Film Review: Jeff Wadlow's Kick-Ass 2

I have to admit that I did not like this film all that much.  It was okay, one could even say it was meh, if one wished to use a more hipstery type of language, but nothing to write home about, as they say.  I also must admit that I was not all that big of a fan of the first Kick-Ass film either.  A bit less meh than the follow-up, but still quite lackluster.  Now the comics, I like.  The comics by Mark Millar are lots of fun, but the film adaptations leave much to be desired.  The hard hitting sardonic, and yes, quite dark and disturbing, humour of Millar's comics are lost in the more, for lack of a more apt term, family friendly  filmic translations.  Yeah yeah, I know, this R-rated film is far from family friendly, but really, it could have gone a lot farther than it did in trying to recreating Mark Millar's scripted comics.  Then again, people like the film's co-star, Jim Carrey, think the film went too far, but more on that in a bit.

As a bit of a background check here, Kick-Ass is a comic book series written by Mark Millar, with artwork by the great John Romita, Jr., and was published from 2008 to 2010 by Marvel Comics' more mature imprint, Icon.  A film adaptation was released in 2010.  The film was directed by Matthew Vaughn, and was a bit controversial for its depiction of violence, especially as it had teenagers, including the then 13 year old Chloe Moretz, in its cast.  As I said, I thought the film just average, and the violence should have been kicked up a notch or three.  Damn the controversy!  With the second series, published in 2011 and 2012, and again published by Marvel's Icon imprint, and written and drawn by Millar and Romita, Jr., respectively, a sequel has been released to the movie going public, and again, the cries of too much violence has erupted, and again, when compared to the comics (which incidentally portrays toddlers being gunned down and teenage girls being gang-raped), said violence is not really all that.  But maybe that's just me.

As I alluded to earlier, after the tragedy of Sandy Hook happened, and those kids were killed (a few months before the film's release), Jim Carrey, who portrays mob enforcer-turned-superhero Captain Stars & Stripes, came out and apologized for making such a violent movie.  Really, Jim?  You act as if Sandy Hook was the first school shooting of its kind.  Like there were no other tragedies, many of them with larger body counts, that happened before you signed up and made such a "violent" movie.  What a hypocritical bastard!  But I digress.  I am not here to talk of some self-absorbed actor spouting off idiotic statements to the press.  Although I will quote co-star Chloe Moretz, now sixteen and playing the murderous vigilante Hit-Girl in the film.  She said of the violence controversy, "It's a movie. If you are going to believe and be affected by an action film, you shouldn't go to see Pocahontas because you are going to think you are a Disney princess. If you are that easily swayed, you might see The Silence of the Lambs and think you are a serial killer. It's a movie and it's fake, and I've known that since I was a kid... I don't want to run around trying to kill people and cuss. If anything, these movies teach you what not to do."  Anyway, I digress once more.

I've spoken so much about the violence and ensuing controversy of the film, but not much on the film itself.  This is probably because I really have nothing to say about the film.  It is a lackluster adaptation of a far superior comicbook series.  Sure, there are some fun moments throughout (Christopher Mintz-Plassse is especially fun as the supervillain known as The Mother Fucker), but overall the film just sort of lays there in a state of self-confusion.  Some say it is too violent, others, like me, say it is not violent enough when compared to the comics themselves, or to other auteuristic action films by the like of Scorsese or Tarantino or Park Chan-wook.  I am not advocating violence, but when it is needed to tell a story, and it is here. The whole fucking point of the story is to show the differences between what is a good guy and what is a bad guy, and how that lined is constantly and rightfully blurred all to hell, and one needs violence to show that.  But then, maybe that is just me.

Retro Review: 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)

The following is part of a series where I bring back some of my "older" reviews (those written during my 2004-2011 tenure at the now mostly defunct The Cinematheque) and offer them up to a "newer" generation.

*************

From the very first moment, as the Warner Bros. logo flashes and slashes its way across the darkened screen, as if forged by mighty Hephaestus himself, we instantly know that Zack Snyder and his X-Box-weened posse of computer geeks, graphic novel junkees and comic book fanboys are about to mightily thrust upon the unsuspecting public a vast and mighty display of ultrasupercoolawesomeness to the very freakin' tippy-top apex-eroding grody-to-the-max. Of course, for those of us who are not brought to the very precipice (or beyond) of orgasm by the thought of a CGI-created universe full of rabid bare-chested oiled-up steroid-pumped half-men half-beast warriors led by a pompous half-man half-pariah (all bad actor) who is just one note (and a lot less work-outs) away from a certain White House residing war monger of our own, fighting an equally rabid über-army of glimmer-masked marauders, gigantic Frankensteinian monstrosities and a few big-ass battle elephants led by some sort of mascara'd crossbreed of Marilyn Manson and Rupaul, way beyond Thunderdome, this film, full of lusty vim and vigor and spewing ultrasupercoolawesomeness out its proverbial watusi, gets real tired real soon - and I got real pissed off real freakin' fast.

Now to begin, please allow me to say that if your artistic sensibilities are not totally grossed out within the first ten minutes or so, as if someone had just thrown-up big fat chunks of falafel and moussaka all over you, then this is surely the movie for you - vacuous, demeaning, completely devoid of any substance whatsoever, replete with all the idiotic, brain-numbing, Nietzsche-praising video gaming geekocity one could ever dream of while sleeping snug and cozy at age 37 in their mommy's basement rec room, copy of Maxim under their pillow and thoughts of Pamela Anderson floating like sugar plum fairies throughout their heads. If this is you, then nothing I can say or do will ever sway your opinion away from the ultrasupercoolawesomeness of this computer designed crypto-movie atrocity that blatantly spits in the face of cinematic integrity, and perhaps you should just stop reading right now and go finish that saved game of World of Warcraft you've been so buggin' to get back to. Meanwhile, everyone else, my faithful readers perhaps, please read on, for I truly scathe only very few and far between and you wouldn't want to miss any of the mordacious tongue slathering that is sure to follow.

Based upon Frank Miller's graphic novel about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, where the King of Sparta led his meager army of 300 strong against the interloping throng of the mighty Persian horde, which in turn was apocryphally based by Miller upon the 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, he saw as an impressionable (if not a bit ADHD) child, Zack Snyder, who gave us all quite the surprise with his quick-witted Dawn of the Dead remake a few years back, tries to have his cake and eat it too by attempting to recreate the feeling of cinematic overzealousness and pop-pulp flim-flam that was the last Frank Miller penned adaptation. Yet Sin City, even with all its many flaws, still managed to hit its intended target at least half the time, while Snyder's overwrought mega movie just falls deeper and deeper into the inevitable chasm of CGI-induced banality, ending up nothing shy of a deadened, terrifically dull, plodding slab of man meat-cum-action figure tableaux, perfectly in tune with the Maxim reading machismo of modern "man".
 

Snyder's film may indeed have its momentary visual exaltation of larks, but once one gets beyond such slapdash smattery and one-dimensional eye porn, one must surely see 300 for what it truly is - a simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic testosteronic monkeyshine, full of so much hokey ham-handed faux pixilated battle scenes, one trick pony actors-cum-glistening torsos, slathered in enough body oils to simultaneously and permanently ejaculate each and every last gay porn connoisseur from P-Town to the Golden Gate, naked writhing slave-girl oracles straight off of a Maxfield Parrish calendar and enough level-ending melees with every fanged, clawed and muscled monster this side of the Khyber Pass, to nearly eradicate the ever-blurring fine line between modern mass market movie making and the benighted art of video games, not to mention giving every person over the IQ of drooling monosyllabic Spartan, a headache the size of the Persian Empire at its glorious behemothic height.

As our mighty Spartan heroes, led by the churlish Gerard Butler, not even attempting to disguise his thick Scottish burr, form an "impenetrable phalanx at the hot gates" and the equally mighty 8-foot-tall man-muffin god-king Xerxes sends wave after wave of circus sideshow lallapalooza at them, one can not help but notice the totally ludicrous identity crisis this movie has in spades. Both sexually confused (this entire freakin' shama lama ding dong is full of enough beefcake bunnies and chest-piercing blood-n-gore for both the leather-boy and the frat boy to be both aroused by and bothered by) and politically metaphored (aka macho jar-headed white guys vs. interloping terroristic golden brown guys), Snyder has pounded every square peg into every round hole he could find and in doing so has let loose a Pandora's box of phallic Freudian psychobabble and right-winged rhetoric spin-doctoring unto an already applesauce'd burlesque of inanity.   

Ultimately, Snyder's sophomore (and sophomoric) film, though with nothing short of a twisted train wreck of an aura that makes even someone that would write this scathing takedown, unable to turn his head away in a strangely happy horror, forcing him to scream "By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!" with every demented twist and turn (a possible so-called guilty pleasure in our future perhaps?), plays out as an excitably unexciting yet hilariously hysterical (as Nathan Lee of The Village Voice has called it) mélange of utter flapdoodle and mad cow-riddled absurdity - all fried up in a synthetically manufactured landscape of digital drudgery.   Run, don't walk from the blob that is 300. 

[Originally published at The Cinematheque on 04/01/07] 

The Cinematheque Reviews: Cowboys & Aliens

The lovely little missus and I were on holiday this past week, so I was unable to see and review some of the films released during this time.  This is the second of several "catch-up" reviews that I will be sneaking, at whim, into my schedule.

Cowboys & Aliens made my "Most Anticipated Films of 2011" list (it came in at no.15) and even though it doesn't live up to such anticipation, it is a fun genre mash-up nonetheless.  Let's face it, how can a film that is basically Indiana Jones and James Bond kicking alien ass in the old west not be great?  Seriously, how can it not?  Okay, perhaps it isn't great after all, but it is still a fun piece of pop summer entertainment that will satisfy all those fanboys out there -- including the one hiding inside of me.  My review of this intriguing genre hybrid (a review where I let that inner fanboy out for a little bit) is now up and running over at The Cinematheque.  Read on true believers.

Read my review of Cowboys & Aliens at The Cinematheque.

Anomalous Material Weekly Feature: 10 Best Movie Supervillains

As you may already know, I now take up weekly residence over at the great film site Anomalous Material.  The fine folks over there have given me a regular weekly gig as feature writer.  It is a series of top ten lists on various cinematic subjects (and anyone who knows me can attest to how perfectly suited I am to such an endeavor - yes I am a list nerd).  This week's feature piece (my eighth such piece) is on  those wonderful and iconic super bad guys.  I take a look at the best comic book movie supervillains and just how better (and most times cooler) they are than the heroes themselves.  Anyway, read on true believers.

Read my feature article, "10 Best Comic Book Movie Supervillains" at Anomalous Material.

Below is a splash panel from Captain America #16.  It represents the newest entry on my list.  So new in fact, that I had to hand in my feature a day late just so I could see the midnight show of Captain America: The First Avenger in case I wanted to add the Red Skull, as played by Hugo Weaving, into the fray.  Needless to say I did just that.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Reviewed at The Cinematheque

There has been much debate lately (especially since the release of Inception) over the idea of a movie being praised for not so much being a well-made quality film as being cool and hip and awesome - which incidentally is not really the same thing.  There are films that can straddle the two factions (sixties Godard and present-day Tarantino come immediately to mind) and one of those said faction-straddlers is Edgar Wright's third movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

When I first saw the film just the other day I made mention in a Facebook status update that I believed it to be one of the best films of 2010 so far - hands down.  Several days later (as I finish my review of said movie) not only do I stand by that seemingly surprising outburst (many a friend commented on how I must be being sarcastic) but have grown even more enamored of the movie.  So much so that I could not stop my rambling on and on and on and on and on and on (and on) about the movie in my review.  A review that I eventually had to put a halt to (lest I succumb to carpel tunnel) at just under 1500 words (my usual critique runs on somewhere in the 500-600 word realm).

Anyway, before I ramble on too much here, hop on over to The Cinematheque and read my review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Kick-Ass and Iron Man 2 Reviewed at The Cinematheque

In finally getting around to posting those pesky little reviews I missed posting while I was on sabbatical (aka buying and fixing up a house and being generally engrossed in all that jazz) here are two more to add to the checked off list.  They are two superhero adaptation movies with less than superheroic reworkings.  No more need be said here, just read the damn reviews.  Oh yeah, and it feels damn good to be back in the proverbial swing of things once again. 

Read my review of Kick-Ass at The Cinematheque.

Read my review of Iron Man 2 at The Cinematheque.