REVIEW: The Ring 2 (2005)

Oh man, oh man, I only have a few hours to review The Ring 2 and pass my misery onto the rest of the world, or else my face will turn into a dried up prune and my brain will go defunct! Just like…what happens when one normally watches The Ring 2...

Director: Hideo Nakata

Starring: Naomi Watts, David Dorfman

IMDb

I really can’t put into words how boring this movie is. But hey, I might as well try!

The movie starts off with some stupid high school kids getting ready for a hot night of sex when the guy asks the girl if she wants to see something scary. If the punchline is him unzipping his pants, I’m turning the movie off right now and converting to Catholicism.

No, actually it’s the Ring tape – apparently Samara was really hard at work in the three years since the first one, at making her very own video store chain, all around the USA now!

We see that he tricks the girl into watching the tape so he can get off the hook from Samara’s curse. But as will be a common theme in this movie, Samara cheats and kills him anyway when the girl only watches part of the videotape, closing her eyes for the rest of it. It’s not like it really matters, anyway. The first movie had plenty of people dying even after they showed other people the stupid tape. It’s an arbitrary, silly rule that just seems to be made up for Samara to kill people. What is even the point? Does she just get off on oddly specific murdering rules? I really want to see a ghost movie from Asia where the killer doesn’t have some bullshit excuse or guideline on what and how to kill people – that would be very refreshing.

Anyway, we then return to the main characters of the first movie, Rachel and Aidan. While I’m all for sequels actually featuring the same main characters as the originals, whoever cared about these two reappearing in another film? They’re bland as can be. It’s fine if you want to tell a continuing story, but for Satan’s sake, could you at least try to make it an interesting one? Or at least, not one that makes me wish I was in a coma?

"Honey. watch out, you're getting in the way of me neglecting you."

Rachel, being a super cool journalist, tracks down the girl who survived her idiot boyfriend’s Ring tape fiasco, and wastes a lot of time at a police station for basically two seconds of exposition where she learns that – DUN DUN DUNNNNNN – the horror is starting over again! Why did we need a five minute scene of her aimlessly putzing around at a police station to establish that this will in fact be a continuation of the horrors of the first film? I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, guys...

"Oh, I'm glad there weren't any guards around or anything. That would have made this completely impossible! And why did I wait that long and waste so much time when clearly I could've just snuck back here in the first place? I...I don't know..."

After that, Rachel manages to track down the tape in the dead kid’s house, and she goes and has her own personal bonfire with it. And just in case you’re completely retarded: this is not the end of the movie. If you think her burning this tape will end their troubles, or do anything beyond just punching holes in the “why don’t they just destroy the tape?” arguments that would have popped up...well, you’re in for a sour, rude awakening with the rest of the movie. As I said before, Samara just breaks every single rule the movie tries to tell us in set in stone. What a load of horse snot.

"I burned the tape! I'm so glad the rest of the movie just doesn't exi---oh shit, the DVD player tells me I still have an hour and a half left of the movie. Wow, this red herring totally failed."

Back at home, Aidan has some freaky nightmares about Samara and the tape and everything. Rachel assures him that she definitely will not just leave him alone while going out and almost dying again. So maybe her parenting is a step up in this one. But that just means she’s at the level of “drunk and slightly incoherent” mom instead of “holy shit, she just did THAT to her child” mom...don’t worry Rachel, you’ll have your own show on MTV sooner or later. It’ll probably be called “Whoops, I Left My Kid Alone to Go Ghost Hunting.”

After that, they go to a fair where she just lets Aidan run off in the middle of a bunch of perfect strangers, who could potentially be crazy serial killers or rapists, but it’s OK. He just goes in the bathroom and takes pictures in the mirror.

Glad your kid is weird and just goes off to take pictures in bathroom mirrors, instead of getting into vans with strangers - seriously, WTF is the logic in telling your young son "oh yeah, just go off without me, it doesn't matter"? Are you high?

In a truly Insidious-esque twist, we see that the camera just makes ghosts appear in the picture with you now, rather than the last movie’s silly ‘blurred face’ crap...apparently this is a signal that Aidan has contracted hypothermia mysteriously, so they get out of the house and go stay with Rachel’s reporter friend Max, who is filling the ‘generic horror movie guy’ quota of the movie. You know the guy who is inoffensive, bland and milquetoast as hell? The guy who, in every horror movie, is the best friend with a possible romantic interest in the main girl, but who would never dream of actually taking advantage of the situation in any way? The guy whose only role is to be the voice of reason and talk in a really wimpy, whiny sort of tone all the time? That’s Max.

In the bathtub, we see some crazy stuff happen as I think Max will want to re-look at his water bill for the month...hope he’s not too mad:

Just think of all the money wasted on this effect. Think of all the green backed dollars and shiny coins that got sucked deep into the funnel of corporate pandering in order to create this scene, in this soulless movie.

Then Rachel decides the best idea is to strangle Max just because she thinks he’s Samara for a second…it’s funny to me that THIS is the big reason that everyone finally starts doubting Rachel’s parenting ability. Let’s count the horrible things she’s already done before this:

1. Leaving the killer videotape for Aidan to watch on his own and thus put his life in danger?

2. Leaving him alone while she goes off on a journey that she could very well DIE on?

3. Letting him wander around a strange new town fair alone where anything could happen to him?

Yeah, like I said in the other review – just take Aidan away from this crazy broad and put him in a home where he’ll actually be SAFE. Christ, these movies give the Poltergeist series a run for their money in terms of bad parenting.

But nevertheless, at least they’re finally starting to suspect Rachel is a horrible parent, even if it is for the wrong reasons. They take Aidan to the hospital, even though Rachel says she doesn’t want to...WHY?! Why would you not take him to a goddamn hospital, you bimbo? What possible reason could you have? Are you just mentally deficient? Is that it? Are you just the worst shit-eating, loathsome, scum of the Earth parent to ever exist?!

Jesus. I’m reaching my limits here. Let’s just get the rest of the movie over with.

There are a lot of boring, dull, trite scenes where Rachel goes around to the old Morgan house from the first movie to research stuff. It’s a complete waste of time, and I’d rather watch paint dry. Why does every 2000s supernatural horror film have to have these slow-paced, uninteresting ‘research’ montages? It’s totally bullshit. There are ways to do these kinds of scenes right, but The Ring 2 doesn’t, and neither does any other subpar excuse for a horror film around this time. It’s lazy filmmaking and all it’s really doing is taking up precious film reel that could have been used instead to educate people, or at least to make an actual good movie. Sigh.

God, I'm glad Cabin in the Woods exists to show how stupid all of these kinds of scenes are. Maybe a couple of times, in the entirety of horror as a genre, has research scenes ever led to anything important to the plot. IT'S NOT SCARY, people! Learning the origins of things is not scary!

Rachel goes off on a quest to talk to Samara’s birth mother and figure out what the hell is going on. After another over-five-minute scene of wasted time trying to get in to see the mother, we finally get there – I think The Ring 2 thinks it’s conjuring up atmosphere, but this isn’t atmosphere, it’s just dragging out the inevitable, like a knife-wound left untreated while your paramedics go and get a grilled cheese sandwich from the bar next door. Painful, excruciatingly dragged out crap is what it is.

So apparently there’s some story about how Samara’s mother, Evelyn, once tried to drown Samara in the pond outside the mental institution, and that’s why Samara was given up for adoption…to the other family that tried to kill her. Evelyn tells Rachel that she did it because “Samara told her to.” Yup, she tried to kill her infant daughter because her infant daughter told her to; clearly this woman is a beacon of sanity in a forest of madness. Her advice to Rachel is to “listen to her child.” Hey, isn’t it a bit weird that Rachel would go to a child murderer and insane asylum inmate to get advice on parenting? Somehow it doesn’t surprise me though.

"I'm totally insane! But I'm a wise prophet on taking care of kids...please, yes, listen to what I have to say. It will tell you everything you need to know."

Oh, and NOTHING about this scene is ever brought up again. That “listen to your child” bullshit? Never referenced or mentioned in the film again! Hooray for pointlessness!

Back at home, Aidan is possessed by Samara now – did you know THAT was one of her powers? How about when he uses psychic powers to make his doctor kill herself? Did you know THAT was one of Samara’s powers? No? Well, that’s because this movie made that shit up without even bothering to try and connect it to the original movie’s story. Is it any surprise that a film so boring and lifeless has trouble even keeping its story straight? “Samara is an evil ghost with the power to kill people, but only if they watch a video tape...or if she just feels like possessing someone and murdering people for no reason...” What absolute ass.

Then Aidan goes to Max’s house again and somehow kills him. Rachel finds him in the car:

Did he even watch the tape at all? Did Aidan/Samara just force him to? I'm more inclined to believe the movie has just thrown all pretense of making sense to the wind.

Isn’t it kinda suspicious to the police in this town that people keep turning up with their faces like that? Even if half the murders happened in another town, they’re all obviously identical in what happened to them – even if nobody knows how it happened. So do the cops really just think it’s all a big coincidence? Geez, movie. I know small town cops aren’t always Sherlock Holmes, but c’mon.

Aidan acts strange and Rachel figures out that Samara is inside him, so she just drowns him in the bathtub again until Samara pops out like a jack in the box. Rachel revives Aidan and everything is cool, until Samara tries to come back through the TV – seriously, are they even trying with this shit now? The premise of “you have to watch the video to die” has become “Samara just does whatever she wants until she kills everyone.” Real gripping plot, movie.

Rachel gets sucked into the TV and ends up back in the well with Samara again. And we also see her do her best Dark Knight Rises re-enactment!

"RISE! RISE! RISE!" Maybe Samara can break her back and take over Gotham City afterwards. Makes about as much sense as anything else in this movie.

Despite all that crap the movie tried to shovel about Samara being sympathetic because people tried to kill her, we see Rachel just drop-kicks Samara in the face and condemns her to live forever in a dark hole with no light at all. After seeing what Rachel considers to be good parenting and just general good humanity, I question whether the ‘good guy’ really won in this movie at all. What else says ‘heroism’ like a little girl who was knocked around her whole life continuing to get shoved back down in the dirt for no other reason than the fact that she makes creepy insect sound effects when she moves and has too-long hair?

This movie is just wretched. It’s stupid, has questionable morals and, oh yeah, IT’S BORING AS HELL. There is nothing about this movie that I liked, or even found the least bit tolerable. It’s just a steaming pile of manure compost made up of the worst elements of post-2000 horror movies. Why even bother with horror movies at all anymore? I’ve already said everything there is to say, and this movie is the final nail in the godforsaken coffin. It’s just...God, this is so bad. It’s so completely insipid, and I’m as burnt out as you can get on reviewing movies like it.

That’s it, then – I’m done reviewing horror movies! I can’t do it anymore! From now on, I will only review romantic comedies!

Images in this review are copyright of their original owners. I do not own any of them.

The Worst Movies of 2012

Okay, so this is going to be the two-part '2012 in Review' for movies...I'm going to start with what I didn't like. Surprised? More accurately, what I'll be starting with is the 'disappointments' section - i.e. not the worst movies I saw all year or even necessarily terrible, but simply the ones that built up the most hype and weren't nearly as good as I wanted them to be. Oh, how cruel the cinema gods can be. Here they are, in no real order:

DISAPPOINTMENTS

The Dark Knight Rises

This is something I’ve been waiting to see for like, four years since the excellent The Dark Knight blew open the gates back in 2008. Christopher Nolan has been getting bigger and bigger over the years, and I really think it’s gotten to his head with The Dark Knight Rises – while previous films of his were accessible while still providing thought provoking themes and intelligent writing, The Dark Knight Rises finally sees Nolan crumbling under the weight of his own ego with a lot of style but very little substance. There is just so much going on in this movie that it’s impossible at first to catch any kind of meaning or coherent themes, but about halfway through you realize that there really isn’t anything worthwhile. The themes in this are rehashed and not very well thought out, and the movie just doesn’t have the same kind of intelligent writing as the previous two. The action is sometimes pretty decent, and there are some very good scenes here and there, but overall the plot is ludicrous and the film overall is generic and shallow, far beneath the best that Nolan can give us.

Prometheus

Another one that got a lot of hype. I was skeptical because, well, Ridley Scott made Hannibal a few years back and that is one of my least favorite films of all time. And likewise, I wasn’t exactly disappointed with this, because Prometheus overall isn’t that good. But it starts out with a lot of promise, and has some fascinating concepts set up – however, the film does not DO anything with these concepts. Halfway through the film, any pretense of intelligence is dropped in favor of pretty standard sci fi action cliches and storytelling tropes that don’t really set up any drama or tension. It’s boring, it’s silly, it’s over-long…it’s just not a good film.

Looper

I like Looper better than the other two movies on this list, but I was really looking forward to this and figured it would be the sci-fi action movie to beat this year – I was wrong. While this is pretty good, and has a neat concept behind it, as well as a cool atmosphere and some good action here and there…it’s just not great. It drags on too long, the pace is disjointed and sluggish and neither Bruce Willis nor Joseph Gordon-Levitt really gives a great, captivating performance like I know they’re capable of – they both seem subdued, actually. This is entertaining enough, but not as good as I wanted it to be.

***

And now, without further ado...the worst, most despicable, poorly written, poorly directed and hateable movies I saw in 2012! Counting down from #5 to #1...

WORST MOVIES OF 2012

5. The Words

Sappy melodrama with absolutely no basis in reality. I did not believe a minute of this; not the characters, their reactions to situations or the situation itself, and the bizarrely disjointed pacing and boring dialogue didn’t help either. Just a weak, weak movie and I’m not really sure what the intended audience was supposed to be. Skip it.

4. Silent House

Awful crap, but at least it isn’t just tired and rehashed like the other two horror movies on this list – no, Silent House finds new ways to be horrible, such as camera work so bad it makes most found-footage movies look like they were shot by Spielberg, and this isn’t even a found footage movie at all, which is almost as hilarious as it is sad. And a needlessly garish plot thread about incest near the end, dumped on you with as much finesse as an elephant trying to fit its way into a small trailer. Silent House is a dubious and tasteless movie that I would not recommend to anyone.

3. The Possession

This is a terrible film without anything recommendable about it, from the rehashed and tired storyline to the awful acting from pretty much everyone in the film to the horrible characters, who are about as likable as toe mold. The Possession is pretty much as vapid and thoughtless a film as you can get unless you’re…well, the two films above it on my “worst of” list, which are…

2. The Devil Inside

I already went on a rant about this one in my review, but seriously, it’s bad. Everyone in the world has tried their hand at a ‘demonic possession’ film in the last few years and this is the worst one I have ever seen. Back when Exorcism of Emily Rose came out in like 2005, this kind of thing was still a little interesting, but a movie like The Devil Inside has no place existing in 2013. Or ever, in any reality, at all, for that matter. Throw this in the incinerator and forget all about it.

1. Cloud Atlas

I haven’t walked out of a movie this angry since Edge of Darkness a few years back. Cloud Atlas is a nadir of sorts; a miracle of insipidly bad Hallmark cards set to a mind-numbing three-hour runtime that will make you want to commit mass genocide once it’s over. This is so preachy, so pretentious, so full of itself and so obsessed with its own holier-than-thou goodness…that I literally can’t even describe it in words to you and convey exactly how sappy, poorly written and embarrassingly sentimental this is. The fact that it has seven or eight different, poorly written stories going on is bad, and the fact that all of them amount to the insultingly simplistic and patronizing message of “stand up against oppression” is worse, but really what it comes down to is the whole picture – the fact that so much money, so many good actors, so many special effects and studio tricks, went into producing those two aspects – that seals the deal. Cloud Atlas, you are the worst movie of the year.

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: Candyman (1992)

I apologize in advance for the excessively gory images that you are about to see. But if they stop even one person from watching this horrible movie, then I've done my job well.

Urban legends are like the modern oral folklore. One could say they are simply a passing-down of the traditions from times before man had the written word to convey expressions and stories. If that’s the case, then Candyman is the modern equivalent of stories back then told by dumbass 15 year olds trying to scare their little siblings with tons of tasteless gore.

Director: Bernard Rose

Starring: Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd

IMDb

I really don’t know where to begin with this. It’s not like the movie has absolutely nothing going for it…they have a cool setting and they start off with a decent build up. But after that? Nothing. Even worse than movies that are all-out bad from the start are the ones that have something going but then do nothing with it, like a cool looking car that peters out on you after twenty minutes on the freeway without even hitting 80 mph. And to top it all off, this is another tale “inspired” by the “brilliance” of that lovable Clive Barker…my heart can barely contain its joy…

Well we start off with some idiot telling a story about a girl who cheated on her boyfriend while babysitting with…Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Looper?

Well, as long as Bruce Willis didn't come back trying to kill a bunch of little kids, I think it's OK that he's in this house where his girlfriend is babysitting.

And they have a rather bizarre method of foreplay…telling stories about a supernatural serial killer called Candyman who appears when you say his name five times in a mirror and then guts and disembowels you with a bloody meat hook. They even start groping one another and the girl even takes off her shirt while they’re talking about this! How perfectly insane!

"Oh baby, talking about people getting murdered with a rusty hook and disemboweled really turns me on! Almost as much as picking each others' noses or talking about our embarrassing bowel movements after eating Chipotle!"

Anyway, they get killed and we get introduced to the real main characters – Highlander 2 survivor Virginia Madsen and her best friend, Token Intelligent Sophisticated Black Woman. They’re doing a study on urban legends for a graduate school class, and throughout the first half hour we get a lot of different people telling stories to them, sometimes when they don’t even plan it, about various urban legends they hear of, including the Candyman story. It’s kind of hokey, but it actually does create some suspense…suspense that the rest of the movie will fail to live up to.

Madsen’s husband is a dorky looking professor at the same school, because that happens so much! And their marriage is so good that she immediately gets jealous whenever a young girl even looks at him the wrong way…yeah, I’m sure she’s a great catch…pfft.

Madsen and her friend discover an interesting fact about their apartment building; that it was actually built the same way as another building called Cabrini Green where everyone apparently lives in fear of the Candyman who was mentioned before. So they hatch a plot to go break into Cabrini Green while dressing like they’re going to experience a winter in Russia.

Off for a Siberian winter in ghettoville...

Inside, they find some pictures and graffiti on the wall that all points toward the larger-than-life Candyman myth that has taken hold of Cabrini Green – I really like the setting here, and more movies should utilize this kind of ghetto urbanized city setting for a horror movie plot. Again though, the movie will eventually even throw this out the window and replace it with overwrought hokey nonsense masquerading as something “deep.” Doesn’t that sound fun?

We also get the story of Candyman told by a fat guy who looks like Ben Franklin’s loser cousin…apparently he was a slave who fell in love with a white noblewoman and got her pregnant, so a bunch of villagers killed him with bees.

Trouble strikes, however, when Madsen talks to a little boy who tells her to go look in the public bathroom where some other little kid allegedly got his balls cut off by the Candyman. She goes inside, finds some bugs using the toilet, and gives them some privacy:

After that, she’s confronted by some gang members who give her a black eye for using their favorite bathroom…because a black eye is always the WORST thing a whole group of violent thugs can do to a vulnerable white woman who they have cornered! I’m totally convinced!

But seriously, THIS is what I mean when I say the movie had potential! We could have had a very interesting take on urban legends by having the whole thing end up a hoax perpetuated by gang members who want to rule the neighborhood. Maybe some slight supernatural leanings would have been OK if they were really vague, but if I was re-doing this story, I sure wouldn’t have gone full-out Nightmare on Elm Street mode after this. Ugh. What could have been a great commentary on poverty and believing in myths reduced to a third-rate slasher horror movie with as much imagination as a pet rock. That’s great, guys. Just great.

OK, back to the review, back to the review…so after telling on the gang members, Madsen is confronted again in the parking lot by the real Candyman! He talks in a cool voice and…that’s really about it. If you thought Pinhead was too white, or the guy from Lord of Illusions was too lame, well Candyman is for you!

The Lord of Disappointingly Boring Scenes cometh!

I’m not going to lie…after this scene, the movie just gives up. It doesn’t even bother to try anymore. The movie just turns into a really bloody slasher movie with nothing good about it. Disappointment, thy name is Candyman…I’ve seriously rarely ever seen a movie just up and stop dead in its tracks like this, just cease to be relevant or meaningful on any level beyond hey, look at our cool special effects! Well, not since The Dark Knight Rises, anyway.

But I digress again…do you like severed dogs’ heads and screaming, crying women and lots of blood all over the place? Is that your idea of what constitutes real fear? Well then you’ll love this scene.

OOH, A DOG'S HEAD! LOOK AT ALL THIS GORE!!!

And there's some BLOOD and KNIVES and SCREAMING and oooh, just so creepy, right?! WE ARE THE EDGY ONES! LOOK AT US AS WE BREAK SOCIAL TABOOS! So violent and gross!

Apparently Madsen has been framed for the murder of a dog, the kidnapping of a baby and the smearing of a ton of red paint all over the walls…amazing…and the cops who were previously very understanding to her plight are now total jackasses without even one inch of any kind of humanity towards her!

After another scene in which the Candyman brutally murders her best friend for no reason...

This just pisses me off. I know characters die in horror movies, it's just part of the territory, but this was just SO BADLY DONE of a scene! There's a difference between adding kills to scare the audience and just being straight up cruel, which is what this is. Needlessly, relentlessly cruel. Why did this character deserve to be murdered in such a brutal, undignified way? What was her crime outside of being dumb enough to take a minor role in a Clive Barker film? Fuck you, Candyman.

...Madsen is institutionalized and kept there on drugs for a whole month. The doctor calls her into his office one day seemingly at random, and to prove that the Candyman is real, she decides to look into the randomly placed mirror on the wall and say his name five times. Even though she KNOWS HE’S GOING TO POP UP AND KILL THE GUY…she just does it anyway! What, did the drugs addle her brain so much that she forgot he was a killing machine? Did she think he was just going to sit down with them for a polite discussion about how he framed her for all the murders so far? Oh well, who cares…GORE!

Killing off a random doctor who was just trying to help? Great job, Virginia Madsen...great job...you deserve a Darwin Award at this point. If she had just SHUT HER DAMN MOUTH and NOT summoned him from the mirror, this whole thing could have been avoided. 

Then she finds out her husband is shacked up with one of his much younger students, but really Madsen herself was already a student to begin with…so really, he just moved from one nubile young woman to another. What a pedophile. I bet he and that weird priest from Pinocchio’s Revenge would get along fine.

"I actually listen to his confessions every week..."

So she runs off to look at the ocean while Candyman intones some more pseudo-intellectual poetry over the scene, because that’s really all he’s got besides framing random young women for murder. He should look into other hobbies, like doing movie trailer voice-overs, since that one deep-voiced guy who used to do them has sadly passed away – I think Candyman would be a great substitute personally. He has just the right amount of dramatic deep-toned grittiness in his voice...hey, wait, what was I talking about again? The movie is so dull that I actually completely went off topic.

How is a film with this much admittedly decent gore effects so BORING anyway? It's practically the eighth wonder of the world. By all human logic, there should at least be some kind of enjoyment out of how ridiculous and tasteless the gore is, but the tone of the movie is so suffocatingly serious and somber that I can't even enjoy the gore! It just comes off as mean spirited, ugly and unpleasant.

But what the hell is Candyman's plan, anyway? Kill everyone who can help Virginia Madsen until she goes so crazy that she has to love him? That’s stupid. Almost as stupid as this scene:

Yeah, maybe a better dental plan is in order.

He forces her to come die with him in a big bonfire conveniently happening that night, only she stabs him with a big burning stake and saves herself and the kidnapped child. After that, we get a scene of her husband and his new fuck-buddy hanging out in his apartment as he cries in his room about how Madsen is dead…how are we supposed to feel bad for the scumbag who just ditched the woman he married in a time of need to start dating someone probably not even 21 yet?

"I'm looking in a mirror while wearing a sad expression...aren't I so deep and tormented?"

The movie doesn’t know either, because after that, he says Madsen’s name five times and she somehow appears to him in ghost-form and kills him with a hook! The film then ends on a “shocking” gore sequence, which maybe would have been shocking if we hadn't seen the same effects like 12 times by this point...

Aw, man, now she'll have to clean the bathroom and everything!

Are you surprised? I’m not! Why would anyone be at this point? I can think of painful surgical procedures more enjoyable than this movie. How did anyone ever find redeeming qualities in this? All the decent ideas in the beginning are just thrown in the garbage in favor of tastelessly done gore that adds nothing to the atmosphere or overall story. The Candyman himself is dull as hell and doesn't do anything half the time besides just intone boring monologues at a snail's pace, and the whole thing is just a drag to watch, too, as it tries so hard to be all deep and profound, with all its deep-voiced narrations over wide-panned shots of the city, when really all it is is a stupid slasher movie huffing and puffing to try and make itself look cooler and more serious.

Candyman is a very nasty, stupid, unpleasant movie with nothing at all to say and no real value to anyone who wants more out of a film than gore effects Tom Savini could do better on one of his off days. It doesn't even work as a gore flick because the whole thing tries so hard like I mentioned – the people who want some over the top gore will be bored by the attempts at being all artsy and atmospheric, which are as clumsy and hamfisted as I've ever seen. It pleases neither audience.

This is one of the worst movies I've ever reviewed on this site, and I feel very confident in saying I cannot see what anyone finds appealing about it. As a straightforward horror flick it’s a boring plod-along, but as an attempt at being anything else – anything with more atmosphere or cerebral satisfaction to its scares – it's just sad and a total waste of brain cells from everyone involved. Candyman can go right to hell and I am glad I will never have to sit through this crap again!

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies truly have taken the superhero movie genre and – maybe redefined isn’t the best word – more like “done something entirely new” with it. Nolan’s movies aren’t the be-all-end-all, and some people won’t gel with their often dark and intensely gritty tones, but he created this really engrossing world of Gotham City that I think is just fascinating, despite how many times things get blown up in these movies. Seriously, don’t the bad guys in these have any other plans than just blowing shit up? I guess not.

Director: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman

Website: www.thedarkknightrises.com

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1345836/

But the inimitable footprint of Nolan on the superhero movie-genre remains, as he took a silly concept formerly relegated to campy action movies and injected it with some very compelling and relevant themes as well as a killer sense of atmosphere and style that made them feel kind of like graphic novels come to life, they were so intricately woven and jam-packed with action and dialogue. Some people laud (or bash) these films for trying too hard to be realistic, and I say – what? These movies were realistic? With ancient cults of black-hooded martial artists and deranged clowns who, despite supposedly not planning anything, had leagues and leagues of henchmen planting bombs strategically throughout the city for days and days on end? Please. They were darker, sure; grittier, definitely, but realistic? These two movies, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, were cinematic forays into the modern graphic novel. They had multiple parts to them where issue breaks in normal comics would be, lots of characters with complex relationships and were very long and detailed – like graphic novels are!

And now we have The Dark Knight Rises, the much ballyhooed and long-awaited third sequel to this trilogy and the final end to it all from Nolan. It’s hard to really sum up how I feel about this in a succinct manner, so I’ll have to go into a lengthier detail about it. I liked parts of it, but there were also some notable downgrades in quality from the previous two films. There were moments where I was completely invested and then others where I was taken out of the movie by something silly and Hollywood-esque that just felt out of place. The scope was magnificent and the length was fully supported by the gala of material Nolan crammed in, but it felt a bit spread-thin and disjointed, without the cohesive and singular impact of The Dark Knight.

I guess one of the most notable departures in style this one has is that it’s more comic book-y than the other ones. The other films had very mature and well-reasoned dialogue about 98% of the time that really did well to establish character, along with the superlative acting and Nolan’s own creative vision. This one sacrifices a little of that depth in lieu of a much more streamlined cinematic style of dialogue more in common with The Avengers or maybe Iron Man, although the complexity of the story and the acting still manage to save the writing/dialogue from completely falling off the map. Instead of the cuttingly dramatic edge some of the dialogue in The Dark Knight had, here we get more calculated witticisms and consciously humorous lines made to elicit a giggle from the audience, as if to offer a break from the suffocating darkness of the main plot. It’s not all bad, but I miss the more well thought out writing from the other movies, and there are some parts of this, mostly near the end, where I actually cringed at how melodramatic and silly it got. Not many parts, but the few there were made a sour impression.

One more comic book-y thing about this movie is the change in story-type. Batman Begins’ plot was very much in the vein of a stylized Asian action flick for the first half and then switched to a more traditional superhero origin story, albeit done up with a more complex emotional tone for Bruce Wayne’s character as well as some nice, gritty shots of Gotham City that elevated it above the norm at the time. The Dark Knight took things to another level with its high-speed and high-tension crime movie plot, and the intricacy of that combined with the typical Batman brooding and the Joker’s philosophy and insanity made for a movie that was staggeringly complex and layered to the point of being exhausting to watch at times.

This one is longer, and one of the longest Hollywood flicks in any recent memory, but it’s also less complex in the way I wanted it to be, in the way of the intricacy of the plot. There is a lot crammed into this movie and perhaps I missed a few things, but my overall impression was that it was streamlined in the storytelling department too, or rather just a bit too sloppy to be called endearing. Where The Dark Knight was interwoven with tons of themes and sub-plots that all added up to the film’s rather crushing overall themes of chaos, order and loss, this one is a lot broader and stretched thin to the point where it’s more like a bunch of discordant parts running simultaneously against one another. Things are explained too fast and sometimes get lost in the huge running time. Maybe with further viewings this will seem less of a problem, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is a big step back from TDK’s masterful unity. While the scope is grandiose, the details in between are rushed and rather sloppily written in at times.

Another gripe I had was some of the new actors Nolan got on board. He’s had a great run of picking unlikely actors and making great performances out of them – see Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger. So when I heard he was casting Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, I was like “OK, I’m sure he’ll be able to get the very best out of this rather unfitting actress and make it totally believable, right?” Not right. I guess Hathaway isn’t too bad, and she mostly seems interested and energized, but she’s just so cleaned up and cutesy for a role like Catwoman. When you see her in Selena Kyle’s run-down urban apartment, all dirty and ghetto, you don’t really buy it. This is a girl more at home in a fancy penthouse suite, not in some low-rent flea-bitten hole in the wall. And I’m sorry to say this, as it seemed like she was really into it, but she just lacks the necessary grit and cunning to be Catwoman. She’s too nice and too sassy and just seems out of place. A shame – it could have been done so well.

The real disappointment for me was Joseph Gordon-Levitt as this new character Detective Blake, a young guy with a strange connection to the long-missing Batman. This character could have been kind of cool…when he first showed up I figured he’d be doing something Dexter-esque like trying to discover the mystery of Batman and his real identity, but the real payoff is pretty mediocre, and as a character he’s mostly just kind of annoying and douchey. The acting is typically decent, and Levitt never turns in an outright bad performance. The problem is the writing for his character, which is probably the worst this movie got overall. He is just way too preachy and the writing for him seems like something out of a 90s anti-bullying PSA. Like they tried for ‘Boy Scout’ and ended up with ‘Captain Planet reject.’ Very disappointing from the usually quite subtle and efficient Nolan.

The regular cast is all good, though. Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne gets a lot more screentime here and he does really well, even though the absence of Heath Ledger’s Joker and the Rachel character makes this whole thing feel like a rock band without its famed lead singer, but hey, nothing we can do about that. Bale performs with the necessary dramatic flair and seriousness and hits all the right notes. His Batman is maybe my favorite one yet in these movies, as he seems older, more experienced and yet also more haunted, like the Batman that gained fame in the comics. That was one thing this movie did very, very well; it really gave you a Batman that was hardened and chiseled by his experiences and thus seems all the more conflicted as to why he’s even doing what he’s doing. And for a character who dresses up like a big bat, to make us contemplate his motives and psychology this much is a big accomplishment.

Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon isn’t as prominent as he was in the previous film, but he still does good, and the same goes for Morgan Freeman’s Lucious Fox. Michael Caine as Alfred is on-point as usual, despite a very poorly done scene at the end of the movie which I can’t spoil for you here, but I’ll excuse that because, hey, it’s Michael friggin’ Caine. You can’t argue with him even when he’s given poorly written lines to say in the context of incredibly rushed scenes. He’s just that good.

You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned Bane yet, and that is because he is probably the film’s biggest asset overall. Tom Hardy was an odd choice, but DAMN does he deliver in this role! Bane in the comics was a calculating, bloodthirsty genius, and he broke Batman in every sense of the word. That character is about as well represented here as I think we’re likely to get in any near future, and although I would have liked a tiny more of the conflict between them in the way that Batman and the Joker had in the last one, Hardy absolutely DOMINATES on screen every scene he is in.

He steals the show. He’s got this really odd warbly Irish-accented voice like some old circus ringleader with a curly mustache, and at first it sounds funny, but when you hear that voice thundering out of the darkness of a dank, poorly-lit sewer lair, or when he’s beating the living daylights out of you…you’ll come to find it unsettling pretty quick. He moves effortlessly like a man who thinks he deserves to have his own moons orbiting around him, and he has this eerie fanaticism and charisma about him that just makes it seem like he really, truly believes everything he’s saying, and would die for it, with it on his lips in his last breath. Everything about him is just incredibly imposing and intimidating. Some of the scenes, like his one-on-one fight with Batman, or one where he addresses a football stadium, are the best in the entire film. A magnificent performance.

The scope of this thing is incredibly massive and covers a lot of different elements of this huge story, and while I mentioned earlier that sometimes the writing was off, I was always entertained by how big and immediate everything felt. At near three hours we get a lot of material, and the film covers a lot of ground in many locations. I really felt the danger the people of Gotham were in, and when the climax rolled around I was totally invested even despite the lame lines and a few trite clichés that Nolan is obviously above in his other movies. It’s so massive that you can’t help but be invested. And Nolan’s penchant for great car-chase action scenes is in full force here – not to be missed.

The ending is nice enough, if a bit rushed – like Nolan was thinking he had to wrap up the film really fast because it was already too long. It’s a happy ending, and that’s refreshing after the brooding last two movies, but at the same time I wish it was fleshed out more and had more emotion to it than it did.

Really what this movie accomplished was that it pointed out what was so good about The Dark Knight. The faults of this movie really bring to light the fact that The Dark Knight was a one of a kind thing, a special film that doesn’t come around more than once. Nolan’s combination of hard-assed political crime thriller and darkly epic superhero myth was spiced with the right kind of writing and dynamic to make something singular and fresh, which sadly wasn’t replicated in its sequel. A few of the best moments of this borrow from The Dark Knight more than I like to really admit to.

So The Dark Knight Rises was a disappointment, if an incredibly ambitious and sometimes engrossing disappointment. There are some moments of this that are stunning and fully encompass the epic scope Nolan was going for, and others that are oddly weak or rushed. This was not a half-assed movie and a lot of effort was put into it, and for that it is worth a viewing no matter what your final opinion of it is. So in the end, it was a beautiful and intriguing disappointment and something worth watching and talking about despite its weaknesses, because it really did have some very good, meaningful scenes and themes of pain and fighting through the pain. It’s a movie about a city in the throes of rebellion and political uprisings and doing what’s right even though people may not appreciate it – typical superhero themes and carried with dignity here.

I wish this was a stronger film, but it’s an odd paradox in that it is a disappointment worth watching anyway, just because of the massive effort put into it, and because it follows such a great duo of films. The writing was lacking and the plot could have been tighter, and those things were its more concrete and basic flaws, but this was mostly a failure of over-ambitiousness - it didn't totally work because Nolan consciously over-extended his reach in trying to make something more epic than The Dark Knight. But that kind of failure makes it more interesting to watch (as opposed to a mere failure of mediocre writing and loose plots), for the creativity and zeal of its creators in putting it together. So this wasn’t the masterpiece I wanted. But I think it still merits a watch. Give it a try anyway.

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