Wow. Without sketch-of-the-day omnibuses to post, the blog tends to lie fallow. And I’ve been doing more reading than movie-watching lately, so it’s taken a while for mini-reviews to stack up.
Big Brother (2018) – Donnie Yen is a former U.S. Marine (it’s complicated) who comes back as a teacher to the same down-and-out Hong Kong high school that he attended and displays his uncanny ability to intuit exactly what each student’s personal crisis it is and where to be outside of school hours to help rectify it. Seriously, Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven has nothing on this guy for being wherever he’s needed and saying whatever will fix everything. If you don’t like To Sir With Love (1967) because it doesn’t have enough kung fu… well, this has more kung fu.
The Meg (2018) – Big shark. Big, big shark. Vs Jason Statham. Enjoyable so long as you completely cauterize your frontal lobes before viewing — otherwise you’ll wonder,
- “Why is such a huge species of shark still extant in such a small ecosystem — wouldn’t they either go extinct because of a lack of large prey, or get smaller through insular dwarfism ?”
- “How can a shark adapted to life literally below the bottom of the sea come to the top (and above the surface) without exploding from the pressure change?”
- “And even if it didn’t explode, how can its eyes keep working in an environment roughly a million times stronger than what the species has lived in for millions of years?”
Killing Gunther (2017) – A crew of up-and-coming hired killers decides to make a name for themselves by going after “Gunther,” the mysterious best hitman in the world, and coerce a camera crew into filming them do it. Complications ensue.
Despite Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face all over the video box (yes, he’s Gunther), he’s really only in it for the last fifteen minutes. But that makes sense in the story — i.e., it’s not just an excuse to throw him in for publicity, like all of Bruce Willis’s roles in the two years before his retirement. (I’m not bashing Willis, as it was a good way for him to stock up some money as his ability to perform eroded. But those aren’t good movies. See below.)
And extra points for working in Canadian pop star Gowan’s song “Criminal Mind.”
Legion (2010) – Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) stands against every other angel in heaven when God finally loses patience with humanity and decides to wipe them out… and apparently everything for the future hinges on the unborn child of a waitress at a middle-of-nowhere truck stop. “Fighting off the hordes” is always a good scenario, but the baby is such a McGuffin that it’s hard to suspend disbelief. What’s this baby ultimately supposed to do? How could a single non-divine baby (nothing in here about virgin births etc.) be the key to defying God? And honestly, if God wanted the baby dead, how could He be thwarted? Isn’t He God? (And what would He need with a starship?)
Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) – I realized that I had never seen this entry, so I buckled down before the last one of the series hit theaters.
Every franchise has to have one entry that strikes out in a direction that doesn’t work, and this is that entry for the M:I franchise. Ethan Hunt’s “smug bastard” character bears no resemblance to the serious-and-sincere version of him from the last movie or the subsequent ones, and the romantic storyline is perfunctory and obligatory. It’s pretty clear that John Woo wanted to be making an American “James Bond” movie with face masks.
The Contractor (2022) – Chis Pine is career Army Special Ops, discharged because of drugs he uses to compensate for a long-term injury. He goes to work for a private contractor, and on the VERY FIRST MISSION gets hung out to dry as a scapegoat and has to fight his way back from Europe. Of course, the plot revolves around an EE-VIL pharmaceutical firm (just like M:I2, in fact), which is such a lazy villain these days.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) – Too long by at least forty-five minutes, and yet seems to give short shrift to a bunch of subplots. And unfortunately, the biggest “Tom Cruise puts himself in danger” set piece — the biplane fight — was both overlong and too reminiscent of the conclusion of Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018). It needed not to have taken itself quite so seriously.
Abandoned movies:
Fortress (2021) – One of the aforementioned Bruce Willis movies where he showed up for two days of shooting and repeated his lines from an earpiece. And the rest of it wasn’t good, either.
Gor (1987) – I’m very used to Italians directing sword-and-sorcery movies, but I usually like them to have a working knowledge of English so they can direct the English-speaking actors’ performances.
Time Barbarians (1990) – Oh hey, is that Deron “Malibu” McBee, who earned my everlasting derision in Immortal Combat (1994)? And is he the best actor involved? Ugh.
“Wait, if this thing was trapped below the lowest known point of the ocean, how is it possible for him to have seen it?”
“I don’t know but we’re gonna keep bringing it up, okay?”
“That works.”
(P.S. As to how a shark that big living that deep could come to the surface without exploding? The same way deep sea submarines do: very, very gradually. While that does still leave the questions of what it’s been eating down there where it can’t get humans and how a creature that’s been living in the dark literally all its life can deal with our sunny surface world… well, the ocean’s got some enormous creatures bigger than the dinosaurs ever were—i.e. whales—living in it, and some of them can go pretty deep for pretty long—like several kilometers for a couple hours at a time on a single breath—in search of their food; I guess the writer of the book series on which The Meg and its sequels are rather loosely based just figured a super-deep-sea shark could do something like what those whales do in reverse.)
“Actually, it’s super-easy — barely an inconvenience.”
I’m sure there are big critters pretty deep, but when you’ve got an ecosystem that’s confined to a strip of the deepest party of the Marianas Trench, Meg’s googol-great-grandfather should have eaten the available food and starved. Plus, a creature which has propagated (and thus evolved) for millions of years in a completely lightless environment under enormous pressure isn’t the same as a whale which constantly goes up and down on a daily basis.
Yes, I’m overthinking it… but for $130 million, SOMEONE should have been thinking.
Of course, as mentioned in the Honest Trailer for the same movie, the book series kicks off with one of the titular megalodon’s ancestors fighting—and eating—a T-Rex, so (though I haven’t read any of those books myself) I’m guessing that whole “was living down under the Marianas Trench” thing was something some incompetent scriptwriter made up exclusively for the movie (to explain—unnecessarily—why we humans have never spotted any such monstrosity swimming around in our oceans before now in all the centuries we’ve spent sailing the world’s oceans), not actually adapted from the books.