This movie sucked.My main problem was that they couldn't settle on the tone of the film. The plot was pretty simple, Bad guy wants to start a nuclear war to destroy the world. Sounds familiar, where have I heard this before. Try most James Bond films, most of the series 24 and a lot of spy films in general. Not only does this film rip of the classic Bond plot, it also rips of the setting, the USA vs Sovi... sorry Russia, the classic plot of Cold War era spy film plot. This wasn't a problem for me, this idea has generated some pretty awesome films in the Bond franchise as well as a few movies with a more serious tone, like Sum of All Fears.
The problem was that the movie was trying to capture a part of that Bond nostalgia, but they failed in the execution. They tried to balance between the Bond films and the more modern serious spy action films and series like 24, the Bourne trilogy or the Sum of All Fears. For a serious nuclear threat film its not serious enough and for Bond nostalgia its not insane enough.
In many Bond film the plot is that the Evil Mastermind has a nefarious plan to start a nuclear war or destroy the world and these plans are generally insane. Here is few examples.
Moonraker The Bad Guy has built several space shuttles, a massive launch facility for the shuttles in the Amazon and space station. The plan is to use neurotoxin from a rare orchid to wipe out all human life on the planet so that the Bad Guy can repopulate the planet with his perfect super race of humans.
The Spy Who Loved Me The bad guy says "fuck it, stealing launch codes or single warheads is lame, I am going to steal entire nuclear missile submarines and use those to start the nuclear war" He does this with a specially constructed oil tanker, in an operation that is conducted from his secret undersea base.
You Only Live Twice The bad guy tries to incite nuclear war by interfering with the space race. He does this by kidnapping American and Soviet spacecraft with his own purpouse built spaceship.
Diamonds are forever The bad guy has a diamond encrusted satelite dish in space which is used to direct sunlight into nuclear weapons causing them to explode.
This film is about a lone insane professor trying to start a nuclear war between US and Sovi..., sorry, Russia, because he believes that mankind will evolve as a result. Pretty lame compared to some of the stuff we got from Bond films made 40 years ago. They tried going a more conservative route but the film wasn't serious enough for that. Just watch the Sum of All Fears and you realise what I mean.
Not only is the basic plot pretty lame compared to the Bond films. The action is as well. The Bond films usually ended pretty epicly, in a massive all out battle scene where Bond takes on the Bad Guys secret lair with an army of helpers. Again examples,
Moonraker Ends in an insane battle in SPACE, when US Space Marines(I am not even kidding) attack the bad guys space station from a space shuttle with jet pack and laser guns. The battle ends with the space station being blown to bits. The action is pretty realistic(for a film with lasers and space marines), when you see guys being hit wirh lasers to their oxygen tanks spinning out of control.
The Spy Who Loved Me Involves a full out firefight when the captured submarine crews start taking over the oil tanker of doom. The battle involves flamethrowers and a scene where Bond MacGyvers a nuke into being slightly less destructive in order breach the enemy's defenses.
You Only Live Twice Ends with Bond attacking with the bad guy's lair, which was built into a volcano with ninjas equipped with katanas, shurikens and guns that fire rocker propelled exploding bullets.
Diamonds are forever Has a full on airmobile assault with Huey Gunships against the bad guy's base on an oil rig. Enough said. Only thing that would make that scene more awesome if it had Ride of the Valkyries blaring on the background.(Yes I know Apocalypse Now was made 8 years after Diamonds are Forever, but I can still dream)
Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol had Tom Cruise battling the traffic in India and having a fist fight in a high tech parking garage. This is pretty lame even compared with the original Mission Impossible, which had a Helicopter chasing a TGV bullet train in a fucking TUNNEL.
From the trailers I was half expecting this to be a more serious side of a spy film, like the Bourne Series. The guys were basically disowned by their government, the movies slogan even includes "no backup", so I was expecting that they were going to be left to their own deviced without the technological gizmos they usually have and instead rely on their wits and skills, like in the Bourne series, where Jason Bourne for example makes a bomb out of a toaster, a news papers and a gas line. It would have been cool to see the tech guy MacGyver some listening devices from cell phones or something like that. But no they get their gizmos handed to them in the armoury of plot convinience.
To make the film feel more serious they would have needed to drive home the idea of how horrifying the prospect of full scale nuclear war or even the detonation of single nuke in a populalated area is. But I guess the had the idea in their heads that the audience has seen this they know what it is all about. Wrong. We need to see what the consequences of failure are. In Terminator 2 you got a real sense of how important it was for the heroes to succeed precisely because they had a very well made scene of a nuclear explosion vaporising a playground full of kids, this single scene sets up the-desperate-fight-for-survival-of-the-human-race feel of the film perfectly. Similarly in the Sum of All Fears there is a nuclear explosion scene that illustrates the effects that nuclear war would have, adding weight to the future decisions of the characters.
These are the reasons why I didn't like the film, not serious enough to be a serious film about nuclear war and not epicly crazy enough to be anywhere near as good as the Bond films that it tried to emulate. I would love if someone would make Bond-homage film similar to the Expendables was for 80s action films.
torstai 9. helmikuuta 2012
sunnuntai 5. helmikuuta 2012
Suing the Devil - I wish a I could sue the makers of this film
Oooh God did this suck. I mean bad. The website of this film claims that it is "An epic, spiritual battle in the courtroom, Suing the Devil, is a high concept, faith-based, legal thriller that will leave you breathless and cheering". Yes it left me breathless and cheering, breathless on how stupid it was and cheering that it was finally over. Most of it happens in a courtroom and it is epic in its stupidity, but a legal thriller this is not nor is it very spiritual. Since this movie wants to be a legal thriller I will use other legal thrillers as points of reference and since it wants to argue theology/philosophy, lets talk about that as well.
Lets get this over with. The basic premise of the plot is that a law student, who's life sucks, decides that it is all Satans fault and like any good lawyer decides to sue the 8 trillion dollars. Satan accepts, for whatever reason, the film did really explain why, and the legal drama begins. Satan hires the "best" trial lawyers in the world to represent him and to really drive home the fact that well-paid, well-dressed lawyers are EVIL, these people defended nefarious groups like Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Air Lines etc. This from the start is slightly idiotic. Lawyers as group of professional are guided by a set of ethical principles(I know hard to believe right) chief of which is that they are required to zealously defend their clients case in court, whatever the case maybe. This is to insure that no matter how heinous the crime you are being accused of, you will be adequetly repressented by a zealous attorney. Its a staple ethical problem in legal dramas when the lawyer's professional and personal ethics come into conflict, not that anything like this would be in this film.
I am getting ahead of myself before the trial can begin our protagonist have to serve a subpoena to the Devil and this where the rather simplistic ethics of this start appearing. The protagonist makes copies of the summons and starts flyering various places where Satan might be found lurking, like a law firm(I don't get this lawyer bashing, I mean isn't the hero of this film working very hard to become one), a strip club and a group Heavy metal fans, who like all heavy metal fans do wear satanic imagery. The dude even asks these guys "do you worship Satan?" and like any self respecting heavy metal fan would, they give him the finger. So this movie's idea of evil things in this world are, law firms, strip clubs and heavy metal. I am going to make list of all the things this movie thinks is EVIL at the end of this review.
Being a legal "thriller" (its not really a thriller, since there is nothing thrilling about it) most of the movie takes place in a courtroom and in which court room you might ask is the Trial of the Century being held. In a very vague Court of Human Rights. I am not a lawyer, but I am under the impression that when someone sues somebody else for damages, its a civil case tried in a civil court. Nevermind. The venue is the least of our problems when it comes to court room procedings. This case should be very simple, the hero has to proove that Satan is responsible for his own misery and the misery of the entire humanity. Satan's team tries to defend against this. Nothing resembling a clear case with any form of evidence emergece from this pile of shit. What mostly happens in the court is that the hero calls various priests on the stand talk about the Bible and quote it(Which proves what exactly?). Satan's defence team objects A LOT, sometimes 4 lawyers at a time and almost without a fail the the objections are rejected by the judge.(It would appear that the film makers idea of a good lawyer is that he/she yells OBJECTION a lot) Absolutely no case or argument comes to forth during the court room scenes and who is leading the trial boils down to a popularity contest, not on the merits of the arguments.
There is the mandatory "evil-lawyers-dig-up-your-dirt"-scene, where, OMG you won't believe this, the protagonist of this film has viewed Internet porn, used the word fuck and ethnic slurs.(Yay, more things to the list) Holy shit, he is such a bad person. For fucks sake, do I even have to explain how dumb this is and more to the point WHAT FUCKING RELEVANCE DOES THIS HAVE WITH THE FUCKING CASE? My god is this dumb, this is again a staple of legal dramas, attack the accuser, but in much better legal dramas it is done to undermine the credibility of a witness with something slightly more substantive than fucking internet porn and foul language.
Lets talk about the Devil for a while. He is played by Malcom McDowell and even he couldn't save this carbage largely because the script has managed to remove all sense of menace and evil from The Prince of Darkness. He behaves mostly like an asshole and McDowell seems to enjoy playing this role. There are several a few ways that Satan is depcited in films, either as some evil demon-thingy or as a seductive tempter. This film attempts the tempter bit at one point, when the hero owns Satan's ass by reading the Bible, he offers the hero money and riches if he drops the case and gives him his soul. Now I am going to do what the film did, randomly introduce a bit of info, the hero's girl friend/wife/fuck buddy has a brain tumor. Now wouldn't the fucking obvious thing to offer been to take the tumor away, to offer the man something he really cares about, instead of money. This would have injected a much needed moral dilema into this so called spiritual film. How much would you be willing to sacrifice to defeat Satan? Would you give up your soul to save a loved one or another human being in general? This lost opportunity remined me of a great film that had a similar dilemma, Michael Clayton, a very good legal thriller. The titular character Micheal Clayton has a choice, he can do the morally right thing but at the expense of sacrificing a large part of his own happiness and well-being. A clear moral choice with huge consequences.
Satan also has this weird rant scene, which is a stand in for the climax of any legal thriller, the scene where the lawyer breaks the key witness/suspect and introduces the conclusive piece of evidence or a confession. In this film, instead of using clever questioning, it is done by using faith and reading the bible to get Satan to hump you from behind. He rants about how he hates humanity and he delights in causing havoc and the things he created, like noise, car alarms, gangsta rap, techno music, customer service, automated anwsering machines, unjust bills, parking tickets, utility companies, apparently to make us miserable.(Wow, A lot of stuff to the list). Euhm, utility companies, like the companies that provide electricity, water, gas and heating, are evil. The companies that provided me and alot of other people with electricity that powers the lights and the laptop I am using, with the water that I use for cooking, drinking and washing, that warm my house to a comfortable +20 celsius instead of the ball-freezing -28 celsius, are FUCKING EVIL AND CREATED BY SATAN. Oooh God is this dumb.
This scene is the only court scene where something gets proven, Satan pretty much confesses to doing all sorts of evil things. And in the next Satan's A-Team manages objects and in some bizarre fluke the judge throws the previous testimony out, because Satan was insane at the moment. Do I even have to explain how dumb this is? Not that it really mattered, since the hero wins anyway. Not that this mattes either since it was all a dream. A fucking dream. I would be angry, but I lost hope in this film, at the scene, where a little girl goes to ask Satan for an autograph(WTF!?!), Satan rebukes him and the little girl kicks him in the leg and runs away, like a boss. At that point the Satan character was reduced pretty much to a joke. Here is this movie's top tip on fighting Satan in your life, forget chanting some exorcism ritual or holy water, kick him in the leg and run away.
The legal thriller parts of this film failed pretty badly. It collects a bunch of cliches from other, much better films and mashes them together into an incoherrent mess. The film actually has the balls to quote the famous "you can't handle the truth"-line from A Few Good Men. The parts that fail even more are the movies attempts at being spiritual. These would be the scenes where the Bible gets quoted, with the message being Satan BAD, Jesus GOOD. There is no great moral dilemma, there is no real debate on the underlying issue, are we responsible for the evils of this world or is it Satan's fault? The main character learns a lesson in the end, which boils down to stop looking at stuff that you have lost or don't have, instead focus on what you have. Not a bad moral lesson to give, but this has again been done much more effectively in It's a Wonderful Life, fucking 6 decades ago.
There other weird things in this film as well, like the where the fuck did all the Satan groupies come from in the court room scenes? Where the fuck are all the christians of this world, you would think that they would take the opportunity to fight Satan himself and score some God points? Why does the "demons vs angels" scene come so early in the story? Why is Satan's legal A-Team so incompetent? Why does Tom Sizemore have role as retarded talking head? Why does the protagonist look like a demented mad man in the owning Satan by reading the Bible to him scene? And more to the point why the fuck do I keep thinking about this film? FUCK THIS FILM, I am going to watch Rainmaker now.
As promised the list of EVIL things according to this movie
Lawyers with professional ethics
Law firms
Oil companies
Tobacco companies
Air Lines
Strip Clubs
Heavy Metal
Cussing
Internet Porn
Racial slurs
Car Alarms
Gangsta Rap
Techno Music
Customer Service
Utility Companies(gas, electricity, heat and water services I pressume)
Automated anwsering machines
parking tickets
unjust bills
Used car salesmen
Lets get this over with. The basic premise of the plot is that a law student, who's life sucks, decides that it is all Satans fault and like any good lawyer decides to sue the 8 trillion dollars. Satan accepts, for whatever reason, the film did really explain why, and the legal drama begins. Satan hires the "best" trial lawyers in the world to represent him and to really drive home the fact that well-paid, well-dressed lawyers are EVIL, these people defended nefarious groups like Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Air Lines etc. This from the start is slightly idiotic. Lawyers as group of professional are guided by a set of ethical principles(I know hard to believe right) chief of which is that they are required to zealously defend their clients case in court, whatever the case maybe. This is to insure that no matter how heinous the crime you are being accused of, you will be adequetly repressented by a zealous attorney. Its a staple ethical problem in legal dramas when the lawyer's professional and personal ethics come into conflict, not that anything like this would be in this film.
I am getting ahead of myself before the trial can begin our protagonist have to serve a subpoena to the Devil and this where the rather simplistic ethics of this start appearing. The protagonist makes copies of the summons and starts flyering various places where Satan might be found lurking, like a law firm(I don't get this lawyer bashing, I mean isn't the hero of this film working very hard to become one), a strip club and a group Heavy metal fans, who like all heavy metal fans do wear satanic imagery. The dude even asks these guys "do you worship Satan?" and like any self respecting heavy metal fan would, they give him the finger. So this movie's idea of evil things in this world are, law firms, strip clubs and heavy metal. I am going to make list of all the things this movie thinks is EVIL at the end of this review.
Being a legal "thriller" (its not really a thriller, since there is nothing thrilling about it) most of the movie takes place in a courtroom and in which court room you might ask is the Trial of the Century being held. In a very vague Court of Human Rights. I am not a lawyer, but I am under the impression that when someone sues somebody else for damages, its a civil case tried in a civil court. Nevermind. The venue is the least of our problems when it comes to court room procedings. This case should be very simple, the hero has to proove that Satan is responsible for his own misery and the misery of the entire humanity. Satan's team tries to defend against this. Nothing resembling a clear case with any form of evidence emergece from this pile of shit. What mostly happens in the court is that the hero calls various priests on the stand talk about the Bible and quote it(Which proves what exactly?). Satan's defence team objects A LOT, sometimes 4 lawyers at a time and almost without a fail the the objections are rejected by the judge.(It would appear that the film makers idea of a good lawyer is that he/she yells OBJECTION a lot) Absolutely no case or argument comes to forth during the court room scenes and who is leading the trial boils down to a popularity contest, not on the merits of the arguments.
There is the mandatory "evil-lawyers-dig-up-your-dirt"-scene, where, OMG you won't believe this, the protagonist of this film has viewed Internet porn, used the word fuck and ethnic slurs.(Yay, more things to the list) Holy shit, he is such a bad person. For fucks sake, do I even have to explain how dumb this is and more to the point WHAT FUCKING RELEVANCE DOES THIS HAVE WITH THE FUCKING CASE? My god is this dumb, this is again a staple of legal dramas, attack the accuser, but in much better legal dramas it is done to undermine the credibility of a witness with something slightly more substantive than fucking internet porn and foul language.
Lets talk about the Devil for a while. He is played by Malcom McDowell and even he couldn't save this carbage largely because the script has managed to remove all sense of menace and evil from The Prince of Darkness. He behaves mostly like an asshole and McDowell seems to enjoy playing this role. There are several a few ways that Satan is depcited in films, either as some evil demon-thingy or as a seductive tempter. This film attempts the tempter bit at one point, when the hero owns Satan's ass by reading the Bible, he offers the hero money and riches if he drops the case and gives him his soul. Now I am going to do what the film did, randomly introduce a bit of info, the hero's girl friend/wife/fuck buddy has a brain tumor. Now wouldn't the fucking obvious thing to offer been to take the tumor away, to offer the man something he really cares about, instead of money. This would have injected a much needed moral dilema into this so called spiritual film. How much would you be willing to sacrifice to defeat Satan? Would you give up your soul to save a loved one or another human being in general? This lost opportunity remined me of a great film that had a similar dilemma, Michael Clayton, a very good legal thriller. The titular character Micheal Clayton has a choice, he can do the morally right thing but at the expense of sacrificing a large part of his own happiness and well-being. A clear moral choice with huge consequences.
Satan also has this weird rant scene, which is a stand in for the climax of any legal thriller, the scene where the lawyer breaks the key witness/suspect and introduces the conclusive piece of evidence or a confession. In this film, instead of using clever questioning, it is done by using faith and reading the bible to get Satan to hump you from behind. He rants about how he hates humanity and he delights in causing havoc and the things he created, like noise, car alarms, gangsta rap, techno music, customer service, automated anwsering machines, unjust bills, parking tickets, utility companies, apparently to make us miserable.(Wow, A lot of stuff to the list). Euhm, utility companies, like the companies that provide electricity, water, gas and heating, are evil. The companies that provided me and alot of other people with electricity that powers the lights and the laptop I am using, with the water that I use for cooking, drinking and washing, that warm my house to a comfortable +20 celsius instead of the ball-freezing -28 celsius, are FUCKING EVIL AND CREATED BY SATAN. Oooh God is this dumb.
This scene is the only court scene where something gets proven, Satan pretty much confesses to doing all sorts of evil things. And in the next Satan's A-Team manages objects and in some bizarre fluke the judge throws the previous testimony out, because Satan was insane at the moment. Do I even have to explain how dumb this is? Not that it really mattered, since the hero wins anyway. Not that this mattes either since it was all a dream. A fucking dream. I would be angry, but I lost hope in this film, at the scene, where a little girl goes to ask Satan for an autograph(WTF!?!), Satan rebukes him and the little girl kicks him in the leg and runs away, like a boss. At that point the Satan character was reduced pretty much to a joke. Here is this movie's top tip on fighting Satan in your life, forget chanting some exorcism ritual or holy water, kick him in the leg and run away.
The legal thriller parts of this film failed pretty badly. It collects a bunch of cliches from other, much better films and mashes them together into an incoherrent mess. The film actually has the balls to quote the famous "you can't handle the truth"-line from A Few Good Men. The parts that fail even more are the movies attempts at being spiritual. These would be the scenes where the Bible gets quoted, with the message being Satan BAD, Jesus GOOD. There is no great moral dilemma, there is no real debate on the underlying issue, are we responsible for the evils of this world or is it Satan's fault? The main character learns a lesson in the end, which boils down to stop looking at stuff that you have lost or don't have, instead focus on what you have. Not a bad moral lesson to give, but this has again been done much more effectively in It's a Wonderful Life, fucking 6 decades ago.
There other weird things in this film as well, like the where the fuck did all the Satan groupies come from in the court room scenes? Where the fuck are all the christians of this world, you would think that they would take the opportunity to fight Satan himself and score some God points? Why does the "demons vs angels" scene come so early in the story? Why is Satan's legal A-Team so incompetent? Why does Tom Sizemore have role as retarded talking head? Why does the protagonist look like a demented mad man in the owning Satan by reading the Bible to him scene? And more to the point why the fuck do I keep thinking about this film? FUCK THIS FILM, I am going to watch Rainmaker now.
As promised the list of EVIL things according to this movie
Lawyers with professional ethics
Law firms
Oil companies
Tobacco companies
Air Lines
Strip Clubs
Heavy Metal
Cussing
Internet Porn
Racial slurs
Car Alarms
Gangsta Rap
Techno Music
Customer Service
Utility Companies(gas, electricity, heat and water services I pressume)
Automated anwsering machines
parking tickets
unjust bills
Used car salesmen
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