Scooby Doo Meets the Boondock Saints

I've never made any sort of secret out of my hatred for the original Boondock Saints. I've often said it's the worst film I've ever seen, and I stand by that. There may be worse movies out there and I'm sure I've seen some, but all those are widely agreed to be horrible movies. None of them have the stark-raving, drunken, tattooed fanbase that The Boondock Saints boasts. Piranha 2 is dismissive material. It was made with no ideals and no pretensions towards being anything but a quick Italian cash-grab. Calling it the worst movie of all time is par for the course. It's not a serious criticism because it's not a serious film. The Boondock Saints is clearly a labor of love, boasting some really profound morals that cater to peoples' stupidity and base instincts. People were passionate about this film when it was made.

In retrospect, I'm not even really sure why the hell I saw this movie. I suppose for the same reason I saw New Moon. It's the sequel to what is essentially 9/11 with Nickelback playing over it (I wrote that sentence, and then it got me thinking: does such a video exist?), but everyone thinks it's just the bees knees. So much so, in fact, that it's the most advertised film I've ever seen in the way of posters, t-shirts, etc. and The Boondock Saints is probably the film I've most often seen on other peoples' DVD shelves. Even my older brother is a heathen to my cause, and many intelligent, well-spoken men of film honestly defend it as a serious film. I feel like Zorro these days, but without the moral and legal impunity that apparently comes with vigilantism. And without the sword. You guys could use more sword through your chests.

The Boondock Saints II picks up eight years after the original. The MacManus brothers went on a murder spree that gave millions of people worldwide huge murder-boners at the end of the last film and have since been hiding out in Ireland. Then a priest is killed in the same style the MacManus brothers killed people, and they're off to solve the case. Along the way they meet a wacky Mexican comic relief character/sidekick played by Clifton Collins Jr., an actor I was starting to quite like before this, and an FBI agent who is a woman and so therefore must be attractive. She also does things like see clues at a crime scene with her eyeballs and make all the other detectives jealous of her keen deductive intellect (otherwise known as eyeballs). And there's something about Il Duce, who I can't really remember from the first movie, and his past making vests. A noble profession.

So how does it hold up to my expectations? Well, since it's the exact same fucking movie, I'd say "pretty good". World-famous cocksucker Troy Duffy, writer and director of these two films and no others, has spent ten (10) years writing this movie. Ten fucking years. In the time he spent farting and writing jokes about it, I doubled in mass, graduated from high school, dumped a handful of girlfriends, had my first #9 with no tomatoes from Jimmy John's and watched over 1000 movies. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much, but it's more than creating a script out of pure fart and then filming it.

So let's dive into the dicks and docks of what makes this movie horrible, and let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. The acting is horrible across the board, but it's a little less stressful on me this time because they aren't robbing Willem Dafoe, one of my most beloved actors, of his dignity. In particular, Julie Benz is a fucking fever dream as the character with the eyeballs. She's playing exactly the same character that Willem Dafoe played in the original film, and that's a role that not even goddamn Willem "God Damn" Dafoe could manage, let alone an actor who has a hard time maintaining an accent. It's one of those roles where you wonder if, as research, the actor watched footage of air-raids. Though I'm sure she was doing her very best with a script that thinks it's funny to have her say "fuck" because she's a woman and thinks that eyeballs are all it requires to outclass local law enforcement.

Troy Duffy directs this movie like he woke up with his skull cracked and bleeding and a big sack of money attached to a time bomb was laying next to him every morning during production. He applies style simply because it looks cool, never because there's any reason to apply style. This is filmmaking 101 and one of the most important rules of filmmaking that I have yet to see a good excuse for breaking: style depends on content. Similarly, you cannot mate a cat with a dog. Actually, a more apt metaphor here would be "you cannot mate an earthworm with a toaster". So when Troy Duffy suddenly starts shooting the movie like a grindhouse film, is he doing it because he's illustrating the content of the film visually, or is he doing it because he's not exactly sure why Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino do it, but it sure looks cool in their movies? Fuck you, Troy Duffy.

So let's get down to business. I've been putting off revealing why these movies REALLY suck.

I don't flinch at violence, twisted codes of ethics are nothing new (I live in Indiana) and my blood, 2/3s of it greener than...something green and Irish. I don't have to cater to you assholes. Go to hell.

I'd like to point out first of all that Troy Duffy's sadistic philosophies are nothing new. But here's the gist of them: bad guys deserve to be executed. Okay, we already do that. What the fuck else do you want? Oh, yeah, the court system and trial by a jury of your peers thing needs to be removed. And who do we replace them with? Two psychopathic Irishmen. I don't see how this could go wrong.

Look, we all know the court system is flawed. But can you imagine how much more awful things would be if we gave a few men impunity to carry out the law in whatever way they liked? There's a philosophy that says the best form of government is a tyranny, but it's the most easily corruptible, and a corrupt government is the most dangerous and ineffective government of all. The same philosophy argues that a Democracy is the worst form of government, but the most difficult to corrupt, therefore a Democracy is the most effective form of government simply because it's a convoluted mess. The same thing applies to the court system. The system itself is bad, but already so susceptible to corruption. If something as convoluted as the United States justice system is still eminently corruptible, making it more corruptible is not the solution.

The film offers violence and sadistic fantasy (both things I'm fine with--I'm sickened by the context) in lieu of serious discussion about the issues the film tends to just shoot at.

"But Oliver," I'm sure you're asking "how can you condemn a film like this and not The Dark Knight, which you still slobber over like a twelve-year-old girl at a Jason Mraz concert?". Good question, reader I just made up. The difference between the two films are thus: The Dark Knight takes place in a make-believe world, in a make-believe city and featuring make-believe criminals. The Boondock Saints takes place in a world clearly modeled on our own (when Troy Duffy isn't muddling his intentions with retarded stylistic tricks) in a city called Boston which is real, but sometimes seems like an abstraction, and featuring criminals based with no pretense of fiction on real criminals. Not a bullet-proof argument by any stretch of the imagination, but it's something that factors in. Second, Batman isn't a murderer (again, not bullet-proof, but work with me here. This is going somewhere.). Third, and I think most importantly, Batman is portrayed as a mentally ill, flawed human being who knows what he is doing is a throat-jab to the fine men and women who work to bring down the bad guys using entirely legal means. Christopher Nolan never tried to push a one-man judiciary system on us and call it a legitimate philosophy. Troy Duffy has spent two films telling us how cool it would be if we shot mafiosos.

I can't think of another film that's violated my moral code ever. I barely even have a moral code. I could care less if they release a Columbine video game. No one is honestly trying to sell us on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's personal philosophies, and if they did no one would fucking buy it. But people talk about The Boondock Saints as if it's a paradigm of moral straightforwardness. People buy this philosophy.

If anything has become clear to me here, it's that maybe I don't hate The Boondock Saints. Maybe I hate that it represents a group of people stupid enough to love it and large enough to demand a sequel.

1/10

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see

Armageddon tapped into a fear like no other. What if the last hope for humanity were fucking OIL DERRICK WORKERS? What if they survived the apocalypse and were solely responsible for repopulating the Earth? What if, 100 years from now, everyone is a descendant of Ben Affleck?

Maybe it's my liberal, bourgeois upbringing, but I don't trust oil derrick workers to successfully harvest enough crude to keep my Camry running year after year, let alone drill a hole into a pissed off meteor and tactically insert a nuke. I know I spent my formidable years bathing in Merlot and if you gave me a heavy oil harvesting device it would probably just make me fall over, but I pride myself on my ability to walk into a room and immediately spot the people who would be able to stop a world-threatening catastrophe. And maybe it's because I hang around theoretical physicists with suspicious amounts of weapons training and my kindergarten teacher was an undercover cop, but I can think of several people in this room right now who I would trust more to stop that meteor, and the only ones in this room right now are cats.

Instead of being a love letter to cats (which it should have been), Armageddon is a love letter to filthy proles, and the greasy sub-humans who man the grills at McDonalds.

Chief among these grumpy, drunk blue collar workers that have somehow acquired gun licenses is Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), owner (maybe; he never puts on a suit the whole movie) of an oil derrick whose daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler), is currently being mauled by A.J. (Ben Affleck) and Harry's just not havin' it. If it were up to him (Although it never occurs to him to arrange a marriage. Just goes to show you the value of education.) she would marry a big city type. Instead she's stuck in what might be the creepiest romance ever passed off as romantic.

When we're first introduced to these little lovebirds, they're fucking like golems in Ben Affleck's dirty little oil derrick shack. When Bruce Willis discovers them he gets angry at Affleck for exposing his daughter to so much tetanus, but they're interrupted by the red phone flashing. Apparently a meteor is on a collision course with Earth and the only ones who can save it is a group of plucky, mismatched oil derrick workers, a bill that Willis' crew fits to the letter.

The working class heroes are to be sent into space to turn on a big drill, because astronauts don't know how to flip an "on" switch. But before they go, we're treated to more nightmare romance as Ben Affleck stuffs animal crackers into Liv Tyler's underwear and then eats them. I wish I could make up something like that, but that's a scene that plays as Liv Tyler's real-life father serenades them over the soundtrack. Unfortunately, this all matches my preconceived stereotypes about the unwashed masses and I was able to hate them even more for it. I was supposed to be rooting for these dickweeds, instead I was hoping that they'd die and Liv Tyler could spend the last few hours of her life making her peace with God and attempting to regain some dignity by having sex with a complete stranger in the bathroom stall at a TGI Friday's.

Now, I'm no scientist (2012 made perfect sense to me), but if we're going to blow a Texas-sized meteor in two with a thermonuclear device don't we have to drill to the fucking center? Their objective is to drill 800 feet, then drop a nuclear device into the center and blow it up, and when they finally blow the meteor up (spoiler alert for a few seconds ago), the explosion is right in the center, as if the meteor was 1600 feet wide. I know I got a D in physics, but I'm pretty sure we have enough nuclear devices under just the court house in my shitty Indiana town to turn the Earth into a jar of Parmesan cheese; a nuclear cough should do the trick against a meteor, or maybe everyone in my county could get their rifles and shoot at it for a few minutes. Accounting for amount of PBR consumed beforehand, the hillfolks' bullets will dishearten the meteor and it'll bugger off back to Meteor Town after about five minutes. Or maybe we could strap some rockets to the side of the moon and put it in the way. I have never had any use for the moon anyway. All it does is illuminate me when I'm trying to escape with the diamonds.

The film somehow ended up in the Criterion Collection along with The Rock. I get that Criterion wants to represent all genres and movements, but Armageddon is a film that does not need representation and the movement it belongs to has far better examples to represent it. But we all know what's really going on here: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma doesn't move that many copies. I'm a huge fan of the Criterion Collection, so whatever they have to do to stay profitable is fine by me, but I'll send them a video of my birth if they're really hard up for weird garbage that no one wants to spend $40 on. They've even issued statements like:

"Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion."

But you don't have to us, Criterion. Your eye for avant-garde anti-art is keen and your representation of the film movement that gave power to the man who would one day destroy civilization is smart. I'll be on your side at the End of Times when you shout from the mountain tops that you called it.

I know, I know, I've been avoiding the actual review section of this film. You know why? Because it was boring. It was way too long, the entire first hour could have been cut with zero-to-minimal impact on the finished product (except it would be less punishing), defending Ben Affleck (I'm talking Comeback Ben Affleck) just got so much harder and I no longer find Liv Tyler attractive. Normally I picture Michael Bay on the sets of his movies foaming at the mouth and babbling nonsense while a scribe translates his ramblings into hieroglyphics that are then handed to the actors, but in this case I imagine he was asleep most of the time, or maybe doing his hair. For all its explosions and utter chaos, most of the film is pretty asleep at the wheel. Despite its questionable content, most of Bay's films are just overly busy and poorly scripted. So rarely are they uneventful.

But who gives a shit. It's a movie that celebrates people that'll be made into glue when they retire. My noble hands may not be cut out for work in that environment, but I'm still not going to concede any amount of respect for the Sudras.

3/10

Those fucking kids

Patrick Stewart is a man's man. I get such a jolly from watching him perform, and he's the coolest captain the Enterprise ever had. As much as I like watching the bridge crew drag Kirk away from the self-destruct console after he spots a spider near his chair, Picard is beyond badass. Patrick Stewart (and by virtue, Picard) is everything a 21st century man should aspire to be.

By formulaic, I mean it might cure jaundice and confuse me on my math midterm. But Star Trek: Generations is damn formulaic. So formulaic it doesn't seem to understand the difference between a television show and a theatrical motion picture (wider aspect ratio, FEWER STUPID SUB-PLOTS).

Here we go. We open on Kirk, Scotty and Chekov being shown around the bridge of the newest incarnation of the Enterprise. Kirk is bugging out because Sulu had time to grow some children-trees despite being gay and despite his commitment to Starfleet. They take the Enterprise out for a stroll around the block when they receive a distress signal from a group of transport ships caught in some strange magnetic anomaly. The inexperienced, indecisive new captain struggles with his ill-equipped ship until Kirk takes over, ultimately dying in a freak accident when trying to rig the hull to buy a few extra minutes for the crew.

This is a fitting death for Kirk. It's the sort of end many people have met on the Enterprise but none of the bridge crew have met because so rarely do they venture into the hull.

Flash forward 80 years to the GAYEST possible film introduction to the Next Generation crew we could have POSSIBLY conjured. They're on an 18th century warship, all dressed in French military uniforms and giving Worf a best friend bracelet in a phenomenally gay ceremony. Apparently it's a hologram (whatever), but this hologram machine can't hologram-in-ite them uniforms, so they spend at least a few minutes in front of their crew in French sailor uniforms.

Unfortunately, Data begins to grasp the meaning of cruel irony but without the restraints of remorse. Worried that Data will soon become an efficient killing machine with a tenuous grasp on humor, LaForge stuffs an inhibitor chip inside of him that makes him feel all the shitty emotions like sadness and fear but without the awesome emotions like murderous rage and bottomless greed.

That's when they find Malcolm McDowell who is, surprise, evil. He's going to blow up a star so he can get back into something not unlike the simulator Picard and the Gang were just hanging out in. I'm still not clear on how blowing a star up is necessary, perhaps he just wanted to be on the (very) long list of people who challenge the Federation and the (very) short list of people who don't get vaporized or thrown into a pit of lava for their trouble.

He's struck up a deal with some Klingon lesbians and they stand around and suck just like everything else in this fucking movie.

Let's break down the Next Generation crew, shall we?

Picard is a badass, yeah, I know. But LaForge is a little girl, and blind, and totally incompetent. Data is the emotionless science officer, not unlike Spock, but without Spock's predilection towards kicking tons of ass and generally being an emotionless killing machine/pun dispenser. Also he's the only android I can think of that gains weight.

Worf is...well, what the fuck does he even do on this ship? Scare children? Public relations? I understand that if you're shooting every day in elaborate makeup, it can get tiresome, but it looks like he walks into the makeup trailer every day and just shoves his head into a bucket of brown makeup with some eyebrows carelessly thrown in. Also, he sounds like he's on the run from gambling debts and has half-heartedly tried to change his voice.

Riker looks like a seasoned sexual predator, but not of the rapey variety. Of the "I've got you in the makeup trailer all by yourself and I can already smell the sexual harassment suit coming my way" variety. His uniform is also too damn broad with shoulder pads making his shoulders boxy but his midsection round. I get that most of these actors are pretty old already, but Jesus, don't let people self-conscious about their aging pick out their wardrobe.

The whole film looks cheap, like their budget is lower than it was on the TV show. They couldn't redesign the uniforms? How much could that cost? Forty dollars? But it doesn't even matter, the whole film feels like a season finale. William Shatner is thrown in so that people will have some reason to go see this fucking thing and he's given a death with all the dignity of being punched to death behind a Denver Denny's and left in a dumpster. I'm pretty sure Kirk has crossed bridges before and many times. Was he nervous in front of Picard?

The whole film reeks of a script that could have been very strong in the hands of a better director, or maybe with a few rewrites. There are some interesting things going on, such as the opening that could have been breathless, not unlike the opening for Abrams' Star Trek and there's a scene where Picard is separated from the villain and is trying to talk him out of his plan that could have worked better with some stronger dialogue and some better imagery.

But the thing that endlessly undercuts whatever might be working about the film is Data's subplot. It adds nothing of thematic value to the story and doesn't tie into the main plot at all. It's just a rejected plotline meant to give Bret Spiner and his diamond cream more screen time.

It sucked.

But then again, Patrick Stewart.

3/10

Ordinary People

Forgive me if this is short, but The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to an elite crop of films that drain the fucking life out of me. Within ten minutes of the film starting, I knew this would be a difficult slough. The opening scene could have kicked off with a terrifying sense of predetermined tragedy, like flying a hundred miles an hour towards a brick wall that you can see from a mile away.

Instead, let me illustrate the opening scene. Young Henry is riding in the back seat of his mother's car. They're enjoying the December evening and singing Christmas songs like happy mothers and sons do. In the distance we see a truck swerving. Panic fills the atmosphere as Henry's mother tries to get off the road. Suddenly, something starts to happen to Henry. He's disappearing. The young actor looks panic-stricken, his mother unable to handle the unfolding crises. Suddenly it's two weeks earlier. Henry is standing naked in his living room, looking at himself sitting on the couch with his mother and father. The camera does a lovely pan around the room. Henry begins to disappear again. He reappears on the snowy side of the road in time to see his mother's car hit the truck and erupt like a fucking volcano. Henry screams out for his mother, but he's grabbed from behind by a stranger. It is Henry as an older man with a ridiculous hair cut and an American accent wholly unconvincing. Eric Bana, you just got that much more difficult to defend. He tells young Henry that there's nothing he can do to save his mother and then begins to disappear.

What a great scene, right? WRONG. This scene could have been edited together with sharpness and punch, it could have been horrifying and tragic. Instead it's flabby and poorly conceived, as if every shot in the sequence has just one fatal error, one badly constructed idea. Like inserting useless CGI, or having the car erupt like a fucking volcano, or the part where Future Henry arrives with his shaved head and tattoos and space ship.

There's no doubt that this film aimed for Epic Romance, and like all 19-year-old dudes, I like myself an Epic Romance. I was quite taken with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year if for no other reason than I hadn't seen a well-made, well-acted film of the Epic Romance variety in a while, and it gives me a good reference point on why this film can go to hell.

First and foremost, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was about Benjamin's arc. We caught glimpses of Daisy's arc across her life span, and that gave the film an epic feel. Second, Curious Case was about the gravity that brought Benjamin and Daisy back together time and time again, but how their young foolishness threw the relationship away over and over again until they were in their 40's. In The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry and Clare get together in the first scene they meet. What's left? I'll TELL you what's next: boring relationship turmoil. Will they ever decide on a name for their kid? Are they going to have pork chops or garden salads for dinner tonight? Whoops, Henry time-traveled. I'll put his dinner in the refrigerator in case he comes back tonight. YAWN.

But what's the most important part about a romance? The fucking romance. Nothing romantic ever happens and the time traveling adds nothing to their relationship. They don't feel like soulmates, they feel like an average married couple stuck in a freshman English major's wet dream. All they ever do is talk about how they're soulmates instead of demonstrating it like a proper romance does.

Maybe the writing could have worked if the actors had been better, but I doubt it. Rachel McAdams does little more than stand around and look pretty and be static and boring, while Eric Bana gives the worst performance I think I've seen all summer. After I was such a big fan of him in Star Trek (apparently the only big fan of him in Star Trek) and Funny People, he seems to be working hard to undo all my praise.

The dude looks completely out of place in the real world. He's too damn pretty. He looked perfect as an evil Romulan general, or an over-confident yuppie, but standing there with normal people pretending to be a normal person, he doesn't look right. And his accent. Jesus fucking Christ his accent. I loved his accent in Munich. I loved the holy hell out of his speech patterns in Star Trek, and I thought his Australian accent gave him an air of innocent intimidation in Funny People. But holy dicks is this thing putrid. It never gets better and I never was able to tune it out. It's just a grating American accent from someone who is quite clearly not an American.

The only nice thing I can say about this movie is that it's prettier than it should be. I just don't even want to write this anymore. I don't want to look it over it or copy-edit it. I just want to be done with it and write a bunch of articles as fast as humanly possible so that I can bury this entry and never have to think of this movie again.

2/10

Deadbeat Summer

I don't know shit about G.I. Joe. Well, that's a lie. My older brother sometimes watched it when we were kids. I will now list everything I know about G.I. Joe:

- The US knows where Cobra Island is, and every week those wacky Cobra folks come up with some new hair-brained scheme and the Joes have to shoot around their feet until they give up. For some reason (probably the UN), we can't just nuke Cobra Island.

- There was an episode where they found a mermaid.

- They had enough R&D funding to make money-powered space-jets that fired money.

I was too busy being a four-year-old Trekkie to watch any G.I. Joe shit.

But my god, that stuff must be Jody Hill compared to this movie. Anyone who knows my taste knows that I'll give free passes to action movies on a lot of things because I think it is a horrifically underrated art form. I love kitsch, and movies with characters named things like Dr. Mindbender, and villains that dress in black with mechanical apparatuses attached to their bodies, and underground lairs and heroic heroes and over-the-top action. I have genuine love and affection for these things and I was hoping against all logic that G.I. Joe would put these elements together in an exciting, original and fun way.

I couldn't have been more wrong. I can't even figure out where to begin on this monstrosity. With the plot, I suppose. Through a series of endless flashbacks we find out that Cobra are the bad guys and the Joes are the good guys. Who gives a shit. Flubber gets shot at the Eiffel Tower in one scene.

It stars Channing fucking Tatum and Marlon "Little Man" Wayans, two of the worst actors alive as a couple of buddy soldiers. The acting in this film is so bad that it makes Dennis Quaid look like a good actor. The only thing redeeming about this film, and I mean that quite literally, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt when he gets in his scientist garb. His voice is cartoonishly evil and the only time I got the impression that I was watching a brilliant piece of kitsch action was when he did that voice. It's the only time the film felt like it should have.

More than any of those problems, more than the endless flashbacks and misuse of great material, is that the action in the film sucks. It looks like an action film from 1993. Specifically, Street Fighter. There's a scene where the Joes chase the Cobras through Paris as they try to fire their flubber gun at the Eiffel Tower that could easily have been a lot of fun, but it's undercut by something very simple: the suits that the Joes wear. They look heavy and cumbersome. It doesn't look right when they move in them and it takes you out of the excitement. Additionally, there's a lot of misplaced slow-motion and general ineptitude behind the camera. I won't even go into all the editing problems the film has, not the least of which is how the action is edited so poorly that all sense of location is lost.

What else? The visual effects. My god, the visual effects. At least Transformers 2 had some incredible visual effects to look at, but G.I. Joe's wouldn't have been cutting-edge five years ago. The whole film looks really cheap for a summer film and it feels like a tax write-off. The only person who seems to be putting in any effort is Gordon-Levitt, who suffers some awful makeup work at the end of the film as punishment.

Although it's not as bad as being the mascot for high in iron Gushers like Christopher Eccleston, the poor bastard.

And the title doesn't make any fucking sense. The whole film Cobra just gets their asses kicked and at the end they've been fucked into submission by the hyper-masculine, electrical tape-wielding Joes. It would be like calling a film about The Black Plague "The Rise of Hand-Washing and Regular Baths in Western Europe". If I shouted "From now on, you will call me Cobra Commander!" at a crowd of strangers and started signing the card reader at the gas station "Cobra Commander", I would have accomplished roughly the same thing as Cobra actually accomplished in this film.

Additionally, it's the most tangential film of all time. We spend about half our time in flashbacks for minor characters that we don't give a shit about. I'm not joking when I say we spend about ten minutes learning the backstory of a character that DOESN'T SAY A FUCKING WORD. The entire movie. Who gives a shit that he was a street urchin when he was a kid? It's a weak way to try and raise the stakes in the final battle. We just keep flashing back to this guy's childhood completely unprovoked because, well he never says anything.

This is a putrid, assaultive, boring movie that could have been great. The wasted potential makes it all the more sad that it's so incredibly awful. I'll give it half a point for Joseph Gordon Levitt's voice, and half a point for the shot of the majestic polar bear.

2/10