Andy’s Movie Review of the Week (6)
According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (movies and movie stuff), 2008 was a pretty good year for filmmaking. The 2009 Academy Awards was full of strong contenders in several categories, and many competitions for coveted Oscars were close races. There was so much Oscar buzz, in fact, that for this year’s awards the Academy upped the number of best picture nominees from 5 to 10, something which hasn’t been done in over 60 years.
One of the most talked-about movies up for recognition in last year’s awards ceremony was Doubt, a film by John Patrick Shanley, adapted from a play he wrote in 2004 called Doubt: A Parable. The story takes place in a Catholic school in the 1960s Bronx, and follows the school’s principal, a nun by the name of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep in the film), as she investigates whether or not a new parish priest has been molesting a male student. The subject matter is certainly timely, given the Church’s recent and ongoing molestation cover-up scandal, and this good timing is undoubtedly (no pun intended) one of the main factors in the popularity of both the play and the movie.
The film was nominated five times for four Oscars (twice for Best Supporting Actress), although it didn’t win in any category. The play on which the movie was based, however, won several awards, including a Tony for best play and a Pulitzer prize for drama. As a matter of fact, the play won a ton of awards, waaayyy more than its movie adaptation. Here’s a list (thanks Wikipedia):
- Drama Desk Award for Best New Play
- Drama Desk Award Outstanding Actor in a Play (Brían F. O’Byrne)
- Drama Desk Award Outstanding Actress in a Play (Cherry Jones)
- Drama Desk Award Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play (Adriane Lenox)
- Drama Desk Award Outstanding Director of a Play (Doug Hughes)
- Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play
- New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- Tony Award for Best Play
- Tony Award Best Actress in a Play (Jones)
- Tony Award Best Featured Actress in a Play (Lenox)
- Tony Award Best Direction of a Play (Hughes)
- Theatre World Award (Heather Goldenhersh)
While the film failed to win any of the Academy Awards for which it was nominated, it did win several other, less publicized awards. However, out of its nine total wins, five went to Meryl Streep (for Best Actress or some variation thereof), and three went to Viola Davis (for supporting actress, although she was only in the movie for about five minutes, it seemed like). That’s 8/9 awards the movie won going to just two actresses. This disparity between the outstanding reception of the play and the lukewarm critical recognition of the movie adaptation should have sent my Spider Sense a-tingling, but unfortunately I didn’t do most of this research until after I had already watched the film.
Not that the film was terrible. I liked Philip Seymour Hoffman as the questionable priest, and I enjoyed the story, or at least the idea of the story. I’m sure if I had seen the theatrical version I would have raved about it. However, watching the movie I almost felt like I was seeing a play – and what works in one medium doesn’t necessarily work in another. Meryl Streep’s performance, in particular – yes, the one which garnered her half a dozen awards – was bizarre. It seemed too quirky, too amateur. It was over-the-top and theatrical. I think her style would have worked on the stage, but in a film it was just plain cheesy. Same with the writing! The play won a Pulitzer, a fact I could barely believe after seeing the film – like I said, what works in one medium just might not be adaptable to another. A lot of the lines in the movie seemed silly, especially several delivered by Streep in her melodramatic way. When she starts to cry at the end of the film and confesses to Amy Adams “I have doubts! I have such… doubts!” I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and search for the remote.
You can do so much in a film that you can’t achieve on the stage – a greater sense of immersion, or realism, if that’s what you’re going for. I think that for a story like this one, that should have been the direction to take it. But Shanley kept a very theatrical feel to the film which was strange and off-putting, to me at least. So much could have been done, but wasn’t. There were a ton of missed opportunities here, all because the cast and crew failed to think outside the box and make a movie, as an entity separate from its original incarnation on-stage.
All in all, it wasn’t great. But it wasn’t really bad, either. It may have left a strange taste in my mouth, so to speak, but there were elements of the story and of several of the performances which I found enjoyable. If it’s still touring somewhere, I’d say seek out the play. If not, the movie is worth seeing, as long as your expectations aren’t too high – as I fear mine were at the beginning. ***/*****
2012 – Disaster Porn
Last November’s 2012, the movie inspired by the supposed Mayan prophecy about the end of the world, came out on DVD this week. Rob and I had a chance to see this film in the theater back when it first came out, and as soon as we arrived home we turned on a tape recorder and started chatting about the movie. I had all but forgotten about that conversation, but with the release of the DVD just two days ago, I figured I should finally get the transcript of our musings online. Here is the full 25-minute conversation between Rob and myself regarding 2012, when it was still fresh in our minds:
Rob: November 22, 2009 – We just saw 2012 in the theater. This is Rob and Andy. So where do we start?
Andy: Well, this is basically disaster porn, as you said, right?
Rob: Yeah, that’s what I heard it described as… and it really is. The plot… there’s a plot somehow. The world gets destroyed essentially is what happens.
Andy: Well, there’s a plot like any disaster movie, you know – there’s some bunk science, and it causes the oceans to rise, or the ice caps to melt, or, you know, earthquakes or whatever – it’s typical disaster stuff, except of course this is more global and more large scale, since it is the end of the world. But it’s the same basic formula – there’s some crappy science that kind of makes you giggle at first, followed by the introduction of all the characters, and they all have family conflicts and things, and…
Rob: Why don’t we start at the beginning, as far as main characters… what the fuck was that guy’s name? Adolpho or something?
Andy: I don’t know – John Cusack?
Rob: John Cusack. No no, the black guy – the scientist, who had a change of conscience or some bullshit.
Andy: Adrian.
Rob: Adrian, there we go. So Adrian goes to… India? Someplace…
Andy: Yeah, India. Really though, the details aren’t even relevant, that’s the thing.
Rob: Well no, here’s what happens – he goes deep underground, and like, the Earth is getting microwaved by neutrinos or… Q-particles, or… Q from Star Trek is doing it… we don’t really know what the fuck is happening. And yeah, it’s bizarre.
Andy: Well yeah, but I mean at least you know what to expect. I don’t think anyone is walking into this movie expecting it to be a great plot, or the tear-jerker of the century, or the, uh…
Rob: I cried.
Andy: Yeah, uh-huh. So it’s a typical disaster movie. It’s a “feast for the eyes” as far as special effects and everything – wasn’t this the highest budget movie to date or something like that?
Rob: Oh God, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Andy: I think I heard something like that; I may have been thinking about another movie. Maybe I was thinking about Avatar, actually – that wouldn’t surprise me either.
Rob: oh, Avatar is the one, yeah. Avatar was in the previews.
Andy: Okay, okay. Well, I’m sure that this was similarly very high budget, not only because they had a few good actors in there, who they probably had to pay a lot, but also… Well, all the actors really haven’t had good jobs in a while, but…
Rob: John Cusack? C’mon.
Andy: Well, I think maybe he was a higher-paid actor ten years ago. But anyway, you know what you’re getting. You know you’re going to get a lot of CGI, a lot of big scenes of people falling off cliffs, and things blowing up, and volcanoes, and tidal waves and everything… buildings falling down, that sort of thing. Like I said, you know what to expect. There aren’t going to be any surprises, really. You can predict right off the bat which characters are going to die, basically – I mean, we had walking in there and sitting down a debate as to…
Rob: …which tertiary character was going to get his ass handed to him.
Andy: Yeah, like… of the so-called main characters, the central cast of the movie… who’s going to be dying, who’s going to be living.
Rob: Well, you had your normal stereotypical American family – 2.3 kids… oh yeah, his son’s name is Noah, like the Bible…
Andy: Of course. There were all sorts of fun things like that, that were very obvious, but were clever in some sense… in a gross sense they were clever. You know… they had “arks;” the big ships to save everybody were “arks,” and then “Noah” was the guy’s kid… stuff like that. But we had a discussion as to which characters would die, and we pretty much called it. We knew right off the bat… as the movie started and as the characters were being introduced we could basically point up at the screen and say “That guy – that guy’s gonna live, or that guy’s gonna die.
Rob: The step dad, the bimbo, and the Russian guy. Both Russian guys.
Andy: Exactly. It followed a very tight formula for the most part, which is good and bad. I mean, it wasn’t a great movie, in any sense of the word, but it was kind of fun. I don’t know if I’d want to see it again…
Rob: It’s like a porno, you see it once and you know what happens.
Andy: Yeah, it was entertaining, it was a feast for the eyes, and it was very funny, too – there was a lot of comedy, which I think actually worked. There were a lot of scenes… whether they were intentional or not, I feel like a lot of it was fun and funny. And, you know, when you’re following a track like that, you don’t have to think as much, and the people making the movie don’t really have to put as much effort into it, which is good in the sense that they focus more on the aspects of the movie that you’re supposed to enjoy – the action scenes, and the…
Rob: The shit exploding…
Andy: Yeah, the explosions, and that kind of stuff, and all the funny ways they kill off characters – you can focus on that kind of stuff, and you don’t have to worry about the plot, or worry about the character development or anything because it’s not important, and they know it’s not important, because it follows a formula. So that’s good and bad – it’s not a great movie, but it was a solid, one-shot, um… pornographic, excessive disaster entertainment. So… what about specifics? You were taking notes during the movie, Rob…
Rob: Um… wow.
Andy: If you can make any sense of your notes.
Rob: Oh, I was keeping track of blatant product placement.
Andy: Oh yeah, that’s another thing – yes. I was thinking about that too; there is so much. Not only all the stuff in the store, because they go through a grocery store and there’s close-ups of…
Rob: Vault Cola…
Andy: Yeah, Vault, and all sorts of things… There was, um…
Rob: Caesar’s Palace…
Andy: Caesar’s Palace, Bentley… what was the other one towards the end…? There was another very obvious one… anyway, very very blatant stuff. And you see that a lot in these big budget, CGI disaster movies nowadays… Transformers, too, a kind of similar sort of thing, a similar movie in some sense – a big budget blockbuster with a lot of CGI – and there’s product placement all over the place. Very similarly, this was… every other shot was like a close-up of a Coke bottle or something. What else? What else do you have in your notes?
Rob: Never live in California.
Andy: Oh yeah! That’s right, it pretty much reinforces all of the things you hear about how California is going to fall off into the ocean if there’s another big earthquake, that kind of stuff. Which is, again, a strength of the movie – they play off a lot of stuff like that which people already know… most people don’t know about neutrinos and all that “science crap,” so they can get away with talking about all this bullshit physics that doesn’t make any sense…
Rob: Remember, the Earth is getting microwaved.
Andy: Right, I mean, they can get away with stuff like that, and that’s fine, because most people aren’t going to be bothered by it. But at the same time, they do run with these things that people do know, fears like “if California has all these earthquakes, there’s this fault line, and it’s going to fall into the ocean,” and they play off of things like that, and make it actually happen…
Rob: It didn’t fall into the ocean, it got swallowed wholesale.
Andy: Well, whatever. People feel… people can follow it a little easier. And so that’s smart, it’s smart movie making – it makes it much easier to write, because you can just focus on the other things if you’re following your track.
Rob: I also got… “crazy old man… Woody Harrelson”
Andy: Oh, Woody Harrelson, oh yeah. There was just a glimpse of him, through the woods in this one scene, and I turned to Rob and said “is that Woody Harrelson?” And it totally was, because he’s so recognizable, even when he’s in a wig and he has a full beard and this crazy get-up. He’s so instantly recognizable as “the crazy guy” that it really worked out well. He was just in Zombieland recently, too. Kind of a similar character.
Rob: Oh yeah. He was good in Zombieland.
Andy: Yeah. He wasn’t bad in this either – he was in this movie doing what he does very well, being the crazy guy.
Rob: Hiding in the bushes eating pickles and watching people take off their clothes.
Andy: Being the badass wild man, so it was interesting. Again, it was a character that fit a formula, it wasn’t really anything new, but he did it pretty well.
Rob: Oh, uh, maps. So they have to find this map to find out where the arks are to save their family or some bullshit, and he runs into the RV, or the minivan or whatever, as it’s on fire… it’s on fire, and there’s a stack of maps, and he goes through them one by one, looking for the right map. Is there a reason he doesn’t just grab the whole stack and run out, since he’s about to die?
Andy: There were lots of things like that…
Rob: The plane is about to take off and they’re about to say “fuck you, we’re going to leave you…”
Andy: As any typical “bad movie” or any typical disaster movie (of course all… well, not all, but most disaster movies are bad), there were a lot of things like that. Besides the science, there were a lot of moments where you just thought “what the hell?” Things like when the President says he’ll stay behind and the others are like “we respect his decision…” no, what the hell. You club him over the head and drag him onboard, like fucking B.A. Baracus trying to get on an airplane – you’ve got to drug him and put him in the cargo hold – you’re not going to leave the president behind. ”Oh, it’s okay, I’ll stay here and go down with the ship.” What? That doesn’t work. The White House is not a ship, you can’t go down with it. He’s unfit to command in that moment, and someone else should take over and drag him onboard. There were all sorts of ridiculous things like that which broke the suspension of disbelief or whatever, but again, who cares, really? You don’t have to really get into the movie and feel for the characters or believe what’s going on… you just want to see shit blow up. And along those lines, I think that the movie was fun, but it wasn’t very good… I think that I would much more enjoy 2012: The Video Game, or even more so, 2012: The Ride…
Rob: Yeah!
Andy: I want to go to Six Flags and I want to see 2012: The Rollercoaster, or even like the virtual thing where you sit in the thing that moves around with the screen, you know? One of those 3D theater rides where the seats move. That would be cool. And you know, I felt like I was in one of those theaters where the seats move around to the action on screen, only my seat wasn’t moving – that’s what it felt like. It was one of those kinds of movies. There were a lot of shots where you’re basically following behind the car or the plane…
Rob: And they’re flying under this stuff or over it…
Andy: Yeah, and the camera’s right behind the plane and you’re following it around as it’s barely missing things, flying under collapsing buildings and bridges, and it felt like my seat should be moving to the action. And I think it would be enjoyable, I think it would be a lot of fun to experience 2012: The Ride, or whatever… the motion simulator event. That seems like it would be more enjoyable than the movie. Same thing with a video game… I’m sure there’s going to be a video game tie-in, there almost always is with this kind of thing… but I don’t think it’s going to have a lot of replay value, probably, but it might be fun the first time, with a lot of near misses trying to escape from exploding shit, which is always fun. I think I would enjoy those more than the movie, is basically what I’m saying.
Rob: I’ve also got “cheesy love story between the main scientist and the president’s daughter.”
Andy: Yeah, of course, they had all sorts of ancillary love stories, and tried to have character development and have all these stories play out, but…
Rob: Why the fuck do we care?
Andy: Exactly. You don’t end up caring about any of the characters, really, you don’t feel for any of the characters… they could have just killed off one of the main characters randomly and no one would care. You’re not going to shed a tear, because you don’t really get into these characters enough to really care for them. And so I don’t know why they even felt it was necessary to have all these plot development moments. Except that, again, they’re following a track, and they’ve got to have the characters doing something, and interactions and conflicts and things – that’s just what they’re supposed to be doing.
Rob: Okay. So in Signs, the little girl has this thing where she puts glasses of water everywhere, in this one the main girl has a thing for hats. Again, why the fuck do we give a shit?
Andy: Yeah, there are little character quirks to try and flesh out the characters… by giving them quirks and personality traits and things, but no one really cares in the end. It seems like that’s wasted time. The time that’s spent explaining why this little girl likes to wear hats could have been spent showing more things blowing up.
Rob: Or not making it a three fucking hour long movie.
Andy: Yeah, that’s another thing… the movie was, what, two hours and 45 minutes or something ridiculous? It could have been two hours if they had removed almost an hour of footage of all this bullshit character development that didn’t work anyway, and the movie would have been tighter. Although, really, it didn’t feel that long. Some movies I just don’t like sitting through if they’re really long, but this one was long but actually didn’t feel that long, because at least I was enjoying myself – at least I was laughing at the bad things and enjoying the visual effects enough that I could kind of get into it. And I was also legitimately interested to see where they would take it. I actually was interested in the plot enough to kind of wonder about how it was going to end. I’m thinking to myself while I’m watching this if I was going to make this kind of movie – and you already know what the end is… it’s about the “end of the world” – but does that mean that the Earth is going to explode, does it mean there’s going to be a flood, whatever… you’re not really sure as it’s going along, you don’t really know ultimately what the end’s going to be, and so I found myself guessing “how are they going to end this? Are all the characters going to die? Are they going to get into a spaceship and fly off somewhere? What are they going to do? How are they going to wrap this up?” There’s got to be some kind of conclusion, an ending where they can have a final shot, pan out, and something happens. So I found myself want to know. Even if I had hated it and wanted to leave the theater – which I didn’t, I enjoyed it enough to stick around – but even if I had wanted to leave, I still would have been compelled to stay just to see how they resolve this. So it was compelling enough or interesting enough in that sense, where you think about it on a meta level, and go “okay, it’s a big disaster movie, how’s it going to be resolved?” And so that was interesting.
Rob: So what else we got? Oh, it sounded like Star Trek half the time, aside from the techno-babble – they have a situation room, emergency teams, a lot of that. Let’s see… Oh, we’ve got… I was hoping the last president would get crushed to death by the Washington Monument, which gets knocked down by a giant tsunami or whatever…
Andy: Yeah, me too.
Rob: Unfortunately, the last president was not killed by the Washington Monument, he was crushed to death by the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier as it was flipped on top of him…
Andy: Although that’s also sort of ironic… although yeah, the last president getting killed by the monument to the first president would have been a little bit better.
Rob: I was hoping that would happen.
Andy: But the John F. Kennedy thing is also somewhat appropriate.
Rob: Let’s see, hmmm. ”The crust has shifted.” What is this, a pizza?
Andy: Yeah, more bullshit science… what were they saying about the crust getting unstable – “Oh no, we have to evacuate the Earth’s crust!” I mean, where are you going to go? Oh no, we’re being bombarded by neutrinos! Watch out for the accelerated particles! Try to dodge them!
Rob: The stupid tsunamis… so at one point a cruise ship gets completely flipped by a giant wave in the middle of the ocean, which is complete bullshit since tsunamis are like eight inches high in the middle of nowhere… I suppose if it’s a “super tsunami” or something it might be… ten inches tall? But not big enough to flip a cruise liner. What else… oh, animal air lift. They apparently flew elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses over the Himalayas and they somehow didn’t get killed.
Andy: That was pretty awesome. Again, there was a lot of comedy… I mean, there was some intentional comedy, and there was also some unintentional comedy – I assume it was unintentional, anyway, and maybe a mix of both – like when the characters are in the middle of the Himalayas and have just landed their Bentley basically out of the back of a cargo plane in the snow, and there are these other cars falling all around them… and they’re standing there, and see these helicopters with long ropes and harnesses carrying a giraffe… yeah, you see a giraffe first… this military helicopter with a giraffe dangling in this harness beneath it, flying through the Himalayas – it just comes out of nowhere, and it’s just such a surreal moment. It’s so ridiculous you can’t help but burst out laughing, which I’m sure was partly intentional, but there were a lot of scenes like that. But that’s part of what made it fun… had they taken themselves so seriously that they couldn’t put stuff like that in there, then it would have been a lot more painful to sit through for two and half hours or however long the movie was. But because they could laugh at themselves, and because they just threw ridiculous things like that in there, you know that they were having fun with it, and were just saying “Look, it’s a bullshit disaster movie, have fun with it.” And so that made me feel good, just seeing ridiculous moments like that, that just added to the enjoyment of it. Again, it’s not going to win any awards, except for maybe best special effects or whatever, but it was fun. There were a lot of surreal moments…
Rob: Watching St. Peter’s Basilica crush thousands of worshipers was pretty cool…
Andy: Yeah, there were a lot of ridiculously over-the-top or also just strangely surreal things in it that were enough to break the monotony. You know, seeing things blow up for hours on end can get kind of boring unless you make it interesting… unless you make interesting things blow up in interesting ways, unless you punctuate it with these…
Rob: It’s like a porno… you can only watch some guy having sex with some chick for so long… you have to add midgets, or a fat guy, or…
Andy: Well, a good porno is not just an hour of some guy thrusting into the same hole over and over… that’s not interesting…
Rob: Haha, what’s that quote from Idiocracy… “not just someone’s ass, but who’s ass? And why does it matter to us that we’re watching his ass?”
Andy: Exactly, that’s the thing… a good porno at least tries to have a plot, you need some kind of setup, right, and then also they change things up, you know? It’s not just the same thing, monotonous, over and over. Thirty seconds of that is enough, you have to change it up a bit. And so this movie was punctuated with enough surreal moments, enough humor, and enough little things… like if you look really closely in this one scene with all the CGI things happening, you can see a SUV as it’s being thrown by the upheaval of the street… it hits a pedestrian walking across a bridge or something. Little things like that which you kind of notice in the background… especially seeing it on the big screen… you can tell that the animators working on all the effects had a lot of fun coming up with little things like that, animating every single little thing that’s going on. And so there’s a lot of fun stuff to look out for that actually makes it interesting enough or fun enough to seem like it’s not really as long as it is. I didn’t get bored. It was not a bad experience. I wouldn’t want to see it again, necessarily, unless I was drunk and seeing it on DVD or something, if I could pause it and get up to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted… I wouldn’t want to sit for three hours and watch it in the theater again…
Rob: Oh, another thing that bothered me – the giant ships they all got saved on, the arks… had internal combustion engines… did you see the smokestacks? I’m just wondering why you would build a ship reliant on fossil fuels if there’s no landmass left. Just a question. You can’t really pull up to an Esso station in the middle of the fucking ocean and fuel up your ship…
Andy: You know what I was thinking, before the movie had ended, maybe halfway through, when the main plot had been established – namely, the characters are trying to get to these ships, right? And so the characters are trying to save themselves by getting to these ships and somehow escaping the disaster… once that plotline had been established, I found myself thinking maybe this movie will potentially set up a sequel that could be, potentially, more interesting than this one, you know what I mean? And I still feel that way, even after I was kind of let down by the ending a little bit, even after seeing the whole thing. I can’t help but think that, if done well (which may be hard), this movie could actually set up a sequel that could be better.
Rob: 2016: The Revenge of Man!
Andy: Well, the sequel could be interesting. At the same thing, it’s kind of unnecessary – you don’t really need a sequel.
Rob: Well, look to fanfic for that.
Andy: Well, that’s true. I just feel like you have some questions about “okay, now what?” What’s going to happen now?
Rob: It’s like that fucking one where the world freezes over and now we have to go to these third world countries we shit on all these years… we were bad, but we need to be better, because they took us in…
Andy: Well, see, that ends up setting up all sorts of more interesting scenarios – a sequel like that is not going to happen, I think, for obvious reasons, but a sequel like that I think could be focused less on big explosions and all the CGI and more on what are the consequences, what are the effects of this happening, you know. What happens next? And that could produce some interesting plot points. I mean, some movies – like Planet of the Apes, right, did the same sort of thing. I mean, Planet of the Apes happened, and Charlton Heston is there on the beach, and it’s like “Oh, it’s the Earth! It was the Earth all along! It’s in the future.” And you wonder what next, right? Now what happens? He’s sitting there on the beach… where does he go? What happens? And there were, like, 50 million Planet of the Apes sequels, and it worked for a little while. Some of the later movies, even though they weren’t very good, had some interesting points. And this is the same sort of thing. It could start, potentially… I don’t want to say a franchise… and you know, Hollywood loves to play it safe these days… if this does really well in theaters (which these sorts of things tend to do, at least in the opening couple of weekends), they might actually make a sequel or two… just because Hollywood loves trilogies, they love to make sequels to movies that did well, rather than have new ideas, and so you could see the sequel to 2012, and it could be horrible, maybe way worse than this one, or it actually might be interesting. They could answer interesting questions.
Rob: 2013.
Andy: So yeah, the movie actually made me think, on a sort of meta-level. On a cinematic level. I didn’t really care enough about the characters or the plot to care in that way, but I was thinking “what is Hollywood going to do next? Are they going to make a sequel? How are they going to do that?” And it was interesting. It was pornographic, and excessive, and…
Rob: Disaster porn.
Andy: Yeah, and a lot of CGI, but I still enjoyed it, and I still found it stimulating on some levels.
Rob: See it in the theater just to see it, and then watch it on HBO or whatever.
Andy: Yeah, it’s worth the money. It’s worth the $8.50 or the $10.00 or whatever for a ticket…
Rob: Second-run…
Andy: …if you go with somebody. Yeah, I’d say see it in a dollar theater a few months after it comes out, see it with some friends, you know, have a couple drinks beforehand, and don’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t take itself very seriously. You’ll enjoy it, I’d say. Maybe rent it on DVD and watch it on a big screen with friends, and have some drinks, and you’ll get a kick out of it.
Movie Review : Ninja Assassins. Rating : 5/5 Ninjas
Ninja Assassins is your quintessential Ninja film. The plotline consists of our hero Raizo, played by a guy named Rain (yes, that IS his name..), who is a Ninja killing a bunch of other Ninja’s for some reason. And not just killing them. Cutting them in half, decapitating them, spraying blood over everything, impaling, eviserating and otherwise blood-bathing everythign in sight. All the while trying to protect some police officer or someone for some reason that is only vaguely addressed in the film. (something about proving ninjas are real?… or something? It really doesn’t matter).
Just like this.. but not as cute.. and deadlier.
As far as plot development goes, they take care of almost 100% of the plot in one, three minute car ride while Naomie Harris’s character, Mika, talk about some dead Russian KGB agent who was researching Ninja, then mysteriously died of throwing-star related injuries. After that it’s all just basically sword and whipchain fights to the bloodspattering death.
We’re Ninjas. There’s your plot.
In the character developement department, Raizo’s story is told through some kickass flashbacks to his time at the Ninja Orphanage. From the time he arrives, he’s some kind of Child-Ninja prodigy, refusing to eat because they’ll be harder on him, getting his feet cut for not being quiet enough, fighting some other Ninja-Wannabe in a room filled with floating, flaming orbs… you know, Ninja stuff. Oh, and something about a girlfriend while at the Ninja Orphanage.
I’m a Ninja. There’s your charater development.
The fight scenes are crazy. There are three weapons used to any effect in this film. Your standard Ninja Sword, Ninja Throwing Stars, and a Whip Chain. Guess which one looks the most badass? Trick question, since they all do. Guns also make an appearance in the film, but several times Raizo laughs at Mika’s use of it saying something like “That won’t help you”. A couple Ninja get shot repeatedly in the head and shrug it off like a light rain.
Like this, but a Ninja.
The throwing stars look like they’re being launched out of a cannon, with several dozen flying across the screen at any given point in the film. The Whip Chain looks insane, and the Ninja Sword, is, well, a sword. Ninjas, in addition to being able to turn invisibile in shadows, are also insanely hard to kill. Whenever Raizo takes off his shirt (happens more frequently then you’d imagine in a Ninja film), you see some nasty scars everywhere. At one point he gets eviserated, but shrugs it off like a stubbed toe and goes on to kill another twenty-thirty Ninjas before taking a break.
This movie easily prooves that Ninja’s beat Pirates.
Overall, this movie is Ninja Porn at it’s highest. Relative lack of plot, stereotypical Ninjas (oh, did I mention they whisper in the shadows? bit of a giveaway…), buckets of blood, and epic fight scenes make this film the best, and funniest, Ninja movie i’ve seen in a while. I give it 5 Ninjas out of Five.
Ok, not “real” ninjas. But there’s 5 of them.