Tag Archives: unnecessary sequels

In Defense of SPECTRE: A Review For the BEST of Us.

You may have read Matt’s review of SPECTRE. He seemed to like it but still called it the “dullest, most phoned-in Bond movie” since Casino Royale. That’s a bit ambiguous but I think he liked SPECTRE and Casino Royale and just hated everything that came between Sir Sean Connery and Dr. Daniel Craig.

Real knight.

Not a real doctor. As far as I know.

You may also have read Jay’s review of SPECTRE. You probably should read it just for context.

Jay and I have been together for over six years now. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met and that’s one of the things I love about her. But it also drives me crazy because I have never been able to prove her wrong. Until now.

Jay is right that she was never going to like this movie. She hates everything I like on principle. But that doesn’t make it bad. Obviously I have fantastic taste in movies. Exhibit A: The Rock. Exhibit B: Transformers. Exhibit C: Bad Boys. Not coincidentally, those are all Michael Bay movies and two of them turned into franchises precisely bec nicolas cage the rock ause they were so good (the Rock probably would have been a franchise as well if not for the curse of Nicholas Cage). Because people loved them. You don’t get a franchise any other way, and everyone knows that sequels always live up to the original movie. That’s just a fact.

Score: SEAN 1, JAY 0

Jay also hates franchises on principle. But franchises make action movies better! With franchises, we don’t have to worry about plot, or character development, or other boring things like that. We can get straight to the action! So when we open with the awesome Day of the Dead sequence, we don’t have to have title cards or anything to let us know that the guy who pulls off the mask is the world’s best spy, because the preceding five decades of Bond movies have already set that up. Thank you, franchises, for simplifying our lives.

Score: SEAN 2, JAY 0

And okay, the helicopter sequence in SPECTRE is terrible. Absolutely terrible. But to say it’s worse than a bucket of army guys? That’s just hyperbole. And that’s a logical fallacy. So therefore Jay’s dislike of the helicopter sequence(s) is invalid.

Score: SEAN 3, JAY 0

Jay also hated the train sequence. Because it got destroyed. But that’s actually entirely realistic when you consider who was doing the destruction. Dave Bautista a.k.a. Drax the Destroyer. Just look at how strong he is in the WWE (six time champion) or in Guardians of the Galaxy (where he singlehandedly fought a guy who later survived a spaceship crash). That train was not only real, it was probably very well built, maybe even German. It just didn’t matter because of how hard Bautista can punch. If you want some sort of arthouse surrealism that’s fine, Jay, we can go to the Bytowne this weekend and watch a movie where two people can’t get out of a shed. But don’t blame SPECTRE for your weird preferences.

Score: SEAN 4, JAY 0

Another criticism Jay made was that James Bond had different jackets all the time. Well, that’s the whole point! He’s not just a spy, he’s a fashionable guy with a watch that blows up and a car with an ejector seat. Obviously he also has some sort of flying or floating wardrobe machine as well. They probably covered that in one of the earlier Bond movies, so there was just no need to explain it this time. Again, thank you franchises!

Score: SEAN 5, JAY 0

I think I’ve proven my point. I’ll even give Jay the sockless loafers, Christoph Waltz in general, and the weirdness/creepiness/wasted potential of the whole Monica Bellucci thing, since I’m feeling generous.

Score: SEAN 5, JAY 3

And as for Michael Bay, you already have all the proof you need (The Rock, Transformers, Bad Boys) to rest assured that he’s Hollywood’s greatest living director.

Case closed.

Winner: SEAN

HOLD THE FREAKIN PHONE, MISTER!!!

It seems our math doesn’t quite agree. Over at MY post, there’s a lot more nodding going on. I think we can count Mark, Joel, the other J, and Hammy as all #TeamJay.

Terminator: Genisys

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There were already a lot of strikes against this movie and then to add insult to injury, I had to double check the “correct” spelling of Genisys. The agony this movie is inflicting on me seems endless. And with that, I have tipped my hand as to how this review is going to end.

Terminator: Genisys is a complete mess, which sadly has been a recurring theme for this franchise over the last 20 years. So in that regard, I can understand why rebooting it makes sense, particularly since the original Judgment Day was in 1997, so when that came and went it made the franchise feel a little dated.

But the way they handled the reboot just trampled all over the first two films, which I still consider to be two of the best sci-fi movies of all time (with the second one being one of my all-time favourite movies period, having seen it at least 25 times because when 14-year-old me was in a hotel for a swim meet one weekend, I figured out how to watch pay-per-view for free, so had this movie on repeat every minute I was in the room). I’m not even sure if I need to be careful with the big twist, since James Cameron spoiled it for me repeatedly in Cineplex’s pre-show.

Without even referring specifically to it I may still give it away. My complaint is simple: somehow someone decided that a good plot twist would be to do something to one of the franchise’s main characters that renders every movie to date, including this one, totally irrelevant. I have no idea why that ever seemed like a good plan. Sure, it makes it easy to put a new timeline in place going forward, but even if that was the plan, the movie fails as a reboot because the ending leaves us with no momentum whatsoever and no reason to anticipate the next movie in the series (if there even is one after this debacle).

I often complain about reboots and, in particular, rehashes of origin stories as a reboot mechanism. Well, this reboot mechanism is worse. And that has me really shaking my head in disbelief, that somehow they found a way to be worse than the lazy reboots, because it seems they did really try with this one. Unfortunately, it’s just so misguided and so unfaithful to what has come before that it offends me. It brings me almost to the level of hatred I had for the Star Wars prequels. Terminator and Terminator 2 were movies I absolutely loved as a teenager and basically, this movie is the equivalent of Skynet sending a robot back to 1991 to repeatedly punch me in the groin while I was watching T2 for the first time, thereby changing the course of history and preventing me from ever liking it. And this time, the robots won.

I’m not even giving this a rating. I’m too angry.

Paul Blarts: Mall Cops 1 & 2

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It should be wonderful when a sequel tops its predecessor. Think Godfather 2 or Empire Strikes Back. It’s a very rare occurrence, and you would think anytime it happens the sequel would be memorable, since if a sequel got greenlit the original movie must have been decent at least, right? If you felt safe making that assumption, like I did, now is the time to reconsider. Because Kevin James and Adam Sandler have gone out of their way to prove us all wrong.

I did not see Paul Blart 1 until Friday. I didn’t try to avoid it at the time but did not expect it to be much good. And I was okay with it being mediocre and also with seeing it at some point. So that point was two days ago. It was surprisingly not funny. Like I was just supposed to sort of cheer for Paul because he was the main guy. I think? It was more confusing than anything, really, as to why this mediocre idea didn’t even get to the mediocre level.

And if they had stopped at one there would have been nothing more to say. It wrapped up, Paul Blart won, he foiled all the bad guys and got the girl. So he could stop being sad and start being a more respected mall cop. Or something, I mean, it didn’t seem like he had more story to tell. But then, six years after that, for some reason a sequel got made.

There can’t have been anyone asking for a sequel. I don’t know how anyone could have thought this was a good idea. But here we are, with Paul Blart 2 playing this week at the drive in. We hadn’t been in a while because we’ve been busy, and we were semi-free, and it was a nice night, so really, it didn’t matter what was playing.

Paul Blart 2 is pretty much Paul Blart 1. I think if anything everyone was a little more practiced, like the first was a dress rehearsal for the second, so the second turned out a bit more polished. The second one is a slightly better movie, just comparing them straight up. But it is still mediocre at best. If it’s at your local drive in then go. Or you could consider it as an option on a plane, I mean, I’d probably rewatch Jurassic World instead but maybe it can be your 3rd or 4th option if your flight is crossing the Pacific Ocean. That’s about the best thing I can say about Paul Blart 2: it’s slightly better than the first one but it is probably not as good as rewatching something you already saw and liked.

I will give this franchise a combined rating of half a segway out of two. Because there’s probably a supercut of these two movies that might be entertaining but even then I think I would be better off rewatching Jurassic World and Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out and Furious 7 on my next plane ride (and since it’s to San Francisco that’s more than enough to fill my flight).

Mark Wahlberg, Hollywood Pinup

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Sure he’s got a slew of forgettable films, interchangeable even (do you know the difference between 2 Guns and Shooter?) but you have to admit, he’s also got some interesting blips.

Ted 2 is not an interesting blip, by the way. It’s pointlessly unamusing with all the same inane cameos as Entourage.

Palette cleanser!

Mark Wahlberg is a pretty straight-forward guy. He’s often not so much acting as working. You know, just showing up, gettin er done, home in time for spaghetti. He doesn’t always pick his projects with much judiciousness, he gets as many wrong as he gets right, but the stuff he gets right is actually pretty great. Like, two Oscar nominations great. Who would have guessed?

Blip: Boogie Nights – He was pretty good in Basketball Diaries and I suppose even in Renaissance Man, but Paul Thomas Anderson put Marky Mark on the map with this ode to the porn industry. Wahlberg’s portrayal is fearless and unassuming and no one saw it coming. The entire cast is stunning but few could have anticipated how well Wahlberg would hold his own against heavyweights like Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Blip: I Heart Huckabees – I heart this movie right to death. David O. Russell gave Wahlberg a juicy part in Three Kings but this movie really hits it out of the park for me. His character is such an interestingly layered mix of macho and whimsical, fevered and confused. He’s a man on the cusp but manages to play his existential crisis with sincerity and commitment.

Blip: The Departed – Mark Wahlberg nearly steals the whole show for me in this one. The ensemble is crazy packed with exceedingly good performances, but his angry, explosive detective really takes the cake. He stole scenes not easily stolen. He clearly relished the role of Sgt. Dignam and you’ll find yourself not able, or willing, to take your eyes off him.

Blip: The Fighter – Christian Bale is probably the acting antithesis of Mark Wahlberg, being all method and shit. Bale took home an Oscar for his part but Wahlberg gave a captivating performance as well, throwing himself into the role and taking a pay cut just to get the thing made.

Is it weird that the guy who did the worst Transformers and talks to a vulgar teddy bear is neck in neck with Damon and DiCaprio for best actor of his generation? Of course it is. But his grosses are consistent and these flares that he keeps sending up, these blips of excellent roles, well, they’re coming regularly enough that you have to wonder if they’re not just blips. What if Marky Mark is the real deal?

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

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Dear Adam Scott,

I have watched and enjoyed you on Parks and Rec. You are cute and witty and charming, and so I’m telling you, as a friend, that your agent fucking hates you.

You know who’s too good for John Cusack’s sloppy seconds? YOU ARE. But did your agent tell you that? No he did not. A quick glance at your IMDB profile tells me he’s been feeding you shite for years. Does your agent appear to have a rampant addiction? Do you think it’s possible you are feeding that addiction with your 10%? Because a normal agent is supposed to stand between you and sodomy. I mean, I don’t think that’s what it technically says on their business cards, but it’s definitely part of the job. Since you are paying dearly for their services, then the script that would have your testicles spurting a milky substance into Rob Corddry’s face should never reach the light of day. It should be tossed in the Pauly Shore pile, or maybe Rob Schneider’s. Possibly Danny McBride’s. But since it ended up in your hands, Adam, and you were somehow convinced to sign on, then I can only surmise that your junkie agent is also a charismatic cult leader deft at brain washing and mind control. That’s the only logical explanation for this movie, and your presence in it.

So for the love of Adam Scott, Internet, will you please band together, so we can FREE ADAM SCOTT! FREE ADAM SCOTT! FREE ADAM SCOTT!

Yours truly, with concern, compassion, and zero tolerance for unnecessary sequels,

The Assholes

Pitch Perfect 2

21 Replies

Welp.

It managed to earn $70 million in its opening weekend, more than the $65 million the original earned during its entire domestic theatrical run back in 2012. The only other sequel to have out-earned its original in the first weekend was Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, so rest easy, Internet, we’re in good company.

Pitch Perfect The First was a bit of a gamble for me, having a raging hate-on for Anna Kendrick and all, but the Fat Amy effect seemed to mitigate the bad Anna juju. And I managed to look past the Miley Cyrus tribute with generous applications of ladies of the 80s, and forgave a song featuring the actually-talented Sia being referred to as “that David Guetta jam” (FUCKING BULLET TO MY HEAD). All things considered, totting up the pluses and the minuses, I found that it was a slightly net positive. Win.

The sequel, however, has left me feeling distinctly negative. My sister, a fan of the first, felt the music was lacking this time around. Except for some 90s hip hop, it was. There are some scenes that are blatantly trying to reignite the flame of the first, but none are entirely successful, and some are incredibly not. But what really stood out for me was how offensively one-dimensional some of the characters are. Character development is a joke – we don’t learn anything new about anyone, but some are reduced to stereotypes that should shame us all.

Ester Dean is back as Cynthia Rose, and to be honest, I’m surprised she even has a name because as her character is actually reduced to saying in the movie, she’s the black lesbian, and she does nothing in the film (beside providing the requisite rap interludes – and she actually has a lovely voice) is remind us how she’s a lesbian, which means she can’t help constantly macking on every single woman around her. Like, grope her friends’ breasts and try to take advantage of a sleepover situation. She has absolutely no other character traits or back story until at the very end she proclaims that she’s moving to Maine to have a gay wedding and we’re all invited! Does she have a partner? We’ve certainly never heard of her before this moment, and she remains unnamed, which is maybe for the best since just a tiny bit before this her supposed fiancée is molesting her mates, because as you know, gay people are walking same-sex hard-ons and no one is safe from their sloppy gay groping, especially not their close personal friends.

Meanwhile, Chrissie Fit is brought on board this time to fulfill the role of illegal immigrant who reminds everyone how lucky they are to be in college without apparently having to attend a single class or work a job or worry about tuition or the job market, let alone having diarrhea for 7 years like she did back in Guatemala. Her plans for the future? To be deported immediately upon graduation, of course! But don’t worry, all the white girls go on to have happy, well-rounded lives. Well, the thin ones at least.

This movie is Elizabeth Banks’ first turn behind the camera, though I believe she also produced the first one. I wish I could support a movie that has a female screenwriter AND director AND a whole bevy of stars, but no. This one’s a perfect pass. Kudos on the Snoop cameo though. Now that was pitch perfect.

Night At The Museum: Something About A Tomb

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Wow did this suck balls. Like, no redeeming factors to report at all. The effects are brazenly shoddy. Embarrassing. Was this movie shot entirely in front of a green screen? Is there even a museum in New York?

My problem is, I don’t like Ben Stiller. My other problem is, Ben Stiller likes Ben Stiller. So much so that he conferred upon himself another character, just so he can have the pleasure of interacting with himself, green screen on green screen on green screen. Is nothing sacred?

I love Rebel Wilson but she’s falling into the Melissa McCarthy trap here – genuinely funny women that are reduced to one-note obnoxious roles that wear thin quickly. Not quite as thin as Ben Stiller as a caveman (haven’t we seen that before?), but still. She was wasted. But this movie wasted actors like it was going out of style (and if this is indeed the third and final chapter, then I guess it is) – Ben Kingsley! Hugh Jackman! Ricky Gervais! And y’all know that I love Steve Coogan but for the love of monkeys, throw the man a bone. He and Owen Wilson and floundering with oodles of screen time but nary a point. I felt bad for them.

There was a single workable joke in the whole entire thing:

Ben Kingsley (as an Egyptian pharaoh) to Ben Stiller, half-Jewish: “I love Jews! We owned 40 000 of them. They were very happy. Always singing with the candles.”

Ben Stiller: “Yeah, they really weren’t happy. They left. Spent 40 years in the desert trying to escape. We have dinner once a year to talk about it.”

So now that I’ve ruined the one funny bit for you, you don’t have to watch it.

You’re welcome!

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

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Maybe my expectations were too high. Which is a bit weird to say because Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a comic book movie, so basically I should have known what I was going to get. And as a comic book movie, it does its job. It gives us lots of really fast and strong heroes who jump out of planes and off buildings, endless bad guys with unlimited bullets who shoot at those heroes for half the movie, and a head bad guy with a mask and metal arm who may not even be the mastermind behind all this mayhem. What it does not give us, and why I was ultimately let down, is any real change to the formula that we have seen from Marvel in its ten (ten!) movies and counting. It’s all the same and it’s getting a little tired.

The problem is, I’m a comic book guy and an action movie guy. I should have enjoyed this movie a lot more than I did. I’m still excited to see Avengers 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy 2. But now I’m a lot less excited. I wonder, am I just going to get a rehash of what I’ve seen before like I did in Captain America 2, a story that really begins at the same place it started without advancing the greater plot I thought was underlying these movies in the Marvel Universe? Before watching this movie I had felt that maybe I should go back and watch the Captain America movies as well as the two Thor movies, but now I feel confident I don’t need to and certainly don’t have any desire to since this movie was so forgettable and so self-contained.

shield punch

Is this just a middling installment in the Marvel movie juggernaut? Or is it a sign that we’ve used up all the good ideas for now and it’s time to wait for the inevitable reboots of all these characters, since their origins are the only stories from which Hollywood can consistently make decent movies? I guess we’ll have a better idea in just a few months because Avengers: Age of Ultron opens May 1 and Ant-Man follows shortly after. My gut says making a movie about Ant-Man is overkill at this point, and then I look and see that there are 16 more Marvel-related movies (including Fox and Sony ones) scheduled to come out between now and 2019. That’s way too many. One a year might be too many. The worst part is, I know there are better movies to be made that have been passed over in favour of these big-budget, low-risk, no-art movies. I would like to have seen those and 18 more Marvel movies, plus whatever DC is doing, is a poor trade and a loss for all of us.

Big picture aside, I’m still not satisfied with what I was given here. This movie is a tolerable distraction but leaves you with nothing memorable. It gets five indestructible shields out of ten.

Muppets Most Wanted

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

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For a blow-by-blow account, read Jay’s live blogging of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

“I’ve gone and done something again. Wish I could remember what”.

Marv (Mickey Rourke) has gone and done it again. It’s bad to forget your medicine when you’ve got a condition. This opening, based on Frank Miller’s short story Just Another Saturday Night, does not bode well for the rest of this sequel that I’d been anxiously awaiting for nearly 10 years. The first scene of Sin City, where Josh Hartnett plays a contract killer who completes a contract that a woman apparently put out on her herself, was not like anything I had ever seen. Sin City 2’s opening felt so much like a movie that I’d already seen before that, when watching it with Luc, it took me five minutes to convince him that we weren’t accidentally rewatching the first one. This had better get better fast.

“Poker. Savage power in gentlemen’s hands”.

If you’ve read my other reviews, you might have noticed that I have a bit of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt bias that I might as well come clean about. With that kept in mind, this next segment of the film, an original story by Frank Miller written for the movie, is the strongest by far. JGL plays a gambler who wins more than he should have against the beastly no good Senator Roark. He’s cocky but with more than his share of demons and if there’s one thing JGL knows, it’s cocky with more than his share of demons. Plus, movies like Brick and Looper have prepared him for lines like “Sin City’s where you go in with your eyes open. Or you don’t come out at all”. It isn’t just him that makes this the best of the four stories though. Everyone involved seems to be having more fun, especially Powers Boothe as Roark, who seems to get hard with every ruthless word.

“It’s another hot night, dry and windless. The kind that makes people do sweaty, secret things”.

This is really the main segment of the film, a nearly panel-for-panel adaptation of one of Miller’s more popular graphic novels, A Dame to Kill for. Eva Green plays Ava Lord, a damsel to kill for who seduces men into doing horrible things, including our old pal Dwight (this time played by Josh Brolin). The almost constantly naked Green is even more wicked than in Miller’s 300: Rise of an Empire earlier this year. She seems to relish playing her, even if she never seems sure what to do with her accent. Everyone else is phoning it in though. Brolin growls through all his lines like he’s trying to out-Marv Marv. Rourke, as Marv (over-used in the sequel) sounds like he showed up to the ten-year Sin City reunion only to find that it wasn’t nearly as much fun as he remembered. And Ray Liotta, in a short cameo, uses the campy dialogue as an excuse to go full Liotta. This story might have been a better fit for the first film, when the novelty was still there.

“I don’t use the stripper logic anymore”.

We end with another original story, this time focusing on Jessica Alba’s character. It gets off to a pretty good start. Nancy starts to fall apart after the death of Bruce Willis’ character in the first movie and Alba plays it better than I would have expected. The segment itself starts to fall apart very quickly though with more skull-crushing from Marv and a crossbow-wiedling Nancy. It ends with the death of a character that may kill the possibility of a third Sin City, which I would have been disappointed by 9 years ago. After watching this sequel though, it’s probably for the best.