I've been avoiding this place like the plague this week because I'm not seeing Star Trek Into Darkness until tomorrow morning, but I've watched a few movies this week, thought I'd chime in.
Started with Premium Rush. Man, I'm glad I didn't spend money watching this. I had a hard enough time finishing it watching it OnDemand.
. There are some fun parts to this, mostly the mouse-chases, but other than that, this movie is terrible. The script is absolutely putrid, and all of the performances are incredibly dry. From Jamie Chung to Michael Shannon, they all suck. JGL is just alright, and that's being generous. I understand this is probably a niche-film for bike-afficionados, and I'm definitely not one, but this was a chore to watch.
What's strange is David Koepp has done some really good stuff. The guy wrote the screenplay for Carlito's Way, Jurassic Park, Stir of Echoes, Secret Window, and the first MI film. He hadn't directed too many other films, but both Stir of Echoes and Secret Window are cult favorites, and Secret Window is one of my favorites in the past 15 years.
The biggest joke of the film is the MacGuffin. The ticket. Okay, so you have Jamie Chung trying to bring her son over, but instead of saying to this woman that she paid her money, she has to have a ticket delivered to her? This Lo-Pan looking dude couldn't just use his cell phone to call up Sister Chen and be like, "Hey, that chick from the Real World paid, send her kid over." I'm able to suspend my disbelief, but this film takes it to such extremes that I can't take it seriously. On top of Jamie Chung's hysterically horrid fake accent, and Michael Shannon's one-liners, I just had a hard time with it. Then we got JGL with the intuition to choose riding paths by previewing them in his head? Man, ugh.
You also have Michael Shannon deeply involved in the Chinese gang underground, and one minute having him killing someone, the next second he's chasing around JGL in straight Roadrunner-Coyote fashion. What? No. And of course, you have your biker buddies nudging him at the end playing bully, only to have him get capped in the dome and act like he didn't understand he just got shot?
I don't often say I'll never watch a film ever again. Premium Rush is on that list. I initially thought it was about 5.5. That's way too generous.
3/10 is more fair for this one.
I saw that Elektra was soon going away from OnDemand, so I wanted to check it out. I had seen parts of DareDevil, and it was just alright. I felt the same way about Elektra. It's just really okay. The action isn't all that great, and I don't know enough about the comics to make any real good judgments on it. I thought the villain was fun enough, as were his henchmen. What I was really disappointed by was Elektra and Abbie. I felt like I was watching a Disney melodrama. It was a drag. It was obvious the chick was special, but they didn't have to make her a brat. I just wasn't really interested in their dynamic. The visuals were fine for 2005, and I really appreciated the work done on Tattoo. Know nothing about him. No idea if he was just a creation for the film, but I felt like that was one of the highlights of the film. The climax was a little weak, but I wasn't expecting a whole lot. The film DID start out pretty well, but I wasn't mad that I watched it. I'll probably leave it alone for quite a while and pick it up for cheap if I can, but I thought it was worthy of a
6/10.
Last film I watched was Red Tails.
Uhh, did anyone else really like this?
. It was fun. It was really fun, I thought. I'm a sucker for films based on WW2. Other than Ne-Yo, this was really enjoyable.
The film definitely has flaws, and they're pretty apparent. Yes, it's obvious that the Tuskegee weren't appreciated, they were looked down upon by other areas of the armed forces before, but there wasn't a sense of how Jim Crow Laws truly affected those in the Army. You had a black dude go into a segregated white-bar, punch a white guy, and he escaped unscathed? Uhh, alright. I'm not saying I wanted the guy to end up being killed, but I just don't really felt like there was ever a threat in the film. Which brings me to my next point. There's a difference between being zealous and being courageous. This film portrayed them as being more zealous and over-confident than heroes. They took on any challenge and never felt like they were capable of being gunned down. And then like two guys die? I like the Tuskegee were a great set of pilots, but they're practically indestructible. The film's mini-epilogue shows that 66 Tuskegee were killed, and I'm not expecting them to explore each brave soldier that lost their life, but they it really took away from the film at times. I just sat there like hrm, Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, and even Pearl Harbor did this aspect of the film a lot better.
That said, I still really enjoyed it. Easy and Lightning had terrific chemistry, and Terrence Howard and Cuba were both satisfactory in their work. It was also great to see Lee Tergesen in a major motion picture (Tobias from Oz; on a sidenote, he's such an underutilized actor). Bryan Cranston was also fun in the film. The action was top-notch, and although it wasn't a true representation of dog-fights, it was still enjoyable. The horrors of war aren't nearly as evident as other films like I mentioned before, but for a film trying to glorify the Tuskegee? Worked fine.
This isn't a classic, but I was expecting a pure crash-and-burn WW2 film. It wasn't at all. I'm shocked it got a 39% on RT. On first viewing I'd give it either a 7.5 or
8/10. On repeated viewings it's flaws may stand out more, but I enjoyed it.
I can see where people could really pick this apart. I see George Lucas and WW2 and I don't go in thinking I'm going to be getting a Stanley Kubrick interpretation of war. Certain parts are pretty bad, and the people you expect to be terrible, are. But the action is great, some of the characters are flshed out enough, and if nothing else, it's entertaining.
I hear there's an HBO interpretation that is far superior. I'd be interested to check it out, but not sure where I'd be able to get ahold of it at. Maybe HBOGO?
