Looking Back In Anger

Conditions: Foreboding

2013 Report Card

With 2014 upon us, it's time for the highlights, the lowlights, the ...er, mid-lights, of the year that was.

The OK (but should have been better)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
-Mostly just a retread of the first film, with a conspiracy bubbling along in the background, kept out of sight from the audience. Trouble is, that conspiracy is far more interesting than going through the old reality show again.

Frozen
-Well made and solidly done, it suffers from not being clear as to who the film is really about, and the animated snowman thing was confusing.

Thor – The Dark World
-Funny, and with a sweet center, but the actual meat and potatoes is small and stringy, and ultimately neglected in favour of the desert. Mmmm, now I'm hungry.

The Last Stand
-Hopefully more of a warm-up for Ah-nuld's return to big action movies. We know he’s capable of better than this.

Riddick
-It's a shame they don't have the budget to make another big Riddick film, and this low-rent sequel isn't even a good follow up to the first movie in the franchise. Still, at least they're trying.

White House Down
-A disturbing and absurd disaster movie that invites us to celebrate the destruction of both the White House, and the dignity of the U.S President.

Pacific Rim
-Should have been better. Could have been deeper. Del Toro has effectively delivered his Transformers film, with nothing but sound and fury to behold.

Man of Steel
-Brash, bold, rich, strong. The re-booting of Superman is a solid, if a little strange in places. Not afraid to roll with the absurd, and assured enough to pull it off, for the most part. It’s still Superman, but it’s better than I thought it would be.

World War Z
-Frustratingly, it’s a zombie apocalypse movie doesn’t actually explain how said zombie apocalypse starts, or ends. We’re just swept up into the middle of it, then knocked out of it. Hope it ends up ok.


The GOOD

Ender's Game
-A dynamic and interesting war movie with a sci fi twist and deep moral underpinnings. Plus Harrison Ford giving a damn!

2 Guns
-A surprisingly well made and well acted bit of fun.

Gravity
-Ultimately it's as deep as a puddle, and there's only one character in the film, but you have to give credit to the sheer brilliance in how it was made, and its relentless pace.

Rush
-And what a rush it was, a brilliant portrayal of the 1976 F1 championship season, with all the drama and action delivered by a top-shelf filmmaker and cast. Terrific stuff.

Red 2
-Still just the right mix of crazy and funny. If we could only get Bruce Willis to lighten up a little.

Elysium
-Damn good hard-sci fi action yarn about how far the have-nots will go for redemption. This Neill Blomkamp guy is pretty good.

Fast and Furious 6
-Aka the not-so-little engine that could. Way to go to these guys, sticking to their formula and finally coming up with a well acted, exciting, and dramatic action movie sequel.

Flight
-A difficult and dramatic analysis of addiction and stress, Denzel Washington delivers yet again in a brilliant exploration of a deeply flawed hero.

Jack Reacher
-While the story itself is fairly straight forward, McQuarrie the director has infused it with some great angles and atmosphere, and Tom Cruise delivers as always.


The Suck

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
-Who would have thought that finally getting to see the dragon at the end of the story would be so half-assed and ineffective? Another long slog, and apparently still three more hours to go.

Kick-Ass 2
-I really don’t get it. A stupid and cheap-looking headache of a film, with bad jokes and undeveloped characters. Wastes its best asset with a boring coming of age drama amidst the street crime. Jim Carrey was wise to denounce this thing, albeit for the wrong reason.

Now You See Me
-The Prestige showed how you make a great movie that is about magic and magicians. This is a film that shows us how stupid magic in movies is: an odd and convoluted heist film that veers all over the place before launching from the fields of the implausible into the the skies of the downright ludicrous.

The Lone Ranger
-Seems to be a good example of what happens when you have a lot of money, a lot of talent, a known-brand, and no actual idea to speak of. A worn, cliched, unbalanced western.

After Earth
-A very strange, uneven and frustrating tale of survival in the woods. The moral of the story is that fear is bad for you. Duh. Another swing and a miss for M Night.

Star Trek Into Darkness
-Proof positive that the whole entire reason for rebooting Star Trek was only to make money. How else to explain this lazy and stupid remix of the original Wrath of Khan movie? New Trek is a disgrace, too scared to try anything new.

Iron Man 3
-Strangely, the latest Iron Man film spends most of it’s time deconstructing the Iron Man, and superhero movies in general. It ends up an odd duck of a film, wrapped up in a silly misdirected plot, with boring action sequences.

Jack the Giant Slayer
-Fee Fi Fo Fum, this film is really flat and unengaging-um

G.I. Joe: Retaliation
-Squanders all the goodwill legitimately earned by the first film by effectively resetting everything, repeating the same plot again, and either dumping the original characters for bland and empty replacements, or undermining the few who did make it in.

Die Hard 5
- Well here it is, the turkey of the year. Die Hard 5 proved without a shadow of a doubt that McLane should have been killed off years ago. A ridiculously stupid movie, with a stupid plot, a stupid bad guy, and a stupid series of stupid action sequences that served to show how far the Bruce Willis action franchise has fallen. Dragging a son into the mix diluted what little drama may have been wrung from this thing, assuming of course that Bruce could be persuaded to give a damn, which he doesn’t. There was a time, decades ago, when Bruce Willis was an actor who would really act his heart out and brought you onto his side as a movie progressed. Those times are long gone, and now we sit and literally watch Bruce collect another paycheck as he shuffles and mumbles his way through another collection of action sequences. We can tell when a movie doesn’t give a damn, and the latest Die Hard movie shits all over the franchise, and expects the audience to lap it up gratefully. This is a film that you want to walk out of, but you don’t because you keep expecting it to get better, while at the same time remain in disbelief that it could be this bad. And when it finally ends (stupidly, of course), we realise we’ve all been punked. How dare they.

Zero Dark Thirty
-As if to rub our collective noses in it some more, Katherine Bigelow directs this boring and distasteful docu-drama about the hunt for and assassination of Bin Laden. I think I fell asleep briefly somewhere in the middle.

Django Unchained
Oh, Yeah, this came out. Tarantino’s latest is a remarkably shallow and stupid western that aspires to empower a former slave but instead just showers the audience in illogical and blood-soaked violence.



- Peace out