Where to begin? I am so sorry I saw this film, but even more, I am irritated that they squandered such a cool idea for a movie. Basically, Vikings come to the New World, slaughter a slew of Native Canadians, for reasons unclear. A Viking lad (called, apparently, Ghost) gets left behind and, Tarzan-like, is raised by the morally superior “savages” before his people come back and – wait, guess who is his adoptive family’s only hope? That plotline isn’t even the bad part.

Pathfinder’s crimes, in no particular order, are:

1. No one is named by anyone, so characters blur together

2. Sets feel small, fake, and temporary

3. Culture shock is taken with stride, which is insanely ridiculous

4. Motivation is non-existent on all sides (besides of course, try not to die)

5. Dialogue and scenes are choppy and sloppy

6. It’s so obviously British Columbia and not the eastern shores that they might as well not even pretend otherwise

7. Boooooooooooooring

8. Drags interminably

9. Literally took one hour and 25 minutes of its “only” 99 minutes to begin the plot arc that one actually can get invested in

10. Made my companion feel claustrophobic despite the admittedly gorgeous Pacific Northwest scenery and all-outdoor setting.

11. Reinforced cinematic stereotype that the oppressed ethnic peoples of the world need the white man to save them, even when they are morally superior

I was so irritated that I paid money to see this that I snuck into two movies afterward to feel better about my investment. How cool it would have been to explore the notion of Native Canadians seeing metal and horses and ships and the scary armored, bearded, tall, pale monsters of Scandinavia for the first time. How interesting to take a 15 year old Viking boy and make him a fish out of water with a hunter-gatherer society not bent on conquest! How archaeologically satisfying it would be to explain the dearth of Viking artifacts despite their apparent insatiable thirst for Native blood and liberal use of metal arrows?

I don’t understand how the screenwriter for Night Watch (which is amazing) and this movie can be the same person, Laeta Kalogridis. I know studios can mess with a script and render it terrible and unwatchable, but this is not just studio muddling. You’ve Got Mail is studio muddling. This is…ugh.

Poor Karl Urban! His acting is fine, he had emotions and could do great physical stuff and looked good in the role, but talk about your pigeonholing (Lord of the Rings, Doom). Surely Moon Bloodgood (Eight Below) and Russell Means (just check out his heap big Indian resume on imdb.com) can find a better way to advocate for their nations than this? Oh jeez this movie was so effing boring! Not even the production design could save it. Save your money!

MPAA Rating R-strong brutal violence throughout
Release date 4/13/07
Time in minutes 99
Director Marcus Nispel
Studio 20th Century Fox

See what I do for you people? I suffer, so that you might live. Ever catch a family member sniffing your underwear? I haven’t either, but I suspect it feels something like how I felt leaving the theatre. Filthy, inappropriate, violated, and over all, uncomprehending of the appeal. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into when I went in; I’d seen the grating previews with the wildly un-Seuss-like humor, squat Mike Myers cat, and flat jokes. They wouldn’t use the worst bits in the preview, would they? Well, for the editors, I suspect it was like trying to decide which vegetables in the crisper were the least slimy. Nothing worked, it was embarrassing to watch. My most positive and tolerant companion (would you believe I found two to go?) laughed twice. Run, Dakota Fanning, run!

I loved The Grinch (also Seuss, also Imagine Entertainment and also produced by Brian Grazer) – and I caught some flack for that, accused of being hypnotized by the production design (and this was back before I worshipped Jim Carrey). Well, this seals it: the Grinch rocks and the Prat in the Crap stinks. The comparisons are inevitable; same beloved author, same whimiscal imagery to draw from, same production company… Sad to say, I can’t even lay all the blame on Mike Myers (unless the terrifying and inappropriate bits were all his, and he defied cooler heads advising him to do differently – not unlike what I suspect happened with Goldmember.) but I am happy to, since he had the power to make it less…grating.

If you’ve seen the preview (and if you have seen any electronic media in the past six months, how could you not), you have seen a surprisingly large chunk of the film – much more so than you can even imagine. But did you know Alec Baldwin is in it? Although his character is misused and poorly defined, Alec can bring a twinkle into any scene he’s in, as can Sean Hayes (in dual roles as Mom’s Boss and the voice of the fish). But their twinkles cannot save us from the malevolent, abritrary, improper, and unpleasant Cat. In a film marketed to children, should we talk about “laying off the sauce,” especially when it cannot be “re-interpreted” as say, laying off the Hershey’s chocolate sauce – when it’s merely an admonition to a 10 year old to quit drinking booze? Where did that come from? And it’s not like the adults would find it funny, it’s just – disjointed.

Yes, the real Cat is an agent of chaos and disorder and fun (if you do it right), but this Cat is a mugging, selfish bastard who has no joy in his wackiness. His randomness is not funny, it’s just…wrong, it’s malevolent, it’s adult in creepy ways. The digressions (again, like the character of Goldmember) seemingly were designed only to annoy. The self-indulgence is painful to watch. And the Bert Lahr/Brooklyn thing is not Bugs Bunny sassy but Kawfee Tawk Lady hateful. Oh and he’s a Seuss icon who *can’t rhyme.* He wants the “pull an anvil out of my pants” absurdity of the Warner Brothers cartoons but instead it’s a painful prop-comic-who-opens-for-Gallagher wince-fest.

The kids seem utterly terrorized and unhappy at every turn, and yet invisible paws shape their mouths into dialogue like “this is awesome!” They are reacting as they should, in frustration, horror, fury, disgust, and yet somehow at the horribly unsatisfying end, they get Stockholm Syndrome and love the Cat. I know I don’t do spoilers, but believe me, nothing could spoil this movie.

The genuinely fantastic production design crew (led by Aex McDowell who also designed Fight Club and Minority Report) does a brilliant job making a cartoon world. Painfully, when the house goes all flooey thanks to some kind of time space twisty dealio that comes from the Things’ boxes (I don’t know, you see it in the preview), what happens is the kids and Cat move through it like a ride, not interacting with anything, not *using* the house’s deformity in any kind of plot way, just la la la looking at it and then – and this was my muttered joke one second before it was on screen – PLUGGING THE (inevitable) UNIVERSAL STUDIOS RIDE. What a waste of the talents of the art department, but let’s give them a hand! (And that perfectly fab purple sticky stuff was cool too.) Inexcusably, director Bo Welch is a long-time production designer and art director, so he should have known to use the marvelous creations his crew developed.

Now, the rash of product cross marketing with the Cat has been embarrassing at most: Citibank, AMC, Burger King, Jif, Pespi, Smuckers, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, Kraft, and, for the kids, Febreze, Dawn, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Cascade, RayOVac, and the US Postal Service (Thanks, KD!). Oh yeah and if you see a car not made by Ford in this movie, let me know. It’s disgusting and depraved, and now I can’t even look upon the original without its being tainted by this abomination. Argh!

MPAA Rating PG
Release date 11/26/03
Time in minutes 82
Director Bo Welch
Studio Universal & Dreamworks

My friend was not hired to work on this film so I was feeling negative about it – but now I am grateful he is saved from the besmirchment and humiliation (not to mention actually having to handle the stuff!) I really enjoyed the first Spy Kids, and to a degree the second one, for their childlike sense of fun and wonder and joy. This movie infuriated me, insulted me, bored me, and depressed me. The nice lady who organizes the screenings asked me afterwards what I thought, and I could only grin grimly. “It is what it is, huh,” she laughed. I was too polite to say, “And it wasn’t even that!” (Sorry MBG)

Spy Kids 3D focuses (as much as one can focus with a red/green anaglyph style 3D movie) mostly on Chuni, who has inexplicably abandoned his OSS family and spy life and is instead a self-employed PI at age 10 or so. Uh huh. OK. Well, so he goes to rescue his (always more capable) sister from a devious video game that traps kids’ minds so that…uh…wait, I think it was the Toymaker (Sylvester “Slumming” Stallone) can begin the roots movement of his world domination plot. Seriously. Anyway, I don’t expect mind-bending plot when I see a movie like this, but it’s the execution more than the idea. It’s like Tron gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The script is simply awful. The story is less cohesive (or engaging or amusing) than the queue preshow of a theme park ride. Some of the game punks that Chuni meets in the game (called Game Over in a poor marketing move) are giving abysmal line readings. I don’t know if it’s a smaller acting pool in Austin or if it’s just Phantom Menace Syndrome (bad script + no actual setting = wooden delivery) but icch! The dialogue is insulting, worse than a backyard play. The Tron rip-offs are plentiful and painful. Take everything you (or I) hated about Phantom Menace, throw in an overexcited score, and then have the illegitimate child of The Mummy Returns and Space Jam do the computer work.

I was too bored to be properly angry, and too disgusted to be properly lulled to sleep. Even the room full of kids I was with wanted nothing to do with it. Free posters littered the floor after the show was over.

Small favors:

1. The time spent in the painful old school 3D glasses is not the whole time. (Hello!
Polarized glasses, anyone? Wave of the recent past!)

2. All the actors from the first two movies show up at the end to generate applause (they practically have a laugh track at this point) but they serve no useful purpose.

While it is always great to see Austin (and Schlitterbahn!) on the big screen, not even that was enough to lower my terror alert level to boiling. Ugh. Painful.

Robert Rodriguez, indie paragon and inspiration to those struggling filmmakers (especially Tex-Mex ones) willing to phlebotomize themselves into finished productions, has done much more than make a worthless sequel to two fun, love-your-inner-child adventure movies. He has betrayed all of those who hope for a budget like his, who work for the recognition and freedom he now enjoys. He spoke to the child within us all, and now he has slapped that child in the face. He hadn’t sold his soul remaking El Mariachi into Desperado, or even making Spy Kids 2; but now he has. What happened to the craft, Robert? Back when Sphere’s budget would have bought 8,571 El Mariachi’s with change to spare, his was a voice that said “all that matters is the story” and he delivered. Now he is worse than the film whores he envied from his drafting table at the Daily Texan, and is no longer the Rebel Without a Crew (check the SK 3D: GO credits) that he wrote as. Shame on you, Robert. You lost your heart, your hand, and your eye, and now you will have to work twice as hard.

I will still see Once Upon A Time in Mexico (how could I not?) but no longer will I assume he is a safe bet.

MPAA Rating PG
Release date 7/25/03
Time in minutes 89
Director Robert Rodriguez
Studio Dimension Films

Based on the video game series, Ballistic appears to have been intended for the raging youth demographic. Casting Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu was, theoretically, to draw in the regular people. Banderas is Ecks and Liu is Sever (this takes 40 minutes for the movie to “explain”) and they do go ballistic, so the title is not at all misleading, however much it may be off-putting. An aggressive, guitar-frenzy of rock soundtrack underscores generally motivation-free verbs. Trust your gut: Skip this film.

I like an action film as much if not more than the next gal, but I do require the barest minimum level of effort to make it not completely boring and/or confusing. The opening drips TV B movie cheese, but I can look past that. There is a lot of mysterious running around and shadowy behavior at the beginning (nicely lit, I do admit, though generally dark), which I suppose was meant to hook my interest. Soon, however, my interest was lost. When? I can’t say immediately, because there was so much confusing and conflicting information thrown at me (with spare, messy dialogue) that I gave up.

Then enters an incredibly boring, painful, witless sequence that starts all gunplay gunplay gunplay (Who’s shooting who? Who’s the bad guy?), and ends up in a painfully boring car chase chase chase chase…I actually dozed off for a second despite the din. Then BLAMMO – a big explosion, another big explosion, a decent car stunt, and yawns all around. Even the parts that evoke my favorite things about Area 51 (destroying property) don’t yield any satisfaction – no secret rooms as payoff!

I’m not jaded. I don’t need movies like XXX to push the boundaries of “action sequences,” I just need good filmmakers to make the action interesting and exciting (see upcoming review of The Transporter). Honestly! Then more of the same until my male action-film-loving companion was begging us to leave. There was one cool fall that I will spoil for you – the camera follows the victim all the way down, from above, close range, through the smash into the top of the car. That is worth a dime in a Cineola but nothing more. A decently choreographed two-person fist/knife fight at the end starts in a promising fashion, but as with the whole movie, peters into a sad, dull mess.

Lucy Liu doesn’t speak for almost 45 minutes and when she does she is veiled and curt. Liu is pigeonholing herself as a cold-blooded woman who’s “hard to know,” and it’s not doing much for my interest in her career. Even Ling cried on Ally McBeal once. Banderas is scarred and blasé about danger, and well, hell, he has no character either. I don’t expect much, as I’ve mentioned, but I expect something. The editing was no help either – locations were confusing, characters’ allegiances and their motivations were confusing (and not in the way they were in Gosford Park, either, I mean). Some moments were surprisingly inept. A golden sunset (composite) but cool blue light on the face of the person, for example.

We should have known when we saw that it was directed and produced by someone called KAOS. If only Maxwell Smart had been here to foil KAOS yet again…

MPAA Rating R for strong violence
Release date 9/20/02
Time in minutes 91
Director Kaos (no, really)
Studio Warner Brothers

Predictably, I hated this movie. No one who knows my tastes would be surprised by this statement, except for the fact that I saw it at all. However, what I found most irksome was not the inherent 60-70% unwatchability of the film, but the other 30-40% that was actually funny. Beyoncé Knowles and Michael Caine are the high points of the film.

The Austin Powers oeuvre has been marked with a gravely unfortunate dichotomy: these guys actually do have good ideas, and the capability of carrying them out. When the trilogy is actually spoofing the spy genre and the swinging 60′s British sexy beast genre, they hit most of the time. Occasional other jokes also happen to score, just by statistics. But then the films are (increasingly) crippled by the terrible, pointless, lame stuff that honestly ruins everything. My companion wisely noted that if you took all 3 movies, snipped out all but the good bits, you would have a very, very funny movie (albeit a short one). This is worst of all.

Imagine a bowl of greasy slimy icky fried okra, or brussels sprouts, or some other distasteful, slimy food. Raw escargot. Then sprinkle in some truffles, or some maraschino cherries, or some such treat. Stir. This is the Austin Powers film experience. For every brilliant moment (for example, casting Michael Caine as Austin’s father), there are nuggets of blecch barring your finding it. It makes it not worth the effort of digging out the truffles; and when you do, they are soiled by association. Do I need to mention that the gags (good and bad) go on and on and on?

Readers who know me know I can find humor in the puerile, the scatalogical, and even the absurd. I don’t require much more than just not to be bored and/or insulted when it comes to comedy. I was so furious when I left the theatre that again I was inundated with pointless, random, unfocused yap and poop jokes that don’t even make sense. At least the sheer, unbridled crassness of the American Pie school of filmmaking serves the story. What is the purpose of the ancient, been there done that penis jokes during a scene that we should be worrying about our hero being discovered?

The best thing about the film is the opening, which I won’t ruin for you, but seriously, as soon as we get to Evil’s lair, just bug out of there. Dr. Evil was always my favorite of the characters (bless him for not mugging as much as the rest of them) but he has fallen prey to the “what are they talking about?” joke machine. And don’t get me started on the character of Goldmember, who was pointlessly weird and gross (unlike Fat Bastard, who had a point to being weird and gross). Gags that even post-To Be Or Not To Be Mel Brooks gave up on in the 1980′s are all over the screen as if Mel had never existed – or done them better. The pacing makes Spaceballs look like Ace Ventura.

If they insist on continuing to make these movies, they should stick with the spy stuff and even the time travel stuff – more Peter York and Robert Wagner and less Mini Me and Ad Nauseum. It’s horrible to see the intelligence shimmering behind the poopy.

MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 7/26/02
Time in minutes 93
Director Jay Roach
Studio New Line Cinema

While it may seem petty, in light of this week’s events, to decry this movie as an abomination, well, that is what it felt like sitting in the theatre. The Musketeer starts out in an average enough fashion, with slightly wooden dialogue, Tim Roth over acting, super tight shots of abrupt movements. Then, an appalling 1970′s student film takes over for the opening credits. Apparently paying Xin Xin Xiong (the fight choreographer, whose name was the only one billed in the previews) left no cash for the titles. My companions giggled uncomfortably during the weird and horrible early 80′s TV movie titles. Still, chin up, we will survive this – and besides, the teaser portion of the movie looked just fine. Key word: Looked. Please note the past tense.

Then the movie reverted back to normal. The sucking began slowly, gradually, imperceptibly. An out of focus shot here, an overly dark action sequence there, inexplicable behavior and silly dialogue scattered like breadcrumbs in the dark woods. It was still the first real scene in the film, it could just have been a ham-handed bid at mystery.

The first fight scene is elaborate, almost cartoonish in its fifty-moves-where-one-will-do, with fingerhold balance absurdity. Impressive hiding of the wires, however – it was so dark in this scene they could have been suspended from nautical ropes. Was it dark? You bet – the almost totally Asian stunt team (according to the credits) probably did not resemble their white French Gallic patrician characters very much, so the director opts for a muddy too-close soup of stupidity.

The director, Peter Hyams, is also the cinematographer (in a low attempt to be Robert Rodriguez, I suppose) and his name set off clanging Notre Dame-size bells in my head – but from what? End of Days, that wasn’t so bad (but now that I think about it, it was dark), Timecop – and The Relic. Long the butt of my movie crowd’s derision, The Relic was only used as an object of positive comparison after Phantoms came out. Similarly, The Musketeer is only watchable when compared to the truly unwatchable, like Battlefield Earth. We did have a lot of laughs watching this film, and it is extremely MST3K-friendly, but man is it rank.

Enter the dame, modern American Virgin/Beauty/Pie’s Mena Suvari, whose period acting is comparable to Winona Ryder’s. “Sexual tension” is played as flat wit after being translated into various languages. Then it gets worse. Continuity is non-existent – bad guys disappear when they are dispatched like a Playstation game, and turn up with the same logic-free silliness. By the end we were holding our pounding heads in agony (like Relic companion SJ’s forehead bruise after pounding his fist there repeatedly during that film), rolling our eyes, gasping in horror, and inserting our own superior dialogue. Instead of calling in, say, William Goldman or Carrie Fisher, apparently all the script rewrites were done by Koko (the gorilla) – didn’t Cardinal Richlieu at one point say “drink drink apple me kill D’Artagnan?”

Bad dialogue, dark dark scenes, Stephen Rea & Tim Roth yawning through their scenes, Catherine Deneuve looking like she shot up heroin just to tolerate the job, and D’Artagnan (The Wedding Planner’s Justin Chambers) almost irritatingly serious throughout.

Good points: production design, art department, locations, makeup, wardrobe, all fantastic. The ladder scene (even if it is ridiculous, it’s still extremely cool.)
Bad points: Everything else. The entire movie is a flimsy and needlessly complex construct to justify the admittedly cool ladder scene. FYI: The Ladder Scene is one hour, 45 minutes into the film. Do yourself a favor: buy a ticket to Rat Race, watch these 5 minutes of the Musketeer, and then go see Rat Race.

Hong Kong actioners generally don’t need such dense and elaborate plots to show off cool fight choreography. The Must-Not-Hear is low on fights, big on badly explained 17th century French politics, and long on suck. The HTML code on the home page for The Musketeer would be a better screenplay.

MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 9/7/01
Time in minutes 104
Director Peter Hyams
Studio Universal

Of course I knew this movie would not please me. I knew it the first time I saw the preview. I got a screener in the mail, I was home sick, what could I do? But I had no idea I would be so pissed at how unacceptable this movie is as “entertainment.” The opening shot traditionally sets the tone for the movie it opens, and in this case that tone-setting shot is an elderly lady having a speculum inserted while she chats awkwardly with her unseen physician. The tone: “off-putting.” It only goes downhill from there.

Marketed as a gynecological light comedy, the film never gets around to telling us what is supposed to be so funny. Is it that he’s a successful gynecologist but can’t cure his troubled wife? Side-splitting! Or is it that he’s a popular gyno because he’s “handsome,” insofar as Richard Gere can be considered handsome? Knee-slapper! It was written by a woman, so I thought perhaps it would be about the amusing dynamics between different women, but instead it was about a man’s inability to fathom the women around him, despite having a medical degree pertaining to their nether regions. Haw haw haw! Oh, and there is poor Shelly Long and Robert “Airplane!” Hayes too, not helping.

Director Robert Altman does his trademark layered dialogue here, which works sometimes (setting a realistic mood) and not other times (failure to establish a sense of actual story). All the women are blonde and fluffy, until Liv Tyler oozes on screen, and then what? Nothing. When I (against policy) try to explain the story to someone to illustrate how disgruntled I am about the lack of story, I get all worked up in a lather because not even a quick synopsis makes it sound like it’s about anything – it’s 17 words short of a 25 word pitch. “Handsome male gynecologist and the women in his life.” Note the lack of verbs. Gere can’t even do anything himself to save it, as he, the lead, is reduced to a reactionary role, whose only advancing actions serve to make us feel less sympathetic to him.

Helen Hunt breezes through this movie as if unaware of the rest of the film or the actual role Gere is playing, (worried husband) so it’s not her fault. She also gets most of the opportunities to repeat the central metaphor, er, image, er, fantasy, which is essentially “look out for women and water” and which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Redemption for Gere is a boy and a desert, but even though the symbolism is broadly drawn, it symbolizes nothing – what about women and water? Dangerous, wonderful, inextricable? Oh, and redemption from what?

Really, the funniest part of the movie (for me, for it was a screener copy) was the subtitle “For Your Consideration.” I will say this – the filmmakers did two things right: the sweet, sad (possibly inappropriate) music of Lyle Lovett is a keeper, and all depictions of Texas weather – the skies, the sound, the instant rivulets on the sidewalks, the Magnolia-esque weather surprise near the end, it’s all executed well. But that does not make a movie. It’s a bummer, it’s got no story arc, the lead is unsympathetic and uninteresting, and the women characters are a wee bit over the top as well. Hestia syndrome? Whatever.

Skip this one, as if you didn’t already.

MPAA Rating R for graphic nudity and some sexuality.
Release date 10/3/00
Time in minutes 122
Director Robert Altman
Studio Artisan Entertainment

Stinkaroo! A long-anticipated film (due to the enormous popularity of the 1970′s novel by famed Thetan L. Ron Hubbard), Battlefield Earth is a disappointing mishmash of crap, silliness, unintentional hilarity, and – for goodness’ sake – embarrassing performances. Barry Pepper, a man genetically designed to play an urban cop kind of character, does the best he can with the material he’s given. John Travolta did not surprise me one whit. As a long-time Travolta detractor, even I had to admit that nothing Travolta could have done would have saved this movie – I mean, I could blame almost nothing on him. Except letting it happen! He’s down with Hubbard, he could have stopped it, somehow? Couldn’t he? It must be a testament to the spiritual bandaid of Scientology that the whole cast did not commit suicide after seeing this movie.

But wait! The actors get a script, they read it, they learn it, they perform it in front of a camera. Clearly, at no point did anyone say, “Man, this is a steaming pile of hangover dung – why don’t we fix it?” My fans know well how little I liked Phantom Menace; well, folks, this has just supplanted it as my mockery target of 2000. I struggled, looking for reasons to like the movie. The aliens were totally Klingon knockoffs, complete with butt-cheek print heads, glarf-krox-narf-blag language, and unending double dealing, hostility, and hubris, but without all the code-of-honor business that makes the Klingons more fully two dimensional. Oh did I mention they are called Psychlos? I mean, COME ON! If your 6 year old kid sister put on a play in the living room about evil aliens she would come up with a better name. This is Hubbard’s fault, of course, but couldn’t at least his errors have been glossed over? Heaven knows GOOD books are destroyed by Hollywood, why not BAD ones? I have been told the novel is quite good, actually, but I was also advised it should never be a movie. I could *not* agree more.

The execrable dialogue was pre-Planet of the Apes bad camp. The makeup was all Apes too, actually, not as good. Rubbery hands rest awkwardly on hips and table tops – gestures reduced to a minimum so the wobbling, claw-nailed hands won’t look as obviously fake. The man-animals with whom I saw the film cracked some seriously good jokes and I was in stitches the last half of the movie. If only I could have been in traction, elsewhere! The only real benefit to having seen this movie is to get to mock it, crucify it, murder it! Oh, to think what Charleton Heston could have done in that mountain gorilla suit instead of Forrest Whittaker! I noted that the production crew names flashing in the opening credits were largely unfamiliar to me (and I pay attention to that stuff). I don’t even want to generate a hit to the IMDB site to find out who they are, I am so offended by this movie. You should check out the alternate movie poster in Entertainment Weekly (May 26, 2000, page 9) – it quotes reviewers much in the same way the Saving Private Ryan poster did…oh, but without all those stars and raves. Very funny.

I will grant that the film had cool ships, decent sound design, and there was a nice glass-breaking sequence (FX-wise). Barry Pepper looks pretty good with long hair. I thought the set dressers did a nice job with Earth of the year 3000 (Futurama bubbling away in an alternate universe), but the people on it – oy vey! The simplest things are handled with idiocy – can the man-animals read, or not? If so, keep it that way and don’t let them selectively forget to read when confronted with important information later. If not, then for all that is holy don’t let them learn how in a week! Never mind all the other stuff they learned in a week. Never mind all the other stupid awful terrible things inflicted upon this unsuspecting reporter!

I have to feel sorry for the cast at the big red carpet premiere – of course everyone shows up with their friends and so on, proud and excited about all this work that they did – and then to have to sit there in the audience and pretend they wouldn’t rather be getting a high colonic from Dr. Kevorkian – I mean, poor Kelly Preston! “Oh honey I loved your movie!”

If you see this movie anyway, don’t blame me. I am encouraging you not only to skip this movie, but to knock over tie-in displays in stores. And as a reviewer I deeply admire said, don’t worry about the extended warranty plan on your Harrier jet.

MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 5/12/00
Time in minutes 130
Director Roger Christian
Studio Warner Brothers

This is a terrible, horrible film, a big-budget student film with stupidity and insipidity written all over it. AOL Keyword: Suck. Imagine Ice-T, suspended by his ankles and sliding along a cable suspended from the ceiling, in the line of fire, spinning and shooting his guns. This was supposed to be the moment when people go, “Wow, bad ass.” Instead, the meager audience, weary from groaning and giggling and snorting with derision for two hours, laugh out loud, so desperate are they for entertainment in this wasteland of awfulness. Even Las Vegas isn’t this cheesy.

Yeah, I knew Kevin Costner was in it. I knew the rest of the cast was not enough to make up for Costner’s inherent shoddiness factor, but I had no idea the movie could fail on so many levels! The first five minutes is a rock and roll video of two CGI scorpions in a weird, video-game-like battle to their mutual plastic deaths. Very, very telling. Bookending the film is a freakodopolis curtain call of Kurt Russell singing an Elvis number with a music video montage of shots from the movie, and the actors (most of whom are dead by the time the film ends) grinning and waving guns in front of accelerated shots of Las Vegas.

The soundtrack is weird – the idea (a casino robbery by a group of guys dressed as Elvis during an Elvis convention) is almost too thin for a Saturday Night Live sketch (which, if made, would only feel half as long). It’s White Trash and Two Smoking Barrels, i.e. Demian Lichtenstein saw that movie and said, “neat,” but forgot the part about story, acting, character, or dialogue. So we have some unnecessarily cool zooms and cuts on things that aren’t very important, a precocious child with a future in crime, and Courteney Cox Arquette rethinking her entire career. The high part of the film is Kevin Pollack and Thomas Haden Church as (gulp) Federal agents. That’s all – they don’t actually do anything, but the scenes in which they are allowed to speak are almost as good as a Shannon Tweed film festival.

It’s an indiscriminate little-boy shoot-em up joyride through nothing, culminating in a poorly-executed sort-of movie that also features Howie Long. Why would anyone go to see this film? I saw it, frankly, because it opened. It’s weak. It’s boring. It’s laughably stupid. At times (see aforementioned Church and Pollack, also Jon Lovitz) I thought, “Well, I could give this a Catch It On Network TV rating” which gives no money to the studio but gives you something to laugh about with your friends; the problem is, the networks would cut out the only “good” parts, i.e. the strong violence, the sex, and the cussing. It’s rank and wretched and I have a lot of making-up to do with my companion, who was shaken and angered by the horribly insulting loss of time from his life. And they don’t even go to Graceland. Sheesh!

MPAA Rating R-STRONG violence sexuality language
Release date 2/3/00
Time in minutes 125
Director Demian Lichtenstein
Studio Warner Brothers

What? Are you surprised? Surprised I even went to go see it? OK, here’s the deal. We wanted to see another movie to lighten the air after The Green Mile (which is very good but obviously intoxicated us), so we chose this instead of Toy Story 2 (which is fantastic). I expected very little, as I always do, but I got quite a bit less. Gone is the humor potential of the film by most of the decent jokes being shown a hundred times in the preview. Gone is the hope that it will be silly, raunchy fun along the lines of Something About Mary when they cast no one else to support Rob Schneider. Yes, we laughed begrudgingly a couple of times. Other times, other people in the audience laughed while we stared, saddened and vaguely furious that we hadn’t snuck in. One of my companions (the deciding vote in the film selection – NOT THAT I AM BLAMING YOU!) was extremely apologetic and fearful of my wrath. Not so – I expected exactly what I got which was a steaming pile of dull, witless antics with humor that South Park fans would find simplistic and puerile.

Rob Schneider, for all his career mistakes, does have one thing, well, two. He has that great, dead-eyed expression which makes him look like an idiot, but when he then does something clever or reacts belatedly to something, it’s good plain old slapstick acting. He is the king (or the man-queen, in Deuce parlance) of the unmoving-head doubletake. The other things he does (besides whine) is pull off a sincere nice guy, an everyman who appreciates that he doesn’t get much good in life and therefore when he does, we can really see that he appreciates it. If only he were given decent material, he might actually save himself from Deuce Deuce: The Man-Whore returns.

Surreally scary is William Forsythe as some poorly explained cop character, who is really just an excuse for some penis talk in a movie, about gigolos, mind you, almost utterly devoid of sex. The other decent thing about this movie (which still does not make it worthy of recommendation) is the fact that Rob’s character actually does some good and extends a message – granted, a message on how to get in good with women, but a sincere one. Like, with tolerance and kindness and stuff. But it doesn’t, you know, make the movie any funnier. The worst part was seeing gags that could have worked, even would have worked, but then crashed and burned. Nothing is depressing about seeing a pie in the face gag flop – you don’t expect it to work. But when a moderately original idea, executed so badly that it just eliminates all hope of someone else trying it and succeeding, that makes it the most painful.

The internet movie database helpfully notes, “If you like this title, we also recommend…Election.” By all means, just go rent Election (an odd recommendation, really, seems like Night at The Roxbury or Kingpin would be more the companion piece to this dreck) – Election is marvelous. And, if memory serves, there is much more nudity.

MPAA Rating R for sexual content, language, and crude humor.
Release date 12/10/99
Time in minutes 88
Director Mike Mitchell
Studio Touchstone Pictures