Posts Tagged ‘The Rock’

The Scorpion King

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

Well, I gave up on Stephen Sommers after the rhythmless THE MUMMY so I never watched THE MUMMY RETURNS. But I have since learned to enjoy The Rock so today I finally got around to watching the prequel/spin-off THE SCORPION KING. It’s directed by Charles NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3 Russell, so I didn’t have to break my Sommers boycott. And I’m glad I finally watched it. This is probaly the best riff on the CONAN THE BARBARIAN type of movie I’ve seen. Not as stylish or violent as 300 but a little more fun. And a hell of alot better than KULL THE CONQUEROR.

The movie got me from the opening scene where Tyler Mane and a horde of barbarians have some hapless dude who they call “an Akkadian” tied up. They are very proud of all the races and nationalities they’ve murdered but they never bagged them an Akkadian before, so this is a big day. But the Akadian says, “May the gods have mercy on you, because my brother won’t.”

His brother, is, of course, The Rock (registered trademark of World Wrestling Entertainment) as Mathayis, a long-haired, giant-muscled, bow and arrow toting, sword slinging, rope swinging, cuthroat motherfucker who storms in for a Rock vs. Mane Smackdown, and fires an arrow into Mane so hard he flies out the side of the building and lands five years later in the remake of HALLOWEEN. (more…)

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Posted in Action, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | No Comments »

Southland Tales

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Poor The Rock. With his outsized charisma, cartoonish build and air of sincerity I’m still convinced he has the potential to make great movies. The problem is he doesn’t seem to hook up with any good directors. THE RUNDOWN is still his best movie and it’s a fun time but, come on, it’s no PREDATOR, or even COMMANDO. I believe we, as a society, can offer The Rock more than THE RUNDOWN. So I was excited when I found out the Rock would be one of the stars of this weird new movie from the director of DONNIE DARKO. “Should at least be interesting,” I thought, not bothering to knock on wood.
Trouble is I had writer/director Richard Kelly pegged all wrong. I liked DONNIE DARKO well enough, thought it was pretty original and enjoyable. Saw it once on video and once as the director’s cut at the Seattle Internation Film Festival, which is when I learned that some youths worship this guy. They traveled across the country dressed in DARKO-themed costumes to nervously stammer to him that he changed their lives. That’s weird, I thought.

Then he wrote DOMINO, one of my most hated movies of the last several years. But I blamed Tony Scott. I figured there could’ve been a good script in there, Tony Scott just ax murdered it to unrecognizable bits with his Guiness Book of World Records All Time Worst Editing Ever In the History of Cinema. But after seeing SOUTHLAND TALES I’m not so sure Kelly is clean on that one. In fact I bet he specified alot of that shit in the script.

SOUTHLAND TALES takes place in Los Angeles, in the near future, after a nuclear attack on Texas. It involves intrigue between an amnesiac action star, a senator, a porn star/talk show hostess, left wing radicals, a Homeland Security type Big Brother department of the US government, twin brother racist cops, the inventor of an alternative fuel, some dwarves, and a weapons dealer in an ice cream truck played by Christopher Lambert. The plot also hits on time travel, dimensional travel, the human soul, psychedelic drugs, kidnapping, blackmail, staged murders, slam poetry, and a zepellin piloted by Kevin Smith wearing old man makeup but talking exactly like he did in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. The cast also includes Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong, Zelda Rubinstein, Janeane Garafolo in one shot of a crowd scene, and the guy who apparently played Seagal on MAD TV. Also your mom is probaly in there somewhere. (more…)

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Gridiron Gang

Friday, September 15th, 2006

GRIDIRON GANG is the latest in this year’s new wave of inspirational high concept true story football movies. This one is THE LONGEST YARD meets STAND AND DELIVER: Dwayne T.R. Johnson plays an officer at a juvenile detention center who decides to start a football team to instill self esteem, discipline and teamwork in young criminals. I didn’t see INVINCIBLE and McG’s WE ARE MARSHALL hasn’t come out yet, but I’m guessing this one is the most generic of the bunch. There’s almost no point in me describing the movie. Try this: close your eyes. Now read that premise I just described, and picture a movie about that. There it is, what you just pictured is exactly what the movie is.

Holy shit, how are you reading this with your eyes closed? I didn’t say you could open them. This is weird. Well, I’m not sure exactly what to say about these amazing powers of yours, so instead I will ignore them and just go ahead and review the movie. Even if you don’t close your eyes, if you make a list of everything you expect to happen in a movie like this, you’d probaly get to cross off everything on the list.

You got the visionary coach who talks The Man into supporting his program. The higher-ups who don’t believe in him at first but are ultimately won over. The disastrous first game where they lose and want to give up. The lovable fat kid who needs to learn to believe in himself. The guy who is too much of a fuckup so they don’t let him on the team but he shows up anyway and proves himself. The part where the coach is too much of an asshole and disillusions the team. The parts where the program gets shut down and the coach has to figure out how to bring it back from the dead. The fights with loved ones who at the end silently show that they’ve changed their minds by showing up to watch the game. And it goes without saying that you have the tense clock-beating come-from-behind-at-the-last-possible-second victory against a bitter rival. And the explanations at the end of what happened to each character (although in this case The Rock narrates it instead of it being written on the screen). And there’s an insipid score that redundantly tells you how triumphant and heartwarming this all is. Now THIS is a movie that could’ve used a soundtrack by RZA. (more…)

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Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews, Sport | No Comments »

Doom

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

There are three very clever sequences in this movie. First, it opens with narration over a starfield, and then pans over to show Mars. Suddenly the familiar UNIVERSAL logo letters spin around Mars. So it’s just like the usual studio logo except the red planet instead of the globe. Then the letters go off screen and the camera zooms into Mars and into a space colony where the movie takes place. It’s like there’s not even time to bother with a studio logo, our only option is to work it into the plot. That is how urgent it is to get to the motherfucking DOOM.

Yeah yeah, I know my movie history, so you don’t have to flood me with emails pointing out that the great visionary McG already connected the first shot of C’S As 1 to whichever studio logo it was. But this is a different thing because the movie has already started, and then we get the logo within the movie. If we are to follow our understanding of standard cinematical language, there may really be giant letters orbiting around Mars within the reality of DOOM. It all takes place indoors, so there’s no way to know if there are giant UNIVERSAL shaped shadows dripping across the landscape.

The number two clever sequence is the one you maybe already heard about, the climax of the movie. It’s a five and a half minute sequence that is a continuous shot from the point of view of the hero (Karl Urban), running through space colony corridors shooting monsters that pop out like it’s a Halloween haunted house. Alot of his opponents are just dumb zombie dudes but there’s also a variety of monsters from rubber costumes to computer animation, and weapons including guns, grenades and a chainsaw. (Apparently the video game the movie is based on is famous for being first person like this, so that’s where the idea comes from. they sure have come a long way since Pac-Man in my opinion, although the stupid thing about the POV concept is that you can never do a MS. DOOM, because how are you gonna know if you’re wearing a bow and lipstick?) (more…)

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Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Videogame | 2 Comments »