Rise of Electro - Amazingly Bad

Amazing Spiderman 2 is a bad movie. Hell, just from looking at the trailers I’m sure many would come to the same conclusion, but it isn’t until after you’ve sat through it, after the dust settles and you get to dwell on it does it become apparent just how bad it is. The movie actually gets worse in real-time. Initially the movie seems alright, and I admit to thinking around the first third mark, that I was going to have a good time. It seemed to have righted most of the wrong of the first movie. Then, all of a sudden, the film slams the brakes on, stops the action and dwells on all the boring crap from the first movie in painstaking detail.

Peter Parker is living it up as Spiderman, becoming a beloved hero of New York City. While he stops criminals and bullies and the likes as Spiderman, in his personal life he’s struggling with the mystery of his dead parents and his relationship with girlfriend Gwen Stacy. After the death of Oscorp CEO Norman Osborne, his son Harry inherits his wealth, his company and also a genetic disease that will kill him unless he finds a cure. Oscorp has been pumping money into genetic research (which lead to the Lizardman situation in the first film) and Harry thinks that the solution to his illness lies in Spiderman’s blood. Max, a nerdy technician obsessed with Spiderman, has an accident involving a tank full of electric eels and becomes Electro, an electricity-powered supervillain who is out to kill Spiderman. The two decide to join forces for their mutual goal of spilling Spiderman’s blood.

While it may sound exciting, the movie handles itself poorly, spending half its length re-treading old ground excessively. The pacing is all over the place. The first third keeps things moving pretty well up until Electro shows up, but after that the entire middle of the movie drags on painfully with relationship issues and Peter brooding about his dead parents as not much else happens. Electro spends most of the movie off-screen in a secret prison (for a movie named ‘Rise of Electro’, he actually doesn’t do much), while Harry Osborn doesn’t do much until right at the end where he decides to turn evil. Things that the original Spiderman movie trilogy established are glossed over here, partly in necessity. It’s mentioned briefly that Peter takes photos of Spiderman for the newspaper and when Harry Osborne shows up we’re assumed to already know they were childhood friends.

The effects aren’t great. Action scenes are a mess of CGI actors flying around the screen. Actually it’s astounding how ugly the designs are. Jamie Foxx made of electricity looks silly, and in action scenes he’s mostly portrayed as a blur of energy. The worst has to be Harry’s version of the Green Goblin. He looks like an evil leprechaun, with big dirty teeth, a curled shock of orange hair and green, almost reptilian skin. He just looks silly. Speaking of silliness, the Green Goblin and Rhino (from the ads) are only in it for five minutes each at the very end of the movie, the former as part of the final battle and the latter at the very end, not even figuring into the plot at all.

There is a lot of really fucking stupid things in this movie. Many have to do with Electro. Electro’s inner monologue is played, during action scenes, as a rhyming rock song in the background. No shit, I am not making this up, with dialogue along the lines of ‘Nobody will look at me, Spiderman’s my enemy!’. Before then, Max as a character is that concerning superhero cliché that a lonely nerd, when given powers, turns evil (same deal in Green Lantern). There are a few scenes involving a ridiculous ‘evil scientist’ character that have nothing to do with anything, while a side-plot about power struggles in Oscorp has no ending.  

Tonally this is a cluster fuck. Sometimes it’s all fun and games as Peter messes with technology (similarly to Tony Stark messing around in Iron Man), but then there’ll be scenes of him crying and brooding. He breaks up and gets back together with Gwen something like three times over the course of the film, while he constantly flip-flops between wanting to solve his parent’s disappearance, to not caring, to crying about it. The scenes where he is playing Spiderman are out of place because his quips and lame jokes are too cheesy compared to the grimness the rest of the movie tries to throw around. Peter is also still trying to figure out the mystery of his parent’s disappearance, leading to a lot of scenes where he’s brooding or crying because he’s sad that his daddy left him. This time at least we get a conclusion to this plot thread, but it’s an unsatisfactory one. The biggest tonal shift comes at the end of the finale, with a genuinely shocking and unexpected event that shows a lot of balls to break from the general status-quo most non-Marvel superhero movies go for. That being said it doesn’t quite mesh well with the rest of the movie.
The big thread the movie climbs along is the ‘Peter Parker/Gwen Stacy’ relationship. Peter loves Gwen, but feels dishonest about breaking the deathbed promise he made with her dad about keeping her out of danger. Thus we have a lot of awkward scenes of two eighteen years olds playing out relationship drama you’d expect from a weak romantic comedy. This entire subplot overtakes the movie, leaving the whole middle of the film an almost aimless wasteland until Harry turns evil and Electro goes on the loose for the finale.

Acting is all generally decent for the main two characters. Andrew Garfield is schizophrenic as the emotionally imbalanced Peter Parker, going from goofy to brooding to heroic to brooding to whatever else they need to character to be. His personality is constantly changing depending on whether he’s Spiderman or Peter. Emma Stone is probably the best as Gwen Stacy, playing the girlfriend who likes Peter but is exasperated by him (she is miles better than Kristen Stewart’s annoying and needy Mary Jane from the original series). The two together actually work as a couple on screen. The rest of the acting is bad. Jamie Foxx is odd, enthusiastically playing Max as a nerdy comedy sort of character. The second he turns into Electro, he becomes one of the most boring villains ever, just standing around yelling about killing Spiderman. Paul Giamatti’s exceptionally brief cameo appearance as the Rhino is about eight lines of an awful Russian accent yelling ‘I am killer!’ and ‘I am Rhino I beat Spiderman!’ for the five minutes of screen time he gets.

In the end I don’t know what more there is to say. Rise of Electro is a bad superhero movie, a sort of ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ film where the more you consider it the more you realise how nothing adds up, how awful and inconsistent it is, how many bizarre plot holes there are. Compared to the first Amazing Spiderman film, I’d say it’s better by virtue of trying more and having a bigger budget (even if it fails, it’s more interesting than the bore-fest origin story they’d pumped out). Compared to the big dogs in the genre, like the recently released Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it’s an embarrassing mess.

Odd Thomas

Stephen King is, perhaps, the most popular American horror writer there is. He’s been writing for decades, has written dozens of books and sold millions of copies, with many of his hits ingraining themselves into popular culture, mostly through their film adaptations. Even if I don’t like his writing itself (I find it really weak) his ideas are interesting and lend themselves to some really good film adaptations. Even if you haven’t read the books, almost everybody gets references from The Shining, Carrie, IT, Pet Sematary, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption, Children of the Corn, even Stand By Me. His books have made the transition to film really well, giving filmmakers rich material to work with. There are over fifty Stephen King books, and over fifty movies based on Stephen King books and I’d wager you’ve seen a fair few of them.  

Dean Koontz is also an American horror writer. He’s also been writing for decades, and has also written dozens of books and sold millions of copies. But can anybody really name any of them? Would anybody get a reference from any of his books? It’s likely not. I’ve never read a Dean Koontz book, but I’ve also never heard anything about any of them, neither good nor bad. I’ve seen dozens of copies of his books in second hand bookstores, but I’ve never met anybody who has ever read any of them. Some of his books, surprisingly, have been transitioned into movies, but none that anybody knows, nothing that caught anybody’s interest. There are over fifty Dean Koontz books, but only about a dozen movies based on Dean Koontz books, and I’d wager you’ve never seen any of them.

Well, flying completely under everybody’s radar, a new movie based on a Dean Koontz book (and it’s, from what I can gather, the seminal Dean Koontz book) has been made. Odd Thomas, directed by, of all people, Stephen Sommers, he behind big, dumb blockbusters like the first two Brendan Frasier Mummy movies, the first GI Joe movie and Van Helsing, and also Deep Rising, the best giant killer octopus movie you’ll ever see. Sommers mostly excelled in directing big budget, family friendly action fare, so it’s odd to see him behind a low budget murder/supernatural detective film.

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Odd Thomas is a weird movie. I guess it’s sort of meant as a fun, quirky, supernatural detective story. And while it has those elements none of them really work.

Odd Thomas, our hero, is a short-order cook who can see ghosts and is psychic. Along with his enthusiastic girlfriend Stormy, Odd uses his powers to help the local police chief hunt down killers and prevent crimes. Apart from the spirits of the dead, Odd can also see ‘Bodachs, demonic beings that feed off of suffering and appear before scenes of death. When Odd sees a sleazy man swarming with Bodachs he feels that something horrible is going to happen soon and it’s up to him to stop it.

Bodachs have a tendency to murder anybody that can see him, so Odd has to pretend he can’t see them, leading to a fair few ‘comedy’ scenes of Odd pretending not to see the shoddily designed wispy skeletal ghost monsters that look like exhaust fumes as they swarm around him and his girlfriend. Of course whenever he does see them (which is constantly) they never really seem to hurt him, only clinging to him to slow him down.

The quirk factor is high, to an almost overwhelming degree. The supernatural aspects are also all over the place. While Odd can see ghosts, he can’t hear them (but seems to perfectly understand what they’re saying anyway). He has psychic dreams and can also see visions by touching people (something that, immensely helpful, he only does once when the story calls for it). He also has ‘psychic magnetism’, which basically means that if he wanders aimlessly around he’ll eventually find clues. Oh, and Odd actually is his first name. Because he wasn’t quirky enough, right? 

It’s just an odd (I don’t mean to keep using that word) movie that doesn’t really work. Odd himself has an internal monologue, which is just used to explain to the audience what just happened in really obvious ways. Any twist, turn or clue is pointed out in this ridiculous fashion, and the writing itself is laughable ('The bodachs are manipulating me?' Odd mutters at one point with odd emphasis) . The motivations behind the villains’ evil plan is so stupidly basic that it hurts. It transcends stupidity to become a sort of ‘they’re just evil’ explanation. The epilogue is also strange, taking a bizarre sombre turn (and dragging out an obvious twist that everybody in the audience would have seen a mile away) leading to something of a sequel hook (Odd goes to Vegas?).  

The acting is all over the shop. Anton Yelchin does ok as Odd, sticking to the brief I guess. He’s quirky enough, but doesn’t quite pull off the ‘pancake-chef that can beat down murderers’ part of the character when the brief action scenes play out. He basically fails at making this odd character believable. The rest of the cast aren’t so great, most filling their limited roles. Strangely Willem Dafoe plays a Sheriff who works together with Odd, but in most of his scenes he’s making out with his wife, and his presence is ultimately irrelevant to the plot.

Compared to Sommers’ other movies, Odd Thomas is a bizarre, drastic change, and without the big budget to pull off the ridiculous set pieces he’s known for (GI Joe had a massive naval battle in an underwater secret base in the freaking Antarctic, Odd Thomas has a chase scene). Odd Thomas is a small movie with a seemingly weak source material, and never manages to be more than a middling detective movie with hazy supernatural elements.

Doom - a guilty pleasure

 

Do you know how many times I’ve watched Doom? Over a dozen. I’m not kidding. I remember I even went and saw it at the cinema nine years ago. A year later I bought the DVD, and in less than a decade I’ve watched it maybe twice a year. The reason is simple; I’m a sucker for movies that use the ‘Alien’ structure. You know what I mean, when a group of characters are put in an isolated area and a monster picks them off one by one. Doom is like that. Granted it’s not a particularly good version of it, but it does have its own juvenile sense of energy, and is honestly one of the better game-to-film adaptations.

I just find it so goddamn entertaining. Look, it has a fuckload of problems – the pacing is weird, the action is bizarre, the writing is pathetic and none of the characters have anything going on, but it all sort of clicks for me. I think it’s because the movie knows it’s pretty bad. It doesn’t aim for high art, it never presumes to shoot above its station. There’s no pretention, it’s a dumb, simple action flick.

The premise of the videogame series was always astoundingly simple; you are a marine on Mars, a gate to hell has opened and demons are wandering around, you need to kill them. Oddly enough, the film version somehow managed to screw that up.

A scientific research base on Mars goes into lockdown after a containment breach and something has killed a bunch of scientists.  In response, a military rescue ops team is sent to secure the base, find the missing scientists and eliminate the threat. The team is a weird bunch of archetypes. There’s the sleazy one, the tough black one, the funny black one, the creepy religious guy, and the wimpy rookie (there’s also an Asian guy, but he gets decapitated before any discernable personality comes up). Rounding up the crew is our main character, John Grimm, codenamed Reaper (Get it? Grimm Reaper. Yeah, they did that), played by Karl Urban. Dwayne Johnson (still going by The Rock) is their unit leader, Sarge, a tough, no-nonsense commando dedicated to the mission.

When they get to the base their mission is somewhat complicated with the appearance of Grimm’s sister Samantha (played by Rosamund Pike), a researcher who needs an escort so she can retrieve important data files. She goes along for the ride, against Grimm’s wishes, and very quickly the team find themselves being picked off by horrific monsters lurking the halls.

The writing is bad with groan-worthy dialogue but the cast really freaking give it their all. Karl Urban bloody gives it his all (he always seems to throw himself into every role he gets), while Rosamund Pike is descent as his sister. The Rock does it the absolute best. This was made in the early stages of his film career, before he became the surprisingly lovable action/comedy star he is today, but the spark is evident this early. There’s a knowing humour in how he overplays the super-tough Sarge who goes full psycho by the films end.

One massive piece of weirdness is the action. The early parts of the movie go for tension and atmosphere with the scenes of the marines exploring the shifty research facility are shot dark, with only brief glimpses of the monsters as the crew gets taken out one by one. Later scenes go full crazy, with a man vs monster deathmatch in an electrified cage being a standout. The movie even ends with a ridiculous bout of fisticuffs (where the Rock gets to show off a few wrestling moves).

The big action scene they played up in the movie (one that was a big part of the hype) is the first person segment, where the movie pays homage to the videogame by essentially becoming videogame footage. It’s like a seven minute haunted house ride from Karl Urban’s perspective, where actors dressed as zombies and monsters pop up in front of the camera while Karl Urban’s CGI hands and gun blows them away while rock music plays in the background. It’s exactly as awful and wonderful as it sounds, a bafflingly horrible idea that’s still entertaining for pure silliness. It’s also really weird and out of place, since before then the action had mostly been slower and less intense.

“I guess you’ve gotta face your demons sometime” says Karl Urban in one of the cheesier lines in the movie. It’s also one that brings up a major complaint from unsatisfied fans - the monsters in the Doom games were hellspawn, but here in the movie they’re genetically mutated people. It’s a major, unnecessary change large borne by the fact that American scriptwriters can’t seem to get over ‘genetic supersoldier experiments going wrong’ as the go-to explanation for monsters and zombies. Otherwise the movie actually does a really good job of referencing the game. The monster designs are lifted from Doom 3, and even the mars base has a somewhat similar design in most scenes. Sarge even gets the BFG (though he never actually kills anything with it).

Doom is a movie I can always come back to when I need to kill a lazy two hours. It isn’t a great movie, it doesn’t even stand out in its genre, but it remains entertaining regardless.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

 

When it comes to superhero movie sequels, most tend to play it safe, pumping out a sequel that offers more action and bigger set pieces at the expense of story. This is essentially the case of Iron Man 2 and Thor 2, two fun movies that you mostly just remember for the scenes involving explosions, robot fights and inter-dimensional hammer throwing. Captain America 2 doesn’t play it safe. Hell it ignores the general rulebook and does something completely different, dispensing almost entirely with the superhero trapping and offering a somewhat different sort of superhero movie. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is, interestingly enough, a spy thriller. Granted a high-action high-pulp one, but it has many of the trappings.

After the whole ‘Avengers’ thing, Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America, essentially works for SHIELD, the global (but centred in America, because of course it is) defensive attack force headed by Nick Fury responsible for monitoring superheroes and taking out threats. While he excels at his missions, Steve is becoming increasingly agitated by all the secrets and lies that seem to come with SHIELD membership, particularly when he finds that a hostage rescue he was leading was mostly cover so that Fury’s other top agent, Natasha Romanov, could covertly filch some secret files. Tensions run high amongst the three, with Steve questioning his trust of both Fury and Romanov (Scarlett Johansson’s character, who gets a bigger role here), while Fury himself is concerned about SHIELD’s big new defence project, headed by SHIELD branch commander Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford getting in on the superhero boom).

An assassination attempt on Nick Fury points to deep-seated corruption within SHIELD, and has Steve and Natasha on the run as fugitives with their own organisation hunting them down. At the front of this hunt in the titular Winter Soldier, a grenade-launcher wielding assassin with a robotic arm whose abilities rival Steve’s and whose identity comes as a shock to the hero. Compared to post-Avengers sequels such as Thor 2 or Iron Man 3, this one looks to have a far more drastic effect on the Marvel cinematic universe, with an ending that looks to shake things up in the future.   

The action sequences are quite taut and intense, feeling like scenes out from Mission Impossible or the Bourne series, but mixing in a little superhero flair (a magic shield that ricochets bullets, robot arms and winged jetpacks get mixed in). That said, this is the first time I can remember where a superhero movie has had action sequences that feel so high-stakes. You know that Iron Man and Thor will shake off whatever gets thrown at them, but here the scenes do carry that feeling of genuine danger, with hailing bullets, ramming cars and explosions all feeling deadly. Compared to the pulpy action of the first Captain America, which mostly lacked in large-scale action set pieces, Winter Soldier offers up some pretty exciting moments, including the tense assassination attempt on Nick Fury (which finally lets us see Samuel L Jackson get in on some of the action).

Most superhero sequels try to do the ‘mid-life superhero crisis’ arc, where a hero questions their actions and abilities. Some do this well (Sam Riami’s Spiderman 2 might as well be the best example of this), while others struggle to pull it off. Captain America 2 does this somewhat differently, with Rogers not questioning his abilities but their use, whether the cause he’s been fighting for is the right one anymore. It also takes an exceptionally brief look at Rogers as a man who has lost his world and everybody he knew and love, giving a brief glimpse into the emotional turmoil that’s hidden underneath the stars and stripes, but only a glimpse.  If there was one failing it would be that the movie doesn’t delve deep enough into this; Rogers is also assumed to have already re-integrated into society so there are no fish-out-of-water moments, which would have been nice.

As with all these Marvel movies, there are end credits scenes. One is played after the early credits, offering some cryptic views into villainous characters that are sure to come up around the time of Avengers 2 (which mostly cause me to shrug and say ‘who the hell are these people?’). Another is a twenty second clip right at the end of the credits that is also shrug-worthy, not particularly offering much.

All in all Winter Soldier is an entertaining sequel, daring to go darker and mix things up with the Marvel universe and characters. As somebody who liked the first Captain America movie, but felt it was a little outclasses by its peers in the action department, it’s great to see Winter Soldier pull off some impressing set pieces. I’d compare it favourable against the other two post-Avengers sequels, Iron Man 3 (entertaining but odd) and Thor 2 (easily the safest sequel of the bunch).