Morgan Avery

I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick, but I’m not sure if I’ve read his short story The Golden Man, on which this Nicholas Cage produced and lead movie is (very loosely) based.

But you don’t really need to be directly familiar with Dick’s work because you’ve already seen a shit tonne of his stuff in film form. Let’s start with the big one: Bladerunner? NO? You must be kidding. How about Minority Report, or Total Recall, or A Scanner Darkly? Fine, fucking Paycheck then.

Generally, I must confess, I like my science fiction sane (kooky is fine), and if there’s one thing our Mr Dick wasn’t, the wasn’t was sane. And if there’s one thing the movies based on his stories have been, it’s loosely.

So let’s call this a digression and move on. Bygones.

If you’ve seen the ads for Next, you’ll know already that it sucks. There’s no doubt right? I mean, those glasses things (bit of a shout out to A Clockwork Orange, yeah?) are goofy as shit. And in context, in the movie, they are completely pointless. It has Nicholas Cage in every goddamn minute, and if you’ve seen as many Nicholas Cage movies as I have, you’ll already know what he looks and sounds like, so why bother looking at him for another 90 minutes? As to special effects, well there are quite a few, and honestly the CG just isn’t so great.

So, as we’ve established, this movie sucks.

But this movie doesn’t suck.

How can this even be possible? Don’t ask me, but it’s true.

Whether the precognitive fight scenes, dozens of Nicholas Cages on screen at once, pink clouding hotties, or … I don’t even know what else. But what I do know is that Next has taken a big gulp from the crazy jug, and I’m down with it.

Bask, my brother, bask.

(But only on Tuesdays, because on Tuesday… Well, on Tuesday Next is just $9.50.)

I came, fairly quickly, to think of Rise as nothing more than a poor imitation of Blade – though I confess that it’s not exactly the same. For instance, instead of a hot black guy, here we have a hot Asian chick (Lucy “far too hot to make this awful a movie” Liu), and instead of being a daywalking half-vampire on a mission to kill vampires she’s a daywalking newbie-vampire on a mission to kill vampires.

Not only is Rise completely predictable from beginning to end, but Rise is completely predictable from beginning to end. And P.S. when everyone expects her to kick her way out of the cold storage in the morgue? Maybe you should just cut away to another shot, or perhaps have your hands cut off, instead of being so damn predictable.

It might be true that vampire movies don’t get counted as horror these days, so it could be that I was expecting too much when I thought maybe I’d be scared at some point, but Rise didn’t make me feel anything. If I can’t feel scared, it would only be fair that I could feel Liu, right? I can be quick. Promise.

Not expected:
Nick Lachey (yes, that one) in a role as a low-life hood. I must confess I could definitely watch more of Lachey lying dead on the floor of a barn with his jugular torn out. Far preferable to watching him suffer through another informercial, poor thing.

So I may have already intimated that I don’t know why Liu is slumming it in this piece of crap movie, but, on a similar note, just what the fuck is Michael Chiklis doing in it?

It could have been good. The cast, aside from the dreadfully cliche English accented vampire ‘boss’, is fairly good. There’s always room for a decent vampire movie – though they’re extremely rare. But you just need to make it well. And this isn’t well made.

Now, I think I have a theory on where to start looking when it comes to apportioning the blame: Not only is the director also the writer, but the director is also the writer of Snakes on a Plane! So. Enough said?

Really, truly, and honestly… Just don’t bother.

(I watched it so you don’t have to.)

Hot on the heels of Die hard 4.0 (‘Live Free or Die Hard’ if you live in WeirdAmerica) comes the last in the Bourne Trilogy.

Well I say last because there were only three books. That doesn’t mean they won’t try and make more movies, of course… After all, the Bourne movies really don’t have that much in common with the Bourne books: Bad-ass gets amnesia after being shot, hilarity ensues. That’s about where the similarities begin and end. For instance, in the books, in number three Bourne should be happily married and working at (as I recall) a university in the States. But never mind.

This time around, Bourne is after the folks who made him the man he is, discovering that Treadstone was only one project under a larger umbrella (Blackbriar) that covered all black & wet ops under curtain of deniability.

Lovely things: Bourne getting badly hurt and… lots of car chases. (Including one on a dirt bike, in which Bourne pulls off some awesome Trials style riding, very good stuff.)

Another lovely thing: The return of our Nicky. Such a darling girl. And the source of the most stressful sequence in the movie. Dear sweet thing.

Maybe a bit overdone: The shaky camera work. It frames the action well, but there was just too much of it.

I don’t want to drop any spoilers, so let’s just say: If you like action movies, you have to see this one.

(P.S. Dear girl at the movies by herself, sitting next to me on Sunday evening. You don’t read my website and will never see this message: but I think you’re awesome. I was the one that arrived with a couple of girls and made you move over one seat. Thank you for smelling like flowers and being so cool. I’d be happy to let you sit next to me in other movies in future. It’s too bad you ran off as soon as the credits started to roll, you were about to be met with the full force of a charm offensive.)

If you’ve heard what I’ve heard, then you’ve heard that this movie is complete shit. You’ve heard wrong.

It’s not shit, it’s the shit.

Sure, the technical stuff is all simplified to be more movie friendly, and some of it is just complete hooey – for instance, the cell network is down, so the kid hacks the phone to use a satellite network instead. Easy, I do that all the time. No, wait.

(Let’s not forget that even in a movie as techno-fantasy as The Matrix, Trinity used nmap when she hacked a network – P.S. how cool was that? Really cool, that’s how cool. Oh, you didn’t notice? Never mind.)

But here’s the thing: this is the best action movie I’ve seen all year and maybe the best Die Hard movie evaaaaar.

The opening action sequence was awesome, automatic weapons in small spaces are scary, and they do a fairly good job of showing the panicked scrabbling desperation of our protagonists as they frantically try get way from the guys with guns.

(What they didn’t show, and what movies never show, is that a bullet will go right through your fucking house. A fridge is not going to stop a bullet. A wall is not going to stop a bullet. Bits of plaster won’t chip off, you’ll just get guys on the other side of said wall falling over with smoking holes in their meat.)

We all know that McClane is going to get completely FUBAR, it’s one of the deals, his life is completely SNAFU… And so he does.

It doesn’t hurt that Cyril Raffaelli is one of the bad guys. He’s one of the coolest martial artist/stunt men in the world. Too bad he had to get minced.

Kevin Smith has a good role – as a dumptruck – no, I kid, he really challenges his acting chops this time by playing a fat fuck. I reckon he pulled it off. Guess he’s a method actor, huh? Too bad he didn’t get minced. (Would make a lot of sausages.) Nay, he still speaks in his acting voice (you know what I’m sayin’), but his role is actually pretty sweet. (Ignoring aforementioned photogenic version of hacking.)

What do I need to say about Bruce Willis? Not only is he a hot bald man, but he’s a complete bad-ass.

If you like a bit of action, you have to see this movie.

(Yeah, so I took the friendgirl to see this movie like two weeks ago, but for whatever reason – possibly I was movie-reviewed out after the festival – I never published to the site. Please forgive the Jackie Harvey’ing.)