released May 4th, 2001
Okay, now the summer is really starting. Crocodile Dundee, Stallone in a car, those were appetizers. This is the first bonafide Big Ass Summer Movie of ’01, with the advertising and the toys and what not. It opened huge, and eventually made more than $433 million worldwide. I don’t think I know anybody that likes it, though.
THE MUMMY RETURNS is the second one, the one where the mummy returns for a while, then leaves again. Like the first MUMMY it begins with a narrated prologue that’s better than the movie proper because it doesn’t have Brendan Fraser or a bunch of talking in it. This one tells a little bit about the legend of The Scorpion King (The Rock), a guy who led a bunch of warriors in trying to conquer the world, but they all died of heat stroke so he was bit by a scorpion or whatever, and magic. His part is less than 5 minutes, he speaks one line and it’s not in English, and his narrative purpose is to return as a shitty CGI bug monster at the end. Also to set up a prequel spin-off that’s way more entertaining than the mummy movies, in my opinion.
(read the rest of this shit…)
released April 27, 2001
released April 20th, 2001
Huh. Turns out Professor X and Magneto started out working with the CIA. You know what that means, don’t you? PHOENIX WAS AN INSIDE JOB.
I thought I’d seen Ridley Scott’s LEGEND back in the ’80s, but none of this shit seemed familiar so maybe not. I was never into the hobbity shit and to this day I have no clue why Mr. Scott thinks that unicorns are something that should be used in a medium other than wallpaper for a little girl’s room, so it makes sense that I wouldn’t have gotten around to this one before.
In the tradition of SNIPER and THE MATRIX RELOADED comes a movie that has the words SNIPER and RELOADED in the title. Actually this is the fourth entry in the SNIPER series and yet another example of the 21st century’s trend of surprised-they-made-this, not-bad, not-great DTV sequels.
Somebody was making fun of me the other day for always saying the full name “Stone Cold Steve Austin,” even though he’s just credited as “Steve Austin” these days. But you know what man, it’s like saying “Sir Laurence Olivier” or “President Barack Obama” or “Screen Actor’s Guild Award Winner Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges.” I am a gentleman and I show respect when appropriate. And anyway he’s not the Six Million Dollar Man, and he’s not an amazing undercover biker movie starring Brian Bosworth, he’s obviously a combination of the two. Just calling him “Steve Austin” or “Stone Cold” would be incomplete and inaccurate. You can’t just say “butter” when you mean “peanut butter,” it’s a completely different meaning.
The remake of 3:10 TO YUMA is a pretty good modern western, but it dilutes the simple power of the original by overcomplicating it. Delmer Daves and friends took this very short story mostly about two men in a hotel room (don’t take that the wrong way please) and expanded it to movie length, but I thought they made it work beautifully. Now they take that expanded version of the simple idea and they go expand on that. Give the hero more of a backstory, involve his son in the action, have the outlaw escape and get captured by other people, etc. The only thing they simplify is the number of guys in Ben Wade (Russell Crowe)’s gang, so you lose that menacing scene of them all lined up at the bar with one defenseless woman pouring them all shots.
(Note: I will be reviewing both 3:10s to Yumas in two separate posts)
