Red Dawn (2012)

You Fucked With the Wrong Family.

I was feeling lucky today.  I had been so lucky recently with remakes of cheesy old movies that I decided it couldn’t possibly hurt to give another one a shot.  The first two were remakes of Total Recall and Judge Dredd that both had some camp appeal back in the day, but were not what I wanted them to be.  The remakes were badass and exactly what I wanted them to be.  So obviously this third movie would be in the same boat, right?  It too is a remake of a cheesy 80’s movie that a lot of people show a lot more respect than I feel it deserves, but I still needed to see how this remake would go.  And that’s how I finally relented and rented the remake of Red Dawn, written by Carl Ellsworth and Jeremy Passmore, directed by Dan Bradley, and starring Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, Will Yun Lee, Brett Cullen, Josh Hutcherson, Connor Cruise, Steve Lenz, Adrianne Palicki, Isabel Lucas, Edwin Hodge, Alyssa Diaz, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kenneth Choi, Matt Gerald, and Michael Beach.

A North Korean battalion lead by Captain Cho (Will Yun Lee) invades Spokane, Washington, probably assuming that it was Washington D.C. and would thusly be the best place to strike at America.  I know it’s a stereotype, but those Asians really need to pay better attention in school, am I right?  Racism aside …  A Marine named Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) is here on leave, visiting his father Police Sergeant Tom Eckert (Brett Cullen) and brother Matt Eckert (Josh Peck), and manages to get his brother and a few other people – Robert Kitner (Josh Hutcherson), Daryl Jenkins (Connor Cruise), and Pete (Steve Lenz) – to the safety of their cabin in the woods, even though Hemsworth has had bad luck with one of those in the past.  A few of their classmates meet them up there.  Pete betrays the group for some stupid reason and that leads to daddy Eckert getting killed.  This puts this ragtag group of kids on the warpath against trained military soldiers in a war the Koreans can’t possibly win.  AMERICA!!

This feels like it certainly has to be a shorter review because I didn’t even realize I was watching the movie for the most part.  I often write these reviews while watching or playing something else that I’m writing a review for, and apparently typing my own words for Game of Thrones was much more enthralling to me than this movie was.  I’m sure you all feel the same.  Unlike all of you, I am often fairly bored by my own words and will often dedicate a lot more of my attention to the thing I’m experiencing for the first time than to my reviews.  This was not the case for this movie.  It was on, and I knew it was on, but I could give a shit less.  And I went into this movie thinking it was impossible to make a movie less interesting than the first Red Dawn.  At least that movie was easily mocked in its stupidity.  This movie was just boring.  It was like they weren’t even trying.  I don’t think they even wanted to release this movie, but they threw it out there because they thought they could make a few bucks off of Hemsworth’s rising stardom.  And they probably did, which makes it worth it to them.  But not to me.  Really, if you saw the first Red Dawn, there’s no reason to watch this one.  It’s the same thing, but it’s not nearly as fun.  It’s just thoroughly bleh.  There’s still no reason for an invading army to target some Podunk town of little importance.  Sorry if anyone is reading this in Spokane, but you should know what you are.  I grew up in Barstow, and I didn’t complain when one of the Fast and the Furious movies treated Barstow like it was a piece of shit town.  I knew that already.  I grew up there.  But I still think if some foreign army invaded Barstow, I would have no problem throwing down.  I didn’t understand the kids that seemed to have a problem with it, like Hutcherson.  He would hesitate when he needed to kill someone and throw up when he saw a dead body.  Hey, it’s me or him.  I’m cool with this.  Stay out of my country and we won’t have this problem.  White power.  Wait, that went off the rails there…  It was probably because he was in Hunger Games.  That surgically implants a vagina on you.  Also, why the hell is there a functioning Subway in this occupied town?  The Sandwich Artists and customers are acting like this is just another day, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there is a Korean invasion going on.  I like Subway too, but I think I’d take that shit to go and enjoy my Meatball Marinara at home if there was a war going on outside.

I can’t really blame the actors in this movie.  This movie wasn’t their fault.  They didn’t help it, and really didn’t seem to give it their all, but I can’t blame them for that either.  This movie was paying for dinner.  No need to bust your acting chops on this.  Thor wasn’t nearly Thor-y enough in this movie, and I think the other characters caught on to that.  That’s why that douche Pete guy was arguing about who was in charge with him.  Under normal situations, of course Thor would be in charge.  No one would argue that the God of Thunder was in charge of a group of stupid High School kids.  But Thor wasn’t in a Thor mood in this movie.  He tried to muster up at least a Captain America mood when he fought a guy using the back of a computer chair as a shield, but he still wasn’t getting into it.  Josh Peck was a shit in this movie, but people kept letting him off the hook for it.  He gets a dude killed by running off on his own to save his girlfriend, and the dude’s girlfriend or whatever forgives him just because they stared at each other for a few seconds.  I wouldn’t have.  That chick was evil.  She didn’t show it in this movie, but I know for a fact that she’s an evil robot with a prehensile tongue.  Okay, maybe it’s worth it then.  And then I got mad at the other chick, old what’s-her-name (I told you I wasn’t paying attention!), for getting mad at the dude that was tagged with a tracking dart.  He didn’t intentionally lead the bad guys to them!  He was tagged with a tracking dart!  Stupid what’s-her-name…

I almost feel bad telling you that the remake of Red Dawn sucked since I invested so little of my attention into it, but I feel like I saw enough to tell you that you don’t need to see it.  It’s boring, it’s not fun, the action is mediocre, the story is ludicrous and unoriginal, and the actors phoned it in.  There are better uses for your time.  If you want a remake of a crappy 80s movie so much, watch the new Total Recall or Dredd.  Leave this movie alone.  Red Dawn gets “Dude, we’re living Call of Duty … It Sucks” out of “That’s a shit sandwich without bread.”

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Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

I Punched Out Adolf Hitler 200 Times.

I just watched a trailer that made me really excited for May of next year. So excited that I decided I should try to do one movie a month that will set us up for that movie. The movie I’m excited about is the Avengers, and today’s movie is the most recent Avenger movie about the oldest Avenger, Captain America. I’ve already knocked out Thor, so I have two Iron Man movies and two Hulk movies left. So, again, the one I’m knocking out for this month is Captain America: The First Avenger, directed by Joe Johnston and starring Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell, Stanley Tucci, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, Dominic Cooper, Neal McDonough, Derek Luke, Kenneth Choi, J.J. Feild, Bruno Ricci, and a brief appearance – as in most Avenger movies – Samuel L. Jackson.

A bunch of scientists are messing around in the Arctic when they find something in the snow. It’s a giant spacecraft looking thing. Inside, they find a circular object with red, white, and blue on it. We then dive into the backstory of that circular object. Back in 1942, a Nazi scientist named Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) busts into a church looking for a shiny, blue cube with untold powers. In the US, a scrawny kid by the name of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) keeps getting rejected from the army because of his health and wussiness. But the kid’s got moxie! A scientist named Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) recognizes Steve’s moxie and allows him to join the army to see if he’s got what it takes to be the guinea pig of Erskine’s super-soldier program. At first, his commanding officers, Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and British agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), don’t have a lot of confidence in him. But, after being the only soldier to jump on top of a dummy grenade that was thrown as a test, they agree to allow him into the program. Moxie! A couple injections and some vita-rays later, Steve Rogers turns from a scrawny fuck into a big hunk of man meat. At first, Steve is made to go around on propaganda tours to raise money for the war, but when he tries that mess for the troops, they mock him for being lame. He finds out that his old friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and a number of other troops were taken prisoner so Steve Rogers resolves to rescue them. He successfully rescues them and meets Schmidt, who then takes off his Agent Smith mask and reveals that he’s the Red Skull – failed first experiment of the super-soldier program – and that he’s got a plan to basically destroy the world. Steve Rogers, with the help of Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), gets a snazzy new outfit, a sweet, very familar, Vibranium shield, and starts ass whooping some Nazi’s under the name Captain America, even though he’s only First Sergeant America.

It always warms my heart when Marvel makes a good movie out of one of their franchises. As with most comic book companies that have taken their characters to the big screen, Marvel has had a spotty history, but they were able to pull off Captain America very well. And thank Odin for that too, because Captain America is not only one of the biggest names in comic books, but he’s also kind of an American icon. The story of this movie could probably not help but be good. Just put the Captain America origin story up on the big screen. That can’t be that hard. That origin story was good when it started, and it has been refined over the years in different incarnations of the Captain that I can’t imagine much difficulty for the writers here. At first, I was thinking that the message of the movie about a scrawny kid becoming a hero was a good message, then I got to thinking that this message is lost because of the fact that he was only able to become a hero by getting changed completely by a serum that real scrawny people won’t have access to. But who cares, the movie is good times. I also like the whole part about Captain America disappearing in martyrdom, then being found in present day and recruited for the Avengers, but that was a fairly small part in the movie that just bookended the rest of the movie. It was also pretty cool that Cap starts off using a gun but quickly learns that he can whoop ass with just his shield and stopped using guns. A couple of story things that caught me was that, at one point, a spy from Hydra tries to sabotage and steal the super-soldier program and he sets off a cigarette case explosion with a button in a lighter. The thing I thought was weird was that this same lighter made a car explode and made his submarine come up. That is a versatile lighter button! Also, Captain America gets onto Red Skull’s big ass plane by the landing gear which made me think: shouldn’t someone do something about landing gear? How many times have you seen someone sneak their way onto a plane through the landing gear, either in movies or video games? Heck, I just did it in Uncharted 3 a couple days ago. Someone should figure that out.

I really like the visual style of the movie too. It’s definitely a period piece, taking place in the 1940’s and all, but it’s also got a little futuristic part to it because of all the cool technology that Stark and Schmidt had invented. The contrast really worked for the movie. The effect of shrinking down beefcake Chris Evans into a scrawny kid actually worked better than I expected. I half expected it to be an awful, young Jeff Bridges from Tron thing, but they did it much better. There were times when the face didn’t fit that well, but for the most part it looked good. I also watched the special features and found out that sometimes it was just Chris Evans in the scene and they shrunk him digitally and sometimes they plastered his face onto a scrawny dude’s body. They also changed Cap’s outfit a bit, as they tend to do in movies, but it still had the classic look to it. It wasn’t nearly as drastic as the changes in the X-Men movies, where each of their distinctive outfits became black leather gear. In this movie, Cap’s normally weird outfit of a blue scaly top, red pirate boots, and wings on his helmet became something more practical with the same color schemes. And they threw in the old outfit as his propaganda costume just to show people how gay it would look.

I came to a realization in watching this movie. I really want to hate Chris Evans because he’s all in shape and handsome and whatnot, but I can’t. He’s an entertaining guy to watch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do an emotionally charged performance before, but I thought he was cool in Fantastic Four, Captain America, and Scott Pilgrim. He’s like Brad Pitt, but not as great an actor. I really want to hate them both, but I like their movies so I can’t. Hugo Weaving is also a badass. I had just been thinking the other day about people that have played so many awesome characters in movies and my best example was Hugo Weaving. He has Red Skull, Elrond in Lord of the Rings, V from V for Vendetta, Agent Smith in the Matrix, and he’s the voice of Megatron in Transformers. Tommy Lee Jones is also awesome in this movie. He doesn’t play it like the classic army guy that R. Lee Ermey made a staple. What he does do is play a pretty serious role that is always making snarky comments. My favorite was when Hayley Atwell kissed Chris Evans goodbye before he got on Red Skull’s plane and then he looked at Tommy Lee Jones and TLJ said “I’m not kissin’ you”. Good times. Hayley Atwell herself did a fine job but she was mainly there to have a love interest for Cap. I liked Sebastian Stan as Bucky, Stanley Tucci as the doctor, and Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, but I don’t really have anything much to say about them.

Captain America is not a movie that will bring out tons of emotions in it’s audience, and I’m not sure they’re really going for that. What they seemed to want to make is a good times movie, and they did. The look was fantastic, the story was from the comics and was always great, but translated well, and the performances were all great too. I bought this movie on BluRay the day it was released and I believe this is a good enough movie to join any respectable movie collection, but in the very least, you should rent it. I’ll give this movie “I think it works” out of “I’m a captain!”

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