Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (PG-13)

"I've got a bad feeling about this."  - Every Han Solo
"The Force!  Man, that's your answer to everything." - Clerks
"Millennium Falcon?  More like Millennium Pandering." - Me.

Sitting in a darkened theater with a dawning internal awareness that you might be the only one twisting in your seat, uncomfortable with the low-risk plot, the awkward references and dismal acting.  The popcorn is gone, the soda dull, and in your head rings the awful words "It's just an another modern remake, they spent all that time and effort just to remake it, and its a bad counterfeit Picasso, a copy, a fake" while everyone else claps and thanks god for George Lucas' non-involvement.  The trailers were a bill of goods, sold by the aggressively pandering suits at Disney Corp., pap made by a director who's made a career of swerving from expectations, and it's as well made as it is creatively bankrupt, a soulless zombie in an expensive knock-off Armani shambling forever towards higher returns.  At least those terrible prequels TRIED to do something new and failed spectacularly.  Awakens just regurgitates what worked before with a wet, money hungry plop.

Meanwhile Awakens looks like it was wholly constructed in the edit suite, scenes come and go at a breakneck pace just so they happen and not in anyway conductive to the pacing.  A scene will end abruptly, cross wipe to a completely different part of the universe, then back to the first without rhyme or reason except for story reasons the 2nd had to be put somewhere.  It doesn't feel thought out or meticulously planned unlike real SWs, it feels cobbled together good enough, and considering the plot is just "girls and guys with force and cute droids and xwings and star destroyers and deathstars again" there very little excuse for it.  And there are soooo many conveniences of illogic, the new crew just stumbling upon the abandoned Falcon being the most egregious and unnecessary, apparently the Force can and will do that kind of thing now.

So it's a remake, let's treat it as such.  The scope and feel, the "Lawrence of Arabia in Space" tone of Star Wars is completely missing from Awakens.  There are few calm, slow moments of world building here; even the obligatory scene-wipes seem somehow forced and overly fast; you don't inhabit this world only glimpse it.  The only exposition we get is from the fanfictiony text crawl and one very stilted and strangely unemotional conversation between a craggled Han Solo and a stone faced General Leia Organa (who looks for all the world like they tightened her girdle so much she can't move let alone act).  Between her strange head tilting and his half hearted swagger it more resembles the cringey "I love you" scene from CrystalSkull than the one from Empire Strikes Back, instead of a stroke of genius its an actual figurative cinematic stroke.  It's all punctuated by that "it's mysterious because we are keeping you out of the loop" thing that is the oldest of JJ Abrams' tricks, and we need more answers than action.  Why would the Republic be in this ramshackle state, never mind the mention in the opening or the reams of comics Disney has put out, the underdog yet again?  This is a movie, explain it!  And John Williams, where are you?  The only time the music is noticed is when it was once again rehashing the themes from the first trilogy, there is no new piece that stands out and marches around the theater announcing it's greatness.  Then there is all the fan service, the god damned fan service.  Capt. Phasma is a marketing dream and fanboy joke.  The "No look shot" is as bad as Greedo shooting first, and you want your new bad-ass Jedi girl, who can do all these things without training cuz you say so, to inherit the beloved fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy?  Then earn it guys, because otherwise its just another lame fan wish-fulfillment without the politically incorrect metal bikini.  Awakens suffers from the worst case of big budget sequelitis ever seen, literally Jump22's ethos of "People want you to do the same thing, Again. Just a bit bigger.  Same lines, same jokes, same action, everything."

It's not all rehash.  JJ does some new things with the camera (but why god, why keep does he keep using the lens flares, it must be an injoke?).  There are some fun ideas, new uses of the Force that seem a bit questionable, but the reformed Stormtrooper story idea is the best of the bunch (but who's character is involved in countless bumbly spoken word comic relief just enough to ruin it).  He doesn't say "Yeah that's what I'm talking about!" once, but they probably did do a take and it's laying on the cutting room floor after checking TVTropes for relevancy and deciding against running it. Yet some of the attempts of new stuff are as bad as any prequel, Solo's side business is simply just busy work, eating up screen time and adding nothing to the affair but bad jokes and a lot of CG monsters.  There is just enough practical effects thrown in to kill the "curse of the prequels" stink list for the fans, but the rest is all remake-orama, and none of it improves on the original.  The fighter pilots all look wrong, and besides main ace Poe (well played by Oscar Issac, star of Inside Llewyn Davis), the Resistance seems to be staffed by fanboys-and-girls pulled from the ranks of Deviantart who don't yet have drivers licenses let alone a pilot's one.  The bad guy is no Vader, he is a twink with a temper tantrum, the Emperor has been replaced with a pale CGI creature who looks like should be spitting out "GOLLUM GOLLUM".  The Nazi Youth has taken over the Empire from the elder British statesmen because... box office?  Old Men no longer start Star Wars it seems.  The Rebels don't meticulously plan how to blow up the DeathStar 3.0, or send a crack team of top commandos and their entire fleet and barely scrape out a victory.  No, they stand around a readout of the plans point at a spot and say "we blow this up, right?" and then Han Solo winks and says "I got this, you don't wanna know how" because his plan is stupidly self sacrificing; instead of bringing the Army he just flies over to infiltrate the planet with 3 people (2 he just met) and of course saves the day, obviously!  There is no sense of urgency, the big kill-weapon has to charge up for like a day, but the Rebellion is so confident in Han getting the shields down (AGAIN!) that they don't even bother EVACUATING the planet that will eventually be blown up, maybe, "waiting to be killed, waiting to be killed".

In the end big things get exploded good, people hug, and yet it still doesn't end.  The final oddity, the mapquest montage, the overdone out of place LOTR spinning helicopter shot with a stupid nospeak Skywalker cliffhanger, cementing that SWTFA seems more inclined to be the New Harry Potter YA film franchise than a true new Star Wars film in a finite universe.

Star Wars, we meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.

4 Chubby C3P0's Unexplained Self-Referential Red Arms out of 10 (BAD)

PS - Kids will never understand the sweet tension build and release of the 20th Century Fox fanfare, LucasFilm Logo, and sudden burst of StarField and music on the silver screen.  Sad.

PPS - Alternative Title: SW - An Old Hype

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow (PG-13)

"Steal From Groundhog.  Crib From Aliens. Repeat"

Tom Cruise stars as a cowardly Major who is thrown unwittingly unto the front line of a final assault against a time-manipulating alien menace in a overtaken Europe.  In a twist of fate (and a plot wholly borrowed from the Bill Murray classic Groundhog's Day) he finds himself waking up to the exact same day every time he dies, a time loop caused by the alien invaders which was apparently based on a Japanese novel called "All You Need Is Kill".

Soundly unoriginal yet entertaining, Edge of Tomorrow is made by professionals like writer Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), starring a talented cast headed by Cruise, Emily Blunt and Brendan Gleeson, no wonder EOT is tightly made, acted and produced (yet blandly titled) blockbuster.  However, burdened with a quite wimpy PG-13 rating, Tomorrow drags itself back again and again to the past.  Generously helping itself to the squad dynamic of James Cameron's Aliens (even plagiarizing Bill "Game Over Man" Paxton), leaves the movie's well groomed hands caught red handed in the cookie jar..  The overly macho "Metal Bitch" played by Blunt is, to put it bluntly, tiresome (even more so is the eye-rolling insistence on a romantic angle between the leads), a product of the film's need to differentiate and lean on modern tropes to distract from it's source.

The reason the original Groundhog wasn't itself repeated by other films despite it's enormous success is that the formula is so uniquely tell-tale that if you copy it you'll have no where to hide.  Hire the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still every critic will mention Groundhog's Day.

Shoot, Die, Rewrite.  Lure the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still EVERY critic will mention Groundhog's Day, even though applying it to an action film can be quite satisfying (any genre in fact it would work on, its a fantastic idea that Harold Ramis came up with), Bing!

5.5 Leave the Helmet on Tom out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)

Robocop (2014)

Robocop (PG-13) - Review

"Go Robo!  (And Don't Come Back)"

A police officer wounded in the line of duty is given a second chance at his would-be killers when a large corporation cybernetically resurrects him for their own ends in this room-temperatured remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1986 cyber-grind classic.

Robocop has been drearily updated for our extremely near future, a world of faddy touchscreens and hand swiping stolen directly from our current News Cycle along with  glowing cell phones, politically motivated  News Hosts and gerrymandering Big Business. Basically the film didn't look so much to the possible future as to last years headlines, leaving us with a future so bereft of SciFi ideas and ideals that it speaks volumes to the design and creation of this film.  The script is so shallow in scope that it predetermines nothing not already discussed on yesteryear's internet message boards.

There is a little that works.  A dig at Asia's near-monopoly/slavetrade of techjobs works with depth while remaining understated; no one in the film bats an eye that Murphy must be sent to the China to be constructed into Robocop just like a new iteration of an iPhone, a fun and interesting departure from the original's Detroit-centric motorcity-construction.   Micheal Keaton's OCP CEO runs his corporation more like a driven inventor "take no prisoners" type like Apple's Steve Jobs, surrounded by market research and yes men (very unlike the self-cannibalizing piranahs from the original).  Yet Robocop's remaining husk of a great story has been stripped of its grand linking components in the name of change just for change's sake.

Nearly everything has been shifted from the hard hitting original, most likely in the great law of the remake, the requirement to separate oneself  from the source material.  Somehow Detroit is said to be a crime-ridden slum yet all we see are sunny clean streets and expensive suburbs bereft of crime.  Emphasis has gone away from stellar action, shocking gore, black comedy and likeable characters of all creeds.  This new film instead focuses on teary eyed family issues, puts a stungun in its hero's hand in the name of  a PG13 rating, provides its gore shocks only from amputees and body horror, provides zero humor or characterization to its players, and its political messages are overlong and simplistic in its views of both America and its Corporations.

While Verhoeven's original 80's film could never be praised for its subtlety it never the less operates like a well oiled machine in comparison to the remake's clunky machinations. While one deftly lampooned both the mass media and the political/Capitalistic society of it's decade (while still maintaining entertainment value for all audiences), this new film can only ruin its own action by holding onto straight faced stoicism while spoiling any valid political criticism it has generated by allowing Sam "My Own Cliche" Jackson to basically scream into the camera "THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT MOTHER F*BLEEP*ING OBAMA'S DRONES" just in case anyone in the audience had missed the filmmakers big point (we got it, thanks).  And how can a title that features the words ROBO and COP end up so drearily boring?  When you focus on the ROBO and not the COP, thats when.

4.5 Why Did They Leave The Hand? out of 10 (BAD)

Old Boy (2013)

Old Boy (R) - Review

"Tooth or Consequences"

A man with a disordered life comes to in a strange hotel room, one that he will not leave for another 20 years.  Imprisoned with no clue as to why or where, he finds out he has been framed for his ex-wife's murder and has daughter has been adopted by another couple.  Year after year pass (told through his TV as he watches 9/11, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina etc) and the man suffers leagues of loneliness, neglect and conditioning which turns him into a violent psychopath hellbent for vengeance on those that have tortured him and taken his life and daughter from him, even if those same men seem to be goading him onward.

Director Spike Lee (Do The Right Thing) has painted himself into a true Hollywood corner lately, extending his meh streak yet further with this remake of Korea's Cultural Cult hit OldBoy (2003).  There is much talk of the Producers taking away final cut and trimming the film in half and it shows.  Plot points fall by the wayside along with characterization and pace.  What is left is a bare boned retread of the Korean language original with Josh Brolin (No Country For Old Men) now fulfilling the lead role.  He is joined by Sam Jackson (in his first collaboration with Lee since Jungle Fever) as the jailer and Elizabeth Olsen as an agent of mercy and tenderness.  The stuttering adjustment from the shores of Korea to the United States bemoans attendance expectations, especially when the misery and weird self loathing so rampant in the old version has mostly been lifted and lightened.

The easiest comparison between the two can be made with the hallway fight which made the original so famous.  It also exists in the new version, with Brolin beating back an entire Martial Arts fight team for a good five minutes in one continuous shot (though why a company of big tough badguys shrink to acrobatic-sized stuntmen is left unanswered).  In a rare decision to try and one up the original, the fight here is now one long steady cam shot that follows the action down levels  instead of just laterally.  According to rumor this scene was longer than 2003s, but shortened by the producers much to Lee and Brolin's loud chagrin, leaving the fight bloody yet a mere exercise in shadow boxing the original.  Whether the entire film's lack of depth and clanging plot holes can be laid at the feet of scene chopping producers will never be known without seeing this supposed 3 hour Director's cut.  What can be determined is whether this remake ever needed to be made at all.  Spike Lee, who brings his own controversial luggage to any mainstream release, still seems a much better choice than originators Steven Spielberg and Will Smith.  Translating the film to english and removing the Asian cinema je ne sais quoi has left the dialogue creaky and unmanageable, the cliches and conveniences glaring, the villain reduced to insufferable mustachio twirling (seriously dragging the entire ending into Vincent Price ham and cheese territory), and for some odd reason the ending changed from its gut-wrenching ambiguity to some unreasonable slice of American machismo that just does not fit the film's tableaux of the taboo.

So what is left on the grill?  Brolin's performance is worthy (Sam Jackson's however is debatable, his role feel contractually expanded and overblown), Lee's direction is sharp and professional and his intentions are obviously good, showing the original true love and honor by keeping its bloody fist balled tight.  And yet the entire production feels like toys you are now too old to play with, simply going through the motions of play without a real passion, biding until you can put them back on their dusty shelf where you know they belong.  The real Oldboy is now a decade older, and it will still be the one you most likely will remember fondly another decade from now, its luster hopefully untarnished by Hollywood's sticky fingers.

5.5 Where Is My Tooth Scene? out of 10 (MEDICORE)

Riddick (2013)

Riddick (R)

"Get Rid-of-it"

The Nightvisioned anti-hero is back in his third film which feels less like a "return to roots" as a tepid remake of the first film.  Riddick (Vin Diesel) loses his space kingship from Chronicles in the prologue and finds himself stranded on a desolate planet with ferocious wildlife.  Riddick can apparently can do anything now, and does as he trains a saberdog and avoids the rad-scorpions.  When a rag tag crew of mercs and a specially trained squad of bounty hunters land and begin pursuing Riddick, he must use every trick and tactic for survival that he knows (and apparently wrote the book on ie "Impervious Planet Living").  3rd film is smaller in scope and more predictable than the last, the space-opera fantasy all but forgotten for grim Riddick and his grunting manliness to take lone center stage and coast his way through bloody waves of human and alien adversaries, swaggering at his impossible deeds like a Bud-Light drunk who drove home safely from Oktoberfest.

3.5 At least the first one had that rocketship crash out of 10 (BAD)

Evil Dead (2013)

Evil Dead (R) - Review

"JOIN US... (but why?)"

5 young people are trapped in a rural cabin, an evil book has unleashed demonic forces which possess them one by one, leading to dismemberment and torture as the evil spreads.  The reformulated plot from the cult classic  The Evil Dead (1981) ends up less than the sum of its hacked off parts.  It's major failings are actually the well known cliches and conventions of the modern horror film that were so easily lampooned in last years "Cabin In The Woods" that the industry and its fans lauded and yet turned have apparently turned a blind ear to.

While maintaining a heavy torrential downpour of gore and menace, the film completely misses the point of the mindless black hearted fun the original had.  Instead of a group of horny kids drinking and carousing in the woods, here the very serious youths are sexless red herrings staging an intervention for their junky female friend (and sister), which I'm sure we all can relate too (right?).  So many horror movies have borrowed from the original Evil Dead over the years that when it comes back around now we are left with is a copy of a copy of a copy, suffering terrible generational loss as the standard hohum scares of  modern day hollywood flicks such as in "Insidious" are shunted in to take the place of the fresh energy of low budget invention that was present in the original.

What isn't new was done better in the original (or wisely unconceived).  The build up to the cabin, the admittedly small bits of characater development, the insanely manic zeal of cast and crew is isntead replaced with an unnecessary and dumb preamble, unwise half-stitched-on heroin subplot, unlikeable characters and professional visuals so muddy and dark and with a narrow depth of field that the special make up effects are often hard to see.  The only thing that could have been modernized but wasn't is the sadistic level of violence against women.  Even though they tried to take the sting off of it by swapping the gender role of "hero" of the film from Ash to the junky Mia, even that is a copy of other failed remakes (i.e. Night of the Living Dead 1990).  The script alone has more egregious errors when compared to the first (which wasn't Shakespeare to begin with), with some baffling and truly embarrassing dialogue (science book?).

When the best bit of acting is a one-liner cameo by Bruce Campbell emoting "GROOVY." after the credits end (which is itself a not a reference or an homage but a straight up LIFT from a better movie), you have a film that is anything but.  You can't just throw gore at the problems and expect it to improve, you gotta "Hail to the King" when you clutch the bloody coattails of your betters..

4 Oldsmobile Deltas out of 10 (BAD)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (R)

"Dance Lizard Dance"

For a remake, its one of the better ones, but Herzog pretending it has nothing to do with the original is just silly. Cage can't out-crazy or out-sleaze Harvey Kietel, the Big Easy's got nothing on the Big Apple, but it's still a good movie somehow, filled with surreal moments filled with hallucinogenic lizards.

 6 crack hits out of 10 (GOOD)

Last Man Standing (1996)

Last Man Standing (R) - Review

"Entertain Hard"

A lone mercenary arrives in a border town that is occupied by two disparate gangs of criminals whose weapons are soon turned on each other by the shifting loyalties of the merc.  Sound familiar?  That's due to the script being based on Akira Kurosawa's masterful samurai film "Yojimbo," However the similarities are soon lost as its set in the border to Mexico and the criminals are bootleggers in Prohibition era Texas.  Despite having a credible action director in Walter Hill (48 Hours) and action star in Bruce Willis (Die Hard), the film is a joyless, violent enterprise that lacks the wit and wisdom of the 1961 original.  Willis' sleazy and double dealing John Smith can't crawl out from the shadow of Toshiro Mifune's (7 Samurai) humorous and antiheroic Yojimbo, but Bruce's role isn't helped by his soulless voice over narration and a haircut only Gomer Pyle would love.  The cast is filled with 90s character actors (most notable Christopher Walken as a heavy), but the action is mostly flat and the accompanying hard rock guitar soundtrack is completely tone deaf.  There's no subtlety to the crash of the twin 45s and the resulting violence actually packs quite a wallop, but the production design is a dreary dust bowl of look a like sets.  This Americanized rethink is grim yet limp bore, and sacrifices the basic fun tone to differentiate itself from its originator.

4.5 Willis in an Undershirt out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

Twilight Zone: The Movie (PG)

"You want to see something that is sometimes scary?"

An anthology of suspense stories presented by some of the 80s best directors as an homage to the late great Rod Serling's television show is dragged down by an on set tragedy and subsequent bad press matched with several mediocre efforts that rewrote and shortened beloved TV versions of Twilight Zone episodes.

1st up is John Landis' (A Werewolf In London) piece that was untimely end of veteran actor Vic Morrow and child costars in a deadly onset helicopter accident and subsequently Landis' career as a director due to negligence.  The segment isn't much anyway, especially with the pall of three deaths on its shoulders.  An outdated man out of time story, a racist and anti-Semite somehow finds himself in Nazi occupied 1943 with the gestapo on his heels.  Sad for all involved.

2nd is Steven Spielberg's (1942) retelling of a Zone episode that already didn't hold up very well by the 80s, Old people mysteriously grow young by kicking the can.  Tedious and sappy nostalgia.

3rd up is the cartoonishly freakout retelling of a child with amazing powers done by Joe Dante (Gremlins).  The child can make anything happen with a thought, and a child being raised on Looney Tunes and PBJ sammiches leads to a lethal combination.  When a new visitor is brought into his influence, will her maternal instincts free the world of this menace or lock us all in his house of childish horrors.  Genuinely creepy.

Lastly, remaking one of the TZs most famous episodes, George Miller (Mad Max) directs the story of a man with a fear of flying strapping in for the flight of his life as something out on the wing is sabotaging the plane and NO ONE WILL LISTEN TO HIM.  John Lithgow has big shoes to fill as William "Jim T Kirk" Shatner played the role for television, but then John apparently has huge feet.  Stupendous tension that does the original justice, and only segment that truly lives up to the film's title and love of the Zone.  Great.

There is also a cameo in the Prologue and Epilogue with Dan Aykroyd as a driver obsessed with scares and Creedance music, but in the end is it worth all the effort?  The movie is a sad reminder to leave well enough alone, and if it comes close to justifying its existence its overall failure and tragedy prove its downfall.

Overall Review:  5.5 Just how Sweaty can Lithgow get out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)

Evilspeak (1982)

Evilspeak (R)

"When Howy met Carrie"

Take DePalma's hit movie Carrie, copy it but make the lead a misunderstood computer guy nerd, and instead of the waifish Sissy Spacek hire the other Howard brother (that would be Clint), and make the setting a strict military school that has a basement filled with arcane satanic artifacts that can provide your bullied teen with his needed supernatural revenge, and you have Evilspeak.  A low budget cash-in on the 80s mania for cheap horror films, the movie levitates just above the pack with some good visuals, well made violence and retro computer usage.  Just like Stephen King's wet dreams, the movie is judged by the climax, and Evilspeak delivers as Howard goes over to the darkside and is possessed by the spirit of satanic Esteban (Richard Moll in one of his many Bmovie villain roles) and brings the house down (or chapel in this case).  Fun, weird and whole-heartedly blasphemous (hey, Exorcist was pretty successful too!), Evilspeak isn't a great film but is a good knock-off.

6 Clint Howard doesn't really need a mask out of 10 (GOOD)