“Brick Mansions” – Would you rather…

…lick a frozen flagpole or watch Brick Mansions?

As an avid movie watcher and fan, I was getting a little nervous that I hadn’t seen a truly wretched movie released in 2014. This is upsetting because the summer movie season is only days away, there are a lot of movies I’m really looking forward to seeing, and what if one of those movies turns out to be the next A Good Day to Die Hard or After Earth or R.I.P.D.? Last year was almost completely devoid of decent popcorn flicks that I don’t know if I could handle two straight years of severe disappointment. Thankfully, Brick Mansions came along just in time to help settle those fears, even going so far as to make me list at least one redeemable quality in every terrible movie from last year. If you read what I wrote about some of those movies last year (including the three above), you know how difficult that is.

…take a punch from Ivan Drago or watch Brick Mansions?

I’m not a fan of Paul Walker, so please don’t be shocked when I tell you the last movie I saw him in was The Fast and the Furious. You read that right; I haven’t seen any Fast and Furious movie since the first one. I simply have no interest in the franchise. However, I did see Walker in what I would consider his peak, from 1998-2001, in which he did The Skulls, She’s All That, The Fast and the Furious, Varsity Blues, and Pleasantville. Across all of those films, Walker’s acting remains static, by which I mean he does not get better. And let’s not pretend that Walker was really much good in the first place. You’d think that thirteen years and nineteen movies would give him ample time to hone his craft, but you’d be wrong. His performance in Brick Mansions is just as one dimensional as any of those earlier performances, except it’s actually far worse. The sad thing is that his performance is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s in the putrid Brick Mansions.

…eat Violet Beauregarde’s chewing gum or watch Brick Mansions?

Apparently, Brick Mansions is a remake of a 2004 French Film called District 13 that was written and produced by Luc Besson. Brick Mansions is also written and produced by Besson, though with help on the screenplay from Robert Mark Kamen. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone remaking their own film, but if remakes are supposed to be improvements on the originals (theoretically), how bad was District 13 that an utter piece of shit like Brick Mansions was an improvement? And what the hell has happened to Besson’s writing? This is the same guy that wrote The Professional and Taken; two very, very good movies. Is Brick Mansions just a French prank that nobody understands?

…crawl up that sphincter in Evolution or watch Brick Mansions?

Right before the screening of Brick Mansions started, three guys got up in front of the audience and pitched the opening of their new parkour gym in Boulder. They said they were going to show us what parkour is and when they didn’t stop talking and someone finally asked, one of them did a backflip and said “that’s parkour.” Um, no it’s not; that’s gymnastics. If you’ve never heard of parkour, it’s because it’s a stupid internet meme that showed up several years ago and gained a small cult following of people that were bored with skateboarding. Essentially, in order to perform parkour, you simply run and hurdle over/around/through obstacles, sometimes using gymnastic moves to do it. That’s it. The other star of Brick Mansions is David Belle, one of the founders of parkour. Now this whole paragraph makes sense, except that it doesn’t, because now you are asking if this movie is really ninety minutes of Walker and Belle performing parkour through some brick mansions. Incidentally, that would have been a much better movie.

…test a bulletproof cup on yourself or watch Brick Mansions?

Instead, Walker is a Detroit cop (Damien) dedicated to avenging his father’s murder in a section of Detroit called Brick Mansions that has a giant wall around it for no reason other than poor people should be fenced off from the world (note: the characters in the film say “Brick Mansions” every chance they get because Besson really wanted to make sure you knew the title of the movie) because they don’t exist if we pretend they’re not there. Belle plays Lino, one of those poor people, who we meet as he is destroying several kilos of heroin in his bathtub. When the bad guys break into his building, he parkours his way through dozens of machine-gun wielding henchmen, hallways, roofs, and windows, finally escaping because those henchmen don’t understand that the bullets only come out when the trigger is pulled. After a failed attempt to rescue his kidnapped, ex-girlfriend Lola, he is forced to team up with Damien to take down the drug kingpin, Tremaine (RZA), who also happens to be the last guy on Damien’s list of vengeance. On the surface, this doesn't sound like the worst movie ever made, but I haven’t told you how the mayor of Detroit wants to destroy Brick Mansions in order to build new luxury buildings, as well as kill everyone inside the walls using a neutron bomb. Yeah, you’re nodding your head now, aren’t you?

…let a tarantula bite you on the testicles or watch Brick Mansions?

It’s not just the story that makes this such an atrocious film; it’s everything about the movie. You don’t have to wait long to see scenes that look like they were made by students who haven’t been potty-trained yet. The one that made me laugh the hardest was when Tremaine rallies his troops to go kill Damien and Lino and his giant henchmen (Robert Maillet; Sherlock Holmes) starts letting out guttural screams as they stream out in standard wedge formation. Even funnier still, the sound editing was so bad that the volume of his screams were toned down to the point where he sounded kind of strangled, but his face didn’t match the noise. As bad as the editing was, the dialogue was even worse, filled with every stupid cliché you could think of and consisting mostly of ‘damns’ and ‘shit dawgs’ and anything else you imagine street thugs and gang bangers say. In one scene, Walker is surrounded by cops pointing guns at him, he tells them he is a cop, and when they ask for his badge, he gives them the middle finger. In fact, one whole character seems to be a walking cliché – a cleavage-spilling, razor-wielding, super-bee-otch named Razor, who is obsessed with Lola’s breasts and wants to rape her. No, I didn’t make that up. But, this movie is PG-13. So, all she does is snarl and slice buttons off Lola’s shirt, while Lola glares right back and at one point they wrestle. I would have an easier time believing that the entire script was improvised than believing someone actually wrote this shit down.

…go to a public place with jizz in your hair or watch Brick Mansions?

It’s bad enough that Besson remade his own movie, but he doubles down by outright stealing from other movies. For one thing, sending Damien into a walled-off, lawless, wasteland to disarm a bomb while secretly being double-crossed, is a straight-up theft of Escape from Los Angeles. Later in the film, Tremaine reveals that he has strapped the bomb to a rocket and is threatening to shoot back at the heart of Detroit (I shook my head in derision at this – he will literally say the rocket has a range of only five miles – which is hilarious in itself; it’s a fucking rocket –which would still kill him) unless he gets $30 million. To further steal from The Rock, he will reveal that he is bluffing to his psycho cohort (Razor), who looks at him in disbelief as he says “I’m not willing to kill three million people. I’m not crazy.” We’re with you Razor; we don’t believe what we’re watching either.

…make out with Chet from Weird Science after his transformation or watch Brick Mansions?

In all my times watching movies in a theater, I have never had a more difficult time not walking out of the theater and not talking during the movie. I managed the first one only because it was an advanced screening and I wanted to make sure the organizers heard at least one person tell them how rotten this was. Unfortunately, I failed on the second one several times, continually asking my friend if the bad guys knew they were holding guns (for as many guys and guns present in the film they fire surprisingly few shots), asking if Damien purposely dropped a gun he had just taken from a bad guy so that he could beat up multiple, armed bad guys with a steering wheel cuffed to his wrist (Jackie Chan is shaking his head), or how the movie could possibly not be over yet (it was the longest 85 minutes in the history of the universe). The best way I can describe this movie in one sentence is…

…spend every movie the rest of the year sitting next to the bad B.O., curry-eating parkour dude who sat next to me… than watch Brick Mansions.

Rating: You’re shitting me. This isn’t a real movie. I would rather watch Will Ferrell and Cameron Diaz perform the Shakespearean porn version of The Last Airbender… than watch Brick Mansions.

“Transcendence” – Skynet, The Matrix, and…Johnny Depp?

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) in movies and television, the list goes on and on. Everyone has a favorite, whether it’s an individual like Data or the Replicants, or a larger entity such as the Borg or Skynet. More often than not, these AI’s are depicted as evil, homicidal, and even genocidal, as the poor humans try to fight back against their creations lest they be exterminated. From H.A.L. to the Cylons to whatever was running the Matrix, there is no shortage of machines trying to kill humans in small or large quantities in cinema. Sometimes the explanations are logical (farming humans for energy) and sometimes they aren’t (“…they tried to pull the plug”). But, with every depiction of the evil AI, people become more and more afraid that one day the machines really will turn on us and that’s how we end up with idiotic policies such as those banning stem cells, cloning, and eventually, nuclear power plants. Luckily, movies like Transcedence come along every now and then, challenging people to actually use their brains and think about how alarmist we tend to be.

The first thing the movie is going to do is tell you that the end of the movie doesn’t really matter by showing you the end of the movie. And, it’s not subtle either. I spent much of the movie slightly annoyed that we knew how it would end and it took me a night of sleeping on it to realize that this wasn’t as bad as I thought. In fact, I think they did it specifically to make the audience watch the movie from a completely different viewpoint – instead of wondering whether the AI would win or lose, we wonder what the deeper message of the movie is supposed to be.

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is one of the leading minds in developing AI and is giving a talk on his work when a techno-terrorist group perpetrates a series of attacks on AI labs and leading minds, including Caster. Caster is shot with radioactive bullets and only has a few weeks to live. Refusing to let him go, his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), with the help of their best friend, Max (Paul Bettany), uploads his consciousness into their most advanced AI computer. When Will asks to be put on the network, Max balks and Evelyn kicks him out. At the same time, the terrorists, led by Bree (Kate Mara) arrive too late to stop Evelyn. They kidnap Max and after virtually no persuasion, he joins their cause to stop Will. Stop Will from doing what exactly, you ask? Well, that’s where the movie kind of breaks apart.

Fast forward two years and Will and Evelyn have purchased a small town in the middle of nowhere and built a sprawling underground research complex and home. Will has been advancing technologies for the better of mankind, and Evelyn has been overseeing the research and managing the complex. By this time, the terrorists have set up a base near the complex and have convinced the military and Morgan Freeman to help them stop Will and Evelyn. Yes, you read that right – Morgan Freeman. He doesn’t do anything, but whichever side Morgan Freeman is on must be the side of right. Right?

At this point in the film, Will still has done nothing to elicit the wrath of anyone, including Bree and her followers, yet the film is still trying to convince us that Will must be stopped. Is it because he’s developed nanotechnology capable of healing human tissue; a capability that is demonstrated on people who hear about the miracles and volunteer to be healed of their own personal ailments? Is it because Evelyn is having a bi-technical relationship with a virtual being? Your guess is as good as mine. The film can’t decide which issue is more important – the marital relationship between virtual Will and Evelyn or the illogical fear of people towards technology – and ends up coming short on both.

Because the marital issue is emphasized less often than the technology fear, I think it’s the latter that the writer was more interested in. As I said, Will seems only to be helping humanity, yet Bree is hell-bent on destroying him and stopping the advance of technology. My guess is she watched one too many movies, including The Lawnmower Man, choosing to believe Will was the next coming of Job crossed with Skynet. But why? The film never really explains why she’s so dedicated to the cause, other than her telling an anecdote about a virtual monkey when she was a research assistant. It makes for a contrived conflict rather than a developed one and the film and audience suffer for it.

I don’t want you to think the film is bad, but it’s not really good either. It fails to dig into any issues too deeply and does very little to really develop any characters. Evelyn and Will are given the majority of the screen time and the rest of the actors feel more like set pieces than supporting characters. It feels more like the pilot episode of a TV drama than a complete film. By the end of the film, you’ll have questions, but won’t be terribly interested in the answers. Of course, maybe that’s just what Internet Depp wants you to think.

Rating: Ask for seven dollars back. Ambiguity isn’t worth very much.

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” – It’s always nice to have a plot.

Despite what you may have heard in recent ads, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not “the best superhero movie ever” nor is it “better than The Avengers.” I understand the point of the marketing – to trick people into seeing a movie they were already going to see. Wait, what? Maybe I don’t understand. Why would they need to hyperbolize a movie that already has an enormous audience clamoring to see it? Were they not confident in the final product? Were they afraid people might have become burned out from too much Marvel Universe? Are they worried Captain America is viewed as the least awesome of all the Avengers and people won’t be that interested? I think the answer is because the first Captain America was kind of a stinker and they decided to overcompensate. The problem with those ads is they have the exact opposite effect that the studio was going for, causing concern instead of excitement. What they should have done was something simpler, maybe like renaming the movie Captain America: This Time it has a Plot.

Like the first Thor movie, Captain America suffered from being a movie whose sole purpose was to say “This guy is going to be one of the Avengers; give me your wallet.” It was a waste of everyone’s time and only had about four minutes of content that furthered The Avengers storyline, mostly which occurred during and after the end credits. This time around, they followed in Thor’s (The Dark World) footsteps again by delivering a movie that felt like they actually put some effort into it.

Like the previous two Avenger’s follow-up films, The Winter Soldier picks up with its title character coping with the aftermath of the attack on New York City. Captain America (Chris Evans), aka Steve, isn’t so sure about S.H.I.E.L.D.’s motives anymore, but unlike the other members of the team, he is still working directly for them. The film kicks off with Steve befriending another soldier (Anthony Mackie) while running in the park, then leaving with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) for a rescue mission. His distrust of S.H.I.E.L.D. grows when he discovers Widow is there for a separate reason and when he confronts Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Fury shows him a classified project in which three helicarriers bristling with weapons have been built that will be able to fly non-stop and target terrorists before they have a chance to attack anyone. Channeling our full-of-shit politicians, Fury defends the program as “necessary for our freedom and security,” Steve calls him on the bullshit, and the audience starts to wonder if the Winter Soldier is Edward Snowden.

Luckily, Fury is just as suspicious as Steve and Fury calls Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), a senior S.H.I.E.L.D. board member, to put the program on hold until he has a chance to review the data Widow brought back from her earlier mission with Steve. Soon thereafter, Fury is shot multiple times and Steve and Widow become fugitives from S.H.I.E.L.D with the blame placed on their shoulders. Like Ironman 3, the rest of the film follows the two of them trying not to get killed while also trying to uncover the evil plot and who is behind it. Along the way, we meet the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), a deadly assassin with a mechanical arm and a cloud of mystery surrounding a past as long as Steve’s. He’s arguably the weakest part of the film, as the “cloudy past” is substituted for character development, even though he’s called out in the title of the film. It reminded me a lot of Darth Maul from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (which is never a good thing) in that they introduce a very promising and intriguing character, but waste him by giving him little screen time in which all he does is try to kill the heroes. Fortunately, that is the only weakness in an otherwise very good movie.

There isn’t much more to say that you probably haven’t already guessed. There are a couple of predictable twists and one large unpredictable twist, some reachback to the first Captain America, and the introduction of another Marvel superhero known as Falcon (Mackie). Aside from the weakness I mentioned earlier, the film is very entertaining and has a story that’s, you know, existent. It was a little surprising to see Redford in this film (I honestly had no idea he was in it) and just as surprising to see he appears to have paid a visit to Courtney Cox’s terrible Botox doctor (his mouth is…just…damn). Naturally, you’ll want to stay through the entire end credits, though it’s the first time that you’ll be truly disappointed as the scene is pointless, redundant, and not even funny, fully driving home the point that marketing folks are sometimes as full of shit as our politicians.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back except maybe from your cable provider for airing those ridiculous ads.

"Divergent" - You keep using that word...

If it seems like there have been a lot of young adult (YA) books turned into movies lately, it's because there have. Last year alone saw seven such movies (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Ender's Game, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, Tiger Eyes, The Host, and Beautiful Creatures) and this year will see five more, including Divergent. What you also may have noticed is that most of these films are not doing well at the box office, prematurely ending franchising dreams by the major studios; The Hunger Games and Percy Jackson being the only two that will continue on. Some folks have postulated the reason for the failures is that most of the series' don't appeal to adults and that teens are more likely to stay away from movies that don't have good word-of-mouth. In fact, you can draw a direct correlation between book sales and box office sales to measure real and expected success and confirm that the more books that were sold the higher the box office receipts. The one exception to this rule is Ender's Game, but Ender's Game was published thirty years ago when the term "young adult" hadn't been invented yet and was only lumped into that category recently as a marketing ploy.

(Side note: the term "young adult" was not invented to make kids feel older, but to make books written for children seem more acceptable for adults to read and, most importantly, not be embarrassed to admit they read. These are the same types of people that are too uncomfortable in their own skin to go to a movie or a restaurant by themselves.)

So, how does that bode for Divergent? Currently, book sales of the trilogy have passed 18 million copies, which is far better than most of the titles mentioned earlier, and has translated to over $100 million at the box office and counting. Interestingly, according to an interview with the books' author, Veronica Roth, the movie rights were purchased before even a single copy was sold and the sequels were greenlit well before Divergent actually opened in theaters. So, what is it about Divergent that made the studio so confident? In a word - dystopia.

The first two successful YA series were Harry Potter and Twilight - two series dealing in magic and the supernatural and nothing similar since has been even remotely as popular (see: Beautiful Creatures, Vampire Academy, and The Mortal Instruments). Then came The Hunger Games, introducing the dystopian future to young adults as if it hadn't been a common theme in science fiction for decades. Instead of being stuck with magic or vampires/werewolves, it simply created a setting in which everyone can relate and many successful films have used in the past. Drop in some younger characters to draw in the younger crowd, give them an underdog to root for against a repressive regime and - BINGO! - box office gold.

Divergent takes place in a near future, post apocalypse Chicago in which nearly everyone is part of one of five factions that now make up society. When each person reaches the age of 16 (why is it always 16?), they undergo a personality test to determine which faction they are best suited to join. The factions (whose names are words you have only ever seen on an SAT test or spelling bee) are Abnegation (selfless and also those govern the city), Amity (peaceful), Candor (truthful), Dauntless (brave and also the military), and Erudite (intelligent, though nobody in the film actually pronounces the word correctly; instead, pronouncing it Ir-ee-oo-dite and driving people like me crazy). Those that are not in a faction are referred to as the factionless, forcibly kept out of the factions and living on the streets (and begging the question, why are they not executed considering the society was designed to make sure everyone served a purpose?). But, as our heroine, Beatrice (Shailene Woodley), finds out, there is another group of people whose tests come out inconclusive and are referred to as Divergent, of which she is the latest.

According to her tester, Beatrice must never tell anyone that she is Divergent or she will be in "grave danger." The only explanation we get for the danger is that “Divergents can’t be controlled,” but we are never given any context or historical precedent for such a thinking. All we know is that the head of Erudite, Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), wants to the kill them all. Luckily, the test results are only suggestions as each person has the right to choose whatever faction they want to join. This seems like a contrivance to allow for people like Divergents to hide, but this society seems to be somewhat lenient on certain things. Beatrice chooses to go to Dauntless, thus alienating herself from her Abnegation parents and revealing another odd and illogical trait of this society – parents whose children choose a different faction are looked down upon and essentially disown those children. Just don’t ask.

For much of the movie, the focus is on Beatrice (who changes her name to Tris) going through Dauntless boot camp, trying to make the cut while enduring insults from other trainees and abuse from an instructor (Jai Courtney). Because the movie spends so much time on character development, hardly any time is devoted to any real narrative and we’re left wondering where any of this is going. We’re shown a wall around the city, but no explanation of what is being protected against. We’re shown a ruined Chicago, but nobody bothers to explain what happened to make it that way. We’re shown that the factions are competitive with each other, but are left wondering why when it’s in their best interests to work together. And, you already know about their homeless, er, factionless problem. Eventually, a romantic subplot involving Tris and another instructor, Four (Theo James), develops, as well as another subplot in which Jeanine is going to take over the government, but they seem like distractions compared to the unanswered questions throughout the film.

I’d like to tell you that the book is better, but it suffers from the same problem. Everything is about Tris and we’re supposed to care because she is Divergent, but we aren’t given any real reason to care, any real narrative to invest ourselves in, or even why being Divergent is something of importance. The one saving grace is that everyone loves an underdog and we all want to see Tris beat the odds and make the cut at Dauntless. I just hope that the sequel (Insurgent) sheds some light on those questions and that the actors stop mispronouncing words.

Rating: Ask for four dollars back and a dictionary.