Month: March 2015

The Bait-and-Switch Movie Trailer (I’ll explain this a little later.)

Released: September 2000

Director: Douglas Aarniokoski

Run Time: 101 Minutes(Producer’s/Director’s Cut: The 2-Disc DVD Ultimate Collection)

Rated R

Cast:
Adrian Paul: Duncan MacLeod
Christopher Lambert: Connor MacLeod
Bruce Payne: Jacob Kell
Peter Wingfield: Methos
Jim Byrnes: Joe Dawson
Donnie Yen: Jin Ke
Lisa Barbuscia: Kate/Faith

When the original Highlander film came out in 1986, it was considered to be a massive box-office bomb in the United States.  Yet, it did pretty well overseas, particularly in France and England.  So, why wasn’t the film initially successful HERE?  I guess people really weren’t itching to see 400 year old Immortals fighting each other on the streets of New York City.  Also Christopher Lambert wasn’t exactly a box-office draw.  His only other big movie was Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan.  People weren’t expecting a film that had flashbacks to different periods in history including 16th century Scotland.  Highlander was a very original and smart adventure film.  Nobody had seen anything like it before.  While the film didn’t get the box office numbers it deserved, Highlander wound up actually getting the recognition it deserved on home video.  It became a cult classic that is basically revered by millions of fans around the world today.  I guess that was enough for the people behind the film to start making sequels.  I have a question.  When you have a movie featuring Immortals whose only goal is to become the only one left standing, wouldn’t it make sense to just leave it there?  Connor MacLeod was the only immortal left after killing the Kurgan, so that should have been the end of it.  Nope.  The producers went ahead a second film in which Immortals came from another planet: Zeist.  Yep, the Immortals were ALIENS!!  Now, subsequent home video releases of Highlander 2 would actually drop that particular issue, but the damage had already been done.  The movie was hammered on release.  That should have been a clue that maybe a sequel was a bad idea.  But wait, there’s more:  Shortly after the second film was released, there was a TV series starring Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod that started airing.  Truth be told, the series wasn’t actually half-bad with the pilot episode featuring Christopher Lambert.  That’s a hell of a way to start a series.  Seeing as how popular the series had become, the producers at Dimension, having aquired the rights to the Highlander film franchise, began work on a third film.  This was the first film in the series to feature a PG-13 rating, and it got slammed.  The home video release would end up being rated R, featuring more violence and other adult situations.  A fourth film, Highlander Endgame, was supposed to bridge the TV series and the film franchise when the series ended in 1998.

Opening in 1986 New York, we see Connor MacLeod’s adopted daughter, Rachel get blown to smithereens in Connor’s loft.  10 years later, we see Connor hooked up to IVs keeping him sedated apparently.  It wasn’t enough to keep him from narrating parts of his life, though.  Flashback to Glen Finnen in Scotland, Connor’s hometown, he decides to save his mother from the very people who drove him away.  Sadly, she ends up getting burned at the stake and Connor kills a holy man in cold blood.  Said holy man is the adopted father of one Jacob Kell who also gets stabbed by Connor.  Jumping back to present day….wherever, we see Jacob Kell invading The Sanctuary, a place where Immortals place themselves to prevent violence to others.  That doesn’t stop Kell and his marauding gang of Immortals from decapitating the helpless Immortals.  Said sanctuary was supposed to be on holy ground.  Kell clearly doesn’t care about The Rules.  We then cut to Paris, France where Duncan MacLeod is meditating when he gets visions of the massacre.  After visiting Methos, we head to New York and the loft that was blown up.  After a flashback(yes, those do happen frequently), Duncan encounters his old flame, Faith/Kate or whatever name she’s going by now.  Okay, the tag line of the franchise is “There can be only one.”  So, why the hell are there 5 movies and several TV shows?!  The line doesn’t say there can be only one or two, just ONE!  Not two or three or four, but ONE.  Story-wise, Endgame isn’t too bad, it features certain themes including revenge and redemption that I quite like.  It’s just done in such a ham-fisted way that we can’t actually care about most of these people.

Let’s look at the positives here.  One: the music is actually fairly well done and not entirely out of place.  It’s got some fairly dark and oppressive themes, especially when Kell shows up.  It’s pretty good stuff.  Secondly, the fight scenes are awesome.  With choreography by legendary martial arts actor, Donnie Yen, we have some really cool sword-fights and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting.  Yes, I referenced Carl Douglas’s song, I’m allowed to do that.  Seriously, though, the sword-fights are some of the best I’ve seen in a movie like this.  This is also Donnie Yen’s first American film.  That’s another plus.  Next, Adrian Paul.  Of all the actors in this movie, Adrian Paul is the only one who seems to be carrying his weight.  Finally, the movie moves at a pretty brisk pace.  So, it’s not boring.  Some of the camera shots are fantastic, especially when they’re in Scotland.  Scotland’s got some of the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever seen.  So what’s wrong with this movie?

The answer is everything else.  The acting in particular is dreadful.  Anyone who isn’t Adrian Paul is basically phoning it in.  It certainly doesn’t help that most of the characters aren’t particularly likable.  That’s one of the biggest issues facing this film:  The writing.  Connor spends most of the film moping around feeling sorry for himself.  Kate spends it pouting and looking pretty while trying to unsuccessfully hate Duncan.  If the villain had a mustache, it would be twirled into oblivion.  Jacob Kell is one of the LEAST threatening villains in the franchise.  It certainly doesn’t help that he’s surrounded himself by incompetent Immortals who easily outnumber him and could have taken his head.  So why doesn’t that happen?  Who knows?  Bruce Payne spends the movie just snarling and sneering and generally being awful as the bad guy.  I don’t hate Bruce Payne, but Kell is his worst character to date.    It’s also clear that during a fight scene with Duncan, there are bits and pieces where you see that it isn’t Christopher Lambert doing the fighting.  A lot of the visual effects are very under-cooked.  In fact, during that fight scene between Connor and Duncan, there’s a JVC sign in the background that’s been blurred out.  Poorly, I might add.  Highlander Endgame feels like it’s been edited by a five year-old kid.  It is painfully obvious where they cut the negative during certain scenes.  If you look closely during the training session between Connor and Duncan, there’s a point during the super-move that Connor teaches Duncan, where he says that this move is unstoppable.  In other versions of the film, he says that the move is NEARLY unstoppable.  There are also sequences during the final battle where they clearly cut and paste certain parts of the fight.  It is perfectly clear that whoever was editing the film, had no clue what he or she was doing.  It’s pretty bad.

The marketing for this film was a disaster.  The initial trailer for the film was clearly bait-and-switch.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the trailer above.  It features elements and visual effects that aren’t in any version of the movie, leading me to believe that those particular shots were created specifically for the trailer.  If you have to dress your trailer up using stuff that’s not actually in the movie to sell the movie, that’s called false advertising.  The trailer depicted Kell as some supernatural force using god-like powers, like stopping a sword using a force field.  It also featured a portal which Connor and Duncan jumped through.  You’ve got to watch it.  It’s unbelievable.  I’ve seen some bad movie trailers, but this one nearly takes the cake.  If you have to create effects just for a trailer to advertise your movie, there is something seriously wrong with your movie.  The movie we got was not the one that was advertised.  Granted, later trailers would eliminate those effects, but the damage has been done.  You see one thing and get something else.   I would like to expect a LITTLE bit of honesty when it comes to movie trailers.  The fact that I heard about 4 different versions of Highlander Endgame existing, doesn’t really bode well for the filmmakers.  It wound up being bad enough, that the 5th film ended up going straight to the sci-fi channel.  That’s pretty much a death sentence for most franchises that aren’t Sharknado.

There’s enough here for me to like about the movie to keep me from tossing it in the Bad Movie category with The Source.  Highlander Endgame is the last theatrically-released Highlander film.  I’ve been reading around the Internet that they are re-making the original film, which is a bad idea, I think.  Depending on who’s making it and who’s going to be in it, I’ll wait and see, but I’m not expecting anything good.  At the end of the day, Highlander Endgame gets a 6.5/10.  It’s entertaining enough, but it’s poorly put together.

Released: December 2014

Director: Ridley Scott

Run Time: 150 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Cast:
Christian Bale: Moses
Joel Edgerton: Ramses
John Turturro: Seti
Aaron Paul: Joshua
Sigourney Weaver: Tuya
Ben Kingsley: Nun

Say what you will about the Bible.  I certainly have MY opinions about the book, but the one thing that really can’t be denied about the Bible is that it has some wild and crazy stories.  The Old Testament in particular is LOADED with epic stories of power, betrayal and faith.  But the other thing you should know is that the God of the Old Testament is NOT a nice guy.  He’s hard and at times very cruel.  This is very evident in stories such as Noah’s Ark, Abraham and the most famous of the Bible’s stories: The story of Moses and the Ten Commandments.  This is all part of the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament.  There have been MANY movies based on Biblical stories.  Movies like The King of Kings and The Passion of the Christ are among the many that are about Jesus Christ.  But there have been numerous films about other stories in the book.  The most of which is The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston stands out among the pack as a 3-hour epic.  A few decades later, Ridley Scott decides to take his own stab at the story of Moses: Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Exodus begins with Moses and his closest friend Ramses are in counsel with Pharaoh Seti, Ramses’ father.  They are deciding how best to handle a potential incursion from an army of Hittites that hovering near the border of Egypt.  So, they decide to catch the Hittites off guard and in the ensuing battle, Moses ends up saving Ramses’ life.  Later, Seti demands that Ramses take an interest in the city, especially with the Hebrew slaves.  Moses ends up going to inspect the quarry instead of Ramses and learns of his true origins as a Hebrew himself.  When Ramses learns of this, Moses is banished from the city of Memphis and wanders the desert until he comes to a remote village where he falls in love a local woman.  Some time later, he chases some sheep up a nearby mountain when he encounters a strange child near a burning bush.  Moses is told to seek out the Hebrew slaves to understand what’s happening to them.  When he discovers that they are being cruelly mistreated, even more so than when Seti was in power,  Moses becomes determined to free the people from the tyranny of Ramses.  Anybody who has read the Book of Exodus will know how this story goes, so spoilers shouldn’t really be a concern to anybody.

Moses is arguable one of the most important figures, if not the MOST important figure in The Old Testament.  He is a symbol of liberation and bringer of law to the Israeli people.  This figure is important not just in Judaism, but also Christianity and Islam.  Moses liberated the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, led them out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, and gave the world the Ten Commandments.  While the story of Moses had the character brought up in the royal Egyptian family, the actual story never portrayed him as a military commander.  That’s an angle that Ridley Scott and company came up with, and for Exodus, it works.  One of the opening sequences of the film actually features a rather large battle between the Egyptians and the Hittites.  I will definitely say this for Ridley Scott, the man knows how to stage a large scale battle.  Don’t believe me?  Check out Gladiator.  Yeah, this movie is epic in every sense of the word.  It would have to be.  The story of Moses is grand and epic in and of itself.  For a movie that is as epic as this, you don’t really see a whole lot of warfare.  It isn’t that kind of movie.  Yeah, we do get a large battle at the beginning of the movie, but the epicness(is that a word?)is the journey that Moses takes to liberate his people.  Now, when you’re making a movie about Moses, there are certain expectations that must be met.  A little backstory on how Moses grew up?  Check.  The 10 Plagues of Egypt?  Check.  Parting the Red Sea?  Check.  The plagues are one of the more interesting aspects of the film, because they are well done.  The sequence with the alligators is surprisingly graphic and disturbing.  The locusts and the frogs?  Not bad.  But the most disturbing plague out of all of them was the death of the firstborns.  This plague affected EVERYONE who’s dwelling wasn’t marked with lamb’s blood.  So, all the Egyptians’ firstborn children, including the pharaoh, were killed.  That’s brutal.  It’s not graphic, but it’s rather unsettling that God would do something this horrendous.  But if you also read The Old Testament, God would destroy most of mankind in a Great Flood.  There’s no question about it:  God was a bit of a jerk.  Speaking of floods, the parting of the Red Sea is one of the most spectacular sequences in the film.  Unlike The Ten Commandments, where the sea would literally split in two right down the middle, the sequence in Exodus has more of a tsunami-like feel to it.  But it’s not just that, you’ve also got tornadoes and big armies involved.  It’s truly a sight to behold.

When Noah was released, people were not particularly happy that it was basically turned into an action film.  Considering how much of the character was revealed in Genesis, which wasn’t a whole lot, liberties were taken to give the film its dramatic flourish.  The same kind of thing was employed here, just not to such a degree.  Christian Bale is fantastic as Moses.  He brings the character a level of humility when he’s banished from Memphis.  Like-wise, Joel Edgerton is great as Ramses.  He doesn’t come across as completely evil, but he’s very selfish and unwilling to do the right thing which is free the slaves.  The acting in the film is pretty strong.  One of my big issues is that Sigourney Weaver doesn’t get a whole lot of screen time, which is a shame, because she is positively elegant in the role.  Ben Kingsley gets more a role, but still seems not nearly as important as he could be.  There are also points where the film seems to drag a little bit.  It seems to run a little too long.  Visually, though, Exodus: Gods and Kings is an extraordinarily spectacular experience that needs to be seen at least once.  I know people are up in arms about the movie’s historical accuracy, but I have to ask this?  When has any movie based on a biblical story been historically accurate?  There’s no evidence proving that Moses even existed.  The Bible doesn’t even mention the pharaoh’s name.  The film has Moses talking to God and even having him write The Ten Commandments on two stone tablets.  What the film doesn’t show is that some of the Israelites ended up worshipping a golden calf created by Aaron.  As a result, Moses smashed the initial stone tablets and ordered the unfaithful to be massacred.  So, yeah, Exodus wasn’t 100 percent accurate.  Overall, though, I rather enjoyed the film.  It’s visually interesting with great sets and amazing visual effects.  It’s a great story with interesting themes and interesting characters.  This one gets a 9/10.

Released: August 2012

Director: Tony Gilroy

Run Time: 135 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Cast:
Jeremy Renner: Aaron Cross
Rachel Weisz: Dr. Marta Shearing
Edward Norton: Col. Eric Byer
Scott Glenn: Ezra Kramer
Donna Murphy: Dita Mandy

Spies and espionage are two things that go together, like peanut butter and chocolate.  We can thank James Bond for making that genre popular.  James Bond even inspired the likes of I, Spy, Dragnet, The Avengers(not the comic book), as well as the recent spoofs of the genre: Austin Powers.  Most of these movies were very lighthearted affairs, even the James Bond reboot with Daniel Craig, Casino Royale.  But there was a movie in the early 2000’s that turned the genre on its head: The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne.  It was a very successful thriller that took the spy and espionage genre by storm and made it gritty.  It featured a main character that had amnesia but physically capable of dealing with any threat.  After three movies featuring Jason Bourne, we get our first Bourne film without Jason Bourne: The Bourne Legacy.

Opening somewhere in the Canadian Rockies, the film finds our protagonist, Aaron Cross, on a very remote training ground.  After being hunted by wolves, he makes his way over the mountains to a nearby cabin that is the outpost of another “special operative.”  After retrieving his medicine that he needs to survive, the cabin and the other operative are destroyed by a missile fired by a drone.  Turns out that the drone was being operated by a mysterious government agency(even more secret than the CIA!)that basically gives its volunteers “super pills,” that gives them enhanced intelligence and physicality.  It also turns out that the events of this movie take place parallel to the events in the previous movies.  Look, I’m just going to flat-out say it: The story in this film is so paper-thin that it’s hardly worth mentioning.  Not only that, by the time the film ends, it feels like nothing has been accomplished aside from some government agents being dispatched by Cross and traveling to Manila for a magical shot of something that will make Cross’s abilities permanent.

The original Bourne film was awesome.  It was a very effective thriller featuring a character that we really knew nothing about and neither did he.  That made for a fairly compelling character and story as he tried to figure out who he was and who was trying to kill him.  In The Bourne Legacy, Cross knows who he is and he knows why he is the way he is and who he is apparently working for.  That automatically robs the character of a lot of mystery.  To be fair, he is trying to figure out why he needs those particular meds and why people are trying to kill him.  What we have here is a movie that is clearly trying to capitalize on the previous films by mixing in the events and some of the characters from the previous films into the opening sequence of Legacy.  It’s pretty clever and it works fairly well, but after that the story flat-lines and goes basically nowhere.  2 hours and 15 minutes later, the only things that have really happened are some fisticuffs, some gunshots, and a rather spectacular chase sequence in Manila.  People were up in arms about the fact the movie didn’t feature Jason Bourne at all.  In fact, Matt Damon chose not to return because Paul Greengrass wouldn’t return, so they had to do something a little different.  Instead of a prequel or rebooting the series, they opted to not change Jason Bourne.  Since they didn’t want to change the actor to play Jason Bourne, they ended up creating a whole new character in Aaron Cross, played by Jeremy Renner.  They chose wisely when they picked Renner to play this character.  Renner has the acting chops and the physicality to pull it off, and he does it convincingly.  He even has chemistry with Rachel Weisz who plays Dr. Shearing.  In fact, most of the actors do a fantastic job here.  It’s just a shame that the rest of the film just fell apart.

So, what does work?  Jeremy Renner handles all his action sequences fantastically.  The hand-to-hand sequences are brutal and spectacular.  You can actually see them without getting a head-ache.  While the film does have the shaky-cam from time to time, it manages to focus on what’s happening so you can see what’s going on.  That chase in Manila?  That was awesome.  Renner and Weisz being chased by an operative from another program.  Between Treadstone, BlackBriar and Outcome, how many freakin’ super-soldier programs does this agency have?  For all that and the scientific mumbojumbo that’s thrown at you, none of it really means a thing.  It’s just…..there.  And the ending?  What ending?  By the time the film decided to really start going, the credits roll.  What the hell?!  There was no third act.  You know, each of the Lord of the Rings films had an ending of sorts while leading into the next film.  Even each of the Matrix films had an ending.  The second film had a “To Be Concluded” tag at the end, but you knew that the film ended.  This isn’t the first movie to pull this crap, either.  Most movies have a beginning, middle and end.  The Bourne Legacy just has the first two.  This is blatant sequel-baiting of the worst kind:  Deliberately writing a movie so that there will be a follow-up film.  Apparently there will be another Bourne film next year.  I really hate to come down so hard on a film that really had potential.  It really did.  Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz had great chemistry together and Edward Norton makes a pretty decent villain.  The action sequences aren’t bad at all, but everything else falls apart.  This is not a good movie.  In fact, it pissed me off.  There aren’t a whole lot of movies that can piss me off the way The Bourne Legacy did.  If you’re a fan of the other Bourne films, you’ll be disappointed with this one.  It’s nowhere near as good.  It’s just a not a good movie, period.  So, my final verdict is a disappointing 5/10.