Ant-Man (2015)

Marvel has a pretty good reputation for dependable action movies these days – in fact, they're addicted to making them. Hell, I think they'd go into a coma if enough people didn't re-tweet them on Twitter about each new movie that came out. But they did have one movie that was pretty weak, and it should be obvious what I am talking about by now, unless for some reason you didn't pay any attention to the title of this review.

I'll give you a hint though: If you've ever said the words 'my favorite movie is Ant-Man,' then you may not like this one.

Director: Peyton Reed

Starring: Paul Rudd, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

Ant Man is the kind of movie I think they'd produce if they asked the most generic human being alive to produce a movie that is acceptable – not great, not even particularly good, just acceptable. And then you took that and gave it to a robot who had never seen or talked to a human before to recreate it from memory. That's this movie. It's as unfunny, weird and awkward as you'd expect, while simultaneously also being pretty dull and ordinary.

This thing starts with Michael Douglas's scientist character punching another guy in the face for a disagreement at work – you know, one of those heated scientist disagreements that so often results in a physical altercation. Oh those rowdy scientists. Apparently Douglas is mad because they stole his formula to make people tiny. What, how does he know it's HIS formula? I mean, that's pretty self centered of him. What an attention whore.

Don't worry, he can't hurt you. He's all bad CGI to make him look younger.

Then we fast forward about 20 years to the middle of a Fight Club outtake starring Paul Rudd, who is less an actor and more of an alchemic combination of bad comedy tropes cobbled into something resembling a man. He's playing Scott, a Thief With a Heart of Gold™ who got arrested for stealing some stuff from a rich con man and giving it back to the people he conned. Don't worry – there's a scene about 20 minutes in that spoonfeeds you this information with all the nuance of a guy trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by just destroying the whole thing with a jackhammer. Exposition!

This movie represents prison like you would if you talked about a second cousin you don't see that often - vague and noncommittal. I know it's not the point of the movie, but could we have ANY effort at character development? Like at all?

But this only lasts a few minutes, because we have really important shit to focus on like the pretty racist caricatures of everyone else who isn't Paul Rudd. Like, the guy who picks him up from prison is the most stereotypical Hispanic character ever, like you'd think Donald Trump's idea of any Spanish speaking person is. His thing is that he talks in a really stereotypical way and goes on long, unfunny tangents when he's trying to convey information. Wow, what a great character idea. I'm sure glad someone's paying you to write this.

And who else do we get? A black guy whose only purpose in the movie is to steal a cop car? A European guy of vague descent who talks in a ridiculous accent and talks about his reverence for superstition in one scene while also being an expert at computers like a Die Hard villain the next scene? Wow. I guess it's progressive if you consider 'progression' to be having them in the movie at all?

Oh good, the local awful Improv troupe is here...

I just think it takes a lot of balls to write characters that most pornos wouldn't consider writing because they're too stupid and shallow. “Hmm, well, you've got a good start, but how much MORE racist can you get without getting protesters on our asses? Can you implement at least some of the stereotypes from 1950s conservative drug propaganda films before your time is up?” It's asinine exactly how bad this is – like, what, just because the KKK would still be like 'nah, that's weaksauce,' it's okay?

I guess Paul Rudd can't hold down a job at Baskin Robbins, which is a bad joke that the movie milks like hell with even worse jokes on top of it, like the manager at Baskin Robbins chewing scenery and talking in unrealistic dialogue about how cool it is that Scott stole things, but also saying they have to fire him. Yeah, convicts can't get jobs! Hilarious! A gut buster!

Ugh, ANOTHER movie in the pocket of Big Ice Cream, shoving its message down our throats...

Oh, and he tries to see his daughter at a birthday party only to get harassed by his ex-wife's new husband, a cop who seems to be so unrealistically douchey that I am pretty sure he literally has a stick rammed up his ass. Can we get a Kickstarter fund going to remove it and end this man's pain? He really is just such a douche to Scott that it comes off as hacky. Because ya know... a convict not being able to spend time with his kid, just more of that hilarity that is Ant Man.

The rest of the plot focuses around Corey Stoll's character Darren performing experiments on goats to try and turn them tiny, which doesn't work and only turns them into formless goop. I'm sure glad all this money is going toward this noble fucking cause.

We really learned a lot from this...

I guess this is what Michael Douglas's old scientist character perfected years ago, which he didn't release to the world and now Stoll's character wants to make a whole army of tiny soldiers to go and do evil shit like assassinate world leaders. They have a whole video presentation about this, like it's some sort of weird school presentation, which is kinda funny. It should really just say “WE'RE GONNA DO REALLY EVIL SHIT” across every picture in boldface lettering. Like, who the fuck was actually in charge of making a goddamn video presentation about assassinating world leaders and doing military coups?

Douglas, I guess, has the one suit he used locked up in a safe which Scott goes to burgle. He breaks into the safe and tries on the suit for no real reason except shits 'n' giggles – like, he broke in already, so why not, I guess? Then it shrinks him down to the size of an ant and we get a pretty decent action scene of him being tiny and running around and stuff. Though I am not sure why this mansion Michael Douglas lives in is apparently in the same building as a fucking night club...

I guess Douglas just likes a good time.

Also, how does he not die when he gets sucked up by the vacuum cleaner? I mean, I guess I've never really TRIED to do that. So maybe I can't criticize the movie on this part.

This is not the movie for you if you're afraid of vacuum cleaners at all.

Then we get a bunch of lame scenes of Scott waking up in Douglas's mansion, where he and his hot daughter live. They also have an army of ants in there that Douglas can apparently control, so he has them guard the bed Scott is in so it's almost like he's a prisoner there – if he steps off the bed, they'll sting him I guess. Except then that turns out to be pointless as he gets out and there is really no threat to him – so, whoop-de-do I guess.

Then there's a bunch of training scenes with him and the daughter, who is the most boring and lame type of female character – the super stoic, badass chick who says everything in a deadpan monotone because THAT shows strength, right? The only type of strong woman is the kind who never experiences emotion because she was probably created in a laboratory as a domesticated robot to deliver quips. I mean, what kind of woman ever has emotions, or a personality, am I right? Oh, she fires back blandly sarcastic quips to literally everything Rudd says? Yes, exactly how real people talk. And in this movie about a guy who shrinks down to the size of an ant, THAT is what I am most worried about for realism, yes.

Her wanting to cause Paul Rudd pain is the only believable part of her character.

Oh, what's that? You didn't think we had enough scenes of forced, dull fucking family drama with the daughter and Douglas shouting about how they didn't really love one another and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes me fall asleep? The movie has you covered.

Then there's a lot more bad jokes, stiff and unrealistic dialogue and lame stereotype characters as the climax clunks along. They stage some plan to break into the lab and I guess Stoll is so far gone by this point that he just ends up dressing up in the suit and going full on supervillain like, immediately. Wow. I dunno why THAT was his first choice, but one thing is clear, and that's that this lab really should do better background checks and mental health analyses on these people before hiring them.

Who, aside from gun sellers in the US, could look at this and go 'yes, this is a mentally OK man'?

Because this is still so cliché that it borders on parody, Stoll goes straight to the house of Scott's kid and threatens his family. How would we have any conflict if we didn't make it super personal right away? I mean, there's NO other sources of things a villain can do that are evil.

But to be fair, this is actually a good scene, and one of the only ones in the whole movie that actually works – I like the silly stuff they can do with the shrinking fight scene, like when they knock stuff over, it falls over with the weight of a mountain in their eyes. But then they show it just looked like some little thing falling over in the regular world:

It's really just one of the only scenes that actually works for the movie's sense of humor – why couldn't they have put this kind of effort into the characters and dialogue? Visually, it's good. Though I think the world could have done without this giant Thomas the Tank Engine and the mutant giant ant... I mean, is this like what the 1950s-era horror films predicted would happen? Jesus.

I guess there really is no price too high to give kids nightmares in this movie's universe.

That is pretty much the end really – we get a few more scenes of things winding down in a happy way, and I don't really care. That's Ant Man!

I guess a lot of people like this, and that's fine – sometimes that many people ARE just wrong. I dunno. I just find it really dull and bland – the writing is bad and the characters are weak when they're not outwardly idiotic stereotypes that come off as vaguely racist. The plot is dime-a-dozen origin story stuff and there's really nothing of interest about any of this except for the wacky scenes where he shrinks down to ant-size. So I guess I'm saying, if the movie was just a 10 minute short film with only those scenes, it'd be okayish, so long as they cut out literally everything else in the movie.

Oh well, at least it's better than Batman vs Superman or Suicide Squad; because those are good standards to have!

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009)

Some of you – the whole three of you that read this site regularly – may have been wondering where I have been recently. Well, last month I saw a movie called Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. A 2009 remake of a 1956 crime thriller, it looked promising simply due to having Michael Douglas in a starring role – an actor I always hold in high esteem.

However, upon viewing the film, I had to retreat to a monastery of Buddhist monks to try and gain inner peace over my mind – for there was no other way to accurately talk about this film. Otherwise, I probably would have burst into flames with blood shooting out my eyes and snakes coming out my ears trying to talk about everything bad in it. I would have been rabid. You would have had to send over Animal Control with a tranc gun and a fucking fishing net – there would have been no way I could have formatted my thoughts into a coherent review.

After weeks of intense mental mastery and calming of my spirit, I have returned. With me, I bring the story of this film. What a twisted and macabre tale it is.

Director: Peter Hyams

Starring: Amber Tamblyn, Jesse Metcalfe, Michael Douglas

IMDb

This is a movie about a couple of journalists who plot to get implicated in a murder just to prove the D.A., played by Douglas, is corrupt. If there's a difference between this movie and a garbage dump, I really haven't found it yet. Except the garbage dump is actually useful to society, and this is not.

We kick the movie off with our main “hero” C.J. Nicholas, played by Jesse Metcalfe. He’s about as douchey of a main character as you’ll ever find. I’m sure Metcalfe is a nice guy, but his performance here is just god-awful, and the character is one of the most annoying and pretentious I’ve come across since Bad Kids Go to Hell. In fact, I spoke to the writers of Bad Kids Go to Hell while researching for this review, and they told me they would have been ashamed to be associated with characters like this. Ouch!

So we get Nicholas, a journalist, watching a court trial where District Attorney Michael Douglas presents evidence to put a guy behind bars for murder. Nicholas approaches Douglas’s assistant, a beautiful woman named Ella Crystal, to try and get some files on Douglas. I think that’s the first plot hole of the film – Ella Crystal? Is she missing her shift at the local sleazy topless bar to appear in this movie?

Anyway, this character is also horribly written. I’m sure actress Amber Tamblyn was trying, but the script once again turns the character into an unlikable and wretched one. Nicholas flirts with her and asks her out. At first she acts uninterested, like a regular girl would – but within the span of two seconds, she suddenly changes her tone and is totally ready to let him rip her clothes off and ravage her in bed.

What? You think I’m kidding? No, seriously – like a few scenes later they’re fucking and she’s spending the whole night at his place and having breakfast with him in the morning. It’s like the relationship version of those pills lazy people take to try and get fit in place of actual exercise. We don’t need any of that pesky character development or interesting dialogue. Just show them giggling for two seconds at a table with food, then fade to them fucking at his house. That’s all you need!

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!!!!

The whole thing is just so retarded. There’s no better word! She’s an interesting female character for about two seconds, then becomes a cardboard cut-out waste of screen space only there to defend her man.

I guess there’s some backstory about how Nicholas got famous for making some news story about a black pregnant prostitute who got kicked out of her house. Or some shit like that. I dunno. Just go watch Precious instead.

When he isn’t boning the cardboard cutout this movie passes off for a love interest, Nicholas spends his time doing retarded things with that guy from Bones, Hatchet and a billion other things and you still can’t remember his name:

Oh, fuck it – his name is Joel David Moore. No, this movie will not be a step up in his career from The Hottie and the Nottie. He does OK I guess, but really what does he have to work with anyway? He’s pretty much just a plastic ‘best friend’ character with no thoughts or independent will of his own.

Together these two morons plot to implicate Nicholas in a murder case just so Nicholas can prove Michael Douglas makes up evidence in order to get a conviction. That’s a monumentally dumb idea! But they go ahead and just do it. Taping everything they’re doing, they go ahead and frame Nicholas for the murder. They get a knife so it looks like he bought a knife (real stretch there!), buy a dog just to have it bite him on the leg and a whole bunch of other nonsense that I won’t bother going over.

"Durrr, awesome, we're on a crime scene, that totally makes this a legit serious crime thriller now. Look at how relevant and meaningful this is to the world!"

That fat guy behind the counter is my favorite character in the movie, just because he's the only one who doesn't let Pretty Boy McDouche there just take whatever he wants. 

These scenes are just padding. They aren’t really referenced again in the rest of the film, and mostly just serve to be as bland as humanly possible. Good films can make even the filler scenes seem important and vital, through strong acting, directing and writing. Bad films just have scenes for the sake of scenes. Get to the next scene you bimbos! Time is money! Pfft.

So after a couple more scenes of the writer jerking himself off by making the love interest character perfect and subservient to Nicholas in every way, Nicholas finally gets arrested. Love interest girl shows up at his jail cell and starts immediately swearing to quit her job and help him on the defense team, acting flabbergasted that he suggests she choose her career over him. Because you know, women don’t really have goals or lives of their own. They just exist to pamper and serve douchebags who put themselves in prison on murder charges, on purpose.

"I have no personality, and I'm OK with that."

Apparently the plan Nicholas and his buddy have goes like this: they have a secret videotape locked in a safe at a bank that can prove Nicholas’s innocence and also prove that Douglas plants evidence to cheat murder trials. Why not just have the tape on you when you walk into the courtroom? Wouldn’t that save time? It probably would – which is why the movie doesn’t just do that.

Instead, we get a loooooong drawn out scene of poor Joel Moore running around with his head cut off, scrambling to make it back to the courtroom on time to show the tape. He gets into a stupid conversation at the bank with a really annoying employee, who of course can’t just do her fucking job and has to draw out everything pointlessly with banal conversation – a prime example of the poor writing this movie regularly displays.

I’m really not sure why Moore is hurrying so much – just to make it look more natural for Nicholas and his defense lawyer? I mean, there’s not so much of a time constraint that you can’t slow the fuck down and be safe. Unfortunately,  speed does kill, and one of Douglas’s lackeys gets Moore into a car accident and kills him. Yes, this is turning into a bad James Bond parody.

Yeah! Next remake Twelve Angry Men and put in a five minute sex scene and some ninja fighting. That oughta do it!

So the movie doesn’t really dwell at all on Nicholas feeling bad about losing his best friend. Instead he gets sent to jail and sentenced to death row. The girlfriend then becomes the main character, and sets about trying to clear Nicholas’s name. She finds some tech support place that can look and see if crime scene photos are doctored. There, she finds out the shocking truth – Michael Douglas really does falsify evidence to win his cases! Guess how? I’ll give you a second to think.

….

Done? OK. Get ready for this. It’s going to blow your mind, the ingenious scheme he came up with to cheat the system and frame people for crimes they may not have committed. Are you ready for this? He takes the crime scene photos and just edits in whatever he needs to make it look like they did it. For example, he edits in a cigarette smoked by the suspect into the crime scene photo, thus making it look more convincing that they actually did murder the victim.

Oh, and of course they can't even just have a normal lame exposition scene, they have to include two lab techs who clearly have never seen a woman in years and are in the running for worst characters in the movie. These characters are so annoying, I find myself wondering if this whole thing wasn't just some kind of horrible schadenfraude. Some kind of punishment!

How has nobody ever caught this? Shouldn’t it be pretty goddamned obvious? What happens; does he just buy off the lab techs and the police who take the photos and the defense lawyers who have to look at the same photos? Does Michael Douglas just have a magical ray that turns everyones’ brains to pudding when he’s working a case?

Oh well. It’s not like his character is really anything special. He’s so un-subtle as a villain, you might as well add horns, a tail and fangs to him. In fact...

SUBTLETY!!!!

That's better!

So love interest girl, with this new knowledge, leaves to set everything right. However, in the parking garage, she’s confronted by another cliché: the henchman guy tries to kill her in his car to prevent her from talking.

How would he explain that in the morning anyway? “Whoops, she accidentally got killed outside of a forensics lab where several other people knew the same shocking secret she did about a prominent public figure and were not killed! Oh, and her blood got on my car by accident. I guess it’s just one of those weird coincidences!”

This whole thing is so fuckin’ dumb. A fucking car chase scene, are you kidding me? It’s as cheap as thrills get. There’s no entertainment value in this; it’s like putting a random topless dance scene in the middle of the next Halloween remake. Oh, wait, Rob Zombie already did that in both of the other remakes, and it was about as pandering, cheap and banal as this is.

So the henchman gets shot by the Helpful Black Cop (a cliché that is never over-used!) and Douglas gets arrested the next day. Nicholas is then free to come make out with love interest girl, thus fulfilling her only purpose in life.

The couple that nobody was thinking about finally gets together at the end. Hooray?

But wait! Because love interest girl saw a photograph of the girl’s hands who Nicholas was accused of killing, and matched up the tattoos on her hand to the ones in that video of the prostitute Nicholas did a story on, she realizes he DID kill that hooker for REAL! DUN DUN DUN!

So apparently he killed the hooker for real because she was the same one he did that story on. Only the story was actually made up, and now she was trying to hit him up for money. Clearly murdering her in cold blood was the only option. I so love the creative process when it can serve up absolute garbage-bin-level trash writing like this. It just makes me so warm and fuzzy inside.

Plus, killing a hooker for real, then faking evidence, all to get publicity? Awesome plan. Right up there with the underwater electrical socket and the camouflage after-dark running outfit.

Love interest girl calls the cops and leaves his place, looking back at him only to say “fuck you!” I haven’t been this burned since grade school when a girl with pigtails told me I smelled! What a great ending line. If you're nine years old and addicted to Grand Theft Auto. In which case your parents should be flogged in the public square a la Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Eugh, douche chills, just looking at this.

Really, though, it’s all a bit of a moot point, because in real life, anyone who wasted the court’s time “going undercover” framing themselves for a murder trial, would be locked up in jail anyway. To suggest otherwise, as the movie does, is so ludicrous I can’t even begin to make a comparison to courtroom movies equally terrible. There’s nothing else this dumb. This wins the prize. For pure cliché, low-brow tripe, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt wins. In other words, fuck YOU, movie.

This is the kind of thing that just makes society dumber. There is so much pandering in this thing, to the lowest common denominator possible. The dumbass romance subplot, the explosions, the car chases - all garbage filtered in and spoonfed to a pre-supposed audience, as if the court drama intrigue wouldn't be enough. The movie didn't even have enough confidence in itself to stand alone without selling out to every cliché imaginable. It's not like the actual plot was done any better. The courtroom scenes are laughably poor and the ending plot twist is done in the worst way possible, with very little build up or reason for it. None of this is in any way educational or useful to society. If it was entertaining, maybe that wouldn't matter, but that ship sailed long ago.

I literally can't think of even one redeeming factor. It's the kind of movie that takes serious issues like crime and corruption in the justice system, pulls down its pants and farts in those issues' faces.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

REVIEW: The Game (1997)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

David Fincher has done better works than this movie, but The Game is interesting and remarkable for reasons outside of the usual fantastic cinematography and acting, namely the way it plays with the viewer’s expectations and the whole general idea of storytelling. This is at once a serious film and a bit of a farce, dually a suspenseful thrill ride and perhaps the greatest attempt at pulling the wool over the eyes of the audience I’ve ever seen. But it’s one thing to tell you that, and quite another to actually explain myself, so let’s go ahead and do that.

Director: David Fincher

Starring: Michael Douglas, Deborah Kara Unger, Sean Penn

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/

The Game’s basic premise is that Michael Douglas plays a rich billionaire named Nicholas Van Orton who gets a present from his derelict brother, inviting him to participate in a ‘game’ with a strange company called CRS. The film quickly turns into a high speed paranoid thriller in which Orton and a young, mysterious woman named Christine (or is that her real name at all?) embark on a wild ride of conspiracies, betrayals and twists that build up like a rising wave.

The film’s pace is fast and fluid, moving seamlessly from one thrill to the next, and as such, its 2+ hour runtime flies by like nothing. What I like about this movie on the surface is that it feels like a descent into madness, slowly becoming more and more alarming and surreal as it goes on until the electrifying climax. This is a very tense movie that never lets up, and for that it’s addictive.

As it goes on, we see Nicholas thrown into a bay in a speeding, out of control taxi. We see him in one particularly chilling scene stranded with nothing in the desert wastelands around Mexico, reduced to a beggar, without any of his riches or charm. These scenes are beautifully shot and add to the diversity of the film, pulling the viewer in and making him or her take notice.

At this point, the Mexican detour, the movie is unquestionably bleak and looks to be a commentary on the follies of the rich, and how they can be brought down to the level of the paupers they ignore. Right? Not exactly. After Nicholas gets back to the city, he tracks down the people who put him in the ‘game’ and puts them at gunpoint, especially the traitorous Christine, who suddenly gets very hesitant and jumpy…

The plot twist is finally revealed – the whole thing has been a huge set-up for Nicholas’s birthday party! Nothing that has happened is real at all, or at the very least, is dangerous at all. The entire movie has basically been a big joke. This is not a comedic film, nor has it given you any real context or set-up for what it does at the ending, so really it becomes an incredibly bizarre film that plays with its audience like nothing else I’ve ever seen. It becomes funny by virtue of being so out-of-left-field, so surreal. The whole film was previously set up on nail-biting suspense and outrageous tension – until the ending reveals it all to be a big farce. This is really a brilliant way to take the piss out of the audience’s expectations. I can understand why some people hate it, but really it’s great by virtue of just coming out of nowhere! This is an ending nobody would ever expect, and for that it is genius. Wry, tongue-in-cheek, whimsical genius, yes, but genius all the same. Hats off to Fincher for another winner of a movie.

All images copyright of their original owners. I do not own any of them.