Category Archives: Sucks ass

These movies are to be avoided at all costs. The only good thing about them is probably our review.

The Occupant

Javier is a middle-aged job who has lost his job, and his dignity. He interviews for jobs that are well beneath him and is turned away for being too qualified. Next Javier (Javier Gutiérrez) loses his luxury apartment, and his car. Well he should have lost his car, he certainly told his wife he sold it, and yet he drives it still, unable to let go of this last tangible trace of his former life, his former self, his very identity.

And yet Javier is not a sympathetic man. He bullies his son. He belittles his wife when she takes a job cleaning to support the family. And through it all he feels very, very entitled. He’s certain he’s better than everyone else, and he’s filled with rage when his lifestyle cannot reflect his ego. So Javier does what any fragile white male’s ego would: he begins to stalk the family living in his old home.

Yeah, it’s not a great trajectory and yet it gets so much worse. It gets so much worse in an inexplicable way. One day he’s a bristling interviewee and the next he’s a complete psychopath. He makes terrible choice after terrible choice and we never really understand why. This is not mere anger, not disappointment or even resentment. Javier’s soul turns completely inside out, his actions cross the line into evil, and the film never bothers to justify or explain it. So while Javier is never a man you root for, he quickly becomes a man you despise, and no fate imaginable seems harsh enough.

Javier Gutiérrez must be a very good actor because his character turns on a dime. You don’t see it coming but nor do you doubt it. The rest of the cast, including Mario Casas, Bruna Cusi, and Ruth Diaz, are equally adept, but unfortunately this film just doesn’t live up to its premise or its promise. The concept is good but the execution is bad. Written and directed by David Pastor and Àlex Pastor, you can’t help but wish the film were more grounded, less concerned with shock value. It plays like a psychological thriller but we’re deprived of the psychology. And because Javier is so despicable and without any apparent or sufficient motivation, the thriller aspect is hard to buy into. There’s definitely tension but it never pays off. The film leaves you with an ending that won’t satisfy even the most lenient critic among us. Netflix hasn’t yet stepped up to help us fight the boredom of self-isolation and instead has stuck to its schedule of dumping really heavy, really gloomy titles on us. But even in the best of times, this movie would still rank among the worst.

Killer Elite

7 Replies

As Killer Elite begins, assassin Danny Brice (Jason Statham) decides to hang up his gun. But clearly, it’s not so easy for an assassin to retire, because before long Danny’s best friend Hunter (Robert DeNiro) has been kidnapped by a sheik, held hostage until Danny takes revenge for a murder committed by British secret agents. Danny doesn’t a 1140135_killer_elite_3 rgue much and sets out to joylessly kill the four British agents on the revenge list. As the agents start dying, retired superagent Spike (Clive Owen) catches on to Danny’s mission and inserts himself in the middle of the action.

The main problem with Killer Elite is that it’s a showdown between anti-heroes who are either trying to kill or save other anti-heroes. I simply had no idea who to root for. It’s not Jason Statham, who so easily falls into this revenge plot imposed on him by the sheik, who brings no personality at all to this role, and whose dead eyes confirm regret in ever getting involved with this movie. It’s not Clive Owen, who somehow is even less charismatic than dead-eyed Statham. It’s not Robert DeNiro, who is totally forgotten during all but the opening and closing scenes. There’s a huge empty void at the centre of this movie that no one even attempts to fill.

The void is all the more glaring because the action scenes are almost as flat as the characters. They’re not terribly executed but since Killer Elite has nothing else to offer, the fights needed to be great to compensate for everything else that’s lacking. And they’re not. At best they’re a slight change of pace from a mundane story that you’ll be too bored to care about, and at worst they increase the viewer’s boredom by being as lifeless as Statham’s dead eyes.

Spencer Confidential

12 Replies

Some directors just have their muses: Scorsese has DeNiro, David O. Russell has Jennifer Lawrence, Tim Burton has Johnny Depp, Wes Anderson has Bill Murray, and Peter Berg has…Mark Wahlberg. Spencer Confidential is another Peter Berg – Mark Wahlberg collaboration, the fifth in a lineup of increasingly forgettable films: Lone Survivor, Patriot’s Day, Deepwater Horizon and Mile 22 and it feels like it was cobbled together by an AI that’s been programmed to write screenplays based solely on other Berg-Wahlberg collabs. It has thrown together all the B(b)erg cliches: Wahlberg inexplicably shirtless, Wahlberg sporting a sexy black eye, Wahlberg sticking up for the working man, Wahlberg just wailing on a guy, driving cars, crashing cars, and just generally acting macho.

He plays Spenser, a Boston cop who’s so dumb he spells his name wrong. He suspects his superior officer is a dirty Boston cop so he shows up at his house and beats him silly. You know, not exactly a rule follower. So he goes to prison to cool his heels, as you do when you assault a police officer. And when he gets out he lies low, drives transport trucks for a living, takes vacations in the desert.

Haha, just kidding. Spenser is out of prison for less than 24 hours when the cop he assaulted winds up murdered, and guess who’s the prime suspect. And even though he’s very much not a cop anymore, he still works the case. Out of the goodness of his heart?

Anyway, he’s got two buddies backing him up: an old man named Henry (Alan Arkin) and a complete stranger who’s also his new roommate, Hawk (Winston Duke). Conveniently, Hawk is a tank of a man who’s an amateur MMA fighter and knows a little computer, so he actually comes in handy when he’s paying attention. But believe me, you don’t want to be Mark Wahlberg’s friend. I mean Spenser’s friend. Okay, I mean both. Spenser has a knack for finding trouble. He’s never even heard of minding his own damn business.

Anyway, Spenser Confidential is a new kind of forgettable that’s actually forgettable even whilst viewing. Luckily there’s no real plot to keep track of and there’s no character development because no characters were drawn in the first place. Which is super convenient if you mostly watch Netflix for the white noise.

Playmobil: The Movie

7 Replies

For a minute I wonder if I rented the wrong movie. These are real, human actors: Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy) just finished high school and instead of going off to college she confides in her brother Charlie (Gabriel Bateman) that she’s destined for a life of adventure. But that all ends when a knock on the door reveals a police officer come to tell them their parents are dead. Cut to: a couple of years later, Marla, having put her dreams on hold, is struggling to keep a household going while brother Charlie is disappointed in the distinct lack of adventure in their lives. He runs away one dark and stormy evening and just as Marla tracks him down at some sort of toy convention with a large Playmobil village, they get sucked into it and pop up an animated Lego form.

Marla reanimates as a girl in a sweater set but Charlie is more fortunate, taking the Viking shape he always carried on his bookbag. Landing in the middle of a viking battle, Charlie immediately makes friends but then gets accidentally trebucheted into another land. Marla scoops up some viking gold and chases after him, not realizing her loot makes her a target as well. She hooks up with Del (Jim Gaffigan), purveyor of magical hay, and he agrees to help if she’ll recompense him.

If you walk down the aisles of the Toys R Us Lego section, you’ll find dozens of Playmobil sets, Lego for the younger set. You will find pirates and police officers, dinosaurs and dragons, mermaids and magic yetis. In the film’s universe, all of these disparate sets are connected by a highway. Turns out, a lot of citizens have been going missing lately, so a debonair secret agent named Rex (Daniel Radcliffe) joins them on their quest.

Confused yet? That may be up to 20% my fault but definitely at least 80% the movie’s. Playmobil is appealing directly to small children, dispensing the shackles of story and logic and just hitting them with a spray of a thing and a thing and a thing and a thing. Are they connected? Vaguely, I think. But mostly they show off a wide variety of toy sets available in a toy store near you while keeping up a colourful and frenetic pace.

Playing With Fire

11 Replies

Directors think John Cena is a bargain The Rock, but what they’re really getting is an overpriced tree stump. He has the personality of dry, slightly burnt toast.

It’s not entirely Cena’s fault. Director Andy Fickman clearly has no vision and no funny bone. He’s not sure whether he’s making a satire or a slapstick comedy. I mean, he’s not making a satire. Satire implies a basic level of intellect. Parody might be closer to what I mean but he’s not even doing that because parody implies you’re being bad on purpose. And the purpose is generally comedy. But nothing here is funny. The attempts at humour are such dismal misfires they suck the oxygen out of the room so fast it’ll flip your eyelids inside out. True story.

The slapstick, such as it is, is an even bigger problem. Physical comedy is the lowest form of humour. There’s such a high risk of failure it should only be attempted by a master. There are no masters in Playing With Fire. They aren’t even comedy interns. Not even comedy fetuses (feti?). They’re just monkeys flinging shit.

John Cena has the range of a rock. I can’t really blame him for eagerly shoveling up Dwayne Johnson’s leftovers. Hell, he’s probably pretty grateful for Dave Bautista’s scraps. But Keegan-Michael Key, I’m disappointed in you. Jordan Peele’s out here making the world a better/scarier place with his incisive social commentary and you’re…tasting farts. While playing second fiddle to JOHN FUCKING CENA.

The script is should have been flushed, and not because it’s a dead goldfish. It’s probably the worst offender in this huge steaming pile of donkey excrement. The script is to subtlety what Donald Trump is to modesty. Yeah, this review ain’t subtle either.

John Cena plays a fire fighter who prefers to be called a smoke jumper. He’s got a dweeb haircut and a complete absence of personality. He and his colleagues-in-flames (Key, and John Leguizamo) save a trio of runaways and end up pulling babysitting duty in their firehouse while the kids do more damage than a pack of wild dingos.

We have 3 categories here at Assholes Watching Movies – Kick Ass, Half-Assed, and Sucks Ass – and until now, that’s been enough. But I’m petitioning to add a fourth one because Playing With Fire EATS ass.

Can’t stop won’t stop ranting.

The Island

17 Replies

Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) lives in a futuristic community where life is prescribed for him: meals, wardrobe, job, friend, all are decided for him and none are negotiable. It’s to keep them safe. There’s been an extinction-level event “outside” in the world, and the survivors survive only because of the safety provided by the colony, and by following the rules. There are two bright spots in Lincoln’s life. The first is Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), a woman who seems to breeze through life unscathed and unoppressed by the sterility and rigidity of her surroundings. Unfortunately, proximity rules keep them apart both literally and figuratively. The second bright spot is the lottery, wherein random colonists are selected to go to The Island, a tropical oasis of peace and tranquility, a sun-drenched retirement highly anticipated by all in the last uncontaminated paradise on earth.

Except lately Lincoln is plagued by nightmares. He has memories of life before the colony. He’s starting to question things.

Unfortunately, what might have been an interesting piece of science fiction turns to shit in the hands of director Michael Bay, who prioritizes explody things over plot and character at literally every turn. Every time there’s a plot hole, he fills it with flames or a car crash or both, like hanging a poster over all the cracks in the wall. Unfortunately, the posters do very little when the whole house comes crashing down, and Michael Bay hasn’t laid a foundation in years. If all you’re after is mindless action (and it’s okay if you are, there’s a time and a place for everything), this is a pretty flashy poster, probably the equivalent of a chick in a bikini straddling a motorcycle. It’s just too bad that he ruined a pretty good concept when he could have left this in someone else’s more capable hands and just filmed another Big Dumb Man Drives Recklessly While Shouting Slogans And Grabbing His Crotch And Saluting The American Flag script instead.

The Last Thing He Wanted

13 Replies

Do you like drama and intrigue and secret ops and exposing deeply classified cover-ups? Oh that’s too bad. This movie has none of that. The Last Thing He Wanted is the last thing anyone wants when they sit down to a movie. It’s sort of counting on you to turn it on and either take a two hour nap take a nap or walk out of the room for a snack and never come back.

Elena (Anne Hathaway) is a journalist who…covers foreign correspondence. She has a kid in boarding school since she’s never home and I have no idea what happened to the kid’s father other than he is indeed alive. Rosie Perez plays her friend/photographer. I think they get reassigned to cover the election at home, which pisses off Elena. She has a kooky father (Willem Dafoe) who is definitely into some shady business and possibly has dementia. He implores Elena to take care of a deal he’s sunk half a mil into but now cannot himself follow through. She does. Or she tries. And things get really shitty. Ben Affleck is around…pretty sure he’s CIA, possibly also into politics? Hard to say.

So this is a brand new Netflix Original that did two things very well: it confused me and it bored me. Granted, those aren’t generally things movies are trying to do, and maybe this one isn’t either, but that’s hard to believe given what a big fat mess it is.

IMDB seems to think it’s about a veteran D.C. journalist (that would be Hathaway) who loses the thread of her own narrative when a guilt-propelled errand for her father (Willem Dafoe) thrusts her from byline to unwitting subject in the very story she’s trying to break. So it turns out I did have the gist. I just didn’t give a fuck. I’m horrified to see this has been adapted from a Joan Didion novel. I hope she doesn’t have a Netflix subscription.

This isn’t a swing and a miss because it was never going to be more than a bunt. I lost track of motivations first, then plot. Anne Hathaway is…dogged. Either survived breast cancer or had a horrific boob injury. Her signature look is a chest covering scarf. She’s mad at everybody. She’s suspicious of nearly everyone but not suspicious enough. It’s so hard to get a handle on this and yet it was so underwhelming I can’t even be bothered to look it up.

Despite the brand name cast and director Dee Rees’ other successes, The Last Thing He Wanted is a real dud. It’s too late for me, but save yourself.

Sonic The Hedgehog

18 Replies

Does the world need movies based on video game characters? Not really. But a good story can spring up from anywhere, except perhaps from the minds of screenwriters Josh Miller and Patrick Casey whose credits are so sparse they literally feature “community television” and yet Sonic The Hedgehog will still not make their highlight real.

Sonic The Hedgehog isn’t bad but it is speeding in the exact opposite direction of good, leaving only lightning farts and a blue blur in its wake. Is Sonic allergic to not sucking? Okay, so it’s kind of bad. The script is bland and overly familiar and exceedingly safe. There’s nothing new or exciting here, just a paint-by-numbers that any idiot could have written, and in the case of Sonic, we got two. I mean: someone got paid for this. Miller and Casey literally cashed a cheque for writing the line “Let’s go do some ROCK-conaissance!” and Jim Carrey got a much, much bigger one to say it.

And ugh: Jim Carrey. I was fine with him having disappeared off the face of the earth. I was never a fan of his annoying, rubber-faced schtick, the over-the-topness of his obnoxious expressions and over-enunciation. NOT. HERE. FOR. IT. I very kindly tolerate him when a director keeps a tight leash on him (Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but Jeff Fowler is not that director. Not only is Carrey unleashed, it’s pretty clear he’s a very bad dog who’s probably pissing on Fowler’s shoes. Fowler, whose credits are no more impressive than Miller’s or Casey’s (ie, he’s never made a movie before), is quite content to simply point his camera in the right direction.

James Marsden, charming and inoffensive, is relegated to saying things like “Good grief!” which is not a thing for grown men to say, or anyone outside of Charlie Brown’s inner circle, really. Tika Sumptner, playing his wife, is given even less to do. Ben Schwartz voices Sonic, and though Schwartz is known for rather larger than life characters, you could go the whole movie without placing his voice, generic white guy à la Zach Braff.

Sonic The Hedgehog is the film equivalent of an oatmeal raisin cookie. Kids might reach for it simply because it is a cookie, but if chocolate or peanut butter or even plain old shortbread were on offer, it would be no question. But it’s just 6 weeks into this new year and it’s virtually the only family-friendly movie in theatres. This is how oatmeal raisin thrives: a complete dearth of options.

10 Minutes Gone

10 Replies

Sometimes even our “Sucks Ass” rating seems too generous. This is one of those times.

MV5BYTcwNjNkOGMtNmQ1MS00NzdmLWJmNDAtOWU4ZTFhZDgyODRiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzI1NzMxNzM@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,962_AL_ Frank (Michael Chiklis) is the safe-cracking heart of a crew looking for a big score in Cincinnati, that will pay the crew $500,000. The opening credits make clear that Frank and his brother have spent a lot of time planning the heist using army men. Their crew is working for Rex (Bruce Willis), a big shot in a suit who’s overseeing the job from an empty floor in an office building. It’s supposed to be easy money but of course things go wrong. Frank gets knocked out during the chaos, and wakes up next to his brother’s dead body. The box they stole is also gone, and Frank is left to figure out who double-crossed them to keep the whole $500k for themselves.

You may remember a bad idea from a few years ago called MoviePass. The initial pitch was that for a set monthly fee you could see as many movies as you wanted. One small flaw in the scheme was that no movie theatres were participating, and in fact they actively spoke out against it. MoviePass pressed on anyway. The result was that MoviePass was buying tickets at full price from the theatre and giving them away for almost nothing (MoviePass’ monthly subscription fee was equal to one regular price ticket).

So after a while of giving away tickets while misleading their investors about their chances of making a profit (which were literally zero), MoviePass found itself millions and millions of dollars in debt. Not even changing the terms repeatedly without notice solved the problems caused by MoviePass’ horrible business model.

Most would have given up at that point, but not MoviePass. Its ace in the hole? Making its own movies and giving away tickets to them! 10 Minutes Gone was one of MoviePass’ first films, and it also happens to be the last. That’s because MoviePass is now dead and gone, and it’s probably best if we agree to bury 10 Minutes Gone alongside it. Everything about this movie is awful. It is an abomination. It was probably MoviePass’ worst idea. And that’s saying a lot.

Blue Iguana

7 Replies

If you’re going to make a movie about seedy undergrounds, small-time criminals, and scary mob bosses, you need to pick the right tone. Make it funny like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Make it clever like Pulp Fiction. Make it suspenseful like The Town. But don’t you dare try to make your movie all of those things, because odds are you’ll end up with a mess like Blue Iguana.

Two ex-cons, Eddie (Sam Rockwell) and Paul (Ben Schwartz), are working in a diner trying to turn their lives around when Katherine (Phoebe Fox) offers them a job too tempting to turn down. Of course, it’s not a legal task, and of course, it goes sideways immediately as the target of their snatch and grab operation falls off a balcony face-first. Do they try to disappear after mucking things up? Of course not. They double down and go after the Blue Iguana, a giant diamond that they’re going to steal from mob boss Arkady (Peter Polycarpou), after he steals it first.

0818-stills-bi-day16-010816 There’s just no one to root for in this film, which is surprising considering Sam Rockwell has made a nice career for himself playing various charming idiots (winning an Oscar as an amazingly bad cop in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). And when someone like Rockwell can’t make us care about his loutish dirtbag, no one else has a chance. These characters just have nothing to offer.

No matter how many quick cuts were taken, no matter how many slow motion shootouts were paired with carefully selected songs, no matter how many montages contained colourful disguises, Blue Iguana never felt comfortable in its own skin. In trying to be lots of other things that writer/director Hadi Hajaig clearly admires and aspires to match, it just tries way, way too hard, to a painful degree.

At no point does Blue Iguana ever get close to being great, and worst of all, in trying so damn hard to emulate greatness, the result ends up being less than mediocre.