Judge Dredd (1995)

I AM THE LAW!

Strangely enough, I had never gotten around to seeing today’s movie, even though it’s one of the classic representations of a big dumb action movie.  It wasn’t recommended or anything, but I know it would’ve been as soon as one of my readers thought of the movie again.  I decided to jump the gun.  When I was reminded of the movie by Kevin Smith and Ralph Garmin on Hollywood Babble-On, I decided that I should watch it post haste.  This is a movie based on a comic book that I’ve never read, so I’m going into this movie clean.  So here comes my review of Judge Dredd, based on a comic book created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, written for the screen by William Wisher and Steven E. de Souza, directed by Danny Cannon, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Armand Assante, Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow, Diane Lane, Rob Schneider, Joan Chen, Balthazar Getty, Joanna Miles, Mitch Ryan, and James Earl Jones.

As in most things from the future, Earth has gone uber-shitty and humanity is living in walled off Mega-Cities.  Justice is maintained by an elite group of police officers/judges/jury/executioners known as Judges.  One of the best of these Judges is Judge Joseph Dredd (Sylvester Stallone).  He shows up to end a riot and save Judge Hershey (Diane Lane).  He also ends up arresting the recently released hacker, Herman Ferguson (Rob Schneider), even though he wasn’t actually involved in the riot.  Rico (Armand Assante), a former Judge that went nuts, escapes from prison, dons a counterfeit of Dredd’s Judge uniform, and guns down a news reporter (Mitch Ryan).  This murder gets pinned on Dredd, but his mentor Chief Judge Fargo (Max von Sydow) intervenes by retiring in order to grant Dredd leniency.  Instead of death, Dredd gets life in prison.  On his way to jail, he reconnects with Leo Getz … I mean Fergee, in order to keep the audience nice and annoyed, then their ship gets shot down and Dredd and Fergee get captured by a group of cannibals, the Angel Gang.  Meanwhile, Judge Griffin (Jurgen Prochnow) works with Rico to create a lot of chaos and get the other council members to activate the Janus project to genetically engineer the perfect Judge, which in this case will be Rico because of his interruption.  I bet Judge Dredd is going to have something to say about that.  And it’ll probably be dumb.

For a big dumb action movie, this movie was acceptable.  Of course, “acceptable” for a big dumb action movie is pretty shitty for a movie in general.  The idea and the story of this movie are good enough, but the greater majority of the dialogue sucked.  I can’t really knock the movie for having a pretty typical dystopian future setting because (though it’s played out) I’ve liked some movies that use a similar setting, so I have to be fair to the ones that aren’t that great in those settings.  I also like the idea of them making the justice system more efficient by making their cops the judge, jury, and executioners.  The rest of the story was okay as well, with the whole cloning thing and the betrayal in the government thing.  This stuff is probably all taken from the comic books, so I give them no credit.  The dialogue is something that I imagine they wrote, and it mostly sucked.  90% of the things people said was, “I AM (insert any word here).”  “I AM THE LAW!” was the most popular, and they said it a lot.  Of course, there were many other things that were really stupid.  Take, for instance, when Dredd turns his gun to grenade mode (without the barrel changing size at all, somehow), and shoots a door five feet away.  One of the accompanying Judges applauds him with, “Nice Shot!”  Apparently, this other Judge is such a bad shot that hitting the broad side of a barn from five feet away is spectacular.  It’s okay, he gets killed shortly after this.  I felt better.  Later, when Dredd is fighting a robotically enhanced member of the Angel gang, and very angry because he just stabbed his mentor, he ignores the guns laying around the room, ignores the gun he was just holding, and chooses to fight the guy with a stick.  Of course, it’s unfair to assume Sly would do something intelligent.  Later still, Judge Griffin shoots himself in the arm with a pistol to make it look like Dredd attacked him, even though Dredd was carrying a shotgun and no one seemed to care anyway.  So he just shot himself in the arm for no reason whatsoever.  And near the end of the movie, Rico activates the clones to attack Dredd and Hershey.  The clones pop out of their containers to frighten people a time or two, and then are completely forgotten.  No one ever dealt with the clones!  They completely forgot to tie up that part of the story!  They didn’t even have Fergee and Hershey run in and say, “Oh man, it sure was difficult killing all of those clones while you fought Rico, but we did it.  You should’ve been there!”  The movie does look good though.  The graphics were way better than I would’ve expected from the movie.  I especially liked Rico’s robot body guard.  It had a nice look, but it never moved in a smooth manner.

The greater majority of the performances in this movie did not impress, but the other ones were plain awful.  So they have that going for them.  Sylvester Stallone was … in the movie.  Thankfully for him, the character he was playing was stiff and emotionless, so he didn’t have to try and fail at acting.  He was mostly there to deliver horrible lines and throw punches at people.  That mostly worked out for him, but at one point, when he was fighting Armand Assante, he threw a punch that was so ridiculously high so that Armand could duck under it that I thought he would dislocate his shoulder.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie with Armand Assante in it before, so I can’t compare the uber-hammed up performance he gave here to any of his other ones.  And oh boy was it over the top.  It couldn’t even see the top from where it was.  Even the music was confused by him.  When we first saw his character in prison, the music swelled up as he turned around as if we were supposed to have any idea who this guy was.  It’s like, “BUM bum BUM!  This is how you should feel now!  We’ll explain later!”  Diane Lane was pretty good in the movie, and attractive as always, but didn’t do that much.  She did get in a fight with another really attractive girl, Joan Chen (I wouldn’t have thought I’d have reviewed two things with her in them), and it made me wonder why a trained Judge was having such trouble fighting some random Asian lady.  Rob Schneider was the Leo Getz of this movie, and by that I mean that he was a failed attempt at comic relief that wouldn’t shut up, but still had to be around for almost every scene.

Judge Dredd isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fair enough distraction for two hours.  The premise is good, the story is fine, the writing is awful, and the performances are what you’d expect.  At least the thing looked pretty good.  Because it can’t be streamed from Netflix, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend you go through any trouble to find this movie.  If it was on Netflix streaming, and you had nothing better to do, I would recommend it as background noise, or something to make fun of, if you only had to click a few times to get to it.  But as it is, no real reason to watch this thing.  Judge Dredd gets “It’s better than prison” out of “Emotions … there ought to be a law against them.”

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Jack and Jill (2011)

This is the Guy Who’s Gonna do a Dunkin’ Donuts Commercial.

Today’s movie was not a request.  Instead, it sprang forth as a sign of my own self-loathing.  I’m pretty sure that everybody that saw the trailer for this movie knew better than to see it, but I saw it and said “I wanna make fun of that.”  That was, of course, once I had figured out that the trailer wasn’t a joke, like some Funny or Die mock trailer.  When I found out it was a real movie, it was on.  But there was no way in Hell that I was going to the theaters to see it.  Instead, I waited patiently for the moment it popped up in a RedBox near me and called to me.  And now the time has come to talk about Jack and Jill, written by Steve Koren, Robert Smigel, and Adam Sandler, directed by Dennis Dugan, and starring Adam Sandler, Katie Holmes, Al Pacino, Rohan Chand, Elodie Tougne, Eugenio Derbez, Tim Meadows, Nick Swardson, Allen Covert, Valerie Maheffey, Gad Elmaleh, and Gary Valentine, with cameos by Dana Carvey, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Norm MacDonald, Regis Philbin, Shaquille O’Neal, Lamar Odom, Bruce Jenner, Johnny Depp, Drew Carey, Jared Fogle (The Subway Jared), and John McEnroe.

Jack Sadelstein (Adam Sandler) works in advertising and lives with his wife, Erin (Katie Holmes), and his two children, Gary (Rohan Chand) and Sofia (Elodie Tougne).  His twin sister, Jill (don’t make me say it) comes to visit his family for Thanksgiving.  She’s annoying as shit, causing Jack to snap at her occasionally, which causes her to extend her vacation so that she doesn’t leave on a bad note.  Jack is also stressed because his work wants him to get Al Pacino (himself) to do a commercial for Dunkin’ Donuts and their new drink, the Dunkachino.  Luckily for Jack, Al Pacino develops a crush on Jill when they first meet.  But Jill, even though she’s incredibly lonely, is having none of Scarface and his tomfoolery.  That’s when shit gets really crazy.

The truth about this movie is a rather surprising one: It’s not as painfully bad as I expected from the commercials and trailers.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s also not good and not very funny, but it wasn’t PAINFULLY so.  It was just another mediocre Adam Sandler comedy (as he’s prone to making these days) with a shitty premise and a good meaning to it.  The premise of the movie seems like Adam Sandler just found out about the phenomenon of twins, ran into the office of his writing partners, and exclaimed “Did you guys know that two people of different genders can look exactly alike?  I have such the movie for you guys!”  And then it was off and running.  Putting Adam in a dress, having him do a voice we’ve heard him do before for her, and having him play opposite himself like Mike Myers.  And then they needed a conflict.  How about one as original as “siblings don’t get along”?  BRILLIANT!  The whole Al Pacino subplot is original, but many people thought it was insane for Al Pacino to fall in love with a female version of Adam Sandler.  That part I can actually get behind.  Pacino seems that crazy.  Then you tie the whole thing up with some “love your siblings for who they are” mess and you have a movie.  All of this would have been forgivable if they made the movie funny, but they didn’t.  The only part that made me laugh was in one of their cameos.  It’s at the basketball game where Jack is trying to talk to Pacino and Jill doesn’t really know who he, nor the person he’s watching the game with, are.  The only funny part of the movie is when Jill asks the friend (are you listening, Loni?) Johnny Depp if he was in Duran Duran, and Johnny says “Yeah, that was me.”  I’ve just saved you two hours!  Except for Loni, that is, who will now watch this movie just because Johnny Depp is in it for two minutes and has words coming out of his mouth.  The whole movie winds up being thoroughly “blah”, with a few moments that are cute, but just as many moments that are painfully not funny.  Jack’s son, Gary, has some strange habit of taping things to himself that is stupid and completely insane, but they managed to get a little bit of almost funny out if it, like when he tapes a salt shaker to his head and Jill uses the shaker while it’s still on his head.  Near the end of the movie, there’s a part where Jack and Jill show off their fantastic jump roping abilities together that is just painfully not funny.  There’s also an entire scene at the picnic of Jack’s gardener that was so blatantly stereotypical that even I came close to finding it really offensive, and I’m not even Mexican (thank God).

The performances did what they could with what was written, but never really impressed either.  Adam Sandler is probably the most to blame for this movie, having written it and for playing two roles in it.  As Jack, he was mainly just normal, but never really realistic.  As Jill, he was annoying and about as far from realistic as you could get.  The problem for me of making the sister so utterly annoying is that you don’t really sympathize with her when Jack is rude to her.  I would be too!  Al Pacino played himself like I want to imagine him: completely insane.  He had a couple of entertaining parts, like when Jill accidentally broke his Oscar and said, “Oh, I’m sure you have others,” and he said, “You’d think so, but no.”  Maybe it’s because you’re doing movies like Jack and Jill now, and not Godfathers and Scarfaces.  I also found him entertaining at the very end of the movie when he was in a bar dressed as Don Quixote.  I like Tim Meadows, Nick Swardson, Dana Carvey, Norm MacDonald, and David Spade, but none of them really brought any comedy to this beyond David Spade being in drag just like Sandler.  As with most Sandler movies, there are a huge number of cameos in this movie, but none (beyond Johnny Depp) ever did anything for me, it was just interesting that they were there in the first place.

Jack and Jill isn’t as bad as you expect it to be.  It’s just regular bad.  It’s a pretty bad premise to base a movie on, it’s not that great of a story, and the only part I found really funny was delivered by a cameo actor.  I can’t surprise any of you by saying that I recommend you watch this movie, even for a dollar.  You can’t really mock a comedy MST3k style because comedies are already trying to be funny and any joke you’d make would just be “That was dumb.”  That being the case, there’s no reason to see this.  Jack and Jill gets “Busted, disgusted, never to be trusted!” out of “We play games, we eat, we steal white people’s money.”

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Demolition Man (1993)

We’re Police Officers!  We’re Not Trained to Handle This Kind of Violence!

When the request for today’s movie came from my friend Loni, I says “Fuck yes.”  I not only know this movie, but I dig on this movie hardcore to the max.  Is this a smart movie?  Hell no!  Is it comprised solely of the greatest actors of our time?  Not by a long shot!  Does it have a good message?  No, not really.  But is it fun?  Shit yes.  A big dumb action movie if there ever was one, I give you my review of Demolition Man, written by Peter M. Lenkov, Robert Scott Reneau, and Daniel Waters, directed by Marco Brambilla, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Bob Gunton, Denis Leary, Glenn Shadix, Benjamin Bratt, Bill Cobbs, Rob Schneider, Jesse Ventura, and Grand L. Bush.

LA is a pretty shitty place in 1996.  I don’t say “This movie’s version of LA” ’cause LA is still a pretty shitty place.  Either way, violent criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) is holding a bunch of people hostage and only one person is willing to do anything about it.  That man is Detective John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone).  This badass mamma jamma busts in on Phoenix and starts whooping that ass, getting the building completely destroyed in the fray.  Turns out that Phoenix’s hostages were not as dead as he led Spartan to believe, and Spartan is now responsible for their deaths.  Both men get put into cryogenic prison, Spartan for 70 years, Phoenix for life.  Somehow, in 2032, Phoenix comes up for parole first, and uses that (plus some new skills of mysterious origin) to escape.  The world has become such a peaceful place and none of them know how to deal with Phoenix’s level of violence.  Policeman Zachary Lamb (Bill Cobbs) suggests that Spartan be thawed out, being the best person at dealing with Phoenix.  Obsessed with the old days, Lieutenant Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock) is totally on board.  Chief George Earle (Bob Gunton) is less enthused.  But the man that saved the world and made it so safe for everyone, Doctor Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), told the Chief he could do anything within his power to stop Phoenix, and so Spartan is revived.  Spartan needs to figure out this new time, while simultaneously trying to stop Phoenix from killing Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary), who he feels strangely compelled to kill for some odd reason.

Not a smart movie, but definitely a fun movie.  Many critics would hate on this movie for somewhat predictable story, some pretty awful dialogue, and mediocre performances, but that’s not what I offer you.  I speak for the Every Man, for the working class.  I dig this movie for it’s action and it’s fun.  No one goes into this movie expecting to be blown away, but instead to see lots of people get blown away.  There’s a lot of stuff you expect from this movie, and they don’t shy away from giving it to you.  The characters all have one personality trait because that’s all they need.  They love to throw out one-liners, which are hit and miss, and Bullock is going to throw them out, but get them very wrong.  When Sly says “You’re on TV” before hitting Snipes with a TV set, that’s not a great line.  When Simon says “You’re dead” and Sly says “You forgot to say ‘Simon says'” before electrocuting him, that works.  When Bullock says “Let’s go down there and blow this guy”, apparently having forgotten “away” at the end, I couldn’t help but think the movie would have been more interesting if Bullock and Sly went down their and blew Snipes, Brown Bunny style!  I don’t want to see it, but you couldn’t say the movie didn’t surprise you.  I think Sly may have also responded to “See you in Hell” with a super-stinging “Not” retort.  This was part of the dialogue during the last battle between Phoenix and Spartan, where the dialogue just seemed to have been taken out of a “What you’d expect to hear in an action movie” book and randomly thrown together, with no regard to if they made sense.  I really liked when Sly says “You’re gonna regret this the rest of your life.  Both seconds of it”.  I also thought it was really funny that they were talking about Schwarzenegger having been president, which was such a ridiculous concept in 1993.  Not as ridiculous to us in 2012, especially the ones of us from California.  The story of the movie will not surprise you, but you’ll probably enjoy it.  It’s just a fun movie.  It’s like a classic action movie that was going on in the background of Back to the Future Part 2.  They try to throw a little ill-conceived message in the end about not wanting the world to be so overly safe that you can’t be who you want to be, but there should be SOME control.  It’s a bit “Duh”, but they don’t waste too much of your time beating you over the head with it.  It actually looks pretty good too.  It does look fairly futuristic, and throws a couple of cool ideas in there.  They got a good deal of mileage out of the swear machine, cool stun batons, and self driving cars.  Pretty interesting and good looking.

This movie does not raise many deep, philosophical questions, but one certainly has stuck with me since I first saw the movie: How do the three seashells work?  I have a couple theories.  The first, and most obvious, is that the shells are for scooping.  Scoop once for each cheek, and one right down the middle.  This would seem rather unsanitary, so I would assume they’re replaced into some kind of cleaning apparatus that completely disinfects them.  This doesn’t seem like the best butt-cleaning solution because it’s really not much better than what we do now with toilet paper.  Perhaps better for the environment that we’re not wasting paper, but I assume much worse because they’re reused.  Another solution could be that these seashells weren’t actually seashells.  Spartan could have seen something that resembled seashells and his neanderthal brain turned it into seashells.  Perhaps a series of sponges or (and more hygienically) three seashell-shaped squeeze bottles filled with cleaning and disinfecting solution.  Some theories on the interwebs assume that these seashells could, perhaps, actually be buttons that activate various stages of an elaborate bidet system.  This would be very hygienic, but would probably be something Spartan could have discovered.  There are some questions the world may never know the answer to, but we do have 20 years to figure that out.

Back to the review!  The performances were what you expect out of this movie.  Not great, but entertaining.  Sly is in great shape in the movie, and lays a nice whoopin when it’s called for.  He also pulls off being very puzzled by 2032.  I could’ve done without having to see his ass and nuts when he was getting frozen, though.  Snipes does a good deal of crazy in the movie as well.  Sandra Bullock was the standout performance in the movie for me.  She had a pretty adorable childlike innocence to her that I really liked.  It also helps that she’s pretty.  But she’s also kind of a whore.  I mean, the chick mentally fucks Sly on the first date!  I need a woman that respects herself, not some mind-slut!

Demolition Man definitely holds up for me.  It’s the kind of big stupid fun you need sometimes.  Fine story, hit and miss dialogue, cool action, and exactly the performances the movie calls for.  It doesn’t aim to change the world, and barely tries to mean something.  It just wants to entertain you, and I’m happy to say it does every time.  I haven’t looked into how YOU can watch this movie, because it wasn’t necessary.  It was already in my collection.  Demolition Man gets “Looks like there’s a new shepherd in town” out of “Take this job and shovel it.”

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