Kevin Lang
Well-Known Member
Been a while since we've had a movie post, but this movie was so spectacularly BAD that I feel compelled to warn others about it. Unless your cash is "expendable", don't waste it on what was billed as "The Manliest movie ever made".
Flaws:
Cinematography:
->Heinous jerky camera action made any action sequences impossible to truly follow.
->CG was horrible. Worst since X-Men origins, looked like a 90s film. Sad thing is, the movie used CG for effects that could have been done easily, and better, with conventional film techniques. (i.e. Inception)
->Several fight scenes were shown faster than actually transpired (i.e. almost every Jet Li move sequence).
Plot:
->Basic premise was a rip of Rambo II, only with the elements that made that decent removed.
->Movie jumped back & forth between New Orleans and The Island. While in New Orleans, the movie focused on meaningless tangent drama, like Jason Statham's girl trouble, and Mickey Rourke's cliched soul-searching.
->Too many big-name actors. Everyone wanted a huge role, no one wanted to die. In a 90 minute movie, this can't happen. Crews & Couture barely show up in the movie, so why were they there? Ensemble Acting can be great (Firefly), but this wasn't one of those times.
->The movie couldn't decide whether or not to stick to hand-to-hand combat or guns. Some fights go on for an eternity mano a mano, others are ended in seconds with guns. Why then weren't they all done with guns? The chars always had them. Unlike say, The Rundown, the plot didn't even address this.
->Convenience. Too many coincidences occurred for the main characters. For having endless girl trouble, Fortuna was on the side of the main characters. One egregious example is that the entire "good guy" cast is trapped in a tight corridor, facing down dozens of armed soldiers. Not one of those soldiers had a grenade, which would have fixed the problem.
->Random objects were blown up for no purpose during the movie.
->The main "villain" spouted EVERY banal villain line known to man during the movie. "You're the same as me", "We both are dead on the inside", "I would have paid you twice as much..." (but never offered). Et cetera.
There are many more flaws, but I do not wish to post spoilers.
Basically, if you wanted a true action movie this summer, The Losers & The A-Team were the only choices.
Stallone directed this...and he also directed Rambo IV. The latter was good. What went wrong?
Flaws:
Cinematography:
->Heinous jerky camera action made any action sequences impossible to truly follow.
->CG was horrible. Worst since X-Men origins, looked like a 90s film. Sad thing is, the movie used CG for effects that could have been done easily, and better, with conventional film techniques. (i.e. Inception)
->Several fight scenes were shown faster than actually transpired (i.e. almost every Jet Li move sequence).
Plot:
->Basic premise was a rip of Rambo II, only with the elements that made that decent removed.
->Movie jumped back & forth between New Orleans and The Island. While in New Orleans, the movie focused on meaningless tangent drama, like Jason Statham's girl trouble, and Mickey Rourke's cliched soul-searching.
->Too many big-name actors. Everyone wanted a huge role, no one wanted to die. In a 90 minute movie, this can't happen. Crews & Couture barely show up in the movie, so why were they there? Ensemble Acting can be great (Firefly), but this wasn't one of those times.
->The movie couldn't decide whether or not to stick to hand-to-hand combat or guns. Some fights go on for an eternity mano a mano, others are ended in seconds with guns. Why then weren't they all done with guns? The chars always had them. Unlike say, The Rundown, the plot didn't even address this.
->Convenience. Too many coincidences occurred for the main characters. For having endless girl trouble, Fortuna was on the side of the main characters. One egregious example is that the entire "good guy" cast is trapped in a tight corridor, facing down dozens of armed soldiers. Not one of those soldiers had a grenade, which would have fixed the problem.
->Random objects were blown up for no purpose during the movie.
->The main "villain" spouted EVERY banal villain line known to man during the movie. "You're the same as me", "We both are dead on the inside", "I would have paid you twice as much..." (but never offered). Et cetera.
There are many more flaws, but I do not wish to post spoilers.
Basically, if you wanted a true action movie this summer, The Losers & The A-Team were the only choices.
Stallone directed this...and he also directed Rambo IV. The latter was good. What went wrong?
