really good and I’d hate to be someone that kidnapped your daughter.  Remember that, buddy?”  Exposition can be painful to listen to, especially when it’s largely unnecessary because it happens right before the scene of Bryan laying a cold ass-whooping on the guy with the knife that tries to Selena that Sheerah lady.  That’s all I needed to decide this guy was a badass with skills.  That AND the fact that he wraps presents like a champ.  And I felt the biggest piece of dialogue was never used in the movie.  After Lenore had been such a dirty bitch to Bryan the whole movie and acted like he was being an asshole for thinking it was too dangerous for Kim to go to Paris without him, Bryan completely neglected to lay a nice, thick “I told you so” onto the lot of them when he was totally right about the whole thing.  Granted, he would’ve just been an asshole if she had gone and nothing had happened, but he was right, and I would’ve punched her bitch ass vagina clean off!  I feel the same way about the part where Kim is under the bed and he tells her she’s going to be taken.  At first, the bad guys seemed completely unaware that she was there.  I figured that she’d be pretty pissed if they left without her and he had seemed so quickly resigned to the fact that she’d be taken.  It would’ve been a fairly lackluster movie if that had happened though.  If you want some examples of good dialogue, it immediately follows that, when Bryan talks to the kidnapper Marco on the phone.  That speech goes down as one of the most badass speeches ever as Bryan tells Marco basically, “I’m a badass, you don’t want to fuck with me, and I’ll show you why if you don’t let her go.  …But don’t let her go, because the movie would be really short and not awesome if you don’t make me show off my badassness.”   At that point, we had already learned enough to think, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into!”  The speech he gives when he does find Marco is pretty good as well.

There was really nothing left to be desired from the action in this movie.  I found it all very satisfying.  They had great gun fights, hardcore hand-to-hand combat, and even some cool car chases.  I’ve always liked the form of fighting that they use in this movie.  It reminds me of the Bourne movies.  I’m not sure if it’s technically Krav Maga, but it looked like it.  It’s just a no nonsense, no frills type of fighting that makes your opponent unable to be in your way anymore.  It comes down to a lot of neck/back breaking and throat punching, and all of it’s good times for me.  ::SPOILER ALERT::  At the end of the movie, he has to fight this skinny, douchey-looking guard to a sheik.  It bummed me out because he was able to hold his own against Bryan who had, up to this point, not met anyone he couldn’t destroy in a couple of moves.  Though I didn’t like seeing my man challenged by this guy, it made sense for him to have a challenging fight at the end of the movie, and the ass-whipping he laid upon him was very satisfying.  I was also surprised at how his daughter reacted to him shooting the sheik because she seemed shocked by it, whereas I would’ve yelled, “Dad!  You is the fuckin’ tits!”  And, at the very end of the movie, I was surprised to see Lenore thanking Bryan for saving their daughter.  With how much of a bitch she was through the rest of the movie, I would’ve figured she’d say, “Oh what?  You could only save ONE of them?  This is so typical, Bryan!”  I know the last two don’t really fit with the action paragraph, but I wanted to keep my spoilers together.  ::END SPOILERS::   The car chases were pretty standard stuff, and car chases have never really held a lot of interest for me.  What I did like from the first one was how the car ran full speed into a bulldozer’s blade, cutting halfway into the top of the car like it was butter.

All of the performances in this movie really worked as well.  There wasn’t a point in the movie where Liam Neeson really had to get emotional, but that actually works as a good thing for this movie.  We already know he can act; he doesn’t need to show off.  But having his emotions so under control under circumstances where most people would be freaking out makes him that much more of a badass.  My favorite bit of badassness was when he shot a guy’s wife out of nowhere.  LIKE A BOSS!  You’ll know it when you see it, but it was so stone cold badass that I would’ve offered my anal virginity to the guy as a sacrifice.  Maggie Grace had to do a lot of damsel in distress work in the movie.  I couldn’t decide if her character was believable or not because 17-year-old girls only like U2 because they want to seem smart and they haven’t found better music yet.  And people that like U2 don’t also like pop stars like this Sheerah.  I definitely hate-fucked the shit out of Famke Janssen’s character in this movie, but that was what she was going for.  I know some divorced people are like that, but you bitches can at least act like you’re being civil in front of your kid at her birthday party.  And yes, I blame her completely.  I thought Arben Bajraktaraj was cool as the short-lived character Marko, but mainly just because I was really convinced by him as he was being tortured.  In no small part due to the veins in his neck looking like they were going to explode.  And I thought Leland Orser was cool, but mainly because every time I see him I think of him either crying because he fucked a girl to death with a sword dildo in Seven, or crying because there was an alien in him in Alien: Resurrection.

Taken is one of the best movies to just shut your brain off and enjoy.  It’s not a dumb movie, per se, but the story is pretty basic and the dialogue is either nothing special or wicked awesome.  Liam Neeson and the action scenes make this movie a fantastic action flick.  This movie is total fun times that should be enjoyed by anyone.  And you should go and enjoy it right now.  I have it on DVD, I SHOULD have it on BluRay, and you should have it in some form or another.  Taken gets “I have a particular set of skills” out of “Now’s not the time for dick measuring, Stuart!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Deep Rising (1998)

Oh Man … What Stinks?

I have no idea what inspired me to rent today’s movie.  I kind of wanted to watch a dumb action movie, so I guess I did that.  It’s one of those times when something is in your Netflix queue and you’re not paying attention so you actually have it get sent to you and then you have to watch it.  What made me put it in my queue in the first place is a better question, but I don’t have an answer to that either.  Either way, let’s make fun of a dumb action movie!  This one is Deep Rising, written and directed by Stephen Sommers, and starring Treat Williams, Wes Studi, Anthony Heald, Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O’Connor, Derrick O’Connor, Jason Flemyng, Djimon Hounsou, Cliff Curtis, Clifton Powell, Trevor Goddard, and Una Damon.

There’s a little boat hauling ass through the middle of the ocean somewhere, crewed by John Finnegan (Treat Williams), engineer Joey “Tooch” Pantucci (Kevin J. O’Connor), and the Tooch’s girlfriend, Leila (Una Damon).  Finnegan has a reputation for putting his boat out to people without asking questions, just as long as the money is there.  This time, the money comes from a man named Hanover (Wes Studi).  He has brought a bunch of heavy weaponry and a crew of mercenaries, comprised of T-Ray (Trevor Goddard), Mamooli (Cliff Curtis), Vivo (Djimon Hounsou), Mason (Clifton Powell), and Mulligan (Jason Flemyng).  Meanwhile, there’s a cruise ship owned by Simon Canton (Anthony Heald), and captained by Captain Atherton (Derrick O’Connor), who are dealing with a mischievous, and hot, thief named Trillian (Famke Janssen).  While they do that, something hits the ship and it goes dark.  Back on Finnegan’s ship, they run into a lifeboat dropped in the impact from the cruise ship, damaging their ship and leaving it nearly useless.  They get onto the cruise ship and find everyone missing.  Apparently, some kind of tentacled monster has attacked the cruise ship, leaving few survivors, and the mercenaries and Finnegan’s crew have to find the parts they need to fix their ship, while trying to survive the creature.

This isn’t a great movie.  I’m pretty sure it’s well aware of that.  It should, therefore, endeavor to be fun.  It gets close to being fun, but is kind of bogged down by being too predictable and cliche.  It’s a fairly typical monster movie, though it seems they didn’t have the money to show the monster very often.  I guess they could have been going for the suspense, but it didn’t really work.  Instead it just seemed like they were afraid to show it at first because it might be ridiculous.  And it was.  For the first 90% of the movie, the monster was just a series of autonomous tentacles that knew where the cast was without actually having eyes or ears.  They were basically just arms on an octopus that wasn’t seen until the end, so how would they know where the people were?  The writing of the movie was pretty typical and cliche.  A few lines required punctuation that came in the form of a shotgun being cocked, for instance.  At one point, the engineer is running down a hallway with the leader of the mercenaries, running from a tentacle that should have no idea where they are, and they both keep mentioning over and over that the only thing that will stop the tentacle from chasing them is if they feed it something.  They say this like five times until the engineer says “What could we feed it?  What could we feed it?!” and the mercenary leader shoots him in the leg, leaving him for dead.  You didn’t see that coming?  Other parts were just badly written.  The one that comes to me right now is when the mercenary puts a gun to Famke’s chest and says “Tell me what I want to know …” pulls back the hammer on his pistol “…or I’ll pull the trigger.”  What a lame punchline!

The cast did what they had to do, but they didn’t have much of a script to work with.  Treat Williams was reminiscent of Nathan Fillion from Serenity, being a wisecracking captain that never seems to take the situation that seriously, but Nathan Fillion had the benefit of good writing.  Una Damon was the hot Asian lady in the movie.  That’s about all that could be said about her character.  I got really angry that she was the first person of the principle cast to get killed, stealing my primary eye candy away.  I’ve never found Famke Janssen too attractive, but she was at her hottest in this movie, so she took over the eye candy role when the Asian died.  She was a entertaining character, and usually portrayed as a tough chick, but that just lead to me getting pissed off at the end when the captain was chasing her with a flare gun.  He fired twice and missed, but she kept running as he started to reload.  She could have gotten to him and whooped that ass before he could reload if the writers didn’t hate women.  I’m pretty sure she punched a guy or two when outnumbered in the movie, and he never gave us any reason to believe he could fight, but women lack the arm strength to best a man of any kind, right writers?  Kevin J. O’Connor was the other role that made an impact with me, but only because he was really annoying.  That was what he was going for, and it worked.  He could not stop words from spilling out of his mouth.  He was playing much the same role as he did in The Mummy, but he never turned evil and the writing was nowhere near as strong.  It was a nice bit of wishful thinking that the writers made him be dating the really hot Asian chick, but really bad writing that this dude survives the ENTIRE MOVIE and she dies first.  No one wants him around!  None of the mercenaries really made an impact beyond the fact that they made me realize that the writers believed that every person can have only one personality trait.  Finnegan is cocky, the Tooch talks too much, T-Ray is an asshole, Vivo is a scary black man, and Mamooli is horny all the time.  If the movie stuck in my head more, I could probably do it for every character.

I’ve said before that I do not mind a movie being dumb as long as it’s fun, but this movie falls short on the fun.  It’s just predictable while making no sense, having poorly written dialogue, and having really basic characters.  The comic relief was mainly supplied by a guy who was always around and would not shut up, but was rarely saying anything funny.  Deep Rising is not a horrible movie, but it’s not good either.  You can skip this one.  Deep Rising gets “There goes one year off my life” out of “Shut your fucking whining weasel …”

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!