Film Review
Nov. 21st, 2004 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athersgeoOK; I've got a bit behind with both the reviewing and the watching; I'm going to try and catch up a bit today.
First up: Passenger 57
OK. It's a relatively old film (1992) and from a technical/stunt point of view that shows. There's some fairly obvious blue-screening in places. That's not a hanging matter, though - I'm a stunt snob, but I'm not that big a stunt snob! What IS a hanging matter is that frankly, the film sucks.
Bruce Payne is cast as the bad guy, and he is a very, VERY scenery-chewing bad guy (as anyone who's seen Highlander Endgame will confirm!), but he's actually about as actually scary as a glass of hot milk. Tom Sizemore is cast as a slick airline executive who I really, really did keep expecting to sell out and prove to be a bad guy. The character's so oily you could use the grease to fry chips in! Liz Hurley is amusingly cast as a bad chick with a gun...that just made me giggle like hell when I realised she was one of the bad guys, though I will say that she was the best disguised bad guy out of the whole lot. The rest of Payne's gang were exceptionally obvious - in fact, the film couldn't have made them more obvious if the director had decided to put up a caption saying "This is one of the bad guys". Wesley Snipes just performed the cliches he was handed, although he did, at least, do them pretty well.
And so to the story. Or, rather, the string of cliches. Cliche one: The bad guy (Payne) and the good guy (Snipes) end up on the same flight to LA. OK, the film doesn't work if you don't have this particular contrivance, and I'm willing to let it slide. Cliche two: The good guy is conflicted, having most effectively caused his wife's death in a robbery by trying to be the have-a-go hero. I don't know what this was supposed to add to the plot; frankly, all it did was make Snipes' character look like a dumbass. Cliche three: Everyone with a British or French accent is a bad guy. Nuff said. Cliche four: The sassy stewardess who the good guy had an arguement with right at the beginning of the film turns out to be working on the flight and ends up the good guy's new love interest (although, really, there was about as much on-screen chemistry between her and the good guy as there is between chalk and cheese - that particular relationship just seems to hit you from nowhere). Cliche five: The bumbling and self-important local cops who get involved and hamper the good guy's efforts.Cliche six: towards the end of the film, with the plane in mid-air, someone shoots out a window and you consequently get all manner of garbage flying out of the gaping hole. YET, miraculously, none of the passengers or anything of that sort ends up out of the door, only the bad guy and, in fact, by the time the plan comes into land, it doesn't seem to be so much of a gaping hole.
And those are just the biggies. It is comfortably one of the stupidest movies I've ever scene - it's certainly the stupidest movie that I've sat through while not out Dan-spotting (bearing in mind that Dan-spotting has entailed me sitting through the whole of Rendezvous, twice [second time to confirm I hadn't imagined it]). If you see one movie in what's left of this year and haven't already seen Passenger 57, don't bother.
Next: Mean Girls
From the rediculous to the...well...the intentionally rediculous, in point of fact. Mean Girls is supposed to be a comedy, and, to be fair, it is.
This is the first time I've seen any of the current crop of tweenie stars in anything, and I have to say, Lindsey Lohan did actually impress me in this. She did innocent and naive very well, and she also did scheming and manipulative very well. The rest of the cast were also very, very good - I was particularly amused by one of the minor characters, KG, who was strongly reminiscent of someone I actually went to school with!
Speaking as someone who didn't go through the American high school system, I also found the film very interesting from a point of view of seeing what it's like to go to school in America. I do know that the film was based on a factual book so I'm inclined to guess that the social interractions are probably fairly accurate - great for me from a pov of research, not so much fun for people actually living it.
I digress.
Back to the actual film. Considering that a large chunk of the film is essentially physical humour rather than the sort of word play I usually go for, I was pleasantly surprised at how little of the time I spent cringing. The fish-out-of-water feeling was done well without being overdone, the fact that Lohan's character ultimately WASN'T happy as the uber-bitch was nice, as was the way she finally ends up back as friends with Damien and Janis. In fact, about the only bit that I could have comfortably lived without was the sub-plot about the school coach's health classes and the fact that he was sleeping with two of the students. I didn't entirely get what what added to the film (other than about five minutes and a couple of bad jokes).
My overall impression is that, for a teen comedy, it's decidedly adult in its content. I found it extremely amusing in places, but I'm not sure I'd let my thirteen year old cousin watch it (even though it's rated 12A). At least, not until she's older!
More later.
First up: Passenger 57
OK. It's a relatively old film (1992) and from a technical/stunt point of view that shows. There's some fairly obvious blue-screening in places. That's not a hanging matter, though - I'm a stunt snob, but I'm not that big a stunt snob! What IS a hanging matter is that frankly, the film sucks.
Bruce Payne is cast as the bad guy, and he is a very, VERY scenery-chewing bad guy (as anyone who's seen Highlander Endgame will confirm!), but he's actually about as actually scary as a glass of hot milk. Tom Sizemore is cast as a slick airline executive who I really, really did keep expecting to sell out and prove to be a bad guy. The character's so oily you could use the grease to fry chips in! Liz Hurley is amusingly cast as a bad chick with a gun...that just made me giggle like hell when I realised she was one of the bad guys, though I will say that she was the best disguised bad guy out of the whole lot. The rest of Payne's gang were exceptionally obvious - in fact, the film couldn't have made them more obvious if the director had decided to put up a caption saying "This is one of the bad guys". Wesley Snipes just performed the cliches he was handed, although he did, at least, do them pretty well.
And so to the story. Or, rather, the string of cliches. Cliche one: The bad guy (Payne) and the good guy (Snipes) end up on the same flight to LA. OK, the film doesn't work if you don't have this particular contrivance, and I'm willing to let it slide. Cliche two: The good guy is conflicted, having most effectively caused his wife's death in a robbery by trying to be the have-a-go hero. I don't know what this was supposed to add to the plot; frankly, all it did was make Snipes' character look like a dumbass. Cliche three: Everyone with a British or French accent is a bad guy. Nuff said. Cliche four: The sassy stewardess who the good guy had an arguement with right at the beginning of the film turns out to be working on the flight and ends up the good guy's new love interest (although, really, there was about as much on-screen chemistry between her and the good guy as there is between chalk and cheese - that particular relationship just seems to hit you from nowhere). Cliche five: The bumbling and self-important local cops who get involved and hamper the good guy's efforts.Cliche six: towards the end of the film, with the plane in mid-air, someone shoots out a window and you consequently get all manner of garbage flying out of the gaping hole. YET, miraculously, none of the passengers or anything of that sort ends up out of the door, only the bad guy and, in fact, by the time the plan comes into land, it doesn't seem to be so much of a gaping hole.
And those are just the biggies. It is comfortably one of the stupidest movies I've ever scene - it's certainly the stupidest movie that I've sat through while not out Dan-spotting (bearing in mind that Dan-spotting has entailed me sitting through the whole of Rendezvous, twice [second time to confirm I hadn't imagined it]). If you see one movie in what's left of this year and haven't already seen Passenger 57, don't bother.
Next: Mean Girls
From the rediculous to the...well...the intentionally rediculous, in point of fact. Mean Girls is supposed to be a comedy, and, to be fair, it is.
This is the first time I've seen any of the current crop of tweenie stars in anything, and I have to say, Lindsey Lohan did actually impress me in this. She did innocent and naive very well, and she also did scheming and manipulative very well. The rest of the cast were also very, very good - I was particularly amused by one of the minor characters, KG, who was strongly reminiscent of someone I actually went to school with!
Speaking as someone who didn't go through the American high school system, I also found the film very interesting from a point of view of seeing what it's like to go to school in America. I do know that the film was based on a factual book so I'm inclined to guess that the social interractions are probably fairly accurate - great for me from a pov of research, not so much fun for people actually living it.
I digress.
Back to the actual film. Considering that a large chunk of the film is essentially physical humour rather than the sort of word play I usually go for, I was pleasantly surprised at how little of the time I spent cringing. The fish-out-of-water feeling was done well without being overdone, the fact that Lohan's character ultimately WASN'T happy as the uber-bitch was nice, as was the way she finally ends up back as friends with Damien and Janis. In fact, about the only bit that I could have comfortably lived without was the sub-plot about the school coach's health classes and the fact that he was sleeping with two of the students. I didn't entirely get what what added to the film (other than about five minutes and a couple of bad jokes).
My overall impression is that, for a teen comedy, it's decidedly adult in its content. I found it extremely amusing in places, but I'm not sure I'd let my thirteen year old cousin watch it (even though it's rated 12A). At least, not until she's older!
More later.
