Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

Ride or Die, Remember?

I was personally not that interested in seeing the movie that I am reviewing. This is the sixth part in a movie series I have been mostly disinterested in all the way through. Whichever ones I saw of the first four did nothing for me, though I did enjoy the fifth one for what it was. When they released the sixth one, I still couldn’t muster any interest in it because 1/5 is still not a great ratio. But my friend Greg said that the sixth was worth seeing, more like the fifth than the other four that preceded. Jesus I’m sick of typing numbers! Let me do just one more as I review Fast & Furious 6, written by Chris Morgan, directed by Justin Lin, and starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Luke Evans, Gina Carano, Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, John Ortiz, Joe Taslim, Clara Paget, Kim Kold, Jordana Brewster, and Elsa Pataky.

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his gang – Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson), Tej Parker (Chris Bridges), Han Seoul-Oh (Sung Kang), and Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot) – have retired after becoming rich from their successful heist in Rio, and because Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and Dom’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) have spawned. DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and his partner Riley Hicks (Gina Carano) have other things in mind for them, such as taking down a former British Special Forces soldier turned bad, Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), before he builds something bad. But Hobbs would need something big to make Dom come out of retirement and get the band back together, and something much more important than that being the cliché that starts all of these sorts of movies. Hobbs has just the thing. Dom’s former girlfriend and current amnesiac Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) is a member of Shaw’s team. Let’s get these cliché’s started!

I didn’t go into this movie with any expectations, and I was right. Story is probably never going to be a strong point of the Fast movies, and I’m sure no one goes in with expectations of anything different. But the story of this movie was quite a trudge for me. How hard can you dig into the cliché barrel in one movie? Coming out of retirement. Getting the band back together. Amnesia. It’s like soap opera quality writing with a few more explosions and face-punches. And we got the band back together on the last movie! So you’re not only using clichés, you’re RE-using clichés! And if elements of your story hadn’t already been done to death, you could only manage passing sense with your own story elements. You have an important mission to accomplish, but you can take time out in the middle for a random street race? I know you could argue that Dom did it thinking that Letty would be there, but what was her justification for it? I think the only real argument you could make was that this is a Fast movie so they felt obligated to do it, whether it made sense or not. Maybe they just did it to keep the audience from getting bored, but it didn’t work on me. I was well into bored by the time Shaw and Dom met up after that for their scheduled dick-measuring contest. It also made no damned sense that Brian went back to LA to find out how Letty got involved. He flies back, gets himself arrested, gets himself thrown into solitary confinement, all just to talk to a mob boss and find out what bullshit they made up to justify Letty surviving the explosion that supposedly killed her. But then he returns and Dom says that information was just for him, and even Letty doesn’t care to hear about it, just accepting Brian’s apology and moving on. So that was a giant waste of time. The one-liners in the movie were hit-and-miss, but more miss than anything else. I liked Letty’s line about Team Muscle and Team Pussy, but a later line of “That ain’t a plane; it’s a planet” is just awful.

Let’s face facts: most people that are interested in this movie have no interest in the things I wrote about in the story paragraph. Hell, some of them can’t even read it. So let’s talk about the action. It was decent. The greater majority of the action in the bulk of the movie was nothing altogether spectacular to me, but I would give Fast 6 the credit for having a climax of the movie even more ridiculous and spectacular than the last movie, but it does take a little away from it that they spoil it right in the trailer. So they’ll take a plane down with cars and cables, eh? I don’t know if that’s physically possible, but I already know it’ll happen. And I didn’t even search out trailers for this movie! Spoilers were forced upon me! But I’ve also never really had that much interest in car stuff, so I started liking a little better when they threw a tank into the mix. I did think the race car was an interesting idea, using its leverage to topple opposition cars, but I also didn’t understand how it was so hard to take out when its wheels were completely exposed. The face-punching stuff was pretty good when it happened as well. The fight inside the plane was pretty exciting, and kind of reminded me of Uncharted, but I really spent the entire fight waiting for the inevitable moment when Hobbs threw down against Shaw’s giant muscle dude. I also found myself bothered by the fights between Letty and Hicks, because Letty came out on top both times. I know Letty was more the hero of the story and so she should win, but I do not accept Michelle Rodriguez winning a fight against Gina Carano. No matter how much Michelle Rodriguez acts like a man; Gina Carano would beat that ass.

Most of the performances were entirely underwhelming, as expected. Vin Diesel is rarely my cup of tea. He always talks like he’s being choked by his own neck muscles, or like the lady with a tracheotomy in the anti-smoking commercials. I’ve seen Paul Walker act once. I’ve seen him in many movies, but I’ve only seen him pull off acting once. This was not that movie. He wasn’t particularly bad in this one; he was just a non-entity. I do, however, tend to like Dwayne Johnson whenever I see him. He’s got a lot of charisma and is ripped as hell. He outshines everyone else in this movie easily, but that also doesn’t really seem like it’d be that difficult.

Fast & Furious 6 came slightly below meeting the expectations that I didn’t have for it. The story was cliché and predictable, and the acting was mostly underwhelming. The action was decent enough, and probably much more interesting to people that like action involving cars, but I personally was getting bored with most of the movie right up to the climax that was ridiculous and spectacular enough to make this movie just pass as watchable. If you like the other movies in the series, you’ve probably already seen it. Otherwise, I’d recommend this movie for a rental. Fast & Furious 6 gets “This code you live by makes you predictable” out of “If that’s what it takes. I just wanna race.”

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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.”

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BloodRayne (2006)

Would You Stop Throwing Things at me?

On a day when most people are going out to see the Avengers, I chose to watch three movies spawned by Uwe Boll, a man whose top rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes pulls down a whopping 11%.  I say this only as proof that I make poor decisions.  In actual fact, I was simply unable to go and see Avengers on the opening day and will be putting it off until next week.  My anger over this leads me to want to take it out on some movies I know to be super shitty.  No better place to look than an Uwe Boll movie for super shittiness.  The man who is potentially the worst director of our time and the Ed Wood of our decade has hurt me more than many others by not only making shitty movies, but making them out of properties I was fond of from the video game world.  Today’s movie is one of these movies.  This movie is BloodRayne, written by Guinevere Turner, directed by Uwe Boll, and starring Kristanna Loken, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Matthew Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Billy Zane, Will Sanderson, Meat Loaf, and Geraldine Chaplin.

Rayne (Kristanna Loken) is a half human, half vampire, all carnival attraction known as a Dhampir.  She is the spawn that resulted from the Vampire King Kagan (Ben Kingsley) raping her mother, and then later killing her.  She escapes from the carnival when one of the workers tries to rape her and takes it upon herself to kill a lot of the people on the way out.  But at least she gets a sweet pair of swords out of it.  This gains the attention of three members of the vampire hunting group called the Brimstone Society and Sebastian (Matthew Davis), Vladimir (Michael Madsen), and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez) set out to find her.  With some advice from a fortune teller, Rayne sets off to find an eye, a rib, and a heart that belonged to a powerful vampire named Belial so that she can face and defeat Kagan.

Fuck you, movie.  And fuck you, Uwe Boll!  It’s no surprise to anyone that’s seen some of his movies that Uwe Boll is a terrible filmmaker.  What can surprise is how much his terribleness can seep into everything around him, making ideas that were good into shit and making actors that were great forget how to act completely.  There is scarcely anything within this movie that could stand as a reason for anyone to watch it ever.  The story of the movie is dumb and disjointed.  It’s been quite some time since I last played a BloodRayne game, but as far as I can remember, this movie has nothing to do with those games.  The only thing in common is that it stars an attractive lady vampire named Rayne.  Then it’s a bit of origin story which turns into a training thing with some junk about finding body parts of an old dead vampire.  You won’t be interested in any of it.  A lot of what Uwe tends to do is realize after the fact that either the scene does not really explain what was going on or the people that would be willingly watching this movie are stupid so he adds in some ADR dialogue over the scene to try to explain it, whether the person’s mouth is moving or not.  He does this early on when people are riding their horses through a scene and some really bad ADR is talking over the scene and even worse later when a guy is examining someone and says, “He’s dead,” even though his lips aren’t moving.  The dialogue is just as bad as the rest of the story.  There’s one part where someone is telling Rayne that, “Dhampirs are rarely the happy product of a vampire and a human,” and Rayne yells, “You lie!” at her.  So, wait…  Are you trying to make the argument that they ARE mostly from happy relationships, or did you just think this was the best time to get indignant even though you weren’t listening to me?  They also get phrases wrong, like when Katarin says something is a “bitter threat”.  The threat isn’t bitter, lady.  The threat doesn’t have emotions.  You may have a bitter ENEMY, or even just a terrible threat, but … oh what’s the point.  You’re dumb.  There’s also a lot of stupid going on in the movie, like when we cut from one scene to a random bit of Kagan biting a random young girl, then just moving on.  This girl never comes back into the story and the scene served no purpose.  It was almost like they didn’t believe that we believed them when they said that Kagan was a vampire so they had to prove it.  And how is it that, in bad movies, guards will kill anybody unless it serves the story for the people to get captured?  Sebastian and Vladimir had gone into a pile of enemies with their swords drawn and started killing them, but then let themselves get overtaken and they were captured, even though Kagan had given no orders to take them prisoner.  But don’t worry: this is an action movie!  Oh wait … the action is crap too.  There was no evidence that anyone tried to choreograph these fights at all.  They just gave the actors some fake swords and told them to get in there and swing them.  But all of the actors swung the swords as if they were really worried about hitting someone with the fake swords.  I understand that, but you’re in a movie.  You at least have to make it LOOK like you want to kill your opponent.  The sex scene is the only reason I can think of to legitimately watch this movie, but only because Kristanna Loken is hot and she has nice boobs.  The sex and the romance come completely out of left field.  I guess they could’ve fallen in love because they’d both lost their parents, but I think that would’ve just made me mad if I was Rayne.  She says that her mom was killed by Kagan and Sebastian comes back with BOTH of his parents were killed.  Alright, I guess you win the sob story game, you son of a (dead) bitch.  The ending also pisses me off, but I’m not going to waste my time putting up spoiler alerts.  I don’t want you to watch this movie.  The ending was vaguely reminiscent of the first Conan movie because Rayne is the only person still alive at the end, so she sits down on Kagan’s throne as the camera zooms slowly into her face.  Then we start cutting to various random scenes that were particularly violent from the rest of the movie, as if the movie was going to start over, but in slow motion and even more annoying.  I was about to open up my wrists until I realized that it wasn’t starting over.  But, as I think about it, maybe the ending fits the movie.  Nothing suits a terrible movie better than a terrible ending.

The ambience of the movie was also mostly crap.  The settings and the costumes were the only things that I wouldn’t judge too harshly … for the most part.  Rayne’s outfit pissed me off though.  Not at first, though.  I liked her original outfit.  It looked like it did in the game.  It was skintight and sexy.  Near the end of the movie, they present her with a new, and vastly inferior, outfit.  It looked to be leather, but looked pre-worn and really dirty, even fresh out of the wrappings it came in.  And the pants seemed to have been sized for an aging soccer mom as they did not fit snugly to Kristanna’s beautiful ass.  The weapons all looked really awful too.  Most of them were really fakey swords, a couple didn’t even look like any decent sword design, and they never captured Rayne’s signature swords.  They were close in the beginning, but then she breaks them and they’re replaced with ones that are just pieces of metal that were clearly rounded on the tips, so as to be not much more effective than fighting with butter knives.  Boll also doesn’t have a terribly good grasp on how to make sound work for a movie.  Screams sounded goofy when they should’ve been emotional, impactful musical stings were noticeably absent on scenes where they would have helped sell the emotion of a scene, and none of it sounded good.  It’s the kind of thing you don’t really pay attention to until you see it done really poorly, so you definitely notice it here.

I think you’ve all gotten the general idea of this review already, so it comes as no surprise to you that the performances were crap as well.  And that is even more tragic because they had some great actors in this movie that gave the worst performance of their lives.  I’m not talking about Kristanna Loken, of course.  She’s not known for her acting.  She’s known for the sexy.  She brings that much to some parts of the movie, especially her uncomfortable tits-out sex scene.  Her best performance to date was definitely Terminator 3 because she didn’t have to speak.  She delivers lines poorly and never really brings emotion, like when she says, “I WILL stand a chance against Kagan.”  It’s hard to explain it here, but the emphasis was on “will” so it seemed like it should have preceded a statement of more confidence like, “I WILL kill the living bejesus out of Kagan.”  It doesn’t really sound right when it’s more akin to, “I WILL give it a shot, but probably die.  Please don’t make me do this!”  Ben Kingsley is exactly the kind of person who shocks me with his performance in this.  This guy won an Academy Award!  He was in Schindler’s List!  …AND BloodRayne!  Why?!  He gives a thoroughly unimpressive performance to this movie as well.  It made me wonder if they just said, “Why bother?  Uwe wouldn’t know a good performance if I hit him over the head with the Academy Award I won for doing it.”  I would say Michael Madsen would fit into that category as well.  I’ve seen him be amazing in movies before.  I’ve also seen him not impress before.  He went with that one for this movie.  I laughed really hard at one point where he was running up the stairs with Matthew Davis in tow and an enemy jumped out of the door, basically onto Madsen.  Madsen just kept going as if it hadn’t happened, because Davis was the one that was supposed to kill this guy that clearly just popped through the door a couple of seconds too early.

BloodRayne is an awful movie.  Uwe Boll did the majority of the terribleness in this thing, offering up a horrible and disjointed story that has little to do with the source material while simultaneously displaying his ineptitude behind the camera by allowing lame fights, awful acting, and terrible everything get captured onto film.  The only thing in this movie worth seeing is Kristanna Loken’s boobs, but you can live without them.  They’re not that nice.  Plus, you can just Google that.  You could stream this movie on Netflix but … wait … No you can’t!  You are not allowed to stream this movie!  I forbid it!  If you want to make fun of a movie, any Uwe Boll movie sets you up for plenty of that.  And, if you want to get into making movies, you will realize that you can do it so much better than someone that actually makes money doing it right now.  BloodRayne gets “I would sooner rot in your dungeon than sit at your table” out of “Your form is weak, lacking passion.”

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