Black Adam (2022, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

A powerful warrior called Teth-Adam is unleashed after 5,000 years of mystical imprisonment and begins to wield his unique form of justice – so a team of superheroes is sent to stop him…

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that, over time, entropy will grow in any self-contained system. In other words, the longer something continues without new impetus, the more it will break down, collapse, fall apart. Metal rusts, organic matter decays, stars burn out. One of the most mind-blowing implications of this is that because the universe itself is a closed system, it too will one day simply stop working. All the activity, energy and dynamic work will even out – a total equilibrium across all of space, which will mean that *nothing* will be able to happen any more. Cosmologists estimate that this will take a while. Perhaps 1.7×10¹⁰⁶ years (that’s 1.7 followed by 106 zeroes).

Superhero movies, however, have taken far less time to reach a stage of flat, listless inertia. After the peak of production and confidence in the days before Covid, the genre has tailed off alarmingly in the 2020s with multiple flops, false starts, fuck-ups and even the shelving of a near-complete movie for tax reasons. And leading the charge into oblivion is Black Adam, which is the 12th entry in the insipid DC Extended Universe series and a quantifiably awful endeavour.

A prologue set in the distant past (‘Before the pyramids,’ a voiceover vagues) tells us the backstory. A young boy in the Middle Eastern country of Kahndaq rebelled against the slavers and, because he accidentally found a chunk of a precious raw material called Eternium, was able to start an uprising. Soon after this, a powerful being dubbed Teth-Adam emerged from the revolution – a folk hero for Kahndaqis for generations to come… We then cut to the modern day. Kahndaq is now run by an organised-crime outfit called Intergang; in an obvious comment on imperialism, they all seem to be thugs with dodgy English accents. Fighting the fight for the oppressed are teenage skateboarder Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) and his archeologist mother, Adrianna (Sarah Shahi). She’s one of those female characters you get in action films who’s strong and tough and independent, so therefore – for some reason – must also be charmless, humourless and lumbered with clunky dialogue such as, ‘I gave up my job at the university and moved four times.’ Her only personality trait is ‘being angry about things’, and Shahi adds absolutely nothing to what’s on the page.

After the kind of haphazard archeology that would make Channel 4’s Time Team wince, Adrianna manages to find and reanimate the ancient hero Teth-Adam (now played by Dwayne Johnson) who’s been interred in a set from Tomb Raider for several centuries. He’s an all-powerful, atavistic meta-human, an unstoppable weapon of mass destruction who’s introduced via a burst of the Rolling Stones classic Paint It Black. In a case of have-your-basbousa-and-eat-it, the script tries to position Teth-Adam as a noble figure, defending his country against the Western oppressors… but it can’t help also childishly revelling in him killing and causing indiscriminate carnage. (The character smashes through walls rather than use the nearby door, which does little to convince us of his intelligence.)

The American authorities are soon worried about the threat of this new murder-machine, so decide to send in a team of superheroes to contain him. But we don’t get the Justice League, we get the Justice *Society*, a second-division team of comic-book also-rans. And rather than establish or embellish these characters properly, the storytelling resorts with leaden laziness to a scene of their leader explaining who they are to his boss, franchise regular Amanda Waller (Viola Davis, appearing on a videoscreen and trying to hide the fact she shot all her stuff in about half an hour).

Long-time fans of the rival Marvel superhero films will find no surprises as Carter Hall (Aldis Hodge) reels off his exposition. He tells Waller that his team includes Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who’s DC’s clone of Ant-Man (except he can only grow big, rather than small)… Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), who is DC’s version of X-Men favourite Storm (both can control the wind)… and Doctor Fate (a bemused-looking Pierce Brosnan), who can predict the future, kinda like Marvel’s Doctor Strange. Hall himself, who lives in a mansion eerily like Professor X’s in the X-Men movies, uses the superhero persona Hawkman, who is risibly reminiscent of Marvel hero Falcon. There should be some fun here: some sense of a team bonding or already in full swing, some sense that these characters have lives outside of their superhero costumes. Instead, all we get are a few lightly scattered references that mean nothing to viewers who haven’t read the comics – Henry Winkler cameos as Atom Smasher’s uncle, for example, which will generate a knowing ‘Ahh!’ from connoisseurs but an Alan Partridge shrug from everyone else.

We’re just never given any reason to care about anything – not about Adrianna or Amon, not about Teth-Adam, not about the Justice Society, not about Kahndaq at large. This is a script, for example, where Cyclone’s entire personality and backstory is summed up with one infamously ghastly line of dialogue: ‘The nanobots were injected into my bloodstream by this really messed-up scientist who kidnapped me when I was 15.’ Actor Quintessa Swindell somehow manages to lever this drivel off the page without melting into a pool of embarrassment.

It’s all utterly feckless, it really is. The character development would embarrass a nursery rhyme. The plot is MacGuffin-based nonsense – there’s talk of the Crown of Sabbac, which has been infused with the power of ‘the six demons of the ancient world’ – and the script bandies about words such as ‘prophecy’ rather than reach for any complex storytelling. There are flurries of senseless action, explosions, fireballs and Zack Snyder-style slo-mo. Comedy is dropped into proceedings with the finesse of a waiter plonking a hammer into your bowl of soup. The quality of CGI suggests that the designers spend too much time playing videogames rather than understanding how real objects move in space. And a smug reference to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly misunderstands the entire point of that classic film.

Black Adam is essentially a spin-off from 2019’s Shazam! (Teth-Adam appeared very briefly in that earlier film, while Djimon Hounsou reprises his wizard character here in a cameo). But whereas Shazam! featured some silliness, some pathos and a sense of telling a story, Black Adam is the inverse of entertainment: a movie that seems like it’s being provocative in its sheer determination to be mediocre. It was a passion project for star Dwayne Johnson, who was a producer and had been attached through many, many years of development. However, whereas he’s often a likeable movie presence (Fast Five, Jungle Cruise), here he’s drearily, dogmatically boring. The Rock has as much charm as granite. The movie deserves to be buried under a mountain.

One neo-imperialist enforcer from halfway around the world sent here to steal my country’s natural resources, strip-mine our sacred lands, pollute our waters, oppress our heritage and make us wait in line all day out of 10

Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood (2004, Donald F Glut)

An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…

These reviews reveal plot twists.

Setting: There’s a prologue set in Southern California in 1897, then the main storyline – if that’s not too sophisticated a word for this travesty – plays out in modern-day LA.

Faithful to the novel? The plot is difficult to follow – not because it’s complicated but because this film is pornography and doesn’t especially care about storytelling. In the late 19th century, a female vampire called Diane (Glori-Anne Gilbert) is targeting a woman called Roxanne (Kennedy Johnston) for both sex and blood-feeding. Roxanne’s brother (Mark Bedell) finds out and is appalled, so with the help of a local monk (Paul Naschy), he kills the surgically endowed Diane and a male vampire called Ruthven (Arthur Roberts). Over a century later, a cape-wearing, kinky Count Dracula (Tony Clay) sends his daughter Martine (Eyana Barsky) and fly-eating assistant Renfield (Del Howison) to resurrect Ruthven. But Ruthven now has a problem: a curse means he can only drink blood via another undead, so he resurrects his sister, Diane, who then proceeds to target young, female prostitutes. Meanwhile, Roxanne’s modern-day descendant (played by the same actress) is having flashbacks to the encounters with Diane. She’s a lesbian too, obviously.

Best performance: None. This is a cast typified by actors who can’t walk around corners convincingly. Tony Clay later played Dracula in another bit of porno-trash by the same director, 2008’s Blood Scarab.

Best bit: None.

Review: Donald F Glut began his career as an amateur filmmaker, churning out cheap-and-nasty genre movies, before becoming a professional writer. He gained many credits in children’s television and penned the official novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back. Then, after the millennium, he returned to his roots and started directing exploitation films. The current example, released in 2004, is what some people would call erotica. In other words, it’s pornography without the money shot; a succession of female nudity and vanilla lesbian scenes designed by and for straight men. If your idea of a great time is watching dead-eyed actresses writhing around naked to the point of tedium, with breaks in between for dialogue scenes that make no sense, then this is the movie for you. Otherwise, avoid.

One vampire strikes back out of 10

A funny story… Looking on Amazon Prime Video for Dracula films to review, I spotted a 2001 movie called The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula. Halfway through watching it, however, I realised that it was an entirely different film – this one. Amazon had mislabeled it.

The Iron Mask (2020, Oleg Stepchenko)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. 

Note: In certain territories this film is called Viy 2: Journey to China, and was first released in 2019. It’s been given a multiplicity of names around the world: in both the UK and the US, where it was released in 2020, it’s known as The Iron Mask.

Watched: 28 June 2020
Format: DVD.
Seen before? No.

Review: If you’re a film fan of a certain vintage – say, older than about 20 – you might have a fondness for the studio logos that begin almost ever major movie. Your current blogger, for example, was a child in the 80s so unconsciously assumes that the fanfare-heavy 20th Century Fox logo will always be followed by a Star Wars film and that the Paramount mountain is always going to blend into the real location of an Indiana Jones adventure.

But in recent years, due to a shift in the way films are financed, sitting through multiple studio and production-company logos at the start of a film has become a tedious norm. The Iron Mask begins, rather ludicrously, with *nine* of the bloody things. Nine little pieces of animation or graphic design, telling you which nondescript companies put up the capital. The sequence takes 90 seconds to play out.

Considering the sheer ineptitude of the film that follows, it’s rather stunning that *anyone* wanted to take credit.

The Iron Mask is a sequel to a 2014 Russian movie called Viy (renamed Forbidden Empire in many countries; Forbidden Kingdom in the UK), which was a loose adaptation of an 1835 horror novella by Nikolai Gogol. The first film told the story of an English cartographer, Jonathan Green, who encountered monsters while travelling in eastern Europe in the early 18th century. An epic production that limped through epic funding crises led to an epic success at the Russian box office – hence this bloated sequel.

There are several strands to the confused (and confusing) storyline. In one, a dank cell at the Tower of London holds a man known as Master (Jackie Chan) who is locked up with a Russian wearing a metallic mask. The jail’s warden is Captain James Hook, played with whisker-faced gruffness by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hook, who may or may not be the same Captain James Hook from the Peter Pan stories, has a habit of brawling with his prisoners. He also maintains a collection of antique weapons.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Green (played with an admirable straight face by Jason Flemyng) is blackmailed into going to China because he’s recently uncovered a sinister political plot in Moscow. As a travelling companion, he selects a prisoner who he sees being whipped – the prisoner is clearly a young woman, but for a while Green thinks she’s a boy. She turns out to be the daughter of the Jackie Chan character *and* the rightful princess of her home district in China, which is currently under the yolk of a powerful wizard-type woman who has changed her face to look like the princess and who now controls a magical Great Dragon whose eyelashes are used to grow tea. (Still with me?) Meanwhile, Green’s aristocratic girlfriend is fearful for his safety so teams up with the deposed tsar of Russia (the man in the mask, who’s now escaped) and poses as a male sailor so they can travel to China aboard a ship. In a moment that makes you wonder if this film was written in the 1950s, the ship’s crew rumble that she’s a woman when she’s scared of a rat.

Watching this amateurish nonsense often feels like sitting through a two-hour showreel for a second-rate visual-effects company. Crummy CGI landscapes are much more important than plotting and the filmmakers also seem overly keen on narration rather than character development. We shouldn’t be *too* sniffy about the narration, however, because at least with a voiceover you can’t see the actor’s face at the same time. The Iron Mask contains the most inept and irritating re-recorded dialogue you’ll ever hear in a major film. Several characters sound like the actor – or probably a totally different actor – has gone into a recording booth months after filming and post-synced new lines of dialogue with no regard for what’s happening on screen. At times, the lips and the noise coming out of them are clearly in different languages. Honestly, this film makes all those Spaghetti Westerns and Bruce Lee kung-fu flicks look like masterpieces of audio design.

Were that the only issue, we might find it charming. But this is an emetic mess of a movie. Woefully written and so poorly directed it surely doesn’t count as direction, The Iron Mask is two hours of short, perfunctory scenes containing diabolical acting, childish characters, lamentable coincidences, unexplained plot twists, functional plotting and tone-deaf drama, all strung together by cartoonish visual effects and chaotically busy fight scenes. Every moment feels like it has a miasmic haze between us and the storytelling.

The fight sequences were arranged by Jackie Chan’s team and his clash with Arnie, of course, means a reunion from Around the World in 80 Days. Their characters here have a semi-comical fight scene while chained together, and a mildly funny element sees Hook continually asking Master not to use his expensive collection of ancient weapons. The scene is actually the most enjoyable in the film, which is akin to calling flushing the toilet the most enjoyable aspect of having a shit.

One (and it’s lucky to get that) latrine pot out of 10

Next time: Junior

Hercules in New York (1970, Arthur Allan Seidelman)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 27 May 2020
Format: A DVD found in a branch of CEX.
Seen before? Nope.

Review: The future king of the action movie made his cinematic debut in this low-budget – and exceedingly low-quality – production. It gave the 22-year-old bodybuilder a starring role and some experience of the filmmaking process, but Arnold Schwarzenegger would never again appear in something quite so aimlessly vacant.

Billed as ‘Arnold Strong’, partly as a reference to his hulking physique and partly as a pun on the name of his co-star Arnold Strang, Schwarzenegger plays the god Hercules of Greek legend. At Mount Olympus, which looks like a landscaped urban park, Hercules is bored of his idyllic life and wants to explore the real world. His dad, Zeus (daytime soap actor Ernest Graves), forbids it but Hercules goes anyway. Arriving in New York City in 1970, he wanders about with no particular purpose, meeting some discus-throwers, punching a bear that’s escaped from the zoo, becoming a professional wrestler, wooing a woman called Helen (Deborah Loomis), and getting on the wrong side of some gangsters.

This is a movie stacked full of dead-behind-the-eyes, no-energy performances. The only exception is Arnold Strang (formerly the voice of Top Cat) who’s quite fun as a New Yorker called Pretzie who pals up with Hercules because he doesn’t have anything else to do. But Schwarzenegger is clearly out of his depth. His acting is like watching the ‘drama’ scenes you get in a 1970s porn film (I imagine). He’s so bad, in fact, that Hercules’s dialogue was dubbed by another actor for the film’s 1970 release. (Schwarzenegger argues it was actually replaced because of his very strong Austrian accent.) Versions of Hercules in New York released on home video reverted to the audio recorded on location, and that was the cut used for this review. It does Arnie no favours whatsoever.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘On the second-to-last day, I finally felt it, what acting is about. We were shooting a sentimental scene where Hercules and Pretzie are saying goodbye. I really got into it, just like they always talk about in acting. The director came over afterwards and said, “I got goosebumps when you did that.”
“Yeah, it was strange,” I said. “I really felt that scene.”
“You’re going to be good. I think you’ll have an acting career because a time went on with this project, you really started to get how to do it.”‘

One monster who looks as if he has come straight from the kingdom of the underworld out of 10

Next: Killing Gunther

The Pink Panther 2 (2009, Harald Zwart)

Spoiler warning: These reviews reveal plot details

Inspector Clouseau joins forces with a crack team of detectives to hunt down an international thief…

Stretching across 11 films, 46 years, five lead actors and several styles of comedy, The Pink Panther series flopped ungraciously to a finale with this turgid movie that leaves you wondering what the creative team were hoping would happen. Was it meant to be enjoyable? Are we supposed to find any of it funny? Interesting? Engaging? Watchable?

That’s not to say there aren’t jokes and slapstick sequences. An early scene features Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Steve Martin) choosing a bottle from an enormous wine rack… and soon dozens of bottles are flying all around the room. It’s sub-Naked Gun stuff, not meant as high art but as carefree entertainment. However, the appalling writing, the pantomime performances and hackneyed staging strangle any possible comedy before it’s drawn breath.

The storyline sees a thief known as the Tornado stealing several famed artefacts such as the Turin Shroud and, in France, the Pink Panther diamond. French police chief Dreyfus (John Cleese, taking over the role from his friend Kevin Kline) appoints the hapless Inspector Clouseau to join a ‘dream team’ of international detectives who are on the Tornado’s trail. Each member is a national stereotype: Alfred Molina as an arrogant, Sherlock-style Brit; Andy Garcia as a suave, romantic Italian; Yuki Matsuzaki as a youthful electronics expert from Japan; and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as a cultured (and, being the only woman on the team, good-looking) Indian criminologist.

Why actors with good careers such as Cleese, Molina, Garcia and Bollywood star Bachchan – and Lily Tomlin, who has a tiny role as a woman who tries to teach Clouseau about his sexist attitudes, and Jeremy Irons, who turns up briefly as a suspect – agreed to appear in such a childish film is difficult to answer. Perhaps they were attracted to the idea of working with Steve Martin, even if Martin now seems like someone doing an OTT impression of Steve Martin doing an impression of Peter Sellers. Perhaps they were paid well. Or, less cynically, perhaps they knew they’d enjoy the experience. I hope so. It’s doubtful anyone in the audience ever has.

One bare-bummed idiot wearing a tutu out of 10

REDUX REVIEW: Batman & Robin (1997, Joel Schumacher)

For this film-by-film look at the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I’ve been watching his movies in a random order and jotting down a few thoughts. The Schwarzenegger Says quotations are taken from Total Recall (2012), Arnie’s brilliantly bonkers autobiography.

Watched: 5 January 2020.
Format: A DVD from my collection.
Seen before? Yes. Sadly.

Note: I’ve already reviewed Batman & Robin on this blog, back in 2015 when I wrote a series of reviews about Batman and Superman films. I was fairly damning, but rather than rake over old ground, this redux review will instead focus on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contribution as lead villain Mr Freeze…

Review: The magic of filmmaking is in its ability to create new sensations of time and space. It isn’t theatre, which mostly plays out on a defined stage with its pace dictated by the actors’ choices. Cinema can redefine geography and chronology through editing, and create the impression of a natural flow by cutting together takes that have been filmed at different times. Sometimes wildly different times: a conversation between the characters of Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), for example, had its two close-ups filmed a year apart for logistical reasons.

At least in that instance, actors Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were acting together during both performances – the fact their respective ‘over the shoulders’ were filmed in November 1999 and November 2000 is not detectable in the finished movie. The same can’t be said for certain scenes in the spectacularly terrible Batman & Robin. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was collecting $25 million for playing the villain Mr Freeze, often feels like he’s in a film all of his own – and not just because director Joel Schumacher had an ‘anything goes’ attitude to acting styles.

Watching the movie today, you can’t escape the feeling that Schwarzenegger is not exactly in sync with anything else that’s going on. He seems detached from the action, isolated from the drama, uncoupled from the cinematic flow. He doesn’t *fit*. A few years after the film came out, his co-star Chris O’Donnell – making his second appearance in the series as Robin – provided an explanation. ‘I’m in a lot of scenes with Mr Freeze,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t work one day with Arnold.’ It turns out that Schwarzenegger was not the only person to play Mr Freeze. A succession of body doubles and stand-ins were used for shots where the character’s face isn’t seen, largely because it took so long to apply the elaborate make-up and costume. Arnie’s close-ups were often filmed in isolation too, with the ‘performance’ being stitched together in post-production.

Not that the situation improves when Arnie himself is on screen. The most notable aspect of his contribution is dialogue that groans under the weight of its own awfulness. The character has around 100 lines of dialogue and every single one is dreadful. Nothing he says, in fact, sounds like dialogue. Instead Mr Freeze’s words are a combination of shallow pronouncements (‘Nice of you to drop in’, ‘I hate uninvited guests’, ‘Ah! A laundry service that delivers!’) and a never-ending conveyor belt of tedious puns. Most of the wordplay involves the character’s icy theme, with practically every variation wheeled out at some point: ‘The Iceman cometh!’, ‘You’re not sending me to the cooler!’, ‘You’re skating on thin ice!’, ‘Chilled to perfection!’, ‘Nothing frustrates a man like a frigid wife’, and many, many more of an equally tiresome flavour. For good measure, the character also insists on leading his henchmen in a singsong while wearing polar-bear slippers.

All this childish nonsense is a double disappointment because Mr Freeze is one of the most interesting villains in the Batman canon. Victor Fries is a scientist attempting to find a cure for his terminally ill wife, but an accident involving liquid hydrogen has led to him needing a cyber-suit to keep his body at a low temperature. There’s pathos in that story, even if the present film mostly ignores it. He first appeared in the Batman comic-book series in 1959 under the name of Mr Zero. Renamed Mr Freeze, he was then a recurring villain in the 1960s TV show (played by a different actor each time – George Sanders, Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach).

But it was Heart of Ice, a critically acclaimed 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series, that introduced the tragic backstory. Voiced by Michael Ansara, this cartoon iteration of the character has become the default and has inspired almost every subsequent Mr Freeze – including various comic books reimaginings and his appearances in the TV shows Gotham (played by Nathan Darrow) and Harley Quinn (voiced by Alfred Molina). In comparison, Arnie’s attempt at the character feels like something from the last Ice Age.

Schwarzenegger Says: ‘There’s a moment going into [heart] surgery that I really hate. It’s the moment when the anaesthesia start to take hold, when you know you’re going out, when you’re losing consciousness and don’t know if you’ll ever wake up. The oxygen mask felt like it was suffocating me – I was gasping for air, short of breath. This was a much bigger version of the claustrophobia I fought when I was having face a body masks made to play the Terminator or Mr Freeze in Batman & Robin. For me, Stan Winston’s special-effects studio was torture.’

One chilling sound of your doom out of 10

Next: Aftermath

Rambo: Last Blood (2019, Adrian Grunberg)

A series of reviews looking at Sylvester Stallone’s two most famous characters, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, film by film…

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.

While living on a peaceful farm in Arizona, John Rambo learns that his friend’s granddaughter has gone missing in Mexico, so he crosses the border to search for her…  

What does Stallone do? He co-wrote the script and plays John Rambo for a fifth time. Well… Sort of. He’s certainly credited as playing John Rambo for a fifth time. In truth, the writing is so indistinctive that the lead character might as well be called Generic Geriatric Action Hero (a point that’s also been made by David Morrell, the writer of the novel that introduced Rambo to the world). With a face that’s not so much granite as landslide, Stallone limps through the film with a permanent scowl and a sense that he’d rather be somewhere else. John Rambo’s never been an upbeat man, but this sinks to new strata of tedium… It’s been 11 years since we last saw our hero. He’s now living a sedate life with a platonic friend and her granddaughter, Gabriela, who he dotes on like she’s his own. But he’s still haunted by flashbacks of his Vietnam War stint and has taken to building elaborate systems of tunnels underneath his farm, where he likes to hide away from the world. When Gabriela then secretly heads to Mexico to search for her deadbeat father – and subsequently doesn’t return – John drives south to look for her…

Other main characters:
* Maria Beltran (Adriana Barraza) is the matriarch-like friend who John now lives with.
* Gabriela (Yvette Monreal) has been pining after her long-skedaddled father, for reasons that passeth understanding. Both John and her gran tell her that he’s a waste of space who abandoned her, and she has few clear memories of him, but the old storytelling crutch of a parental pull is being used here. When she arrives in the kind of Mexico that Hollywood films seem to love – muted colours, lots of scenes at night, deprivation, poverty, music – she finds her dad, Miguel (Rick Zingale). He’s a twat who tells her she’s hot but otherwise doesn’t want to know. She’s then at a nightclub when a local sleazo spikes her drink. She wakes up as a prisoner of a crime gang and forced into prostitution.
* Hugo (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and Victor Martinez (Óscar Jaenada) are the local gangsters who hold various young women hostage as enforced prostitutes. Like most successful crime lords in these types of films, they’re also whackjobs with short tempers. Of course they are.
* Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega) is a woman who comes to John’s aid after he confronts the Martinez brothers and has the shit kicked out of him. A journalist investigating the Martinez drug cartel, she offers help without ever feeling like anything other than a plot device.

Key scene: Last Blood’s critical reaction has featured many mentions of its gore and violence. It’s easy to see why. In the final third of the film, John deliberately provokes the Martinezes into coming after him, then holes up in his tunnels. He prepares a number of traps and weapons, all the better for picking off the pesky Mexican bad guys one by one in a variety of gruesome ways. Heads are cleaved, legs are chopped off, bodies are pierced. But rather than any shock value, the sequence is just *boring*.

Review: This is a hopelessly tired, sluggish movie, always quick to go for the easy option and always keen to be obvious. Hackneyed stereotypes practically trip over each other as a simple-beyond-belief plot is played out with leaden, lumpy crassness. We’re a very long way from the character study and subtexts of the original Rambo film.

One cross carved into your cheek out of 10

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013, John Moore)

Spoiler alert: these reviews reveal plot twists.

John McClane heads to Moscow when his son is arrested and thrown into prison…

Source material: This is the first Die Hard film that isn’t based on pre-existing material. Initially, the movie was going to be called Die Hard 24/7 and there were rumours it was to be a crossover with TV show 24. John McClane would have teamed up with Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. Surely that would have been more entertaining than what we ended up with…

John McClane: He’s still a cop in New York and still separated from ex-wife Holly. Hearing that his son is in trouble, John flies to Moscow, where everyone is either a criminal or a moron and the authorities show no interest in terrorists running amok. He makes idiotic quips as he blithely ignores huge destruction and untold deaths, and for the first time the character seems uncaring and arrogant. Bruce Willis gives the most dour, lifeless and bored performance of his career. Look into the actor’s eyes and you can see him daydreaming about the fee.

Regulars:
* Jack Gennero (Jai Courtney) is John McClane’s 30-ish son, who was known as John Jnr when we saw him as a small boy in the original Die Hard. Like his mother in that film and his sister in Die Hard 4.0, the character doesn’t want to use John’s surname; father and son also haven’t spoken for a few years, which explains why John is unaware that Jack is now a CIA operative working in Russia. But when news reaches New York that Jack has been imprisoned, John flies over to see what’s what… For a while, actor Jai Courtney seemed to be specialising in turgid franchise films: he’s also in Terminator Genisys and Suicide Squad. And he’s terrible here, turning a character we should care about into a petulant brat. Why the CIA would ever trust this whiny, quick-to-tantrum man-child with daddy issues is difficult to fathom.
* John’s daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), returns from the previous film for a cameo.

Villain: There’s a cack-handed plot about a Russian billionaire called Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch) who has a secret file that could incriminate corrupt politician Viktor Chagarin (Sergei Kolesnikov), so Chagarin’s henchman Aik (Radivoje Bukvić) breaks Komarov out of prison in order to get the file. If you manage to pay attention until the third act, you discover that the file never existed and Komarov is the real bad guy. Or something. Also involved in the story is Komarov’s daughter, Irina (Yulia Snigir), who’s there simply to provide a shot for the trailer when she unzips her motorcycle leathers to reveal her underwear.

Music: The score by Marco Beltrami is actually not that bad. It’s busy and powerful and steals the interest during many of the film’s 376 action scenes.

Review: A poster for this film contained the strapline ‘Yippie ki-yay, Mother Russia’. Not one single element in the movie itself even approaches that level of smartness or self-awareness. Watching A Good Day to Die Hard is a truly dreadful, depressing experience. It seems to want to be a Bourne film: urgent, visceral action; clipped, terse dialogue scenes; and driving incidental music. But it lacks the intelligence, panache and interesting characters that made those early Bourne adventures so engaging, and instead comes off more like a straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal flick. There *is* a plot – we know this because there’s one scene after 55 minutes where Jack explains it to John. There’s also a plot twist – late on, one character kills another and we’re meant to be impressed by the script’s Usual Suspects-esque sleight of hand. However, the film is directed by John Moore (who’d previously made the appalling remake of The Omen). He’s not interested in wit or character development or depth or subtext or suspense. He prefers computer-game carnage carried off without any style or story logic or consequence. “It’s going to be loud,” smirks one of the bland villains just before the first of several thousand explosions – it’s also going to be sensationally dull. This is a crass, classless, joyless, artless sequel and the worst film ever made that comes from an otherwise decent series.

One… oh, I don’t know… thing that blows up out of 10

The Wicker Tree (2011, Robin Hardy)

SPOILER WARNING: These reviews reveal plot twists!

Two young Americans travel to Scotland intent on spreading the word of Jesus. However, they soon fall in with the residents of a strange town…

How to classify this? Is it a sequel to the 1973 film The Wicker Man? Well, a case could be made for that. Christopher Lee has a tiny cameo, possibly as Lord Summerisle, so perhaps this is The Wicker Man: The Next Generation. Or is it a remake? It’s certainly a very similar storyline – the same kind of things happen to the same kind of people. Perhaps we should consider it a companion piece: another take on the same ideas. It’s also an adaptation of director Robin Hardy’s novel Cowboys for Christ (which itself was based on an earlier version of the film script after an attempt at making it fell through). But however we define it, The Wicker Tree is a truly mediocre movie.

It tells the story of American couple Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol) and Steve Thompson (Henry Garrett). She’s a successful country-and-western singer; he’s her boyfriend. They’re both young, clean-cut, devout Christians who are waiting until they marry before having sex. Beth is also turning her back on her singing career to spend two years “bringing God’s message to the lost people of Scotland.” That’s right: two aw-shucks Americans are coming to do missionary work on the council estates of Glasgow. Not too surprisingly, they just get doors slammed in their faces.

At their lowest ebb, Beth and Steve then meet local landowners Sir Lachlan (Graham McTavish) and Delia Morrison (Jacqueline Leonard). The Morrisons clearly have nefarious plans, and also tease the couple about their faith, pointing out contradictions and belittling Jesus. But despite this, Beth and Steve accept their hospitality. Meanwhile, we viewers learn that Sir Lachlan runs the local nuclear power plant. (Of course he does.) There was an accident there a decade earlier and now the whole village is infertile.

A huge problem with this story is that – unlike Beth and Steve’s equivalent in The Wicker Man, Sgt Howie – the two lead characters are just so dim. The script does them no favours, presenting them as dippy, childlike, naïve characters who you never feel any sympathy for, but the performances are nothing to write home to Texas about either. The Scottish characters are also burdened with bizarre, antiquated attitudes towards Americans, as if they’re a newly discovered race of people and not the globe’s most dominant culture.

Another issue is the old-fashioned-ness of the plot. Is it really plausible that a town on the Scottish Borders in 2011 could be entirely infertile and yet no one else has noticed? This isn’t an isolated island community like in The Wicker Man. There’s probably a Little Chef just round the corner. At least someone has spotted the town’s paganism: a copper called Orlando has been sent to the area to do some rooting around. But he gets distracted by a local woman called Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks, using a Scottish accent that needs subtitling at one point) who has sex with him multiple times to wear him out.

Anyway, various weird things happen to Beth and Steve. He’s spooked when a middle-aged woman sings a suggestive song in the pub; she’s nearly drugged by the Morrisons’ butler. We also get Christopher Lee green-screened into a 72-second flashback that tries to explain why Sir Lachlan is practising paganism. (Lee was originally going to play Lachlan, with Joan Collins as his wife, but then injured himself on the set of another film and had to drop out.)

When Beth learns that Steve’s been unfaithful – he couldn’t resist himself after seeing Lolly naked in a river – she ain’t happy. But worse is to come once we hit May Day. Steve is lured to a remote castle and then… torn to pieces and eaten by the townsfolk, who are now apparently cannibals. Meanwhile, Beth has been tricked into being the May Queen for the festivities and is lured towards a giant wicker tree. Lachlan plans to sacrifice her to the gods, hoping it will cure the community of its infertility. But when she figures out what’s going on, Beth pushes him into the tree and sets it on fire – perhaps the film’s one genuinely smart surprise. (Her victory doesn’t last long. She’s soon caught and killed by the locals, who are all dressed like post-apocalyptic zombies for some reason.)

This movie beggars belief. The dialogue is mostly either just laughable or ear-scrappingly off-key. The tone shifts all over the place, from po-faced philosophy to high comedy. The acting is extremely variable, ranging from doing-their-best (McTavish, Leonard, Clive Russell) to actually-not-good-enough. Some crummy visual effects and that’ll-do cinematography only add to the feeling that the film was made with precisely zero passion behind it. It’s an awful piece of work.

One stuffed cat out of 10

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007, The Brothers Strause)

Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists. Not that it really matters with garbage like this one.

A hybrid of a predator and an alien crash-lands in modern-day America…

The cast: A dreadful collection of wooden, daytime-soap performances. It’s not long before you’re rooting for the monsters. The only notable actor is Reiko Aylesworth (24, Lost, my sexual fantasies). She plays Kelly O’Brien, a soldier who’s really picked the wrong weekend to visit home. There were plans to get Adam Baldwin to reprise his Predator 2 role of army guy Garber, but a new character was created instead.

The best bit: There isn’t one.

Crossover: The previous film had featured the head of Weyland Industries, so this one gives us a coda scene with a character called Miss Yutani. (Weyland-Yutani is the name of the all-powerful conglomerate in the original Alien movies.) At one point a character says, “Get to the chopper!” – a reference to Predator’s most famous line of dialogue.

Alternative version: Turns out, the DVD I watched *is* an alternative version, with seven extra minutes compared to the theatrical cut. Haven’t I suffered enough?!

Review: This staggeringly boring mess mines new depths of storytelling ineptitude. Thankfully it’s so badly lit you often can’t tell what’s happening.

One pizza box out of 10

Next time: The Predator series gets its Aliens…