Wrongfully Accused (1998) – Leslie Nielsen in a spoof of The Fugitive, with Richard Crenna playing the Tommy Lee Jones part. Along the way there are other callouts and sight gags referencing Braveheart, North by Northwest, The Seven-Year Itch, and plenty of others.
If you like this kind of movie, this is the kind of movie you like.
Screamers (1995) – When I first saw this almost 30 years ago, I thought it was uneven in its storytelling and didn’t really know where it wanted to end. However, it was popular enough to get a sequel 14 years later, so I gave it another shot.
Yup. The backstory is intrusively convoluted without being necessary, and the self-upgrading robotic “screamers” go from heatseeking landsharks to humanlike decoys to fully conscious androids that can steal human faces and memories with barely a stop in between. All the best nickels are spent in the first act; after that, it’s just a succession of “and then, and then, and then…”
There are some nifty visuals involving snow-covered urban ruins (courtesy of shooting in old quarries in Montreal in the winter), but aside from that, it leaves me pretty unsatisfied.
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) – And this, for me, is where the John Wick franchise jumps the shark. Oh, the action scenes are still strong (although I don’t remember quite so many CG blood splatters from over-penetrating bullets in the last two), but the backstory premise becomes even more of an element, and it keeps mutating into worse versions. Observe:
In the first movie, the background was that there’s a shadowing underworld that operates by its own rules (mostly from New York), with which the “mainstream” government and law enforcement studiously avoid interacting.
In the second movie, this underworld turns out to be ruled by the “High Table,” a combination of U.N. and the Iroquois League, where the heads of the various underworld factions and cartels hash things out.
And then in the third movie, the High Table turns out itself to be ruled by one man — who lives in the desert like a Bedouin — so it’s all really one organization after all (of which every third New Yorker is a member). Plus, it’s revealed that it has bitchy internal affairs “adjudicators.”
With every revelation, John Wick’s world becomes more bureaucratic and less cool.
And then the introduction of the huge glass-filled room beneath the New York Continental, which serves no purpose except that someone said, “Hey, we should have a big battle with lots of broken glass…” Blech.
I think I will avoid the fourth movie, for fear that it completely longhouses the John Wick milieu and adds its own IRS, too.
Abandoned movies:
Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) – I was willing to overlook the substandard CG animation, because the idea that Lovecraft’s father ended his days in the madhouse because of forbidden knowledge is indeed a cool one… But then when Howard ended up in a parallel dimension with a Cthulhoid creature that follows him like a puppy dog… I just couldn’t.
IMHO, miss JW4 altogether. I was…I am loath to say it–bored. I mean, BORED. That’s no bueno.
Alas.
John Wick 4 still had great action scenes, but they had turned into a parody of the original to a extent. I still enjoyed it but can’t deny that.