CLICK ON MY FACE TO LINK TO THE VIDEO!
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?!
Tag Archives: Kevin Durand
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
Waiting for a Written Invitation?
Why would someone feel so compelled to watch 5 movies in a series that was never really that good to begin with? I don’t have an answer to that question. I do know the person that would do such a thing: me. Every time this series releases a new movie, I feel like there’s no way I’m going to watch it. I let it get all the way through the theaters too. But when it comes to DVD, I always check it out. There’s no excuse for my actions. I’m contributing to this. It’s like I’m watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians or the Jersey Shore or something. But I can’t help myself. And so you will be dragged into my psychosis as I review Resident Evil: Retribution, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and starring Milla Jovovich, Li Bingbing, Shawn Roberts, Sienna Guillory, Aryana Engineer, Johann Urb, Kevin Durand, Boris Kodjoe, Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Colin Salmon, Megan Charpentier, and Mika Nakashima.
Alice (Milla Jovovich) is a normal housewife that lives with her husband Todd (Oded Fehr) and their deaf daughter Becky (Aryana Engineer). OR IS SHE?!?! No, she’s actually a zombie killing machine. Well, one of her is. There’re a lot of clones in the Umbrella facility she wakes up in. The real-ish one wakes up and is getting interrogated by Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), who has been brainwashed by Umbrella. Alice escapes to find herself in a giant, underwater facility designed to test the zombies or some shit. We spend the rest of the movie watching Alice escape this facility with the help of Ada Wong (Li Bingbing), Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), who have all been sent by Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who is a good guy now, I guess. The Red Queen (Megan Charpentier) is also back, and she uses clones of Alice’s original team – Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez), Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr), and James Shade (Colin Salmon) – to try to stop them.
This movie is exactly what you expect. I think it was Jonah Ray on the Nerdist podcast that acknowledged that these movies are lower class cinema, but that he could not help but be excited that they were coming out. I never get so far as to say that I’m excited for them to come out, but they are enjoyable in their stupid simplicity. The same goes for this movie. It’s definitely not a good movie, but it’s enjoyable if you just shut your brain down and watch. That’s the way they’re meant to be watched; with an aneurism. They don’t really seem to be trying too hard either. First off, the story is really not much more than Alice trying to figure out how to get out of a facility. And that facility is full of various landscapes representing different places in the world, so they’re going to act like Alice is spanning the globe on the poster for the movie even though she’s not leaving that one facility. But don’t worry; if you forget that all these places are fake, everyone in the movie will need to remind Alice several thousand times. But she’s pretty, so brains are really irrelevant. The same kind of goes for the writers of this movie and their ability to pull off some sweet one-liners. They all fell completely flat. Alice hits some baddies with a, “Hey boys. Bad idea,” when she blows a car up in their faces. You’re not even trying now, guys. Bad idea works if you blow up a light bulb in their face or something. That situation demands more of a “Here’s your ride” line. I’ll need to refer you to Batman & Robin for proper usage of horrible one-liners. Then you miss out on another good opportunity after Leon proclaims, “We’re gonna be okay,” and you didn’t have the Red Queen pop up and say, “Activating ‘Famous Last Words’ Protocols.” It also bummed me out that it seemed clear that this game was not made for fans of the Resident Evil games, or even gamers for that matter. All gamers know about the concept of a weak spot. And all Resident Evil fans remember that the way to beat brainwashed Jill was to shoot the giant red spider brooch in the center of her cleavage. And it wasn’t just obvious because all gamers were probably staring at her sweet rack. Well it took this killing machine lady about 15 minutes before someone else told her to shoot at the bull’s-eye between Jill’s tits.
The look and the action in the movie worked out pretty well throughout. The first scene in the movie was interesting because they were basically playing the last scene of the previous movie in slow motion reverse. And, for a while, I thought they were going to play the entire movie in reverse because it went on so long. But the movie seemed completely aware of the fact that its story wasn’t going to support it, so it made sure it was decently full of action. The hallway battle early on in the movie was pretty sweet, even though it didn’t really have anything to do with the story. I didn’t really care though because I didn’t really care about the story. That way, it’s perfectly fine to make your action scenes just a bit of jerkin’ off because it had been three minutes since something blow’d up. When the executioners showed up later, I was a little bit thrown off over how much they were ripped off from Pyramid Head from Silent Hill, but I’m pretty sure I remember them from the game too, so I can’t really blame the movie for that. I also realized that this movie had a total Star Trek thing going on because guys wearing masks were the red shirts of this thing. Michelle Rodriguez and Oded Fehr would come out of battles unscathed because they had the sense to not cover their faces.
Most of the performances were entirely acceptable and not much more. I thought it was cool that they got the original team from the first movie back for this one, but I also thought it got a little confusing that there were like 4 versions everyone. The only thing I thought about Milla Jovovich is that her housewife character was fuckin’ stupid for throwing away her baseball bat after one use. That shit still works. Li Bingbing was also pretty good. Her performance wasn’t anything special, but she looked good in that Ada Wong outfit. I did have some problems with Sienna Guillory. She definitely looked the part, and definitely had some sweet knockers, but she delivered her lines super robotic and paused in weird places. I guess she could’ve decided that it was the way someone who was brainwashed would act, but I just felt like she decided to let her tits do the talkin’.
Resident Evil: Retribution is exactly what I’m sure everyone expects. It’s a big, dumb action movie. And it lives up to every bit of it. It’s so huge in scale that it’s unsatisfied with the idea of having their movie appear as if it was filmed in only one global hemisphere. And, even though the story was weak, the action was fun and frequent. It will probably not be the last time I say it about the Resident Evil franchise, but you know what you’re getting and it always delivers. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you buy this, but it’s a fun rental. Resident Evil: Retribution gets “I’m kinda enjoying myself” out of “I’ve heard that before.”
Let’s get these reviews more attention, people. Post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, MySpace if you just awoke from a coma, and whatever else you can to get as many eyes on these things as possible. Follow my fanpage on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, and subscribe to my YouTube channel to keep on top of all things Robert. And don’t underestimate the importance of some constructive criticism. Rate these reviews, like the videos, and comment on both with anything you’d like to say. And don’t forget to request things you want a review of. LOVE YOUSE GUYS!!
Real Steel (2011)
The People’s Champion?
Some of you that are old enough may remember a time when one of the best “video games” you could play was two plastic robots on either end of a tiny ring, controlled by two buttons on each side that would cause the corresponding robot to punch with either his left or his right arm until one of the two robot’s heads popped off. This game was called Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. In order to pave the way for them to somehow turn Battleship into a movie, they decided to turn Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em into a movie to test how people would react. And then to add a little baby mamma drama into it, just to get the ladies watching. They kept the beginning initials the same, but rename the movie Real Steel, written by John Gatins, Shawn Levy, and Richard Mathis, directed by Shawn Levy, and starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Hope Davis, James Rebhorn, Evangeline Lilly, Karl Yune, Olga Fonda, Anthony Mackie, and Kevin Durand.
In the not too distant futures, the world has decided that the sport of boxing is far too brutal for humans to go through, so they are replaced with giant robot boxers. But also (and thank God for it) PETA seems to have disappeared because, on occasion, those giant robot boxers are allowed to fight bulls. That’s where we start off, with former boxer Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman), down on his luck and forced to take his robot, Ambush, to fit bulls. Charlie gets distracted by a cute blonde and his robot get scrapped, making Charlie skip out on the money he owes the promoter, Ricky (Kevin Durand). Charlie finds out that his ex-girlfriend died and he must attend a custody hearing for his 11-year-old son, Max (Dakota Goyo). Deciding that he is neither the paternal type, nor the type that wants to be likeable to almost any audience, Charlie not only does not want custody of his kid, but sells custody to Max’s wealthy uncle Marvin (James Rebhorn), behind the back of Max’s wealthy-by-marriage aunt Debra (Hope Davis), for $100,000. Because Marvin and Debra were about to go on vacation, Charlie agrees to take Max for three months, until they return. Charlie takes Max to the boxing gym of Charlie’s childhood friend Bailey Tallet (Evangeline Lilly) and promptly drops around $30,000 dollars on a once famous (and championship material) robot named Noisy Boy … which he quickly enrolls in an underground main event fight and gets it destroyed. Charlie and Max go to a scrapyard to find pieces to make a new robot when Max stumbles across an old, 2nd generation sparring robot named Atom. Flying in the face of all logic, Max single-handedly digs Atom out of mud and claims the robot as his own. They take it to another underground fight and find out this little robot’s got some chutzpah.
I admit being completely caught off guard by this, but this movie actually won me over. Going into this movie I figured that the robot fights would be awesome, but that they’d be flimsily held together by an ill-conceived plot and the addition of a kid reminiscent of Seven from Married … With Children. …Okay, that’s kind of exactly what happened, but it was done in a way that worked. The story is kind of one you’ve seen before … especially if you’ve seen Rocky. There are two underdogs in this movie (as opposed to the lone one they had in Rocky) in Charlie and Atom. Charlie doesn’t believe in himself anymore and his kid helps him believe in himself again. The similarities to Rocky are at their boiling point in the very end of the movie where ::SPOILER ALERT:: Atom puts up a good fight but loses the decision, settling for the “People’s Champ” booby prize. In this scene, Atom and Charlie take turns being Rocky, whereas Max takes the role of Adrian. IMDb tells me that they’re in the process of making Real Steel 2, so one can feel safe in thinking that Atom will win in the next one, fight a robot with a mohawk in the movie after that (but Charlie will probably have to die at some point), fight a behemoth Russian robot next (and make a cheesy speech about how we all can change and love each other), and then further ruin the entire memory of the series in the fifth one. Maybe, some years after that, they’ll make a coming out retirement one that tries really hard to fix what number five fucked up. ::END SPOILERS:: I found the kid parts of the movie fairly tedious for the greater majority of the movie, but then it started getting to me towards the end of the movie, causing me to get a little bit choked up about it. And before you go calling me a pussy, think to yourself why movies about daddy issues affect me so much and, if you know me, you’ll understand … and THEN you can call me a pussy. On a much more manly note, the robot fights are pretty spectacular and incredibly gripping, especially when you take into account that they’re robots with no feeling or emotion. I guess it’s because you kind of get attached to Atom, even though he only mimics movements of people around him. Of course, that lead to something that I found sickening on every occasion, but it still popped up about 3 or 4 times: Max dancing with Atom. Charlie comes up with this idea when he sees Max dancing with Atom outside of a hotel once and decides to incorporate it as a gimmick before the fight to get the audience on their side. I grant that this would probably work for some people, but I just found it annoying. Get to the robot smashing! Speaking of ::RESPOILER:: The ending bout worked for me too. I originally predicted that they would need to defeat the adaptable, super powerful champion, Zeus, by doing something unpredictable. I guessed that would be dancing to confuse Zeus. Thankfully, that was not the course they took. His remote controls damaged, Max comes up with the idea to have Atom mimic Charlie, so that Charlie would be doing the fighting via proxy. Charlie doesn’t believe in himself, Max gets him to, and though they don’t win, they whoop that ass. It’s another predictable strategy, just not the one I expected, but I thought it was very well done. ::END RESPOILERS::
The cast mostly does a fantastic job for what I went into this movie expecting. Hugh Jackman’s performance was great, but it was difficult to do with the writing being a little soft. You hate him to some degree for about an hour and a half, getting to like his character for only the last half hour of the movie. This guy basically sells his son, who he’s either never met or not seen in 90% of the kid’s life. Then, Max turns out to be more business savvy than Charlie is because Charlie’s so desperate for money that he’ll throw a robot he’s never used into a main event fight, never thinking about why a legendary champion robot could be purchased for less money than he was fixing to win in that one fight. Maybe there was something wrong with it, Charlie. These kinds of decisions lead him to get in a bad financial situation, which in turn leads to more bad decisions, which in turn leads to him getting his ass kicked by the guy that played the Blob, probably mostly in retaliation for being in that shitty Wolverine movie. But I got really confused by this beating they gave him because Charlie and Max were getting their asses beat fairly close to a truck that contained their giant, ass-kicking robot! I’m sure there’s some law against using your giant robot to beat up a guy (and I’m sure Asimov wrote these stupid laws), but there’s also a law against beating up a man and his son with your two goons. I’d call that a push. I never really liked Dakota Goyo, but I’m not sure if that’s because he was bad or just because I hate kids. I do know that I hate the kid in the movie that’s supposed to be smarter than a kid his age ever really is, but is also always trying to act tough when I know, for a fact, that I would beat the shit out of that kid. Not so tough now, are you Dakota! One thing that annoyed me about him was that he was instantly able to speak Japanese and disassemble a robot. How was he able to do this? He plays video games. Well so do I, and I also watch TONS of Japanese Anime porn, and I only know how to say “No” and “Stop raping me” in Japanese. Thankfully, I’ve had to use those two phrases a lot, but I still call bullshit on this movie for it. Evangeline Lilly was also in this movie, and pretty attractive as well, but there’s not a whole lot more to be said about that. She did, at one point, say that her plan was “trying not to let (her) gym die”, but that is not a plan. That’s something you need a plan to do, so you’re apparently in the same boat as Charlie. The performances of the robots in this movie can roughly be equated to that of Jet Li: they’re stiff and can’t really act, but they are good in the fight scenes. I never really did understand how they justified the robots getting punch drunk, though. They don’t actually have brains. I could understand parts of them not functioning from being broken, but not them staggering around the ring because they’ve been hit in the head too many times.
I was quite shocked to find that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. Sure, it was pretty easy to make fun of because some of it is so ridiculous and pointless, but their story had won me over by the end of the movie, and the robot fights had me from the word “go”. A lot of fun as an action movie, and pretty solid as a movie in general. I say go rent this movie. I’m probably going to outright purchase it, but I understand if you don’t trust me. I’ve lied to you before. OR HAVE I?! Real Steel gets “I want you to fight for me! That’s all I ever wanted!” out of “You know you’re bringing him home in pieces, right?”
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!
I Am Number Four (2011)
I Am … Not Interested
The timing of my decision to start doing movie reviews became fairly unfortunate when my friend Cody suggested I review the movie I Am Number Four. The reason it was so unfortunate is because I had already watched this movie, it was completely lackluster, and now I must do it again to review it. Well, here goes anyways. I Am Number Four stars Alex Pettyfer, Timothy Olyphant (or Olyphantastic, as Kevin Smith called him), Dianna Agron, Teresa Palmer, Callan McAuliffe, and Kevin Durand (who I know from his portrayal of the Blob in the Wolverine movie I don’t like to call an X-Men movie).
At least 6 aliens have come to Earth, their planet having been destroyed by a race known as the Mogadorians, or as I call them the Overactians. We follow, of course, Number 4, otherwise known to us as John Smith (Alex Pettyfer) and his protector Henri (Timothy Olyphantastic). Their identities are compromised by 4’s shiny calf scar and a combination of iPhones and the interwebs. So they have to pick up and move. Turns out his shiny calf (not a golden idol, I mean a scar on his calf that started glowing) meant that one of the other 6 was killed by the Overactians. The move to Paradise, Ohio and John enrolls himself in the most cliched, John Hughes-ian school in recent memory. Here he meets the the bully jock, the quirky artsy girl (Dianna Agron), and the picked on nerdy kid (Callan McAuliffe). Being the good guy, he befriends the two outcasts. This pisses off the jock because he used to date artsy girl. Eventually the Overactians descend upon Paradise and the whole group, plus Number 6 (Teresa Palmer), must overcome the enemy.
Not a lot of this movie works for me. The writing is totally cliched and obvious. Like I said, the high school 4 goes to is right out of a John Hughes film. I’ve been to high school before and I never really saw any of this stuff going down. I could’ve been considered either a nerd or artsy girl … I mean guy … back in high school, but no one ever knocked my books out of my hands or set up elaborate exploding paint pranks in my locker. Hell, I didn’t even have a locker!
The acting pretty much tops off at mediocre. No one really stood out. One of the weird things I thought about towards the end of the movie involve Number 6. This chick shows up in the very beginning of the movie at the house Number 4 just evacuated and decides to blow it up to cover their tracks. They work really hard to make her appear to be a badass here; having her walking out in slow mo, sunglasses on, and the building blowing up behind her. Then you don’t see this chick again until the last 10 minutes of the movie, where they again try to sell her as a badass by giving her cool powers. If this chick is supposed to be so cool, why not give her a little screen time? As I said, the Mogadorians are totally hamming it up as the alien enemies. And they look weird too. Their main physical feature that sets them apart is having gills next to their nose, which apparently cause them to speak in a ridiculous way. On a positive note, the fight scene near the end is decent, the CG is actually pretty good, and they have some nice parkour in the movie.
So, not a lot of this movie made sense to me. First off, the names of everyone. How clever is it to just give people numbers? Was it a placeholder so you could go back and give them names later but you forgot and the deadline on the script ran out? And how angry would you be if you were Number 2? The poop jokes would never end. “Hey, here comes Number Two.” “Oh you guys were looking for me?” “No, I was just saying I haveta take a shit pretty soon.” “…I hate you guys.” Another weird thing is when Number 4 meets the artsy girl. She introduces herself and he does as well, introducing himself as John Smith. She gets all butt-hurt and says something like “Okay, you don’t want to tell me your name. That’s fine.” Bitch, you don’t think there may be a few people whose name really IS John Smith? They’re super common names, that’s why they even use it as a unidentified person’s name. The biggest thing that bothered me while watching the movie was the relationship between 4 and artsy chick. Why is he even falling in love? Aren’t you an alien?! What kind of horrible abomination are you looking to create? And do you even know if our reproductive organs match up?
The best thing I can say about this movie is that it is completely lackluster as a movie, but probably would’ve made a pretty decent Saturday morning TV show. It’s got a lot of Power Rangers to it. Probably Ben 10 too, but I’ve never seen it. They have these powers called Legacies and it seems they can make up new ones on the spot. This is how they show up. They are all apparently extra agile and strong, 6 has a shield of some sort, 4 makes his hands glow, 4 learns to blast and grab things with his glowing hands, 6 can teleport, and then apparently 4 can blast another Number Ranger with his hands to “power them up”. The glowing hands create light, heat, and concussive force, but if he decides they can also gently cradle a girl that just fell off a roof. They can just decide whatever they want to be able to do. Tell me this format wouldn’t get kids on board on TV every week.
This movie seemed to be after an audience stupider than myself. Between it’s hip music, pretty people, and parkour, it adds up to a formula to appeal to the dumber masses. It’s not horrible, but it’s not worth watching either. Make a TV show out of it, get some kids to watch it, ’cause I won’t for a third time. And Heaven help you if you make a sequel to this like the end of the movie hinted at. I will never forgive you. I give this movie “Red Bull is for pussies” out of 1060.
And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others. It may help me get better.
Robert Reviews Stuff 