Category: Reckons

Viggo Mortensen putting in a pretty convincing performance as a Russian gangster in London.

Dude goes balls out, and I meant that entirely literally – if you’ve ever wanted to see Viggo’s skinny bare ass, or his dick & balls, this is the movie for you. (I hadn’t ever wanted to, but in context it wasn’t exploitative – it’s not a hot scene.)

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie that was so graphically, realistically, disturbingly violent. Where other movies would cut away to a face shot, we instead see the bolt cutters grinding through flesh and bone, and cutting off fingers, or razor blades being forcefully sawed back and forth, cutting through a throat.

Punches are not pulled.

Even if it isn’t all good, it’s still an exceptional piece of film making.

Actors wanting to learn how to project a palpable air of menacing power, violence held in check but ready to go at a moments notice, without screaming and shouting and putting on scowling and gravelly voices, would do well to pay close attention to Mortensen’s work in this role.

There was at least one scene which seemed to have the entire theatre (which was full of Russians, for obvious reason) shocked to the point of holding our collective breaths. Followed by a long release, with the odd nervous laugh from various around the room. Truly intense.

It’s quite something, if you have a strong stomach, you should see it.

I like: hot women, science fiction, zombies. Roll them all up together and what do you get? That’s right: Resident Evil.

This is the third in the Resident Evil series (so far?). Now, what’s the normal rule of sequels? Who cares! This is by far the best of the bunch.

Everything is fucked. Everyone is dead. Well, practically. There are a few Umbrella complexes operating around the world, there are a few stragglers out in the wild, running to live. It’s been years since everything went to shit… And as it turns out, the zombies don’t need to eat to live (they just like human flesh a lot, go figure) so they’re going to be around for decades. It turns out that the virus that causes the zombieism also affects other animals, and even plants… So the entire world is turning to desert.

So, like I said, everything is fucked.

But Alice is still alive, and she has guns.

It’s brutal, visceral, violent. You know how in some movies you get scared? You jump, and maybe feel a little embarassed, so perhaps you try to take a different posture in your seat to hide the inevitable next jump. Maybe you get so scared of the music building up to a climax that you even go as far as looking off to one side of the screen, as if peripheral vision will save you from being eaten.

This is totally one of those movies.

And – with the given caveat that it is a horror/zombie/scifi movie – it’s really very good.

Great performances, with returning roles for characters from the previous movies, and the introduction of that crazy-hot and plain crazy MPD chick from Heroes, as well as a small group of others. (Including some who get their just desserts with cherries on top.)

(Karl, I’m sure you already are, but you have to avoid this one like the plague.)

Everyone else will dig it.

Yeah, I know. What was I even thinking?

It was the biggest seller at the box office for the last 6 weeks running, and I wanted to see what was going on. Now, I’m not going to say that everyone else in the theatre was an idiot, but let’s say they were easily amused and just leave it at that.

Pro: Some of the music was alright; the stuff in the taxi (and some of the taxi driver’s scenes in general); the outtakes in the credits were funny. The incredibly hot Asian girl sitting next to me. Man, she’d make just sitting in a silent theatre fun.
Con: Everything else. It’s certainly no City Hunter or Drunken Master.

New Zealand made vampire movie. I was going to say ‘distinctly New Zealand’, but the truth is… well, that it’s not entirely true. Sure, in a market scene we see a kuia selling eels from a barrel, and yes it’s set in a made-up country called Nuovo Zelandia. But. None of the major characters is played by a New Zealander – they’re all from the bloody UK.

Set in a grimy, runny-nosed sweat-house of a dystopian alternate past – one in which genetics/dna was discovered in the 17th century, or thereabouts, which was a lucky thing for the vampires which were discovered around the same time – instead of being feared and hunted out of existence, they were instead recognised as a simple mutation/evolution of normal humans. There’s a certain steampunkness (a grimy version, as opposed to the polished brass and oiled wood kind) about it with steam powered cars existing alongside DNA display screens and stun-gun billy-clubs.

The story is reasonably straightforward, in this universe vampires don’t eat people – non-vampires provide them with blood freely, and seem to like doing it – but then one vampire is infected by a virus that instills the desire to kill and eat people. The other vampires, and some people who happen to be in-the-know, can see that if the knowledge of this gets out, the general population will be unhappy, so they have to stop him.

It features a fair bit of distinctly average CG, and something about either the editing or film transfer process wasn’t quite right, some of the faster moving action is rendered entirely unintelligible.

Althought it misses the mark in several respects, the performances were generally pretty good, and on the whole I found it to be better than I expected. If you’re a New Zealander, you really are kind of obligated to support our fledgling film industry. So go see it.