This is sadly pathetic when you consider the material at your disposal and all the talent on display.
The grinning Brian Cox is the only thesp in it who seems to be aware that he’s starring in a godawful pile of hokum. And he steals the movie.
The rest: crappy cinematography, derivative battles and sword fights, Orlando Bloom once gain displaying his inability to act a lick. What else? James Horner utilising the same score he’s used in a hundred other films (maybe I’m exaggerating), and dialogue so cringe you’d think Ed Wood Jr. was on scriptwriting duties.
A motion picture which is balls. But it has a certain appeal in that it’s a lesson in how to make proper drivel.
This vexed me from the start with the black-and-white archive footage and grating music. Thousands of films do this for exposition and it’s rarely with effect.
It’s just so boring. It’s a safe, BORING movie about cars. Such an extraordinary director. The subject matter, boringly, appears to have dictated everything in this. Cars. Engines. How fascinating …. I cannot relay a single memorable image or sequence from this sad film. Which is quite sad.
Show me something stylish, make a moment lasting, give me the MANN TREATMENT. Nah, this was your biopic about a car-person featuring the most wooden actor ever to feature in a Star Wars movie. And on that topic, those rancid sequel flicks will hopefully be consigned to the garage bin.
I turned this off after 57 minutes.
I was fuming at how silly and crap this movie was.
This is the best-looking movie about gruesome happenings of the soul and imagination.
You’re seduced, almost, into its albeit engrossing web of cruelty through the outrageous grandiosity of its style; it’s obsessively framed and lit. Yet it somehow never descends into the pretentious, a rare movie that pulls off its conceit.
And Michael Shannon is in it and he can do no wrong.
This is a good movie in a landscape of capes and all that.
This is based on a lauded video game. I haven’t heard of it or played it, so I won’t bother alluding to the geneses of 2007’s Hitman. Timothy Olyphant has been around forever and he’s a fine actor but has never quite hit the A-list. I mind him first rocking up as the zany Mickey (“the freaky Tarantino film student!”) in Scream 2 (1997) and the slimy drug dealer in Go (1999). He’s had decent work ever since, though he was a monotonous ‘presence’ in Die Hard 4.0 (2007), but that’s down to having zilch to work with.
This movie kicks off with one of the most turgidcredits sequences I’ve seen, with ‘Ava Maria’ joining in the snores. The lack of originality wasn’t a shock; the entire film being an imitation number wasn’t, either.
It has a bit of visual verve to it, and we have a sympathetic protagonist (Olyphant is good) with more layers than I expected for this variety of trash. The dialogue, though, is so lumpen and stilted it’s like R2-D2 beeped the words and had them translated by a writer on the expired soap opera of mank that was Brookside. “Eat your sandwich, I need to get some sleep,” orders our eponymous hitman to Olga Kurylenko. Profound words. It’s a full 90 mins of this kind of exchange.
To add to the melting pot of the derivative, Dougray Scott (“I coulda been Wolverine”) is also in it with his Received Pronunciation Scottish accent, Sean Ambrose from Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) but as an Interpol agent. The plot is confusing and confused; even the actors seem confused as to what is actually happening and why. The totality of this flick is that it’s Bourne-lite and Luc Besson-lite at the same time.
Shite, but just shite. It has no pretensions to be anything else, so it receives a 1/5 from me.
Mental movie and in a good way. It has a lot to say about media and brainwashing but in typical Cronenberg style it’s through humans disintegrating or losing their marbles. It’s not as bad as Dr. Ian Malcolm vomiting on a sweet delicacy and metamorphosing into an insect, but it approaches it. One would always confuse the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg. They are thematically so similar, but Lynch veering more into dream territory and Cronenberg the flesh. This could have been a Lynch movie, though.
Videodrome (1983) is some experience, and I had to watch it twice to figure out what I thought was going on. It’s never boring and always … well, nuts.
I didn’t know what to make of this. Nothing happens but it does. The ‘conflict’ isn’t about anything important; zero character arcs. It got a bit dull. The quotes are memorable. It looks fabulous.
I saw it in the cinema in 2007 with a bucket of Blue WKDs. It was a masterpiece back then.
I’ll give it another whirl in a few weeks. With some Blue WKDs.
A very weak Costner performance, especially when you consider that the real-life Kenny O’Donnell had little bearing on these events. The role stinks of ego and the movie is better when he doesn’t feature. Sadly, he’s never off the screen.
The actors playing the Kennedy brothers are also fucking dire.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 