Since I had been enjoying the new one so much, I figured I’d double back and replay the original game. This was doubly important, as I had never actually beaten the game originally, instead getting about three quarters of the way through before being distracted by something or other, and then never came back to it. I’m a little ADD, I admit.
It’s interesting to go back to this after having played through the sequel to see how things have changed. The controls, for one, are absolutely better in the sequel, the most important difference being that in this one, you can’t climb over anything. This leads to such situations as you being trapped in corners by hunters when there’s visible escape paths all around you that you can’t get to because you can’t clamber up onto platforms that don’t even come up to your waist. It’s not usually an issue, but it can be maddening when you’re frenziedly running from a gang of hunters that have spotted you.
In almost every other way, though, it’s superior to its successor. It’s both longer and harder, giving it a longer shelf life than the sequel. Additionally, the enemies are more varied and interesting, with the various gangs of hunters trying to kill you each having a nice, distinctive look to them, and seem a good deal smarter than those in the sequel, which largely appear fairly oblivious to your presence (in fairness to the sequel, it at least can boast of somewhat better level design). The graphics are simultaneously worse and better than in the sequel; worse in general, as could be expected by virtue of it being a couple years older, but better in the sense that its executions are totally unfiltered, so you can watch the violence totally uncensored.
This game is certainly not going to be to everyone’s tastes. Being a game that’s basically based around sneaking up behind people and murdering them, it’s going to appeal more to horror fans than anyone else. Still, for those who can get into such a game, and if you’re reading this site you more than likely are such a person, there is quite a lot to like about this. If you have a PS2, you should certainly try to hunt down a copy.
Rating: *** ½
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Manhunt
Monday, November 26, 2007
Hitman
Well, as promised, here’s a review of Hitman. I wasn’t really expecting this to be anything worth watching, judging by the past pedigree of movies based on video games (the best I had seen thus far was Silent Hill, and even that’s only likely to appeal to horror fans). Moreover, it was by a director I had never heard of, and starred Timothy Olyphant, a man I’ve never really been all that impressed by. Still, despite all that, I had a free pass to see it, and damn if I wasn’t going to use it.
All that said, this was actually a pretty fun movie. For an action movie, there are surprisingly few big action sequences, the film wisely preferring to focus instead on exploring the world of the mysterious organization that raises people like Olyphant from birth to be assassins, and how they would operate when forced to live in the real world. The best part of this are easily his interactions with Nika, a prostitute he rescues early on and then takes along with him “for her protection”. Trained to be a perfect killing machine, he has no idea what to do with a woman, and her attempt to seduce him leads to the film’s greatest payoff.
Somewhat less impressive are the action scenes. An early throwdown as he tries to escape a hotel swarming with Russian police works well, as does the big climax, but the battles in between aren’t so good. He randomly engages in a sword fight with several other hitmen from the Organization in a train station that just seems randomly thrown in for fear that the audience will revolt without enough action, as does a later scene at an arms dealer’s. When it focuses more on Olyphant’s interactions with Nika, or his cat and mouse game with an Interpol agent trying to arrest him, the film works a good deal better. I guess this is one of those movies that’s just kind of trapped by its genre into being a bit less than it could have been.
Rating: ***
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Live Free or Die Hard
While I confess I haven’t seen every action film that’s out this year, I can say with some measure of confidence that any other such movies are going to have an uphill battle convincing me that it, and not this film, is the best action movie of the year. This movie is that good.
It’s been twelve years since the last Die Hard movie, and poor John McClane’s life is in its usual shambles. His wife’s out of the picture, his daughter’s taken her mom’s last name and doesn’t want to be on speaking terms with him, and now he’s the only man available to save the world from cyber terrorists. Worse still, he’s accompanied on this mission by an incredibly obnoxious hacker sidekick who, in the grand Hollywood tradition, continues to perpetuate the myth that hackers are attractive people (a cameo by Kevin Smith as a fellow hacker is much closer to the truth).
While said sidekick, Justin Long, is very irritating, he’s also mostly relegated to the background as Willis takes the stage. This isn’t a Die Hard With a Vengeance type deal where they both get equal billing, Long seems to be there mainly to work computers and draw in young girls to the audience while Willis guns everyone down and blows up a bunch of stuff. The action scenes, as one might think was obvious, are really where the movie shines. The stuff in this movie is, quite frankly, so ridiculously over the top that it transforms itself into sheer brilliance. I’ll give one example of what I mean. About a third of the way through the movie, Willis and Long are being chased by gunmen in a helicopter, and flee into a tunnel to escape. Their enemies, having already seized control of the traffic system, try to draw them out by first opening up every lane for incoming traffic on the end of the tunnel they’re driving toward, and then opening up every lane on the other side, forcing them to flee their car to avoid being hit by a mass of cars coming at them from both directions by evidently suicidal drivers. Willis eventually regains control of his car and goes back to his entrance where the chopper is waiting for him, but he outdoes them by jumping out of his car just as it hits a makeshift ramp and goes careening through the sky into the copter, making it explode instantly. This is, of course, after he had already driven over a fire hydrant so that the sudden spray of water would hit the helicopter and knock one of the gunmen out of it. James Bond would have been astonished watching all this.
There’s a number of ridiculous action sequences like that, as well as some martial arts scenes and a gunfight or two to keep some variety to things. Willis’s character has evolved into a post-action hero delight; now, instead of delivering a flippant one-liner after taking down an enemy, he merely stares at all the carnage he’s wrought and starts giggling like an asshole. It’s not a completely perfect movie, but it is perfect in all the parts it needs to be perfect in. And to those who remember the controversy when this originally came out about how Willis’s trademark phrase was cut for its PG-13 rating, worry not. The unrated DVD includes it (as well as some other nicely placed profanity throughout). The unrated version also contains a free ticket to the movie Hitman, so I guess I’ll be reviewing that for all of you tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.
Rating: ****
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Ocean's Thirteen
I would like to consider myself a fan of this series, at least moreso than the average person is, given the popular reaction to the second film. However, I am noticing here a disturbing trend with the series, as all three films thus far have run along similar plotlines, the main difference being that each new venture feels the need to make the film that extra bit incomprehensible.
I don’t really have to describe to you the plot of this movie, which helps me out tremendously since I only have a vague understanding of what was going on in it. It’s another heist at a casino, just like in the first film, though this time instead of being for money, it’s for revenge, as scheming casino owner Al Pacino has screwed over Elliott Gould, giving him a heart attack in the process. Andy Garcia, the villain in the first film, and an antagonist in the second, has now been upgraded to a cautious ally, as they go to him for help in putting the screws to Pacino.
Again, how they go about doing this exactly, I was very unclear on, but it did admittedly look rather impressive as it was happening. The problem with this film is that it’s just too cluttered as it’s whizzing on by. With such a large cast, some character shorthand is expected, but at the very least you need a really impressive villain for the characters to be going up against. Sadly, Pacino is never really given enough face time to really show off how villainous he can be. I’m not expecting him to be Michael Corleone out there, but it would have been nice if director Steven Soderbergh had at least given him the chance to give us a villain as good as his role in The Devil’s Advocate. This is clearly a film that needed some extra time to slow down and learn what it and its characters are all about. Without that, we get a lot of flash and style, but we’re left with nothing to really remember once it’s done.
Rating: **
Friday, November 23, 2007
Driftwood
This is a particularly frustrating film for me, and I have to say, despite my admitted junkie-like fixation with horror movies, I think this one would have been much better if the horror elements had been stripped out of it.
The film follows a troubled, potentially suicidal youth as his parents, panicked at the thought of their younger son killing himself like their older did, dump him at a facility to “rehabilitate” troubled youths. Such places actually do exist, though they usually operate outside of the United States so they can have more legal leeway with how they go about their rehabilitating. Our hero is fairly wooden, letting us focus more on former pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, who plays the charismatic and sadistic Captain, warden of this “jail that’s not a jail”. Were it just a film about their battles with each other, or of life in such a place, the film could easily work. Unfortunately, it also has to throw in a haunting by the ghost of the Captain’s nephew, who suffered a brutal death at the facility, and who wants our hero to find his bones so he can know rest.
I guess it’s kind of like if some director had decided he wanted to make a film exposing abuses at Guantanamo Bay, but felt the best way to really make people take notice would be to make it into some stupid fucking ghost movie. The film sabotages itself right at its very core. It’s well made enough, with a (mostly) solid crew of actors, and Tim Sullivan’s directing work is certainly an improvement over the meanness of his previous effort 2001 Maniacs, but it’s all in service of a work that was doomed at the script level. This is one film that would have greatly benefited from some rewrites.
Rating: * ½
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Manhunt 2
To celebrate the holiday a bit, I figured I’d give a little change of pace and do a video game review instead. After having loved the original Manhunt, I made this the first video game I’d purchased in a couple years (the last one, of course, being its predecessor).
For those that are unaware of the series, this is one of those dreaded murder simulators that you always hear politicians railing against. Like the original, about half of the game involves you hiding in shadows until an enemy wanders past, and then you sneak up behind him and execute him in a number of different ways, depending on what weapon you use and how long you stalk him. The other half, not to be outdone, involves a great many intense gun battles, perhaps even more prominent here than in the original.
The game is a great deal of fun, but it is noticeably weaker than the original game. For one, it’s both shorter and a lot easier, so you’ll breeze through it pretty quickly. For another, the ESRB bewilderingly rated it Adults Only, so to get a Mature rating they had to put obnoxious filters over the execution videos to make them more difficult to watch. I say bewilderingly because they aren’t noticeably different from the ones in the first game, so I’m not sure exactly why that was able to get a Mature rating but not this one.
Still, despite those flaws, the game is still a good deal of fun. After all, it’s about the only game series in existence where you get to actually play as the mad slasher, and not just one of his victims. More than that, the programmers seemed to be anticipating the ESRB smackdown, as they focused the game more on the gun fights rather than the sneaking around and executing people parts, so that problem is partially alleviated. It may not be as good a game as the first one was, but it’s still certainly worth playing.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Satanico Pandemonium
This is a much better nunsploitation effort than the lamentable The Other Hell was, but I think I may have to face the sad fact that, School of the Holy Beast aside, the nunsploitation genre is doomed to never live up to its glorious potential.
The film follows Sister Maria, a devout nun at a convent who becomes ensnared by Satan and begins having constant forbidden sexual hallucinations, often ending violently, to win her over to his cause. By hallucinations, I of course mean that she begins stripping constantly and getting it on with half the people at the convent, and then usually stabbing them to death with a knife, only for us to later discover that they’re still alive (though in some cases it seems that the attempted sex did happen, as a few of her would-be victims seem a little worse for wear around her). Eventually it gets so muddled that we get hallucinations within hallucinations, and after killing the Mother Superior, the other nuns all vote for her to lead them because of her great purity and goodness, for which she plans to bring them all to Hell with her.
There are some nice over-the-top moments (my personal favorite is her speech to the Mother Superior, before killing her, when she informs her that “I do not fear Hell…for I AM Hell!!!”), but there are too many deep flaws within the film for it to work. For one, while I’m certainly grateful to our lead Cecilia Pezet for being topless in about half her scenes, they would have worked a lot better if she wasn’t so plain looking. It would easily have been ten times hotter if, instead of getting completely naked, she had gotten naked except for that hat thing nuns wear (a habit? Is that what a habit is?). If you’re going to go the kinky nun route, you may as well go all the way, I say. Another critical flaw is the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it pretty much hits the reset button on the whole film, and I can’t stand it when that happens. It’s something along the lines of Boxing Helena, for anyone who’s seen that. Oh, spoiler warning I guess for anyone out there who has seen this but not Boxing Helena. Sorry.
Rating: **
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Blood Car
Here’s yet another straight to DVD horror comedy, but sadly, unlike Murder Party this one doesn’t quite bring the goods. It’s certainly not terrible, mind you, but while Murder Party was able to stay humorous the entire way through, this one struggles a bit, giving us a good amount of filler as it tries (and fails) to get to a 90 minute running time.
It starts off rather promising too. A newsman-type directly faces the camera like he’s in an Ed Wood production and warns us of the terrible calamity waiting in store for us in the future, two weeks from now, as gas prices have risen so high that none but the rich can afford them. Enter our hero, an aspiring vegan (yay to Microsoft Word, by the way, for not acknowledging vegan as a word) and Kindergarten teacher who’s trying to make a car engine that runs on soy grass. Of course, if it worked properly we wouldn’t have a movie, and so he discovers that his engine will run, but only when supplied by blood. The rest of the movie is basically him going around looking for victims while not-very-menacing government types stalk him.
Remember what I said about it giving us too much filler? Well, the film is only about 75 minutes long, and has enough good material to last roughly 50 minutes or so. This means we a lot of boring scenes, particularly near the end when the film starts to grind to a halt. Still, there’s a good deal of good moments to it, particularly in the form of My Girl’s Anna Chlumsky, who plays a hopelessly nerdy vegan street vendor who spends her spare time drawing erotic fantasies about her and the lead. The film comes with a “Making of” documentary that I didn’t watch most of because it was almost as long as the film, but I can confirm they at least started it off right by focusing on her shower scene. God bless ‘em.
Rating: **
Monday, November 19, 2007
Red Eye
I’m not sure why I didn’t see this film when it first came out. I suspect it had something to do with me childishly refusing to see a Wes Craven film that was only PG-13 and not R. This, of course, comes from the same person that actually purchased a copy of Sasquatch, so you should be careful about listening to me when it comes to opinions on films I haven’t seen yet.
This is one of the better thrillers set on a plane I’ve seen, easily outclassing films like Flightplan and Flight of the Living Dead (though it doesn’t quite match the sheer fun factor of Snakes on a Plane). The film follows the owner of a hotel as she takes a late night flight back to her home in Miami, only to be menaced by an assassin sitting next to her who plans to use her to kill a Homeland Security higher-up who’s arriving at her hotel in the morning. The killer, as is the case with several of the actors here, looked vaguely familiar to me, so I wasn’t too surprised when I just checked his IMDB and found out he was Cillian Murphy, who I’d also seen in 28 Days Later and Batman Begins. Here he perfectly oozes creepiness, even at the beginning when he’s trying to be charming.
What I really enjoyed about this film was the actual intelligence that went into the screenplay. Neither of the two main characters are idiots, and they spend the whole flight (and the aftermath) trying to outwit each other in pretty believable ways. There’s also a great deal of tension throughout the film, as Craven really brought his A game to this effort. Despite it being PG-13 for the kiddies, he also managed to make it surprisingly violent at the end, as there’s a pretty vicious chase and end fight between the two once the plane lands (spoilers, I guess, for those of you thought it would stay in flight forever). If not Craven’s best (New Nightmare will probably always hold that title for me), it’s certainly one of his top efforts, and is one of his only good efforts that non-horror fans can enjoy too. Go check it out.
Rating: ***
Sunday, November 18, 2007
The Arena
This is one of a number of cheapo exploitation flicks Pam Grier did in the early 70s until she had developed enough star power to enable her to make less interesting movies where she wouldn’t be required to get naked. While she had already done a few women in prison films like Black Mama, White Mama or The Big Doll House, this was a somewhat more inspired effort, giving us a Women in Prison flick crossed with a gladiator movie, setting the film in ancient Rome and giving us the pretense of it being a female empowerment movie.
What “female empowerment” in this film of course means is that, after our female cast is all captured, enslaved, and constantly stripped naked and occasionally raped, they are turned into gladiators to satisfy an increasingly jaded Roman public, where they then try to overthrow their captors and strike a blow for women and slaves everywhere. This sounds a bit more interesting than it actually is. The film is actually pretty dull, despite its premise, with a good deal of filler padding out its running time to feature length. Exploitation films like this tended to be fairly rushes productions, with filming usually only lasting a couple weeks (Little Shop of Horrors was the king of this, with filming going on a scant two days), so I get the idea that the writers and director simply didn’t have enough time to think of a really interesting direction to take this, and so just went with a Spartacus rip-off with a good amount of nudity. That the characters in the film openly discuss Spartacus’ rebellion probably counts as clever in this world.
To be honest, had it just gone full-blown with the sleaze I would have liked it more than I did. I mean, hell, I did buy it after all. Unfortunately, this is a rally second-rate exploitation film. It doesn’t have enough violence or nudity to keep up its exploitative side, and it simply doesn’t have enough plot or humor to keep things going outside of the exploitation angle. This one can safely be ignored.
Rating: * ½
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Talk To Me
I had seen Don Cheadle in a number of films without really noticing him before becoming completely entranced in Hotel Rwanda, and he keeps up the momentum he gained with that film here. He has an amazing level of versatility to himself, so much so that I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even recognize him until I went to write this review.
As with Hotel Rwanda, here he again throws himself into the role of a real-life person, the legendary D.C. radio DJ Petey Greene, who rose to fame in the 60s after a chance encounter with WOL employee Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in another great performance, though not as flashy as his role in Serenity) while serving out a prison term. After pretty much conning his way into a job as a new morning show, he rises into becoming pretty much a radio legend before completely self-destructing.
One thing I really enjoyed about this film was in how it subverted the standard routine these biopics tend to move in. While he did have a big rise to fame, complete with the apparently required self-destructive behavior to accompany his newfound success (one particularly telling incident – when MLK Jr. is killed, he gives a powerful broadcast about it that leaves his audience and co-workers in tears and makes him an instant legend, and then immediately afterward he goes to introduce James Brown at a free concert in memory of King and shows up both late and piss-drunk), he never seemed to actually want success, openly preferring to remain small time, and his career doesn’t recover after his path of ruination reaches critical mass.
Another thing that works nice is that his friend/co-worker/eventual manager/enemy Dewey is just as important a character in the film as Petey is, and their interactions with each other really form the crux of the film. Each man seems to need the other to fulfill something lacking inside, and both end feeling somewhat disappointed in the other. That this film came and went through theaters without making a ripple is baffling to me. Something this powerful and intelligent should at least have made waves among critics if nobody else.
Rating: ****
Friday, November 16, 2007
Spider-Man 3
This movie is sadly emblematic of one of the key problems that killed the Batman movies back in the mid-90s. While director Sam Raimi managed to make it through two films without resorting to overcrowding, it seems here that he has finally given in to the urge to cram two or three films’ worth of material into one. The result is a number of potentially good or great moments rushed through so much that we can’t really enjoy any of them.
The beginning of the film is dominated by Harry Osborne and the Sandman, both of whom could have easily achieved an impressive villainous role if going solo, but they aren’t given enough time to be properly developed. Harry, in order to make way for the rest of the plot, is hit on the head and develops amnesia until the final act, while the Sandman is just completely forgotten about. This frees up the middle portion of the film, where we’re given a clumsy love triangle between Spider-Man, Mary Jane, and new girl Gwen Stacy, as well as what is the weakest part of the film in Eddie Brock and Venom. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not such a purist that I need every character to have the exact same origin and story that they had in the comic, but if you’re going to change things around, then at least try to improve on the original story. They absolutely weakened Brock’s backstory here, making him a much more generic villain than he was in the comic. Additionally, one of the main points of Venom was that he was just like Spider-Man, only bigger and stronger, and Topher Grace is not the first person who comes to mind when I think big and strong.
The film does have a good number of good moments to it, don’t get me wrong. Bruce Campbell’s required cameo thoroughly steals the film, there are some good comedy scenes when Peter gets the black suit, and Sandman’s and Harry’s scenes, when they’re allowed to do more than stock villain material, works quite well. It’s just that, unlike Willem Dafoe or Alfred Molina in the first two films, they simply aren’t given any time to develop themselves, and the film suffers as a result. This is something that needed to be stretched out to two films. I don’t know if Raimi is just getting tired of doing the films and wanted to make sure he could throw in everything he had ever wanted to direct in them as quickly as he could, but he needs to calm back down and return to his earlier style, or this franchise is going to start winding down pretty quickly.
Rating: ** ½
UPDATE: Apparently Sam Raimi has gone on record saying he didn't want to include Venom in the film at all, but was pressured into it by the studio. This is clearly a case of either the studio being completely wrong, or Raimi half-assing his effort because he resented being made to include him. Either way, it drags the film down quite a bit.
