Best Idea, Poorly Executed:
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter – Missing: Matching tone to title.
Alex Cross – Missing: a lead that isn’t Tyler Perry
Casa de mi Padre – Missing: More Anchorman Will Farrell (shows up about 2/3’s through)
Lawless – Missing: More Tom Hardy, more Gary Oldman, less Shia the Boof.
This Means War – Missing: Everything except the cast.
WINNER: This Means War
Honestly, I don’t know if I could come up with a better pitch for a movie. Two spies compete for the same girl’s affections. The cast is a top-5 salary actress (Reese Witherspoon), Captain Kirk Redux, and Christopher Nolan’s Big-Shot Rob, Tom Hardy. Release it for Valentine’s Day. It’s difficult to see what could go wrong. Except everything else! The movie is not funny or romantic. The bad boy wins, the good guy loses, the girl is miserable to be around so we can’t tell why they’re competing over her.
Best/Worst
Laughably Bad Action Movie:
Act of Valor
Battleship
Dredd
WORST:
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
BEST:
Lockout
It’s hard to
really say, in this genre, what good is and what bad is. Dredd has 90 minutes
of shooting. Is that good? Is that bad? Act of Valor is a Navy Seals commercial
voiced-over with poetry so bad that it has to be real. Battleship has 30
minutes of Navy commercial, 10 minutes of board game advertisement, Tim
Riggins, Pearl Harbor’s redemption, a legitimate double-amputee war hero who seems
more at home on the screen than Brooklyn Decker…and not enough Liam Neeson. I
mean, that’s a really strong entry right – for good or for ill?
So I’m
splitting this new category up into what is clearly the worst,
laugh-at-how-bad-it-is of the movies, and then the guilty pleasure bad action
movie that is secretly good.
Ghost Rider
2 is laugh-out loud bad. I’ll just stop at “drunken motorcycle monks riding
through Romania.”
On the other
hand, Lockout has no business having as good a character as Guy Pearce plays. So
the plot has holes bigger than Manti Te’o’s story. (If you don’t like that one,
Notre Dame fans, then I can change it to ‘the plot has holes bigger than the
freeway lanes Alabama’s offensive line was opening in the National Championship
game.’) It doesn’t matter, because someone who should be writing for Justified
wrote Guy Pearce’s dialogue and it flat out rocks.
The
Year in Concept Chick Flick:
The Vow
– Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams…eventually they were going to do a chick
flick together.
This
Means War – Two spies, one girl, no entertainment.
The Lucky
One – Zack Efron is in the military. Stop laughing. He finds picture of a
girl, keeps it as a good luck charm, awkwardly stalks her three years later.
She’s OK with it because she finds him attractive.
The
Five-Year Engagement – Apatow-lite: less funny, more scripted, and less
incisive.
Hope
Springs – The date movie for boomers.
Silver
Linings Playbook – Love resolves a man’s brain chemistry-induced emotional
problems.
Playing
for Keeps – Leonidas is a washed up soccer player and dead beat dad. THIS
IS NOT SPARTA!
MOST PASSABLY
WATCHABLE CHICK FLICK: Silver Linings Playbook
Movies
That Didn’t Make My Top 10, But Are Still Worth Watching if They’re On Cable:
Argo –
This is an average movie. Which I enjoyed. But all this talk of it being a
“throwback to a past era of film-making” is newspeak for “it’s really kind of
slow, but we’ve all been ordered by the powers that be to like this movie.”
Chronicle
– I thought this would really hit home if I were a troubled teen.
The
Dictator
Frankenweenie
– Maybe we’re too used to Tim Burton. This, to me, was some of his finest work,
it’s just that we’ve seen him do it so many times before.
Men in
Black 3
Project X
– The party we all wish our friend had thrown
Prometheus
Looper – It
was very hard to leave this out of my top 10, but too much of my recollection
is occupied by the turn to the lame “creepy kid” dynamic of the final act. The
most devastating late-movie addition since Chris Tucker ruined The Fifth
Element.
MOVIES I
WANT TO LIKE MORE THAN I DID:
Hyde Park on
Hudson
Lawless
The Master
Moonrise
Kingdom
This is 40
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