..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

I Watch Bad Movies
(So You Don’t Have To)

Every year, I see a lot of terrible movies…on purpose.  I go into movies that I’m pretty sure won’t be very good and I often pay money for this privilege.  Why would a (semi-)sane man do such a thing?  I suppose the reasons are twofold: 1) You can never trust anybody but yourself and you cannot judge something until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.  I might go into these movies expecting them to be bad, but I am always hoping for the best.  2)  More people see bad movies than good ones and I like to keep up with the general public.  It’s a sad fact, but more people have seen Hitman than No Country for Old Men and I think it’s important to stay abreast of what the majority of people think is worth seeing these days. 

So, I have sought out the following bad movies in the name of getting all of the bad movies out of my system.

Hitman

This is a film based on a popular videogame franchise that I have never played and I give it credit for not looking or sounding like a typical videogame adaptation.  Those are about the only kind words I can say about it, though.  This is what The Bourne Identity would have been like if it were made by the creators of the Saw franchise, with characters gallivanting around scenic locales like Moscow and Istanbul but it never once looks beautiful, instead going for a grungier, grimier view of the world.

The needlessly complicated story follows an unstoppable hitman named 47 (Timothy Olyphant), who was trained from birth to be nothing but a contract killer.  He completes his latest assignment, assassinating a Russian leader, but afterwards finds out that he was set up and the Russian leader is still alive.  There is a witness named Nika (Olga Kurylenko) who might represent his only hope of salvation and there is Mike, an Interpol agent hot on his tail (Dougray Scott).  Basically…yawn.

My mind wandered as I watched the film, thinking of similar films that weren’t very good but were at least better than this, like The Saint.  There is a scene late in the film where 47 tortures a man by putting him in a bathtub that he rigs like something straight out of Saw and completes it with a line that I believe is lifted straight from that franchise, “Live or die, the choice is yours.” 

As a character, 47 is not supposed to be developed because he has no personality, but his mood swings at the drop of a hat, he talks in a monotone, and he decides to allow people to live for no real reason other than the fact that the audience knows they are good people.  There are a couple of flashes to his childhood of him in a blue-tinted room, where presumably he gets the barcode tattooed on the back of his neck and his head is shaved.

The chemistry between Olyphant and Kurylenko is non-existent, mostly because the character of 47 is completely asexual.  At one point in the film, it seems as though they will actually consummate their relationship, but instead 47 sticks a needle in her neck that puts her to sleep.  This is never mentioned or alluded to again.

The movie gets off to a bad start when Olyphant intones, in a voiceover, the single dumbest line of dialogue of the year (I’m paraphrasing): “I work for an organization of contract killers so secret that nobody has ever heard of them.”  Hmm, really?  No one has ever heard of them?  Well, then how do they ever get jobs?

The only thing the film really has going for it is that Kurylenko is undeniably sexy and she spends much of the film in differing states of undress.  Ultimately, the former model doesn’t really define herself as an actress and it’s hard to tell if it’s her fault or the film’s.  Olyphant is somebody who has done a lot of good work in bad movies before (The Girl Next Door, The Safety of Objects), but this can be added to his growing list of bad work in bad films (along with Live Free or Die Hard and Dreamcatcher).

I had some hope for this picture because it was scripted by Skip Woods, who had previously written a guilty pleasure of mine (Swordfish), but in the end I was left with bon mots like this:
            “What are you going to do?”
            “What I do.”    

August Rush

So far this year, nepotism has resulted in hits (Juno, directed by Ivan Reitman’s son Jason) and misses (In the Land of Women, directed by Jon Kasdan, son of Lawrence).  August Rush is definitely a miss.  This film is such sentimental pap that I cannot believe this came from Kristen (daughter of Jim) Sheridan.  While her father has worked with material that could have very easily swung towards cheesy with My Left Foot and In America (co-written by Kristen), he worked enough dark material into the roots of those stories that those misty-eyed moments were earned.  One could believe this work came from the daughter of Jim Sheridan if they had only seen Get Rich or Die Trying and none of his other pictures.  However, much of the blame should be laid at the feet of screenwriters James V. Hart and Nick Castle because the forced whimsy starts on the page.

The story follows an orphaned child named Evan (played by Finding Neverland’sFreddie Highmore) who has spent his entire life waiting for his real parents to come and claim him.  He’s a special boy who hears music in everything (especially wind chimes), although he is a little closed-off and robotic.  Unbeknownst to him, his real parents don’t even know he exists.  His father Louis (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and his mother Lyla (Keri Russell) met in New York City 11 years ago where they spent one magical night together.  Unfortunately, Lyla (a budding prodigy on the cello) is whisked away by her father, never to see Louis again.  Louis is so distraught that he quits the rock bad that he was singing in and Lyla, through a series of ridiculous circumstances, believes that she has lost her baby in childbirth, when in actuality her father has put it up for adoption.

The film follows Louis and Lyla as they journey back towards one another and (hopefully) their child that they don’t know about, as Evan is taken in by Wizard (Robin Williams) who is kind of a musical Fagin to a ragtag group of runaways and orphans who all know how to play instruments.  Wizard takes a special liking to Evan (whom he dubs August Rush) because he has perfect pitch.

The problems with the movie start with credulity.  I had a hard time believing that it would be possible to put up a child for adoption without at least meeting with an adoption agency.  Instead, the father forges his daughter’s signature and voila! the kid disappears.  Wouldn’t at least one doctor or nurse tell Lyla that she has a kid or at least mention it in passing? 

Either way, the storyline opens up the possibility for some darker twists and turns, especially with Robin Williams’ Wizard character, but although Wizard pushes Evan against a wall a few times, it never amounts to anything more menacing.  Williams seems kind of lost here, unsure of whether to use his Insomnia persona or his Patch Adams one.  As a result, the character seems like a sad clown.

The acting by the leads is forgettable.  Keri Russell is adorable and charismatic, but here she is playing a character that never feels real because of how she is written.  She is supposed to go from despondent to ecstatic to morose and it shows on her face, but it never truly resonates.  Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is charming, but his character is so thin that he when he picks up to go to Chicago, we don’t really understand what his reasoning is.  He is searching for a girl he met 11 years ago, but only now does he decide to Google her?  Freddie Highmore plays Evan as so complacent and wide-eyed that I have to wonder if his character was supposed to be mildly autistic.  It is never said, but perhaps it was supposed to be hinted at.  Regardless, Highmore laughs, smiles and cries, hoping the audience will do the same, but we never care enough to share in those emotions.

Sheridan chooses to shoot the movie as colorfully as possible, trying to set the film up as an urban fable, but the story doesn’t gibe with the look she is going for. It doesn’t help that she is using beautiful locations around New York City, despite the fact that the geography is all wrong.  For instance, Evan walks two blocks away from Union Square and bam! he’s in Time Square.  Two minutes later, he’s back downtown at Washington Square Park, as if he had just walked around the block.  It is inconsistencies like these that plague the film and it is not just in scope, but in tone as well.  The movie tells us how to feel, with liberal use of music throughout, but it never allows us to connect, never taking a moment to breathe and as a result, we can see the film trying so hard to make us feel something, anything, but instead I was just indifferent.

By the time I reached the end, I was hoping the conclusion would at least be satisfying enough to bring a smile to my face or a tear to my eye, but instead of seeing the moment we’ve all been waiting for, Sheridan decides to show us a preview of that moment.  It’s the most infuriating way to end a movie like this, building us up for a huge emotional release, only to end it in a cutesy way that causes us to leave the theater with a shrug.

Awake

Now this is a premise that should have been added onto Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse: a man gets a heart transplant, but when they give him anesthesia, it is ineffective and as a result he can feel and see everything, yet he is paralyzed, unable to even twitch a finger!  It’s a perfect B-movie, grindhouse kind of idea but it is executed as a sappy melodrama with hints of suspense. 

The biggest problem with this film is the casting of the leads; Hayden Christensen and Jessica Alba are two of the least talented actors working today, getting by on their beauty and name recognition.  The whole film hinges on the relationship between the characters they play, but because they have zero chemistry with each other and they exude nothing but cold-eyed stares, it is difficult to care much about what happens to them. 

One of the most trying obstacles for a film with this premise, I imagine, is trying to build the storyline around the anesthesia sequence.  Unfortunately, it flatlines.  Writer/director Joby Harold gives us a half-baked plot revolving around a young billionaire named Clay (Christensen) with a heart problem, trying to live up to the reputation of his father.  He has a doting mother (Lena Olin) and a loving girlfriend, Sam (Alba), and a best friend, Jack (Terrence Howard), who also happens to be the surgeon that will aid in his heart transplant.  Except when he goes under, he realizes that he might have put his trust in the wrong hands.

I don’t even know where to start when it comes to detailing the dumb decisions that Clay makes over the course of the film, before he goes under for his operation.  First of all, he never introduced his fiancée to his mother because…well, the film never really says and we’re supposed to understand.  The film portrays his mother as a good and understanding woman and the only reason she is upset when she finds about their dalliance is because it has been hidden from her. 

Then, when it comes to picking a surgeon to perform his surgery, he goes with his good-natured buddy Jack because Jack happened to be in the ER the night Clay first experienced chest pains.  His mother offers up a top-notch surgeon (Arliss Howard, criminally underused as always) who has operated on Presidents, but does Clay want the best guy in the world, who has written textbooks on heart transplants, to help him with his operation?  Nah, he’ll take the guy who has a handful of malpractice lawsuits piling up. 

It also doesn’t help that Christensen is a naturally whiny actor and a good portion of this film is devoted to him whining and screaming.  The strange part, though, is that he doesn’t scream nearly enough for a person undergoing that kind of procedure and feeling every bit of it.  He is able to drift away, thinking about his past and dwelling in his memories as if he were an expert in Transcendental Meditation.  If he was going to so easily be able to focus on his memories while a scalpel was plunging into his chest and a saw was grinding open his heart cavity, perhaps the film should have at least showed him doing yoga once.

Jessica Alba continues to prove that she is absolutely gorgeous and utterly lifeless on the screen, with this film being the third awful film she starred in this year (Fantastic Four 2 and Good Luck Chuck were the other gems).  She spends much of the movie just sitting there with big eyes, talking in hushed but angry tones.  A twist involving her character is so laughable simply because of the person playing her, ruining the effect of the twist just by casting her.  Terrence Howard is absolutely wasted in a thankless role, seeming like he is looking off-camera for his atrocious dialogue.  Lena Olin is perhaps the only person in the cast who comes out with her dignity intact.  I walked out thinking that it was a shame we don’t see more of her in the movies because her relationship to her son was deeply felt on her end, even if we can’t understand why she would care for a son so imbecilic.

Again, this is a film that should have been treated like the B-movie it is, with really despicable over-the-top villains and a great character actor (like Steve Buscemi) in the lead.  The premise is so ripe for something fun, gory and wild, but instead it is melodramatic, staid, and frustrating.

Revolver

I saw Guy Ritchie’s Revolver almost two years ago and I can remember it as if I had seen it yesterday.  Unfortunately, the reason the film has remained a vivid memory is because of how unbelievably awful it was. 

I remember when Guy Ritchie was going to be the British Tarantino, the guy who made funny, eccentric and fast-paced crime movies like Snatch.  Many people point to his marriage to Madonna as the tipping point, when he started losing his coolness and making atrocities like Swept Away.  But, perhaps it is because producer Matthew Vaughn left after Snatch and maybe he had a bigger influence on Ritchie’s films than we had originally thought.

Revolver’s plot is so twisted and asinine that it is almost a chore to write, but basically it concerns Jake (Jason Statham), a man who just been released from prison after seven years spent in between the cells of a chess wizard and con artist.  His plan is to get revenge upon Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta) and that plan unfolds slowly and confusingly, involving two guardian angels (Andre Benjamin and Vincent Pastore) and many scenes of Macha in a giant tanning room, his glittery face bathing in an overwhelming blue light wearing nothing but a speedo.  Also, Jake is dying.

Basically, this is like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels only without a sense of humor.  Ritchie doesn’t seem to understand that the levity he brought to his earlier crime pictures were what saved them from being laughable.  The plots of those earlier pictures, as well as Revolver are so densely layered that there needs to be something to lighten the mood and keep us moving along.  Instead, Ritchie tries for pathos and fails miserably. 

If I were to describe the plot in its entirety, it would sound as if I were making a joke.  The truth of the matter is, though, that Ritchie runs out of steam with a half hour left in the movie, resulting in a lot of scenes of Ray Liotta’s face shouting at nobody in particular and Jason Statham in an elevator. 

Both Ritchie and Statham, who broke in together with Lock, Stock…, need to get a new schtick because their routine is wearing thing.  Statham has genuine presence, but has thus far wasted it on silly crime/action pictures like this and Crank.  Ritchie, on the other hand, simply just needs to stop writing his own scripts.  Ritchie has such an interesting eye and definitely knows how spice things up in the editing room, it would definitely be beneficial for him to get some better material.

Perhaps the film has been tweaked or edited since it was released in England two years ago, but I’m not anxious to find out.

E-Mail of the Week

"Regarding the reader who asked why it seems like Oscar only nominates films from the last few months of the year and your statement that it's rare that Summer Films get nominated for Best Picture (Gladiator and Seabiscuit being your examples), I think it's a misconception that that is so. I looked up the list of nominees and winners from 1990 to now and there have been films 17 nominated for Best Picture that were released prior to September (considered the beginning of Awards Season).

They are:

2006: LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
2005: CRASH
2003: SEABISCUIT
2001: MOULIN ROUGE
2000: GLADIATOR, ERIN BROCKOVICH
1999: THE SIXTH SENSE
1998: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
1996: FARGO
1995: APOLLO 13, BRAVEHEART, BABE
1994: FORREST GUMP, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL
1993: THE FUGITIVE
1992: UNFORGIVEN
1990: GHOST

Keep up the interesting writing.
Dave”

So there have been 17 summer (or earlier) films nominated for Best Picture, but it's out of a possible 85 over that time period; so it was never the norm.  But it's gotten far worse recently.  Since 2001, as your research shows, there's only been four collectively.  So, while there are always some films nominated from the summer and spring, the overwhelming majority are from the last four months of the year. 

Thanks Dave, for doing some research.  I still think there needs to be a better distribution of movies throughout the year.  Bad movies are released every week (hence my column above) and I just wish the same were true of the good ones.

- Noah Forrest
December 10, 2007

Other columns by Noah Forrest
11.03.07 - No Country For Old Men
11.26.07 - Oscar Thoughts
11.19.07 - Thanksgiving
11.12.07 - Redacted
11.05.07 - Oscar, Don't Forget the Subtle Guys
10.30.07 - Ridley Scott - Overrated?
10.21.07 - Clooney Straddling The Line
10.08.07 - Wes Anderson
10.02.07 - Jake Paltrow's The Good Night
09.27.07 - Cleaning House
09.20.07 - Top 10 To Date
09.13.07 - Film Vs Television
08.31.07 - Halloween Review
08.28.07 - Who Is The Next Scorsese?
08.21.07 - Fall Preview
08.14.07 - The Horrific State Of The Horror Film
08.10.07 - Reservations About Catherine Zeta-Jones
08.07.07 - Saving Steven Spielberg
07.30.07 - Skinheads in the Cinema & This Is England
07.28.07 - Siena Miller: Good or Evil?
07.26.07 - The Frenzy on the Wall

Noah Forrest is a 24 year old aspiring writer/filmmaker in New York City.

The opinions expressed in these columns are the writers and do not neccessarily reflect the opinions of Movie City News or any of its editors or other contributors.

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