Rush Hour 2

One that I was really looking forward to after hearing about how well it had done in the US, was Rush Hour 2. This is, of course, the sequel to the hugely popular Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker Hollywoodised beat-up-athon. The original was great, funny and some great action scenes.

Unfortunately, I was a bit let down by the sequel. Chris Tucker’s character is so damn annoying I found it hard to focus on anything else. There were some funny scenes, sure, and some decent Kung Fu action, but I found a lot of it really boring. A lot of the humour was in-your-face, non-politically-correct shock value stuff, which sucked. The funniest part was the outtakes.

Put simply, the story is – Tucker is the same cop, on holidays with Chan in Hong Kong. Triad bosses are running riot, a bomb explodes in the US Embassy, chaos is reigning. They have to solve the crimes, and much fun is had by all, etc.

Also featured in this movie is the awesome Zhang Zi Yi, the girl from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who plays an evil ninja chick, and does a great job. Don Cheadle also has an almost-inexplicable bit part, so small that I don’t even remember what the hell he was doing there.

Overall, another one that is safe to wait for video. Nothing really in there that makes it worth seeing on the big screen. As a Jackie Chan movie, its average at best – nowhere near enough hardcore stunts and fighting scenes for my liking.

Final Fantasy

Not being much of a console person, I don’t really know anything about Final Fantasy. I wrote a small feature on the series for Wireplay in July, which if anything left me knowing slighlty less about it than I did before. However, I do know enough to know that it is one of the longest running series of games, kicking off way back in 1987 and having some extremely huge hits, more so of late.

So because of this, it is safe to say that my interest in the movie wasn’t really piqued – at least, until I saw the trailer for the movie, as well as some of the stills. Needless to say, I turned around pretty quickly; the quality of the visuals was quite simply stunning and, in my humble opinion, unlike anything to grace the silver screen before.

The plot is sort of what I expected – a little bit weird. Basically, the story is set on Earth, after it has been invaded by invisible ghosts that suck people’s spirits away. The movie starts with the main character, Dr Aki Ross, as she continues her quest to try and find a way to battle the creatures by studying them and learning their secrets. Without going into the plot in too much detail, the story focuses on her and a bunch of others as they cruise around battling the monsters looking for a way to defeat them. Unfortunately, there’s the usual bad guy sort, General Hein, a black-clad military leader who inexplicably just wants to try blowing them up.

As mentioned, and as you can see in the trailer and wallpapers, the visuals are breathtaking. Everything is rendered in exquisite detail, perfectly modelled, accurately textured, and painstakingly animated – all the elements combine into a movie that is simply stunning to watch when you consider it was all generated on a computer.

The soundtrack fits in well, and the sound effects are pretty well done; nothing really exciting here. Its worth mentioning the big names that do the voices – Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Donald Sutherland and James Woods all do voices for the lead animated characters. I didn’t actually know any of them were doing voices, so it was cool picking some of them up during the movie.

Overall, I really enjoyed watching it. Some of the plot stuff was a little weird – it seemed very Japanese/anime focused and the tentacles and big blobby glowing masses were all over the place. Despite this, is was fun to watch – I supposed I should confess I spent a lot of time just with my mouth slightly open and glazed eyes as I was marvelling at the effects though. Good to see on the big screen for the effects but should look great on DVD as well.

Evolution

Directed by Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters fame (as well as a bunch of other classics like Stripes, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, Six Days Seven Nights) I had pretty high hopes for Evolution. Starring David Duchovny, Orlando Jones and Seann William Scott (as well as a brief appearance by Dan Aykroyd, who now ironically resembles the Marshmallow Man). The addition of Scott (aka Stifler from American Pie) was undoubtably going to make this movie appealing.

The plot is pretty simple. Scott plays a trainee fireman dude, who – whilst performing amusing antics with a dummy to practice for his fireman test – happens to witness something plummet from space and explode into the ground, taking his car along with it. The services of Orlando Jones, a college teacher type who moonlights for the US Geological Service are called into play, and he takes his chemistry professor buddy along for the ride as they go out to the impact zone.

Upon arriving, they find a large meteorite (as distinct from meteor, because we all know meteorites occur when something from space hits the ground!) Some brief investigation leads to the discovery of a goopy substance, which further examination reveals to have single-celled life forms in it. This is, of course, incredibly exciting and fortune and fame soon beckons.

However, in a very X-Files, the government swoops in and takes over the investigation. The compulsory love interest arrives on scene, played by Julianne Moore, who for some reason in incredibly uncoordinated. The audience is subject to several scenes where she does incredibly hilarious things, like tripping over, and dropping stuff. Great stuff. She is, unfortunately, working for the government, so there’s a bit of a love-hate vibe happening throughout the movie.

The plot continues quite simply by making the alien life forms evolve into nasty things that eat people. Some nice special effects for the aliens combined with some witty dialogue make this pretty entertaining. There’s some absolutely hilarious bits, which are unfortunately a bit far between – the rest of the movie is merely a gentle giggle-fest, but its worth seeing for the really funny bits. As usual, the best humour are the ass-and-fart jokes.

Overall, its a fun movie to watch. It is by no means a classic, but has enough funny bits in it to make it worthwhile. Duchovny is good, even though he is basically Mulder. Orlando is pretty funny, and Scott is unfortunately not as cool outside of his role as teenage dude. Safe to wait for video, though some of the effects are pretty cool, but don’t really warrant a trip to the cinema.

Someone Like You

Something that I wasn’t really planning on seeing due to the fact it is one of those real life movies that doesn’t have a) aliens b) guns c) Arnie or Bruce d) explosisions e) any of the other stuff that usually attracts me to movies like vultures to a corpse was Someone Like You. Starring Ashley Judd and the increasingly cool Hugh Jackman, its about the story of a chick that is continually jilted in love, and her bizarre theories on how men can be likened to bulls, or something.

Poor Ashley meets some charming dude at work (played by Greg Kinnear), who, despite the fact he already has a woman of his own, finds Ashley more appealing and does the sneaky guy thing where he’s seeing two girls at once. As a result, all the girls that see this movie will instantly hate him (as is the intent) and then want Ashley to fall for Hugh (as is the intent). Hugh is portrayed at the start of the movie as a dawg who basically just picks up women all over the place, which to me seemed to be a fairly negative character aspect as well. Fortunately though, it turns out that he’s like that because he had his heart broken by a girl, which makes it ok, because it shows he can fall in love and stuff too.

While almost totally predictable, its a fairly decent watch with some pretty funny lines. If they’re anything like me, guys will probably feel constantly offended because of the harsh aspersions Ashley Judd keeps casting on the male species as a whole. Sure, they’re funny, but broad generalisations that have a focus of ‘all males are evil’ suck.

Overall, something that will keep you entertained for a couple hours. Safe to miss at the theatre but something to see on video, probably under the instruction of a girl when its her turn to select the movie.

Alive?

Somewhat. Been a busy few months, and now I’m wrapping it up with an awesome cold/flu thing which has knocked me flat on my ass for the last couple days – too much exertion after a QGL and my sister’s 21st birthday party catching up to me, I guess.

There’s a few movie reviews coming this way: Bridget Jones’ Diary, Someone Like You, Evolution, Final Fantasy and probably a few others as soon as I find the time. Looking forward to seeing Planet of the Apes, even though word on the street is its pretty average. Jurassic Park 3 is coming up, which looks pretty good too (dinosaurs rock).

Swordfish

An action movie with the awesome Hugh Jackman and the hawt Halle Berry, this movie caught my attention with its impressive trailer and computer-orientated storyline. Oh, I think John Travolta is in there somewhere as well.

The storyline is mildly interesting; Travolta is basically a patriot mercenary trying to raise funds to bankroll his operation of anti-terrorism that he plans to embark on to protect America from its enemies. He hires the ex-hacker Jackman to write some stupid virus thing to steal $9 billion from the US Government.

The movie starts fairly well with an action scene at the start featuring a really awesome explosion (nice Matrix-esque effects), then jumps back in time a little bit so you can see how we got there. I was pretty interested in the story until it had anything to do with computers, at which point I just more or less gave up.

Unfortunately the computer nerd in me just fully rejected the rubbish that they were spouting every time anyone opened their mouth about anything to do with computers. Invalid IP addresses and buzz words liberally strung throughout the movie just grated on my ears to the point that I couldn’t handle it anymore. Normal people will easily be able to overlook this and probably will enjoy the movie, which works out to be a fairly decent action romp. All the actors do good jobs, the sets and effects are pretty good, the script isn’t too bad (with the exception of the woeful computer terminology).

There was this scene where Halle took her top off, which allegedly cost $1 million to get her to do. I suppose it was worth it, but it was totally out of place and basically just some gratuitous nudity. Appreciated, but stupid, nonetheless.

Anyway, I was disappointed and annoyed with it, although there were a few scenes which were pretty good. As mentioned, normal people will be able to sit through it quite easily and will probably even enjoy it as a nice action ride.

Cinema Rant

After seeing Shrek last night – the first children’s movie I have seen at the cinemas for years – I was reminded what a horrible, painful, shattering experience it is to have to be close to poorly behaved children for extended periods of time.

Whilst choosing my seat, I noticed that there were a group of infants directly across the aisle from me. I, showing particularly good faith in the child-rearing abilities of their parents, who I judged to be well within slapping range should the children decide to act up, decided that all should be fine in the seat that I had selected, and parked myself in it.

Almost instantly, it became apparent that this was not a wise choice. The parents were instantly deluged with questions in a tone obviously calculated by these hyper-intelligent child-demons to be the most irritating to my ears. They also though that moments in the movie where there was no loud sound effects or music were perfect opportunities to ask more questions; coincidentally these scenes collided with parts of the movie in which characters were discussing major plot points.

As you may be able to appreciate, this more or less changed the focus from an enjoyable visual spectacle with witty dialogue to a painful experience which left me with a significant lack of desire to ever see a movie that is rated below MA, ever again. It would be nice to think that the parents might have taken away something from the movie – that their children are not yet old enough to understand how to behave – but judging from the lack of effort that they made to silence them, I don’t think this was the case.

Let this be a warning to all – if you want to see children’s movies, see them after 9pm when they’ll all be asleep.