[REVIEW] The Expendables
I will freely admit that I’m a Sylvester Stallone fan. When I was a much younger man I used to groove on Rambo: First Blood, Part II and Rocky IV with a perhaps inappropriate level of intensity. Cobra was the last film of Stallone’s ’80s period that I can honestly say I enjoyed. The other stuff (the comedies especially) can go to hell.
Stallone’s had something of a renaissance in recent years, starting with the excellent Rocky Balboa and continuing into the bloody, uncompromising Rambo. So I looked forward to his next venture, The Expendables, with some excitement. Now that he’d done such a great job closing the books on his two most famous characters, what would he do with something original?
I felt even more favorably about The Expendables when cast details began to emerge. Favorite names from action movies current and past surfaced. Jason Statham. Jet Li. Dolph Lundgren. “Death From Above” himself! This was going to be good stuff.
I will confess I didn’t go out the first weekend and see The Expendables. I tend not to do that with movies, so they win or lose their box office race without my help. The Expendables hit #1, which was definitely good news for Stallone and Company, but in the extra time that lapsed I began to hear things about the movie that gave me pause.
[REVIEW] Alien vs. Hunter
I owe the makers of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem a heartfelt apology. You see, in my review of that film, I described Requiem as a very, very bad movie that I would recommend to no one. I said this, now I understand, because I lacked the appropriate context to make such a statement. You see, I hadn’t yet seen Alien vs. Hunter.
I can say without fear of contradiction that you will see no worse an Alien or Predator or Alien/Predator knockoff than Alien vs. Hunter. Oh, you can look as hard as you can and turn over a lot of stones, but you aren’t going to find something equally bad. Not even close. Those folks who laughingly discount Plan 9 From Outer Space as being the worst film ever made have not seen Alien vs. Hunter, or they would surely change their minds. It really is that awful.
To a certain extent this is to be expected. Alien vs. Hunter comes from production house The Asylum, whose primary claim to fame is their capacity to churn out “mockbusters,” movies that hew closely to the model of some popular film title, only with a tiny fragment of the budget and little attention paid to the finer points of moviemaking. So you get stuff like Snakes on the Train or Transmorphers. I’m not sure who they’re fooling, but their stuff does tend to show up on SyFy a lot.
So Alien vs. Hunter has a strike against it from the get go. Maybe even several strikes, as the production is likely to be as abysmal as the screenplay. Populate the cast with has-beens and never-weres and you’re ready to start filming a microscopically budgeted knockoff of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. I guess.
[REVIEW] Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
Holy moley does this movie suck. I’m not even sure I have it in me to spend 500 words talking about much it sucks, but I’m going to give it my best shot. I owe Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem no less.
I said yesterday that Alien vs. Predator was a well-intentioned semi-failure of a film that never rose to its own potential. Despite that, I kind of like it and will probably watch it again. I’ve seen Requiem twice now and I can say without fear of contradiction that I will never watch it again. Only viewing the movie with the commentary of Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis on made the film tolerable the second time through. It’s just that bad.
The movie begins pretty much right where Paul W.S. Anderson’s left off. For those of you who’ve seen that film, you know that it ends with a chestburster emerging from the dead body of the lead Predator, displaying some of the traits of the Predator already. What happens then is actually pretty stupid, but then you can say that of most of Requiem. Anyway, somehow the chestburster gets aboard a Predator ship that’s headed back to Earth for reasons unknown. Following the rapid development cycle I complained about in the last film, the PredAlien matures to full size in the blink of an eye and kills everyone aboard the ship, forcing a crash landing in the mountains of Colorado. And did I mention that the ship is inexplicably loaded with facehuggers? Well it is.
What follows is a slow infestation of a small town by Aliens, led by the goofy-looking PredAlien. And when I say goofy-looking, I mean that. The PredAlien looks like someone’s Alien knock-off for a movie like Alien vs. Hunter and it never looks good under any lighting or at any point during the entire film.
[REVIEW] Alien vs. Predator
At risk of giving away the whole ball of wax in the first paragraph of my review, I can say this: I’ve now seen Alien vs. Predator four times and I can safely say it’s not a good movie. It is, however, a better movie than I gave it credit for the first time I watched it, which is saying something.
It all started with Dark Horse Comics. Looking for a comic idea with crossover potential with another company (like Hulk versus Superman or something like that), they decided to mix two of their own licenses to create something excellent. See my review of the Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus, Vol. 1 for more on that. The idea was carried forward on the set of Predator 2, when an alien skull was placed among the trophies aboard the Predator ship at the climax of the picture. With the success of the Aliens vs. Predator comics, it would seem natural that Hollywood would take an interest.
What’s surprising is how long it took for 20th Century Fox to do a film take on the pairing. The ball started rolling with screenwriter Peter Briggs’ adaptation of the original Aliens vs. Predator miniseries. The screenplay was really quite good, but I think Fox wanted to go cheaper and thus began a process whereby more than 40 different filmmakers and screenwriters pitched their ideas. The winning bid was placed by writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson, who’d made Resident Evil, among other things.
Anderson’s idea put the action on contemporary Earth, not a distant space colony, and involved just a handful of Aliens, humans and Predators. It could all be done on a budget smaller than the one for Alien 3. Set in an underground pyramid in Antarctica (don’t ask), Alien vs. Predator promised and delivered Alien-on-Predator action.
Interestingly enough, the bulk of the movie is taken up by its human characters — including Sanaa Lathan, who’s our Ripley stand-in — and Lance Henriksen. An expedition is geared up to head under the ice to this mysterious pyramid and we spend probably half the film just getting to know the various people involved. These aren’t deep characterizations by any means, but they do demonstrate a willingness to give the human dimension a go before piling on the aliens and slime.
[REVIEW] X-Men Origins: Wolverine — Uncaged Edition
Wolverine — the mutant hero of comics, novels, TV shows and movies — has knives in his hands. Knives in his hands. If you think nobody’s getting seriously cut up when he starts slashing around with those things, you are sorely mistaken. The incredibly long-titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine — Uncaged Edition is a video game that finally shows us what it would be like to be a virtually indestructible, metal-clawed killing machine.
Now it’s worth pointing out that Wolverine has starred in many video games before this one. He’s done everything from platforming to fighting Capcom characters. But this is the first time someone’s actually put two and two together and realized that there was maximum bloodshed to be had if only Wolverine was treated seriously. And this game is oh, so very serious.
From what I understand, work was afoot on Wolverine (as we’ll call it for brevity’s sake) before the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie rolled around. So the game has one foot in the usually lackluster movie-game arena and half in that of a proper game. The character models are based on their movie counterparts and Wolverine is voiced by Hugh Jackman, which is nice, but you get some of the goofier story elements from the film mixed in with what becomes a somewhat uncomfortable retcon of familiar comic book continuity.
Story issues aside — and to be fair, it’s more like a “greatest hits” of the movie than a generic movie tie-in — there’s the bloody gameplay. And it is bloody. That’s the selling point of Wolverine: leaping into the middle of a group of hopelessly outclassed normal-human bad guys and carving them literally limb from limb as the pixelated gore flies. In this game Wolverine is ripping off heads, impaling people on spikes and generally meting out chaos as we always imagined he could if the censors at Marvel Comics weren’t so busy keeping him family-friendly.
