Watching this again was a fatalistic regret because it’s absolute rubbish and bloody tedium defined. It’s another one of those movies that I convinced myself was good.
It isn’t and takes so long to get going I thought I was viewing one of those indulgent director’s cuts.
I went to school with a lad who would scream, “The bridge is out, the bridge is out.” This was conducted at random intervals, my introduction to True Lies (1994).
Ludicrous story but pure entertainment and James Cameron gets away with it, mainly for the esoteric banter that is Bill Paxton. The lad defines enthusiasm and lights up every bit of celluloid he’s in. He has been missed.
It’s coarse and childish and it’s 1994. Stick to Bill Paxton and the action. Skip or mute anything with Tom Arnold.
And marvel at the other Arnold on a horse … in a shopping mall.
2/5.
It’s okay if all over the place with a jarringly inconsistent tone – too violent but not violent enough, it’s half a kids’ movie, half Lethal Weapon, which doesn’t work. Maybe they should have just stuck with the one genre or infused it with more magic, the escapism of the movie theatre and all that.
Spot the cameo helps pass the two-hour running time, and it has its moments when you think it could be relaxing into a movie that goes somewhere. But it doesn’t.
It’s stupid. But it’s not stupid-stupid. At least you get two Arnies for the price of one in this hit-and-miss deconstruction of action cinema.
Good poster.
I personally find him extraordinarily inspirational.
His ego must be bananas but it’s justified – he started from zilch and made it to the summit through body and mind. I would buy him a pint. I’d vote for him also.
Despite some big boo-boos that he openly admits to, he remains the definition of hero.
The reasons multiple, I put off watching this for a long time.
My two cents:
Again, the needy references to superior fare, the sheer desperation of bad writing, the mindless action with seemingly nothing at stake.
The ‘characters’ here buy the premise so instantly that you’re immediately questioning their validity, and as they have no dimensions it’s doubly irritating. They are chucked into unimaginative shoot-outs from the get-go. Who are these people? No idea, so I don’t care. There’s an antagonist who is as threatening as a poodle slurping a bowl of Bacardi Breezer, a hero sent from the future who is just plain dull, and Linda Hamilton looks more bored than I was watching her being bored.
I got to 48 mins. I couldn’t take any more torture and turned it off before Arnie arrived. So boring, so without logic or merit, so pedestrian on every level. This has to be the end of this extended shower of shit.
No more.
Let’s get this over with quickly.
Claire Danes’ daft performance is … daft. She just stands and stares, and clearly can’t act at all.
A dreadful antagonist in a movie which is derivative to the max and for some reason mocks itself (lack of any other scripting ideas), even the action is badly choreographed.
The ending is decent. But this is mainly because you’re on fire because the torture is done.
Total shite.
Walter Hill invented the buddy cop action movie with 48 Hours (1982). This is the same premise but with looser plotting, fewer thrills, and zero chemistry between the leads. Arnie is the best thing in it (as he always is) and does a creditable job as a Soviet policeman, but Jim Belushi is hopelessly miscast and it doesn’t help that some of the dialogue he’s given is humiliating. There’s a bus chase of sorts near the end and for almost the entire duration Jim Belushi simply wails at what’s going on in front of them and the general situation. It is the most boring chase in a film I’ve ever seen. The bad guy is almost intriguing and Ed O’Ross does possess a certain charismatic quality. But the movie is simply pointless.
It’s so desperate to be something more than it is that Arnie as a stoic commie cop is its go-to place. Almost every gag, every joke, every line of dialogue between the crime-fighting duo is this schematic clash of cultures nonsense but in a mostly non-threatening way. It’s like the filmmakers looked at Reagan and Gorbachev and the thawing of relations and thought it a good idea to have Arnie as a Soviet rozzer in a shitty movie.
Probably.
The most interesting thing on display here is the cast. It is Kevin Bacon territory. Everyone is in it. I even spotted Kurt Fuller. Who has also been in everything.
I’ve had shites that were more enjoyable than The Predator (2018), and one time in 2014 in Tokyo I shat out nothing but green water for 11 straight days. How can you go from peak Arnie circa 1987 to this garbage? I thought right-wing US governments were meant to bring about a seismic change in film discourse? Like, proper satirical stuff masquerading as flag-waving propaganda. Apparently not.
This film was so fucking atrocious I fell asleep for half an hour, spilled Coca-Cola on my £11 Sainsbury’s jeans, and had a dream about Warwick Davis dropkicking Kenny Baker into the Death Star. My movie-watching colleague had to wake me up with smelling salts.
Worst film I’ve seen in years.
“You’re a top operative working undercover on an important mission. People are trying to kill you left and right. You meet this beautiful exotic woman. I don’t want to spoil it for you, Doug, but you rest assured that by the time the trip is over, you get the girl, kill the bad guys, and save the entire planet.”
Philip K. Dick wrote We Can Remember It for You Wholesale in 1966. I’ve never read the short story, only having on about 16 occasions watched the movie adaptation Total Recall (1990). As a kid I was in it for the action and Arnie one-liners. As an alleged adult it’s the purchased memory theme that brings me back, the ambuiguity as to whether Quaid’s Secret Agent adventure is fantasy or not.
Perhaps the peak Arnie flick – a blistering entertainment married to cerebral ideas and conceits – it still stands as one of the most accessible sci-fi works over the past 30 years. The future of the holiday here is the downloading of data, the transcending of air travel. Returning with artefacts aside, what are journeys but the accumulation of memories, imprints which serve as building blocks of the id.
The movie – and, I presume, the short story – was way ahead of its time, and still holds up.
Quaid’s Rekall program: Blue Sky on Mars.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 