Vin Diesel and Michelle Yeoh continue to squander their potential by starring in this nonsensical jumble of science fiction about a grizzled mercenary hired to smuggle a girl from a Central Asian convent into New York in the near and dystopian future. Babylon A.D. is aggressively worthless Even those seeking a quick fix of scifi and action will have even the lowest of expectations squashed. It is an astonishingly vague and joyless movie with a monotone script that feels like filler, intended to be inserted into a better movie. What little action there was is uninspired and lackluster. There are no jokes of any kind. There are no interesting characters, intriguing moments or clear motivations. I generally understand that the movie had something to do with saving the world, but honestly could not tell you if the world was successfully saved or not. My 90 minutes, I can tell you, are lost and gone forever.
Posts Tagged adventure
Babylon A.D.
Jan 10
Sherlock Holmes
Jan 1
Sherlock suffers from the delusion that if you squint hard enough, its titular literary character kinda-sorta resembles the Tony Stark of Scotland Yard. The result is an impotently indecisive movie: cowardly with its desperate overseasoning of the fiction with non-sequitur martial arts and love interests, but too talky and long (2.5 hours) to be proper popcorn. I won’t praise Robert Downey Jr.’s quirky performance as Holmes because I’ve seen him (and Johnny Depp) play this part a million times already. And everyone else is boring and forgettable.
The story is the expected hackwork involving secret societies bent on vague world domination. Those looking for a clever mystery should flee. Instead of proper clues, twists or solutions, Sherlock hides behind the lazy and arcane trivium straight out of 1960’s Batman. That plant produces a little-known toxin, don’t you know?
Sherlock is not offensively bad. But it is such a wasted opportunity that it is offensively average.
Avatar (Real-D 3-D)
Jan 1
James Cameron directs an ambitious science fiction epic about human efforts to wrest mineral-rich deposits from the tribal denizens of a jungle planet, called Pandora. Critics of Avatar will note that its ambitions are limited to its visuals and that the story never diverges from its archetypal roots: there is an earnest human soldier and a fierce warrior princess; there is an aggro human general for whom explosives solve all conflict; and there are “spirit trees.” Strictly speaking, the criticism is not misplaced: every beat of the story can be predicted by anyone paying marginal attention, and the characterizations are paper thin.
But while we have seen this story before, we have never seen it like this. Avatar depicts Pandora with an unprecedented level of visual richness; it never feels like a slapdash of expensive computer-generated effects. Go see Avatar because it feels like being transported; you will not to see anything like it for years to come.
The Harry Potter films continue their (generally) upward quality trend. The cuts keep getting smarter. By dropping the least endearing bits of the series, the lengthy book is condensed to an easy 2.5 hours. Only the purest Harry Potter nerds will mourn the loss of Harry’s previously obligatory self-pity. Some will retch at the teen soap opera that takes center stage, but again, the cuts “keep it light,” retaining the cute moments of affection, but dropping the burdensome angst that went along with it in the books and prior films. This is my favorite Potter thus far.
But all of the above is irrelevant because, by now, the sorting has has already placed you into one camp or the other: You are either Someone Who Watches Harry Potter Movies or you are Someone Who Does Not Watch Harry Potter Movies. If you skipped the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, the Prisoner of Azkaban, the Goblet of Fire and the Order of the Phoenix, you will not make time for the penultimate chapter. But if you have followed Harry, Ron and Hermione through a five movie journey, stop kidding yourself: You will watch The Half Blood Prince and the remaining two films as well.