Machine Gun Preacher (2011)

Starring: Gerard Butler, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Shannon

Director: Marc Forster
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1586752/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Gun_Preacher

You know how Africa has a lot of problems? All those wars and child soldiers and everything? Ever wanted some guy to go around and kill all the bad guys with a machine gun and then make a movie about him with the guy from "300"? Then this is the movie for you! Or is it...?

Based on the true story of Sam Childers, Gerard Butler plays the protagonist, a drug addict just out of jail who does not seem too concerned about changing his ways. But after a night on the town goes terribly wrong, he decides to follow his wife's advice and becomes a born-again Christian. He starts to turn his life around by getting a job as a building contractor before eventually starting his own company. But things really start to change when he takes part in a Sudanese outreach program and becomes heavily involved in their cause. Wanting to build and run a church, he is constantly under attack by the rebels who are trying to either kill the children in the area or turn them into soldiers. Eventually he has enough, so he picks up a machine gun and starts wiping them out, determined to stop them at all cost.

This movie is one of those films that "is what it is." Despite its title, it is not really about religious faith, but it does highlight the moral issues surrounding the plight of African children. Childers represents these issues at various points in his mission and it becomes clear that he does not do well with the word "no." Despite his controversial ideas and actions, he keeps pushing forward until he gets his way. He gets very angry when a friend of his who shortchanges him on a check to give to his church while throwing a party at his multimillion dollar house. However, it also happens when his daughter asks to rent a limo for her formal, with her responding with the quote "you care more about those black babies than you do about me." It shows how people in the developed world can dismiss those in the developing world, but also that those who fight for a good cause can sometimes go overboard, however pure their intentions may be.

You have to give credit to Butler as he does a good job showing Childers in the various stages of his life. While it is not exactly an Oscar-worthy performance, for his own sake, it is good to see that he can actually act. Not that he did not do an amazing job in the classic that is "Gamer," (http://docuniverse.blogspot.com/2010/10/review-gamer-2009.html) but it just seemed like he got overshadowed by a masturbating fat guy and Dexter trying to pull off Frank Sinatra/Michael Jackson. Yes...classic...

There are probably two big flaws with this film. First of all, it does not have very good pasting, particularly in the beginning. It just bounces from Jail, Drugs, Redemption, Happy Life, Africa in really short order. I know that this first part is not really the main focus of the movie, but they could have slowed it down a little it by adding an extra scene here or there. Luckily it gets easier as the film goes on.

The second problem is that the film comes off as being really heavy-handed. This may seem a bit obvious since this is about genocide in Africa. I guess it feels especially so because it is very blunt; while it may talk about the big issues and how it effects people, there is no real subtly to it and at times it feels like it is being thrown in your face. But in a way, that is kind of the point. Childers is a very straight forward person and the style of the picture seems to put that upfront and center.

So that is that. Like always, I am judging the movie based on what I saw, not on what actually happened (they do show some photos of the real-life Childers during the end credits and it concludes with a video in which Childers poses a poignant, if rather disturbing question, to the camera). I cannot say that this movie is for everyone because of everything I just mentioned, but I personally liked it overall, and if it seems it suits you, I recommend it.

I do not own the rights to these pictures and links; they belong to their respective owners and are being used for entertainment purposes only. Please do not sue me.

The Month of Terror: Dracula 2000 (2000)

Amazing, a movie that actually manages to screw up the Dracula story even more than the 1991 version with that ridiculous Gary Oldman costume. I didn’t even think that was possible. Yes, Dracula 2000, brought to you by the genius minds that brought you sequels to White Noise, Pulse, Children of the Corn and Hollow Man, is another gem of a movie that you just can’t describe in a short review…so I made a really long one again, happy?

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219653/

"Don't ever fuck with an antiques dealer!"

-Jordan Chase

Our movie begins quite beautifully with scenes of London in the 1800s, with a bunch of dead people on a ship. I’d say these scenes had a point, but really I just think the director wanted to take a vacation to London, as we flash forward unceremoniously to the present day, without any kind of transition. Then we see Christopher Plummer and Jordan Chase from Dexter talking about some stuff in a room. Chase proceeds to flirt with the token attractive woman in this unnamed and vague company, who turns him down like a bad grade on a math test. Burned, Chase! Burned!

Then we see that this attractive woman is actually a part of some gang of robbers planning to break in and steal stuff. They find a secret passageway, a dungeon full of skulls and smoke and a big coffin, and, being idiots of the highest order, think that Plummer decorated the place like that to scare off thieves:

Looks like a rejected Buffy the Vampire Slayer set.

Come to think of it, why did Plummer decorate the secret passageway like that anyway? He’s clearly keeping the Dracula-coffin down there to keep it safe, so what’s the logic in decorating the place like a cheap haunted house? Why go through the trouble of putting up all those skulls and everything when he could have just put it in a room and locked the door? Not like anyone would see it if he was just using it to keep the thing in. I guess he’s just got a flair for the most ridiculous and over the top drama.

So yeah, the robbers activate a bunch of traps that were rejected from Indiana Jones 17 and a couple of them get killed off and impaled on stuff, which shocks the surviving robbers about as much as getting a letter in the mail. They just kind of shrug it off, take the coffin and go. This gets Plummer and Jordan Chase mad, as you can clearly tell by the way they scream every other line as if they’re in a terrible soap opera. Because that makes it dramatic! About as dramatic as a bunch of kids fighting on a schoolyard anyway…

We also get introduced to Mary, who has dreams apparently directed by Rob Zombie, although I would also accept ‘dreams directed by Tim Burton’ if you please:

Stop tormenting me, strobe lights and quick cuts!

She lives with her friend Lucy, they talk about boys (because that’s all girls ever do when they’re alone, you know), and that’s pretty much it. BACK TO THE ROBBERS!

They’re on a plane transporting the coffin back to wherever the hell they came from, and they all pick on this one guy for no reason except that he’s white and has a dorky Jew-fro style haircut that just begs to be made fun of. He opens the coffin after whining and complaining to himself, and is suddenly engulfed in a cloud of pot-smoke that I think was used by the writers to create the script!

Look at that hair; it's practically its own meme.

Actually it’s Dracula, played by Gerard Butler. He then proceeds to hide and wait for more idiots to come out. Which they do, leading to several long, drawn out minutes of those terrible ‘stop kidding around man!’ scenes you get in every terrible horror movie. Joy. But then using his incredible 'appearing ominously in doorways' power (which is pretty much all he does throughout this movie), Dracula turns everyone into vampires and crashes the plane.

But the wonders don’t end there, as then we get one of the strangest hallucination scenes ever as Dracula and Mary see each other through the door of the plane somehow? But one side of the door is the cockpit of the plane, and the other side is her room…and then he goes into her room, and attacks her until Lucy walks through him like a ghost? It’s hard to describe, but that’s because it’s just visually confusing as hell! I get what they were going for, but seriously, what kind of insane brain-cobble produced this anyway?

Well, I guess David Lynch was called on set to direct a scene after all...

After that, we get the BEST NEWSCASTER EVER as she wears a skimpy dress and talks incredibly dramatically about the robbers’ plane, which crashed in a lake. I mean really, saying things like ‘this is a lake of death and doom today’ is just silly. And I love how the camera-man is drooling over her the whole damn time. “I’m just recording this for my own jerk-off sessions later tonight, thanks!” But then Dracula just kills them, although even THAT is rendered incredibly silly by the fact that you see it through the camera so you can’t actually see him doing it:

"And tonight on National Enquirer News, we have a newscaster who they probably picked up from a brothel down on the bad side of town..." 

"...and flying men propelled by their own farts (that are actually vampires killing them; but that's just a conspiracy theory)!"

So then we get some exposition from Plummer on why Dracula is so evil: he hates Christianity. Yup, that’s it; just like any common acne-ridden 14 year old internet troll! Dracula’s just angsty! Oh, and apparently Christopher Plummer is actually the real Van Helsing, who kept himself alive by injecting himself with Dracula’s blood over the years just to make sure he doesn’t get out of his prison. And while doing THAT, he apparently also had time to father a daughter! And that daughter was Mary! See? It all makes sense now…except it really, really doesn’t. Let’s take a closer look at this ridiculous subplot:

First of all, how did he know that Dracula’s blood would give him any kind of special powers anyway? He’s counting on them to let him live forever, but how can he possibly tell that would work without some kind of problem occurring? Second of all, how did he know he wouldn’t run out sometime in the 100 years since he killed Dracula? What would’ve happened if he came in one day and tried to drain the blood but found out there wasn’t enough? “Whoops, my bad! Guess I should have just left it to my descendants or something, like any other sane person would have!” Third of all, he really had time to father a daughter? So much for devotion to the cause. You’d THINK a guy smart enough to figure out a way to live forever would be smart enough NOT to have sex with someone with that demonic blood in his veins! But I guess stupidity is necessary to move the plot forward!

Also I really like the Michael Jackson dance moves the hot vampire chick does in the science lab where she’s being held:

You could have at least put in "Thriller" or "Smooth Criminal" at this point...might have made the movie better...

And then we get another fight scene with some of Dracula’s goons, full of Matrix-style wire-jumping, terrible one-liners and implausible set-ups…and where are they supposed to be, anyway? Could they just not afford a real morgue, and so they had to film in a high school auditorium-slash-gymnasium?

After that, we see Dracula approaching Lucy at the video store where I’m sure they have much better movies than this one available. She decides to take him home, because I guess the creepy guy in the black trench coat who approached her in the video store is a good enough catch for her standards, and surprise surprise, he kills her soon after. Mary discovers that Lucy went off with some guy, and, jumping to the most bizarre conclusion possible, she of course automatically suspects that it’s Dracula at work. Because a hot blonde girl like this:

…couldn’t POSSIBLY have gotten a date otherwise, right?

Christopher Plummer goes to Mary’s house too and gets killed off easily by Dracula. So much for the great Van Helsing, right? Ho hum. So then we see some more of those wonderful schizophrenic editing in the Rob Zombie style as Mary returns and starts seeing things in the house. She fights some of Dracula’s posse, including the news-lady for some reason, and then runs away only to find Jordan Chase outside! They run away and go to a church, because…I guess the director felt like he hadn’t ripped off The Crow enough with all the shots of Gerard Butler wearing black perched on top of roofs, and had to compensate for his own insecurities.

Through more fight scenes that not even 4^th graders who like The Matrix would find endearing and lines so stupid that I’m surprised the actors willingly said them, the movie pretty much gets nowhere. However, there is one line so over the top and so silly that it actually makes the movie worth it…for a few seconds, anyhow. It’s when Jordan Chase is fighting off the vampire chicks. He beats them down and then screams “DON’T EVER FUCK WITH AN ANTIQUES DEALER!” at the top of his lungs, like some kind of battle cry. Yes. I believe we have a new indictment into the hall of absolute AWESOMENESS. No other line in this movie touches this level of over the top cheese.

But yeah, after that it pretty much produces nothing of worth, and I’m almost positive the writers ran out of ideas after that too, because the movie can’t even hold my interest for two seconds anymore. Jordan Chase chases the vamp-chicks around and Mary is kidnapped by Dracula and blah blah blah. They fight on the roof until it’s revealed that…DUN DUN DUN

Somebody call Mel Gibson, I think we have a new movie idea: Dracula and Jesus Christ!

No. No, you can’t be doing this, movie. You seriously can’t!

No, what are you thinking, movie? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Dracula is Judas? What? Why? What was wrong with the original story so much that you had to add this religious crap into it? It makes zero sense at all and just turns the whole thing into an even bigger joke. This isn’t Dogma or some nonsense where you can just make stuff like that up! At least in that movie it was played for comedy and satire. Here’s it’s supposed to be serious! Ugh. Let’s just finish the damn review.

So Dracula turns Mary into a vampire and tells her to bite Jordan Chase, but in a VERY SURPRISING TWIST she fakes it – didn’t see that one coming, did you? It’s only been used in EVERY OTHER MOVIE EVER MADE after all! Then he throws her off the building but she wraps some wire around his neck before she falls…and wait a minute, wouldn’t the fall barely hurt her anyway? I mean it’s been shown in this movie itself that vampires are almost invincible, so…what? Dracula burns up, Mary turns back into a human somehow, becomes a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rip-off and then we mercifully get the credits!

Phew. So in case you couldn’t tell…this was stupid as hell. It made as much sense as the ramblings of a fever-ridden fourth grader on a sugar high, the acting AND writing was terribly over-done and over-dramatic, the story was a pile of clichéd horse crap and the characters weren’t very interesting. I will say it was at least entertaining, but it was entertaining in spite of itself rather than for any actual merit. And that’s never the way to go.

So are you guys ready for the sequel?!?!? I am!

REVIEW: Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

Director: F. Gary Gray

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197624/

What is it with Gerard Butler and doing really poor attempts at social commentaries? First he did the abominable Gamer and now this one. Granted, this is a notch more watchable than Gamer, but it’s still nothing to fawn over, and in fact I’d say I didn’t much like it at all.

The story is about this guy whose wife and daughter are murdered by two guys. When the justice system fails to apprehend them as well as Butler wants, he spends ten years concocting a revenge plan against everyone involved, including his old pal Nick (Jamie Foxx). Butler commits horrendous acts against innocent people in a very hammy, clumsy attempt at making some sort of statement about the justice system…and that’s really all there is to it.

Mostly this movie is just dumb. I could excuse the extreme levels of implausibility at hand if the movie was likeable and smart in other areas, but it’s not. It’s basically just another SAW movie. I didn’t like Gerard Butler’s character because he was a crazy psychopath with no human qualities at all (oh, wait, I forgot about his daughter’s little ring of beads…well, like I said, no human qualities at all). I didn’t like Jamie Foxx because he was a cardboard cutout sometimes and a coldhearted dimwit who couldn’t do his job right the next. There’s basically nothing likeable about this movie. So what are we left with?

GORE! LOTS AND LOTS OF GORE! AND DEATH! Butler sets up ridiculous SAW/Hostel-lite traps, makes “profound” speeches about how smart he is and how much the justice system sucks, and Jamie Foxx incompetently tries to stop him while neglecting his family over and over. There, you don’t even have to watch this movie now; that’s all there is to it.

What really pisses me off though, even more than the fact that this is clearly trying to make some kind of statement about the judicial system in America. There’s one part, where Butler stands up in court and verbally schools the judge on why she’s wrong, that did point out some good things that the film could have elaborated on, but most of the time it isn’t like that. Gerard Butler is not making a statement about how much our judicial system is flawed. He is just killing people. There’s no meaning to any of it, and if you think there is, I advise you to go watch Se7en and see what a real meaningful, intelligent thriller is like. This is just crap. It’s got no subtlety, no grace and nothing about it that’s really likeable or interesting beyond the KUH-RAZY PLOT TWISTS MAN! Ugh.

Review: Gamer (2009)

Directors: Mark Niveldine, Brian Taylor

Starring: Michael C. Hall, Gerard Butler

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034032/

You ever have a movie that you just flat out don’t like? That just rubs you the wrong way in every direction imaginable? One of those movies that just pisses you off from beginning to end? Yeah. That’s Gamer. Let’s just get this over with before I put my boot through the fucking screen.

We start off with a bunch of news reports and advertisements about a new reality TV show called Slayers, where convicts have the fated magically vague computer chip jargon inserted into them so they can be controlled manually by outside parties who play the games. We see that they are controlled by Dexter – I mean Michael C. Hall, who is an eccentric billionaire who designs these groundbreaking futuristic interactive TV show games. Among them also is Society, a play on the SIMS series where participants are paid to sell their bodies to players who control them at their whim in online gaming zones throughout the world.

Yeah. We get it. It’s like prostitution. You don’t need to shove it in our faces.

So then we get Gerard Butler as a wrongly convicted criminal toughing it out to get back to his wife and daughter – ooh, feel the tugs at your heartstrings yet? This character is just boring, as even though Butler tries, he just can’t really make such dull writing entertaining. We see some pretty clumsy action scenes as he and some disposable buddies run around and blow shit up without any control over what they do.

Yeah. We get it; it’s making a statement about the commercialization of violence. Stop trying so damn hard.

After that we get some shots of what exactly the whole Society game is like. It’s made up of mostly internet basement dwellers who sit around in their houses naked and jerk off while playing as female avatars. And one in particular who is Gerard Butler’s character’s wife! Yeah, it’s a small world after all. I guess after he went to jail she couldn’t pay the bills and had to take this demeaning job in order to put food on the table. And on top of that, her daughter has been forcefully taken away from her and put in a ‘better’ home! Isn’t this just so sad? It’s like they were trying to cram in every bad, hurtful thing they could possibly do short of making her an invalid. Oh wait. That’s exactly what they were doing.

Oh, and the guy who controls her is a particularly fetid caricature; this huge fat guy who can’t even get up to walk and has to breathe through a tube, and spends his time sitting in a chair completely naked and seemingly playing this game every waking minute. It’s so disgusting that I’d rather have my eyes eaten out by wolverines than ever look at it again. And wouldn’t you know it, the movie spends a lot of time showing us this, because apparently they decided it was the best possible way to get its message across. Why does this need to be seen? So what, did they think this movie would be too subtle if they didn’t put in a big fat parody of an internet nerd masturbating naked to online characters? That’s really insulting, and I hate the implications of this almost as much as I hate looking at this fat ass tub of lard himself.

So then Gerard Butler finds out from a mysterious source that they plan to kill him off in order to boost their ratings. Gee, that…is a complete and total rip off of Network from 1976. You really have no shame, do you? He somehow gets this really pretentious douche of a kid who was controlling his avatar – never really explained how he came to have it; he just does… - to let him go free and control his own body. He then constructs the most genius escape plan ever conceived!

…he drinks a bunch of alcohol and then pukes and pisses it up into the gas tank of a random car to drive it out of the game and escape. What would have happened if he didn’t make it to the car? Why couldn’t he have just taken the bottle itself and poured that into the gas tank? Is there any guarantee it would have worked long enough to get him out of the game? Who cares? I don’t. This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard to try and escape a place. It’s so retarded that it violates every single solitary rule of intelligence that I’ve ever held true. This is rock bottom, people. Take your seats.

He goes and finds his wife and the next half hour or so is full of half-assed action scenes, mind-boggling chase-escapes and ridiculous, unwatchable garbage with that fat guy jerking off. Yeah, now we get to see him trying to have sex with a freak in leather pants who tries to hump her doggy-style. Because this movie would have been SO MUCH LESS CLASSY without that! Fuck, this is like being lobotomized with a rusty pipe; it’s just intolerable! We really needed to see a shot of his huge, bloated stomach, didn’t we? That really gave the movie an extra edge!

So the entire rebellion group gets killed off by Michael C. Hall’s men, and I have to say this is the most believable part of this movie, as their leader is played by Ludacris. And a rapper getting shot is nothing that I can’t fathom. Finally, some grounded sanity here!

Oh, but then we find out – DUN DUN DUN – that Butler’s daughter was actually adopted by Michael C. Hall! What a shock. It is a small world after all. Why did he pick this one family to torment? Why would he even need the girl in the first place? Nothing. You could just take any explanation off any random Wikipedia page and it would make about as much sense. Truly worthless, hacked up writing.

Gerard Butler and Michael C. Hall square off after a pointless dance number that I guess I have to admit is the best scene in the movie, as seeing good old Dexter do this spacey, tripped out rendition of “Thriller” is just priceless. But it serves no purpose and the fight scene that follows is incredibly stupid. So he breaks Hall’s hold over his mind through the power of love for his daughter, who had no lines in the entire movie. Ooh, anything can be accomplished by the POWER OF LOVE! Ugh, what a load. And then he kills Hall just by making him think about being killed. Then everything is wrapped up in two seconds because presumably nobody on set could stand another five minutes working with this awful, awful script and direction.

Fuck this movie. It’s seriously unbelievable how annoying this is, and how much it rapes every fabric of good cinema that you can imagine. It’s not completely worthless, as there are some good ideas scattered here and there, but that’s just more reason to hate it. It’s just so awful and so garishly unpleasant that it’s impossible to enjoy. The acting is mediocre, the action sucks, the direction is a complete mess and the message behind it is so hammy that it’s insulting. It’s not like you have to shove everything under our noses with big bright neon lights or else we won’t get it. We can use our brains, you mongoloids. Try taking that into account next time you vomit out a script.

It’s like the Fifth Element smoked some cannabis and then went out and pissed on the scripts of Network and The Running Man, all while trying to play Call of Duty with its toes. That’s the level of insanity this movie has brought to mind! And really, people. Just go play a fucking video game. It’s more entertaining, more stimulating and far less wretched than anything this pile of alligator piss has to offer.