Terminator Genisys (2015) */*****

Hollywood has been remaking and rebooting so many huge movies from the 80s in recent years that it feels a little bit like I’ve been reliving my childhood—if my childhood were filled with really bland, bad movies made by studio committees instead of really great movies full of blood and boobs that were made by exciting young filmmakers, of course. Terminator Genisys takes this process a step further by not only remaking or rebooting the franchise started with James Cameron’s 1984 film, The Terminator, but by using the series’ killer-robot-sent-back-in-time conceit to actually revisit meticulously recreated scenes from The Terminator and spin them off in new directions, which effectively erases the other sequels and creates a launching point for a new franchise that still pays respect to the original. Watching the film must be what it feels like to experience déjà vu.

Or to use a more damning metaphor, watching Terminator Genisys is like having a dream that starts off as a revisiting of old memories and then spins off in nightmarish, hallucinatory directions. This is a bad movie—a really bad one—maybe the worst Terminator movie that could have been made by generally competent people. Its director, Alan Taylor, proved that he could work in a strictly controlled studio environment before by making the generally acceptable Thor sequel for Marvel in 2013, but when faced with the task of filming a script that’s as broken on a fundamental level as this one, he falls flat on his face.

Short Round: Walk of Shame (2014) */*****

There have been enough movies about a character or group of characters traversing a city over the course of one night while an increasingly improbable series of inconvenient occurrences keep them from reaching some goal that it can probably be considered a comedic sub-genre at this point. Some of them, like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours or Chris Columbus’ Adventures in Babysitting, are very well liked. It’s safe to say that this latest entry in the sub-genre from writer/director Steven Brill, Walk of Shame, isn’t going to end up being part of the canon though. It’s terrible. Not just in a disappointing but inoffensive way either. Walk of Shame is sub-Date Night in quality, and is a complete waste of Elizabeth Banks in a lead role. Thinking about how this film comes from the same man who began his career as a director with the delightful Heavyweights is just heartbreaking. What was once such bright and shining potential has now been so long extinguished.

Banks’ character is an aspiring news reporter who’s hit a rough patch in both her personal life and career. In order to take her mind off of things, her friends take her out for a night of carousing, which winds up resulting in the shameful walk that the title refers to. You see, after waking from a one night stand, Banks’ character finds herself without her phone, money, or car, and living in a modern LA where anyone deprived of even one of those things would basically be as helpless as an infant. The journey part of the story begins when she finds out that she’s got to make it to an important job interview the next morning—a make or break moment for her—so she needs to somehow get across the city in her handicapped state. None of that is very important though. All you need to know is that Elizabeth Banks gets put in a tight yellow dress and is then thrown into a series of crazy situations.

As a concept, that’s not so bad, but in execution, it ends up being miserable. Walk of Shame just doesn’t work on any level. It’s broadly comedic, to the point of even being farcical, so you don’t ever believe in any of the characters as real people or care about whether or not they achieve their goals, but the real problem is that, for being so cartoony in tone, the film is weirdly devoid of jokes—and not just jokes that work. Jokes of any kind. Every once in a while there’s a half-offensive assertion that all women are whores or that all brown people are criminals, but that’s exactly what they are, assertions. The pseudo-racism and sexism doesn’t even get basic joke construction. Basically, the characters all run around a lot and yell their lines, so there seems to be an assumption that the audience is blindly going to laugh because they’ve been prompted to. Gillian Jacobs is kind of charming in a small role as one of the friends, and Lawrence Gilliard Jr, Alphonso McAuley, and Da’Vone McDonald seem like they could have been amusing as a trio of crack dealers if they were given more of a chance, but none of these people end up getting nearly enough of an opportunity to even remotely right this sinking ship. Walk of Shame is sunk, it’s covered in barnacles, and it’s probably haunted by a pirate ghost.

Short Round: Winter’s Tale (2014) */*****

Longtime screenwriter Akiva Goldsman's (A Beautiful Mind, I Am Legend) debut as a director has finally arrived, and it comes in the form of an adaptation of an apparently well-liked and certainly ridiculous novel by Mark Helprin. Winter’s Tale is kind of a romance, but also kind of a story about angels and demons, and even sort of a time travel tale. It’s very much concerned with how light connects people, how dead people become stars, how every human being is given one miracle, and how Satan’s minions tend to do his bidding by putting together gangs of pickpockets. If all of that sounds like it’s too much to fit into one story, it is. Winter’s Tale is one of the most poorly-written, tonally confused, plot hole-ridden movies that’s come around in a while.

The film stars Colin Farrell as a thief who’s currently trying to leave the lifestyle and who was abandoned as an infant by two parents who had Eastern European accents of some sort, was raised by a man who seems to be a Native American of some sort, but who nonetheless speaks with an Irish lilt. The object of his affection is a shut-in virgin played by Jessica Brown Findlay, who suffers from a form of tuberculosis that causes her body to generate so much heat that she almost qualifies as being an X-Man. His antagonist is his former employer, a demon named Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe) who wants to see him killed for bailing on his gang. Oh yeah, there’s also a magical horse, who’s an even bigger plot contrivance than Gandalf’s eagle friends, and who never fails to provide a laugh when he shows up to hang out with Colin Farrell in the middle of New York City.

Crowe preens and postures while giving one of the worst, loudest, most embarrassing performances you can imagine. Farrell, on the other end of the spectrum, seems to be asleep for the vast majority of his scenes. The only thing the movie manages to stumble into doing correctly is to confirm that Brown Findlay has a star quality about her, but anyone who watched the first couple seasons of Downton Abbey already knew that. One doesn’t need to sit through Winter’s Tale to see that she’s going places. Though maybe one should, because it’s really so ridiculous that it needs to be seen to be believed. At one point this film introduces us to a vivacious woman who runs a newspaper even though she’d be well over a hundred years old by the story’s own timeline. That’s in the third act. In the first, Farrell’s character scales a wall with a grappling hook. Somewhere in the second we’re given the most intense scene built around a home furnace this side of The ‘burbs. This movie has absolutely everything.

Short Round: Labor Day (2014) */*****

Director Jason Reitman’s first four features, Thank You For Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air, and Young Adult, didn’t have a whole lot in common, content-wise, but they were each crafted well enough that it made sense that they were made by the same guy. That’s not really the case with his latest film, Labor Day, which is an adaptation he wrote of a novel by Joyce Maynard, though. With Labor Day he’s made a film that’s so clumsy and tone deaf that one has to wonder what existed in the source material to make him want to turn it into a movie in the first place.

The story here sees Josh Brolin playing an escaped convict trying to avoid a pretty large-scale manhunt that’s hot on his trail by holing up in a house that’s inhabited by a single mother played by Kate Winslet and her son, who is played by Gattlin Griffith. What starts out as a hostage situation pretty quickly turns into a holiday weekend bonding experience where Brolin and Winslet’s characters fall in love, Griffith’s character begins to see Brolin’s as a father, and nobody bats an eyelash at the fact that what should have reasonably been several years of character development gets crammed into a few days of ham-fisted, implausible melodrama. Labor Day is one of those movies that seems like it was made by aliens who are trying to pass themselves off as human, but who haven’t yet nailed down the intricacies of the species.

While the pulsing score is heavy-handed, Winslet’s jittery performance is too maudlin, and in general the film’s dialogue and storytelling plays like amateur schlock that’s straight out of a high school creative writing class, Labor Day did have a couple of things going for it that were keeping it from being a complete failure for most of its run time. Namely, Brolin gives an understated and affecting performance and the camera work is all really lovely. But in the third act things get wrapped up in such a saccharine, paint by numbers, rock-stupid fashion that the film shits the bed so thoroughly it completely erases the memory of any good qualities it brought to the table alongside the crap. Labor Day doesn’t even feel like a real movie. It feels like a non-comedic spoof or something. Kill it with fire, bury its ashes deep, and let’s never speak of it again. 

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) */*****

After directing 1987’s Predator and 1988’s Die Hard, John McTiernan probably had one of the greatest back-to-back film runs in history, and he certainly made two of the greatest action movies of all time. Die Hard, especially, is widely regarded as being a true masterpiece and probably the best template of everything that an action movie should be. The same can’t be said for its sequels though. McTiernan came back for the third film and made a fun movie that presented a reasonable excuse for why its story would have happened, but Renny Harlin’s Die Hard 2 lacked the charm and smarts of the original and was little more than an implausible rehash, and Len Wiseman’s entry in the series, which didn’t come until 2007, was a forgettable piece of glossy pap that proved there wasn’t any life left in this mediocre series, even if it was initially spawned by a great film. 

Given all the history, there probably wasn’t much of a chance that director John Moore’s (Max Payne) latest entry in the series, A Good Day to Die Hard, was going to be anything that was actually worthy of carrying on the franchise’s name. But, putting all of the Die Hard baggage aside and viewing it as its own stand alone thing, does it at least manage to be a fun enough action movie that can be viewed as brainless entertainment? No. Not at all. A Good Day to Die Hard isn’t just so bad that it’s brainless, it’s so bad that it will actively harm any brains that do exist.

Short Round: A Haunted House (2013) */*****

Though I don’t recall the first couple spoof movies Marlon Wayans had a hand in writing and acting in, Don’t Be a Menace To South Central and Scary Movie, to be great works of comedy, they were at least passable movies with a handful of laughs and a cursory understanding of the genres that they were parodying. And they were certainly worlds better than the mess of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer spoof movies they inspired. Not so with A Haunted House, the newest spoof that Wayans co-wrote and stars in, however. This is a movie so stupid, vile, and unfunny that it would look right at home sitting on a shelf next to things like Date Movie, Epic Movie, etc...

The genre that’s being lampooned this time around is the found footage horror genre, which is certainly pervasive enough to garner attention and is definitely ripe for some skewering, but calling what A Haunted House accomplishes either a lampooning or a skewering would be really generous. This film fails to provide any insight concerning what makes found footage movies like The Blair Witch Project worthy of a takedown, and it doesn’t make any observations regarding what have become the recognized staples of the found footage genre. Instead, Wayans and his collaborators merely take scenes that are loose recreations of scenes we’ve already seen in films like Paranormal Activity 3  and The Last Exorcism, and uses them as a framework in which to present a slew of bottom scraping sex, fart, and poop jokes, all without a trace of satire or smarts in sight.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with ribald humor, but like anything else it has to be presented with wit and timing to be effective. For comedy to work there has to be something in its delivery that offers up a unique point of view that the audience hasn’t considered before. The extent of A Haunted House’s point of view seems to be that sex exists, and it’s a pretty silly thing to look at when presented out of context, farts can be loud and smelly, and they come out of your butt, and pooping is even smellier than farting and even sillier to watch than someone having sex. This is the sort of movie that wants you to know how gross gay sex is, and what perverts gay people are. It’s going to clue you in on the fact that black people do things this way, and white people do things that way. In short, it’s one of the most boring, least funny chores of a film that I’ve encountered in quite some time, and you should avoid it at all costs.

Short Round: That’s My Boy (2012) */*****

Over the years Adam Sandler’s starring vehicles (at least the ones he produces himself) have become so obtusely bad and predictably similar that I consider them to be the most difficult films to review. How many ways can you say that his random crudity and nonsensical absurdity doesn’t equal funny? How many ways can you say the schmaltzy pap that makes up the heavy-handed sentiment of his third acts always falls flat? How many times can you complain about the witless poking fun at the fat, elderly, and non-white that insultingly gets passed off as being just a laid back guy having fun and making jokes? Why would anybody waste their time writing yet another full review, when Adam Sandler keeps putting out the same movie over and over again? So I won’t. But I will keep going to see his movies, because their persistent badness holds a sort of fascination for me at this point. Just how long can he keep this up?

This time around Sandler’s playing a ne’er do well named Donny Berger (who talks in a formless mishmash of Sandler’s two or three silly voices combined with varying hints of a Massachusetts accent, depending on how lazy Sandler was feeling on set that day), a drunken trash ball who owes $43 thousand in back taxes to the IRS and who fathered a son with his math teacher when he was 13. The twist is that his son, Han Solo Berger (shame on you, Andy Samberg), is an adult now, something of a preppy finance wizard, and is about to get married. Cue Donny crashing the wedding to do whatever he can to squeeze the money out of his estranged son and avoid prison.

This is an Adam Sandler movie, so what sounds like an inevitable disaster actually works out great for his character. Despite the fact that he’s obnoxious and awful, all of the snooty rich people at the wedding inexplicably love him. Despite the fact that his son denies his existence after experiencing a lifetime of abuse, one night of drinking together makes everything forgiven. And despite the fact that he’s old, out of shape, and weird looking, all of the women in the film want to have sex with him. The self-serving, extended-adolescence train just keeps rolling right along for Adam Sandler. But even as an Adam Sandler movie this one kind of failed for me. Despite this being his big foray into R-rated movies, and despite the fact that the film tried to button push by making sleazy jokes about child molestation and incest, it was really only the casual racism that left me legitimately offended. And where were all of the cameos from his deadbeat friends? I only counted a small handful. If I’m going to buy a ticket to see an Adam Sandler movie, I want to hear Rob Schneider yell, “You can do it!” in a vaguely foreign, don’t-know-why-it’s-supposed-to-be-funny accent. To not even give me that ironic pleasure feels like a slap in the face.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) */*****

The first Ghost Rider movie, directed by Mark Steven Johnson, is a contender for worst comic book movie ever, which pretty much puts it in line to be a contender for worst movie ever. When that massive turd hit theaters it didn’t seem very likely to anybody that a sequel would ever be made. But, you know, that’s the magic of opening weekends and overseas grosses. Pull in enough that first weekend, before people know what they’re dealing with, and pull in enough overseas, where big, broad stupidity seems to be the thing that best crosses language barriers, and even the crappiest of movies can be viewed as a success. So here we have Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sequel brought to us by Crank directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Now that the Ghost Rider character is in different creative hands, how does it fare? Not well. This fetid sequel is nearly as bad as the original, but seeing as it is a bit more self-aware about its badness, not quite as laughably so; which pretty much ruins the whole point of going to see a Nic Cage movie.

That’s the second thing you need to know about this sequel. One might think that if you were going to take a second crack at Ghost Rider you would want to distance yourself as much from that abysmal first film as possible; start things completely over, put together a completely new cast... but here he is, Nic Cage, once again playing Johnny Blaze. This time he’s wrapped up in a plot that involves the Devil who turned him into a demon (Ciarán Hinds) hunting down a woman (Violante Placido) and her child (Fergus Riordan), because the kid is his spawn, and the fresh, young body he plans on transferring his consciousness into. Along for some of the ride as well is Moreau (Idris Elba), some sort of leather jacketed, French monk who’s presence in the story seemed completely unnecessary (though I can’t complain because, hey, Idris Elba), and a secondary bad guy who is hired to track down the boy and his mother, and who later gets turned into a demon named Ray (Johnny Whitworth).  

What’s Your Number? (2011) */*****

It didn’t take long to figure out What’s Your Number? wasn’t going to be my cup of tea. The film opens with an annoying pop song and a credit sequence imposed over images of trashy women’s magazine articles. That’s fine though, a movie doesn’t necessarily have to be right in my wheelhouse to be enjoyable. You could put out the glossiest, pinkest, girliest movie in history, and if you make it well I’ll appreciate it just as much as anything else. I always go into a movie that I’m not particularly looking forward to hoping for it to prove me wrong and turn me onto something new. Unfortunately, What’s Your Number? isn’t the sort of movie that’s going to surprise anybody. Far from it. As a matter of fact, the only thing surprising about this movie is that it somehow manages to be way worse than even I was expecting. For someone who looks at going to the next formulaic, insulting rom-com the same way he looks at a trip to the dentist, that’s really saying something.

Apollo 18 (2011) */*****

Found footage films that tell their story exclusively through shaky, grainy footage that has supposedly been recovered from some sort of disaster and then edited together so the public can know the truth about what happened are awful. The gimmick is only cute for about a couple minutes, and then all of the herky-jerky camera work, the constraints the gimmick puts on the way the story can be told, and the contrivances that give the gimmick away as being inauthentic overwhelm the film and sink what might have been a decent story if it had just been written, shot, and presented in a traditional way. Apollo 18 is one of these found footage movies, and it’s maybe the most insufferable one I’ve ever seen.

Everyone knows that Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon, but what this movie presupposes is that; maybe it wasn’t? What we’re watching is supposedly declassified footage from the top secret Apollo 18 mission. A trip to the moon that ended with disastrous results; results not revealed to the public until now, in the form of a late-summer movie theater release. Sure. Let’s cut to the chase: the first ten minutes of Apollo 18 are maybe the most boring ten minutes of any film I’ve ever watched. Things get moderately more interesting once we get into space, but moderately more interesting than the most boring thing I’ve ever watched is still extremely boring. Luckily for me, there was a couple sitting behind me during the screening, surrounded by a smorgasbord of snacks, who were committed to doing running commentary to each other all the way through the film. Their over the top lack of theater etiquette gave me something to focus on other than this miserable movie. Eventually I stopped taking my own notes about the picture and just started writing down everything that they were saying instead. So, in lieu of a proper plot synopsis, I will present to you with this insightful stream of thought:

Short Round: Just Go With It (2011) */*****

Adam Sandler is at it again. If you would have pulled me aside in the 90s and told me that Adam Sandler would end up being a complete joke who would systematically put out the worst comedy to hit theaters every year, year after year, I would have said you were crazy. There is just no way. This guy was Theo’s Jew fro’d friend on The Cosby Show, he was that guy from the greatest game show of all time Remote Control, he was Billy Madison… he was Opera Man for Christ’s sake! Unfortunately, all of those highs are distant memories. Sandler starred in Judd Apatow’s latest film Funny People playing an aging comic who lost his way both personally and professionally, making a string of embarrassing movies and ultimately ending up a miserable, pathetic man. It turns out there wasn’t any self-aware realizations that led to Sandler taking that role, he’s perfectly comfortable making terrible movies from here on out. Just Go With It isn’t as bad as last year’s aborted pooh baby Grownups, but it’s insufferably terrible in its own ways. Sandler is still shoe-horning all of his unfunny buddies into his movies, he’s still trying to jerk tears in the least deft, most ham-handed ways possible, and he’s still refusing to make movies that have meticulously written and comedy filled scripts in favor of vapid, stupid pieces of garbage that will allow him to lazily improvise whatever nonsensical, wacky noises pop into his head. Sandler on the job might as well be Sandler sleepwalking. This movie has a couple things working for it. Jennifer Aniston plays the least off putting shrew she’s played in a movie in a long while, and Brooklyn Decker looks better than anybody ever in a too small bikini; but other than that everything about this one will make you want to punch your crotch in fury. It makes no sense, the characters are stupid and unlikable, there’s a couple of annoying child actors, and it never gets so much as a smirk out of you.  

Short Round: Sanctum (2011) */*****

I’ve maybe never seen so much melodramatic clap-trap squeezed into one little movie in my entire life. Sanctum is what it would be like if Old Yeller was just scene after scene of the kid going around to farmhouses and tearfully shooting rabid dogs. It would be exhausting if it was performed well, when it’s brought to life by terrible acting and a putrid script, it’s unbearable. I struggle to think of the last time I saw a movie so completely composed of hacky dialogue and clichéd situations. I can’t imagine that this film was made for any reason other than to give James Cameron the opportunity to test out some new underwater camera equipment for Avatar 2. To spend any more time talking about Sanctum would be a disservice to humanity. Just forget that you ever heard about it. And if you come across any copies of it, burn them.

Something Borrowed (2011) */*****

Something Borrowed is a film that starts off looking clichéd and ordinary, but that develops over the course of it’s runtime into something so egregiously contemptible that you will walk out of the theater seething with hatred toward everyone involved in its production. Or at least you will if you have a brain in your head and even a small sense of decency. I’m sure a lot of the hate for this movie is going to be aimed toward Kate Hudson. Audiences fell in love with her back in 2000’s Almost Famous and ever since she has let people down by appearing in disappointing film after disappointing film, with only an acceptable turn sprinkled in here and there to break up the crap. Every time she’s in another bad movie the cry of “Why does Kate Hudson keep getting to make movies?” gets louder and louder, and it looks more and more ridiculous every time she is cast in something new. Hudson isn’t really a bad actress though, just one that has shown a pretty limited range up to this point. It’s not her presence that sinks films, just her poor taste in picking projects that highlights something as probably being terrible before anybody even sees it. I don’t know why she makes the movies she does, or how she manages to show up looking bubbly and fresh time after time; but with Something Borrowed even Hudson is starting to look wore out and weary. She plays a character that, at one point in her career, would have come off as overbearing but charming, but who now just plays like a Frankenstein monster mashup of Absolutely Fabulous and Sex and the City. And despite the fact that Hudson’s name will get thrown around more than anybody else’s when people spew hate and bile at this film, her presence is the least of its problems. Something Borrowed’s failures start at its roots and extend all the way to its highest branches. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a tree of suck.

Short Round: Elizabethtown (2005) */*****

I remember hearing over and over again how bad this was when it first came out. The people saying that obviously missed Paul Schneider and his awesome pork chop sideburns. Seriously though, this thing sucked. It was just weirdly bad. Half the time I didn’t even know what I was watching. Where was this movie going and what did it want to be? What was with that big speech by Susan Sarandon? What was everybody laughing at?! That might have been the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. Thank God that Orlando Bloom as a leading man thing didn’t stick. How can someone so pretty be so boring to watch on screen? Dunst is Dunst. I generally have a crush on her when she’s being cutesy, so I didn’t mind her here. She’s scripted to say some stupid stuff though. And with an inconsistent accent. Okay, so maybe I did mind her. Yeah, this movie sucked bad. It just kept going. Shame on you Cameron Crowe.

Drive Angry 3D (2011) N/A/*****

Like anybody else fascinated with mental illness, I’ve been following the career of Nicolas Cage very closely for the past few years. Movie choice after movie choice, line delivery after line delivery, and hairdo after hairdo, the man continues to keep me guessing at how self aware he is about what he is doing and how much of his late career can be completely chalked up to a mental breakdown of epic proportions. We’ve heard audiotapes of a lot of A-list Hollywood actors completely losing their grip and getting nutty over the past few years. It seems to be some kind of trend. Manic episodes are the new “it” thing, and I get that, but how does Nic Cage fit into the equation? I hear a lot of people explaining away his bad movies as a need to take any paycheck that comes his way due to impending bankruptcy, but I don’t buy it. Firstly, he’s been going after ridiculous roles for quite a while now. Remember that whole decade where he was doing all of the campaigning he could to get himself cast in every super hero movie that was in development? Remember the concept art for Tim Burton’s proposed Superman film with Cage as the most horrendously miscast Superman that I can imagine? And secondly, what’s the deal with his bankruptcy anyway? He has been a top-level actor in Hollywood for literally decades now. Brother was in The Rock. Did he really blow his whole life savings on mansions and jet skis and things? I would say that to do such a thing is in direct relation to the kind of mindset that leads someone to take any role where he gets to play a tough cop, a demon from Hell, an unstoppable hitman, a super hero, a cowboy zombie pirate, or whatever else thing that little children think is super wicked. It all adds up to mental discombobulation in my book. Something has happened to make Cage’s mind regress back to the summer of his twelfth year. His choices have been the cause of a lot of criticism and derision over the last decade, but I’ve been loving the journey every step of the way. Every bad movie, every ridiculous performance, and every stupid looking weave on his head grows the Nic Cage legend in my eyes. Drive Angry 3D is the next step in either the Nic Cage public breakdown or the Nic Cage life as performance art, and I really have no idea what to think about it.

The Tourist (2010) */*****

The Tourist is a remake of a French film from 2005 named Anthony Zimmer.  If the original was even half as dumb as this remake, then I feel bad for the French.  What we get here is little more than a collection of trinkets.  The filmmakers have cobbled together a small collection of actors and locations that are pretty universally beloved and admired and brought them into the theaters for show and tell.  Cast Angelina Jolie to bring in the fellas, throw in Johnny Depp for the ladies, and then have them run around Paris and Venice for a little under two hours; it’s the perfect formula for a movie, right?  There will be spy plot action, but also they’ll fall in love!  It’s like somebody built a super advanced computer program and had it suss out a prototype for the most universally appealing film of all time, then they made it and sat back to wait for the cash to roll in.  The problem with that setup is their super computer must have also wrote the script; a clichéd bit of nonsense that had nothing of note to offer, shallow characterizations, and felt more like a cobbled together pastiche of overly familiar situations than it did any sort of original piece of work.  Is it possible that this script was constructed by some sort of psychopath who snipped words out of other screenplays and then arranged them in a new order with glue and tweezers?  Yes, I would say that it’s very possible.  All of the elements of this film are conceived of and presented in a manner so bluntly aimed at getting a positive reaction out of a general audience that it feels like pornography.  Johnny Depp is quirky and interesting even though he’s supposed to be playing an average Joe.  Angelina Jolie plays more of a statue than she does a real woman.  Opulent hotels, designer clothing, the cobblestone streets of Paris, and the canals of Venice are all lingered over by the camera as if they are things that are integral to the story.  This is what you want isn’t it?  This is the escapism of cinema!  Lap it up fools!  Lap it up!      

Grown Ups (2010) */*****

What I just saw is one of the most insanely idiotic things I’ve ever sat through.  At no point during its rambling, incoherent runtime was Grown Ups anywhere close to anything that could be considered an actual film.  Everyone in the theater is now dumber for having watched it.  I award it no extra stars, and may God have mercy on Adam Sandler’s soul.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) */*****

If I had to write some sort of primer on everything that is wrong with modern cinema, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time would be the perfect place to look to begin working out a thesis statement.  Just on a surface level, there is a colon in the title: never a good sign.  Is the story original?  No.  It’s based on a video game.  Colon in the title, adaptation of an existing property, and that property is a video game to boot… that’s three strikes right there and I haven’t even gotten into discussing the film itself.  Dig a little deeper and the crap really starts to pile up.  Too much unconvincing CG, a completely miscast young actor in the lead role just because he is a name, camera work that lacks the fundamentals of sequential storytelling, a clunky script that could have used about a hundred more rewrites; the laundry list is seemingly endless.  I would be hard pressed to find any aspect of Prince of Persia that doesn’t expose it as a thoughtlessly churned out product of a creatively bankrupt studio system.  Nevertheless, I will attempt to pontificate on it’s non-virtues a bit further in order to satisfy the morbid curiosity of whomever might want to know a little bit more about Jerry Bruckheimer’s latest producer credit.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2010) */*****

Doing a quick search around the web for definitions of the word “porn” led me to the general consensus that porn seems to be explicit depictions of sexual behavior meant to arouse sexual excitement in the viewer.  The term “torture porn” has been thrown around the film world a lot lately to describe works like Hostel and the Saw series.  I guess what people are getting at is that these films are explicit depictions of torture meant to arouse some sort of sadistic pleasure in its viewers.  By all accounts writer/director Tom Six’s new film The Human Centipede should fit right into the genre.  The question I must raise is, what do you call a film that contains little more than explicit scenes of torture and somehow manages to bore?  With the first installment in his Human Centipede series Tom Six may have created the first torture lullaby.

Legion (2010) */*****

A decade after his debut as a director, Scott Stewart has hit the multiplexes with his sophomore effort, an angelically themed action movie named Legion.  This film, to cut to the chase, is a conceptual mess that doesn’t bother to take the time to make sense of itself, let alone explain to the audience what it is they’re supposed to be watching.  The story centers around an angel named Michael, who when tasked with the duty of wiping out humanity at the behest of God, instead decides to defy his orders and give the humans another chance by protecting their last chance at survival, an unborn child.  Why this child is important or how he could possibly stand to save us from the judgment of an all-powerful God is never explained.