This was just plain annoying, featuring a very annoying protagonist with a very annoying voice. I realised it’s one of the blokes from Narcos and the reason I stopped watching that show. Michael C. Hall is also in this and he also has an annoying voice. We also have Bokeem Woodbine, who possesses the softest, suavest voice, but he’s not in it enough for the movie to be decent.
I lost interest in it all after half an hour and doubt I’ve missed anything worth writing about. It’s just an array of annoying voices.
I know very little about any of this; I quite simply do not care for the yarn, and I never will. So such Biblical inaccuracies are of no concern to me, much as a filmic deviation from a comic book also rouses no faux-incredulity on my behalf.
Visuals here were impressive. The rest, absolute shite, from the horrible characters to the bombast, and the general tedium of it all.
The personal narratives – mega meltdowns – linked to an Extinction Level Event (ELE) is a lofty ambition but the director cannot be faulted for his audacity, and this film has a preternatural quality from the start with its striking opening and inspired use of Wagner (Tristan und Isolde).
We also have an acidic Charlotte Rampling, a plastered John Hurt, and Kiefer Sutherland doing his best ‘Fuming Mode’ in quite some time. There are scenes of such awkwardness in the first act that it’s a genuine feat to have put them together in rapid succession. Then we get all apocalyptic and it somehow works. There are so few movies like this, one toils to put it in a category.
Classic songs you’d expect in a Scorsese movie ruined by their despairing accompaniment to threadbare scenes of Travolta and Alley mugging it, that’s Look Who’s Talking (1989) summed up.
I don’t get the point of any of it. It’s coarse, crude, cheap, and frankly just a minging watch. How is the interior monologue of a baby amusing? Oh, Bruce Willis does the voice of the critter. What genius!
A movie that can’t decide if it’s family fare or an R rating, it’s somewhere thrashing in the middle, daft and pointless. I suppose this got Travolta through his ‘wilderness years’ as it beguilingly scooped up a fucking fortune. But audiences know nothing.
Riotously entertaining if totally ludicrous and unnecessarily graphic in its violence and shagging. This is preoccupied with sleazy old men and delectable items of the flesh plucked to seduce them. It’s awkward to watch and I suppose that’s the point of the honey trap premise, which is apparently a widely-practised tactic by intelligence services.
There is nothing complicated here and it doesn’t really matter what city the characters are in. I don’t think I can recall a spy thriller with such a nonchalance as to its locations, which are without distinction.
But whatever, it’s just high trash with a cast who seem to know what it is.
This was verily an impressive motion picture, and it starts with the cast, even though the highly irritating, 100% talentless ‘lad’ from ghastly ’90s British TV series Men Behaving Badly is somehow in it.
The music is pure Vangelis and it suits the story and locales surprisingly well; one wouldn’t expect Blade Runner (1982) stuff to work in this setting. The attention to detail (life on a ship) is necessary, the toils a clear element in the breakdown of the crew, most of them toothless goons who appear to have been press-ganged. You can see the temptation to mutiny. It’s the late 1700s and you’re presented with Tahiti when all you’ve got upon return to Great Britain is living in a cesspool.
The weirdo Anthony Hopkins does his best weirdo Anthony Hopkins, which is just the right amount of weird.
The Robert Bolt screenplay is a tad disappointing. After the craftily put together exposition, he resorts to homoerotic undertones to explain Bligh’s reaction to Christian’s shagging, which is just lazy writing. And there’s not enough drama on display, which sounds nuts considering the scenes. Not enough characterisation, no scenes exploring a character doing anything outwith the collective, not enough style that grabs; you’re in the hands of a most journeyman director.
This was pathetic from the very first second, the opening a superhero movie-style newspaper headlines montage to make up for the lack of a well-written exposition.
It’s so dull, the script going like this:
Character one: “Something is happening.”
Character two: “What is happening?”
Character one proceeds to explain what is happening and then reeling off a line with a time and date of an event in order to segue to the next scene.
What else? No one in it appears to be affected by anything that happens to them in a case of ordinarily excellent actors phoning it in. It is so badly edited, cut to the max in desperation yet still dull. Framing is without purpose. Music is better suited to a two-hour sequence shot of a pigeon napping. This movie is an abomination.
One of the many sequels I saw before the original, like my viewings of Aliens (1986) and The Godfather Part II (1974), both films alluded to in the life-imitating-art film class scene in the hugely impressive horror Scream 2 (1997).
The truly annoying-as-hell Jerry O’Connell aside, this movie is fabulous, with frighteningly tense scenes, a tight script, witty dialogue, and a rather gnarly soundtrack. There’s also a genuine romance (Dewey and Gale) and David Warner managing to be creepy merely by being there. And as self-reflexive as it is, its postmodern obsessions doesn’t stop it being up there in the vanguard of the slasher movie.
Wes Craven was the best. And poor Randy Meeks, eh. Pray for Randy.
I don’t care what anyone says, this movie is entertaining as hell and that’s all that matters.
Aye, it’s a pile of shite but it knows it’s a pile of shite; no one is splitting the atom here and that’s a wise decision considering the ludicrousness of every situation, character, line reading, fight sequences, … everything. A nice wee companion piece to Mortal Kombat (1995), which does take itself seriously, but not too seriously, this movie defines the burgeoning video game era, nonsensical attempts to translate a new(ish) medium to another.
In a way, it wouldn’t survive on its own as a movie; it’s game-dependent in that every facet of it is explained by the game.
Bob Hoskins as the criminal parvenu Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday (1980).
A “testicle on legs,” as Pauline Kael once wrote of the lad. An extraordinary performance from a bloke who never gave a bad one despite not a single acting class in his life. He was a born thespian.
Bob Hoskins was quality – even in a Mario Bros. movie.
‘The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they’ve arrived in England if the upper class treats ’em like shit.’
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Wanderings and ... wonderings. 