Tag: action

Review: The Meg 2: The Trench

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

Do you want to become stupider? You probably don’t, but I have an excellent method for lowering your IQ, should you want to do so. It would involve watching “The Meg 2: The Trench.”

Obviously the original film wasn’t exactly cerebral cinema meant to make you think about… anything. It was a fun dumb movie about a giant prehistoric shark causing mass mayhem and carnage. But “The Meg 2: The Trench” is almost criminally stupid – stupid enough to shatter your suspension of disbelief – and it lacks any kind of self-awareness about how stupid it truly is.

The story begins with a prehistoric glimpse of various animals eating each other, climaxing with a megalodon swimming into perhaps ten feet of water to gobble down a T-rex, and then popping right back into the ocean. That was pretty much when I knew the movie was going to be bad.

Fast forward to present day: Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has inexplicably become a James-Bondian eco-vigilante who singlehandedly beats up dozens of criminal waste-dumpers. How and why he started doing this when he was a rescue diver in the first movie, I don’t know. His love interest from the previous movie has also died – presumably Li Bingbing didn’t want to reappear – which means Jonas is raising his precociously annoying maybe-stepdaughter Meiying (Sophia Cai), and hanging out with his maybe-brother-in-law Jiuming Zhang (Wu Jing). Oh, and Jiuming has a captive megalodon that he’s clicker-training. Not kidding.

But a dive into the trench goes horribly awry, leaving Jonas, Jiuming, Meiying and a handful of characters we don’t really care about at the bottom of the sea. But escaping back to the surface won’t keep them safe for long – not only do they have the minions of a poorly-written evil billionaire attacking them, they also have been followed to the surface by more megalodons, a giant octopus, and these air-breathing lizard creatures that apparently have not evolved at all in all those millions of years. And of course, all of them want to eat the partying tourists who happen to be nearby.

Hollywood sequels usually follow a certain pattern – they have to be bigger, more bombastic… and much dumber than the first. “The Meg 2: The Trench” follows this pattern from the very beginning, and never manages to even briefly transcend its witlessness – it’s crammed with explosions, bloodless violence, suspension-of-disbelief-snapping action stunts (Jonas is able to prop the body weight of a Meg over his head with a piece of metal) and random bursts of Marvel-style comedy.

Yes, the first “Meg” movie was a big dumb action movie too, but it had a certain measure of restraint. Here, there’s no restraint – there are so many movie monsters that you can’t keep track of them all, and some of them – like the giant octopus – don’t actually add anything to the story except more bloated CGI ‘splosions. Why are the lizards living at the bottom of the ocean, and why have they not evolved into sea creatures in millions of years? Because the writers are huffing paint.

It’s also one of those movies where the characters are all idiots whenever they’re not required by the plot to be smart. The villain’s dastardly plans would be easily uncovered by a nine-year-old by a magnifying glass, but she literally exists just long enough to get the creatures to occupied territory, at which point she’s dragged off and eaten. Meiying is a mass of idiotic decisions from beginning to end. And while Jiuming is depicted as smart and knowledgeable, he is shown to have zero common sense. Think floating around in a meg enclosure with nothing but a clicker and optimistic thoughts to protect himself.

Jason Statham isn’t a great actor at the best of times, but he is clearly operating on autopilot here, looking vaguely uncomfortable in almost every scene. Wu Jing gives a pretty decent performance as Jiuming, and he’s obviously trying much harder than Statham. Most of the other actors have nothing to really chew on, like Sienna Guillory’s evil billionaire or Sergio Peris-Mencheta’s mercenary Montes, who is fueled by vengeance against Jonas for some past conflict that we didn’t see. Melissanthi Mahut has the closest thing to a fleshed-out supporting character, and has some good moments where her characters reacts to loss and/or blackmail.

“The Meg 2: The Trench” seems to be aiming to be brainless fun, but it shoots so far beyond “brainless” that it ends up not being fun at all – just insultingly witless, chaotic and full of blithering idiots.

Review: The Mummy (2017)

On By E. A. SolinasIn reviewsLeave a comment

Since every movie franchise now has to be a cinematic universe, Universal decided to dig up up all their old movie monsters and fling them into new, flashier films.

And their most recent dead-on-arrival attempt to revive their shared universe was “The Mummy,” a remake/reboot-but-not-really of previous films about an undead horror rising from the tomb… except they pretty much abandoned any actual material from those movies except “there’s a mummy, and a giant screamy face.” Instead, they present a mass of action cliches without a hint of irony, dressing it up with a “sexy” mummy and a crammed-in starting point for the Dark Universe.

During an airstrike, soldier-of-fortune/looter Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) accidentally uncovers an Egyptian tomb buried under a town… in Iraq. Even the movie is aware of how strange that is. They just happen to have an archaeologist (Annabelle Wallis) on hand, who discovers this was the tomb of Ahmonet, an Egyptian princess whose lust for power caused her to sell her soul to Set, murder her family, and be mummified alive for her crimes. Never mind that the process of mummification would kill you.

But things immediately start going wrong — the plane carrying her sarcophagus crashes, Nick temporarily dies, and then he is haunted by visions of a bandaged woman stalking him through the mist. He’s been cursed by her, and she wants to use him as the vessel for Set. And even when Ahmonet is captured by a Super-Sekrit Organization (like S.H.I.E.L.D., but less competent), Nick finds that he may have no hope of escaping her grasp.

“The Mummy” is very much a MOAR action movie. Moar mummies. Moar crashes. Moar fistfights. Moar ‘splosions. Moar attractive women. Moar boogity-boo scares. Moar moar moar. This movie feels almost like a parody of a Hollywood action-horror movie, ticking off all the cliches and never bothering to do anything that we haven’t seen before… but without a sense of humor or self-awareness that everything in its story has been done before.

Instead, we’re pelted with so many cliches that it feels like the studio raided TV Tropes. And as a result, its massive, bombastic nature seems like a storm conjured up to try to hide the fact that the plot is as thin as papyrus — and it’s definitely not scary, or as funny as it thinks it is (haha, Nick is naked!). There are a few spooky moments here and there, mostly when we see Ahmanet scuttling around in her undead state, looking like an arthritic Gollum. But more often we just careen from place to place, following Nick and Boring Blonde as they lurch from one crisis to another, building up zero momentum as they go.

And as if to show the lack of care that went into it, there are also blatant fails at Egyptian mythology (Set as the god of death), ancient Egyptian culture, etymology (Jekyll claims “Satan” is an alternate name for Set) and history (what would the Crusaders have been doing in what is now Iraq? Being horribly lost?).

Tom Cruise is… Tom Cruise. Despite playing a looter, liar and thief, we’re clearly meant to be charmed by his roguish one-liners and occasional moments of not-totally-self-centered-ness. But when you boil him down, there isn’t really anything about the character to like or be interested in, which makes Wallis’ Boring Blonde’s transition from contempt to love seem even more ridiculously artificial. And Russell Crowe plays a woefully unimposing Dr. Jekyll, who predictably transitions into a ludicrously unscary, scenery-chewing Mr. Hyde.

Sofia Boutella does an excellent job with what little material she has; she seems to have been hired mostly because she can scuttle, scamper and bend a lot. Unfortunately, she’s simply not frightening here — her version of a mummy is too wriggly, weak and ALIVE to ever be a properly undead fright. She looks and acts more like a gymnast in a mummy-themed unitard.

“The Mummy” has a few good spots that haven’t been totally dried out, but the withered hulk is just a standard Hollywood blockbuster — lots of sound and fury, signifying that the Dark Universe was dead on arrival.