Movie Critics Thread

[The_Black_Sheep]

"Cheapskate Tuesday" was the only reason I needed to watch GI Joe today...

What can I say without giving major spoilers away? Compared to the 1st movie, Retaliation was 100% better. The characters actually reminded me of why I luved Cobra/Joe as a kid. & what about General Joe Colton's house? Negatives? They brought Storm Shadow back to life but they couldn't bring back my two favourite members of Cobra? (the Baroness & Destro) What was the real reason for delaying this movie for a year - to convert it to 3D or to film that Duke/Roadblock playstation scene? & who's gonna be the major villain in the 3rd movie? Serpentor?

[Trent]

Watched GI Joe today and while it was ok, it could have been A LOT better.

[SharkyMcShark]

Written for the website of my gaming clan, but I'll put it here too

A Good Day to Die Hard

Or, a lesson how to make a quick buck while missing the point

(note: this has a spoiler in it. The spoiler is that the bad guy dies at the end of the film. Now that you know that, it isn't a spoiler. With that out of the way...)

One of life's great tribulations is trying to decide how much a sequel should be judged against the body of work from which it sprang as opposed to on its own merits. I call this the Max Payne 3 problem. In the years after the release of the original Die Hard a particular subgenre of action films became known as 'Die Hard clones', or 'Die Hard on a _______'. For example, Air Force One, for my money the best of these clones, was Die Hard on a Plane. There are certain elements involved in Die Hard that were aped not only by the Die Hard sequels but this subgenre of film - a tense, slow build up as the (invariably cash motivated) antagonists position themselves to spring into action, a sophisticated bad guy, a vulnerable, trapped hero who gets beaten within an inch of his life by the end of the film. A Good Day to Die Hard, which I'm just going to call Die Hard 5 from now on guys, ignores basically all of this. That doesn't in itself make it a terrible film, but basically everything else about it does.

So we start the film with John McClane's son Jack, now a CIA agent, getting arrested for trying to assassinate someone in a Russian club. He gets put on trial and basically says he will give false testimony against some dude named Komarov in exchange for a lesser sentence. Meanwhile John McClane boards a plane to Russia more or less just so he can watch, because his son doesn't like him or really want his help. He rocks up at the court room just as a bunch of bombs go off because some nasty men want to kill both Jack and this Komarov guy, but all it does is allow them to escape. It turns out that Komarov (who about 45 seconds before Jack had been willing to sell down the river more or less) has a file that incriminates someone else in whatever scandal was going on there, so they now need to run around town being shot at by European stereotypes while they try to find it. This is all established in the first 25 minutes or so, and to be honest there's not much else except for a final twist. This is a short film, thankfully.

So there's no slow buildup, with the explosions starting about 10 minutes in and not really stopping, and the climactic car chase that so much fuss was made about is about 15 minutes in. This lack of pacing reflects what is my biggest problem with the film - it tries to be 1988's Die Hard in all the really unimportant aesthetic ways and misses the point entirely. The bad guy doesn't get any character development, he's an eloquent well dressed European who dislikes "American cowboys" and is after a payday, and that's basically all the audience needs to know because hey, that character was developed in 20-25 years ago in Die Hard 1 and 3, so why bother devoting time to that in 2013, right? Hey you know what else was cool? That bit at the end of Die Hard where a subdued and disarmed Bruce Willis just started laughing, and then all the bad guys were instantly off guard and laughing with him so he could take them by surprise. I liked that, lets have a bit of that, but not at the end of the film as an absurd punchline to horrible beating that Bruce Willis has taken over the last few hours, lets just drop it randomly in the middle. Oh, and wouldn't it be cool if the bad guy in this died basically the exact same way as the bad guy in Die Hard, with the same camera angle, facial expression and musical score? It is basically like it was written as Die Hard fan fiction by a fan too immature to understand the themes and key conventions underpinning the series, but aware enough to steal some of the unimportant aesthetic fluff which would usually represent a nod to the fans but here seems to be the basis for the entirety of the connection with the rest of the series.

The problems are worsened by the tangibly bad acting, especially by Willis. As with every other aspect of this film except the important ones, Die Hard 5 tries to directly copy Die Hard by having Bruce Willis popping off a series of one liners as the film goes on. I love one liners - a bad pun or two is usually all the emotional fuel I need to get through the day.Here however their delivery is so unbelievably poor that it changes not only your perception of the directing abilities of John Moore (as if the Max Payne film didn't make you think he was shit already, am I right?), but your perception of the character of John McClane himself. An early car chase in the film is punctuated by Willis dropping father-son themed one liners, as if to suggest that tearing up Moscow in a three way van - APC - truck chase is normal father-son fare. However, as with all of the 'witty' 'dialogue' in this film they are delivered under the breath, muttered and barely intelligible, leaving the viewer with the impression not that this is an adrenaline pumping car chase but the actions of a senile old man who doesn't really know what he's doing. Basically Bruce Willis spends most of this film walking around Moscow talking to himself under his breath while perpetrating violence against a variety of Russians, some of whom don't even deserve it. Like a socio-path Mr Magoo.

So there's basically an hour and a half of running through Russia while John tries to rebuild his relationship with his son, the outcome of which is basically his son just accepting that he's a shit dad but is good at "killing scumbags", which is the kind of heart warming character development that I had been hoping would be there, and makes me feel that John McClane is a human character and not basically a walking aimbot/one liner machine. Fortunately this film did not cause me to have to think about the Max Payne 3 problem (see the first paragraph if you've forgotten what that is already). As a Die Hard sequel, disappointing. More importantly, as a film, very very poor. It's just shit across the board.

Score: I told you it's shit, I don't need to put a number here. Don't see this. If you want to see this then watch the trailers a bunch of times, they're a lot more fun than the film.

[5FDP]

I've read some really scathing reviews about the new Die Hard. To say that I'm disappointed would be an understatement