Reviews

This movie had all the trappings of a successful film, but was obviously did not come together in editing. Much of the third act was simply not there, and the use of voice-over to advance the plot was an obvious sign of internal problems. The movie as a whole is incredibly uneven, and the sudden inclusion of CGI hoodoo after the half-way point was jarring and unwelcome.

Even still, just about all of the plot devices have been done better in other movies. Comparing this movie to Musa, Hero, and CTHD is doing those movies a disservice. While this movie is not bad, nothing raises it above mediocrity.

It's almost beautiful how bad this movie was. The "dwarf" is just as tall is everyone else, the "elf" sports a breast plate that has to be seen to be believed, the evil warrior sports super-cool purple metallic lip-stick for no apparent reason, Irons uses his level 3 Scene Chewing spell to awful effect, Thora Birch seems to be reading her lines as the cue-card man scribbles them down, Marlon Wayans seems to have decided everyone needs another Jar-Jar, and the score is at times so inappropriate that I actually laughed at it. The sets looked like the crew snuck onto the Xena lot after hours. The movie stole painfully from Star Wars (new AND old) a few Indiana Jones movies, and other movies not worth stealing from. You name it, this movie did it badly.

The tag-line for this movie should be "And You Thought Battlefield Earth was Bad!!!"

Yes, it's that bad, folks.

On the other hand, I highly recommend it. You'll laugh, you'll wince, you just may lose control of your last meal, but it's one hell of a ride.

I thought this was a great movie. Comparisons to Sixth Sense are inevitable but pointless. I think this movie stands on its own and has its own unique charm.

The film enjoys showing us without cramming it down our throats. Many points of the story are told without dialogue, and often with simple actions that speak volumes about what is left unshown. The movie is slow, mute, and moody. The elements of supernaturality are taken very slowly and believably. There are no pyrotechnics at all.

This is a first-rate movie that has respect for the intelligence of its audience and a genuine interest in its characters and story.

Okay, first off: I work at a bookstore. I have witnessed the slavering fans. I have accepted the wrath of those who were denied their God-given right to purchase an out-of-stock Tribulation Force. These books are big sellers. These people want a movie version. You would think that the movie folks would be throwing money at this movie. What do they come up with? Direct-to-video Kirk Cameron from GROWING PAINS??? You might as well crumble up the entire franchise and throw it in the garbage! What the heck happened Hollywood? Sure the books are preachy and written simple enough for middle-school drop-outs, but they sell in the MILLIONS!! You let a million-copy best-selling series slip through your fingers!!! What have you done???

Well, you have saved me the pain of listening to fools count the blessings of the Left Behind movies to me at 5 minutes after closing.

Want a revelation? Here's one: LEFT BEHIND SUCKS!!!

Now spread the Word, my children.

Well, incomprehensible as in "Why did this get made?" or "How the heck could they make it this bad?" or "Did they think they could get away with that?"

Arnold's accent is thicker than ever, somehow. He spends twenty minutes being hauled around like a sack of meat from a helicopter in a major "action" scene, and falls victim to the dumbest of movie blunders: he defeats evil through LOVE!

Byrne is really awful, but he has nothing to work with. Evil given form is apparently a slightly horny, smirking man who wisecracks and leers. He spends the film killing his henchmen (I'm so sick of villains doing that) and random people he bumps into by use of buses and magic dynamite. How boring is that? Satan is given a human body and he behaves like a teenager who's read the Anarchist's Cookbook too many times.

Ahnold is NOT back. He is a dinosaur of the past and will be replaced by younger, comprehensible actors who do some of their own stunts and can read a proper line to save their life.

What really got me was the APATHY of the whole thing. The entire movie isn't trying. Perez gives a lame performance, and not just compared to Lee. The main villain is totally uninteresting, and not just compared to Wincott. The secondary villain looked cool, but had nothing to do or say. The part of Sarah just SHOULDN'T have been there to begin with. I never read the comics, but carrying her over from the original was totally lame in my book. The whole plot was a lame retread, except now our Crow needs to be told what to do, and after long periods of mopey dialogue he just about says "Well, might as well get more of that revenge that's expected of me," before dragging himself into a by-the-numbers action scene involving bikes, exploding barrels, or other available cliches. And finally, while the end scene in the original was poetic, the end to this one is confusing, annoyingly subject to the sequel one-upsmanship curse, and downright dumb.

I found one worthwhile line and image in the entire movie: the part in some club where people are throwing themselves against taut sheets looked like a nifty NiN video effect, and the "Murder of Crows" line, while obvious, was delivered well.

The commercials made this look like it was going to have this huge pay-off, that the astronaut on Mars would be thrown into some gigantic, surreal extravaganza, like a 90's 2001. Well, copy one movie in a really cool way, it just copied a whole lot of movies in the worst ways possible.

We get to stare at NASA logos for the first 25% of the movie, then spend the entire middle 50% involved in unrelated space complications, which serve no point except to be filler, and then, during the final 25%, the point at which we all expect to be treated to some gripping, wild stuff, we get the lamest sci-fi cliche in existence presented as sappily as possible with so much self congratulatory smugness that I wanted to puke all over both Gary Sinese's 10 minute Howdy-Doody grin marathon and the 6' Antz reject they called a Martian.

Watching this movie caused physical pain. It is so bad, so worthless, so pointless that after viewing it I felt like someone had been hitting me over the head with something heavy. It wasn't funny. Watching people sob and agonize over violent death and scream at each other is not funny. Adding grisly scenes with body parts doesn't make it funny. Without comedy the whole thing is worthless because it doesn't do or say anything. Obviously they realized that when they titled the movie. It's just a bunch of bad stuff that happens. Weee.

Tarantino must have been really bored one weekend when he wrote this trash. Unfortunately he later realized that anything he stuck his name to would make some money, so he dug it out and let people make it.

Bad bad bad!

Before the vampires pop up the movie is like a cheap rehash of Reservoir Dogs with gun violence, a dark torture-death, and witty banter. Then it seems Tarantino squatted behind some bushes and used the remaining script pages as Charmins, because the the next two thirds of the movie felt like a group of wild monkeys throwing their own feces onto the screen.

Just looking at pictures of this movie gives me flashbacks to the cheese-fest that was the 80's. If this movie had been remade sometime in the 90's, without the 80's "fashion" and with some better special effects, it would have been a much, much better movie.

Although I am a big fan of the (now cancelled) show, I was reluctant to pay $8 for something that seemed no different than a commercial-free version of a tv episode. I rented it was pleasantly surprised by the density of the really good jokes. I was in tears at some points, it was so damn funny. They obviously spent much more time on this one to make it jam-packed with comedy. Don't knock it because its a movie version of a TV show, most movie comedies are 90 minute sitcoms anyway.

Weenie Man away!!

It's dead. Finally. Somebody stepped up and shot the poor beast before it could endure any more of Shuemacher's torments. Death by day-glo paint I think.

With the powers of bad-acting, bad script, and bad action combined, we form the cinematic cianide Batman & Robin! True, I've only seen about half the thing, but I think that's as much of my life as Shoemacker's gonna get. Unlike deer, when the headlights come barreling down at me I don't freeze, I kung-fu leap the hell outta there, to the Fortress of Good Movies, where evil Dr. Shoomakerr cannot touch me! Hoo hah!

They almost had it. If someone else had had access to some of those sets and visuals, and the Crow franchise, I would bet green money that they could make a decent movie.

This movie is a laundry list of failures. It seems neither the actor nor the director were capable of making proficient action scenes, horribly missing the bar the first movie set. The plot is sluggish and the main character dull and apathetic. They stole a character from the original for use as a cheap plot device and thus tarnish the original. The villains of the movie aren't nearly as compelling, the main lackey looked 60 years old. Then to wrap it all up the film dies on a convulsion of bizarre, pulled-out-the-rear nonsense.

Bad bad bad! For shame!

I liked Carrey, and Tommy Lee Jones would be hard pressed to be bad in any movie, (though he danced a razor's edge in Double Jeopardy, while all around him was ruin) but Shuemacher, or however you spell the name, just cannot direct action. I squinted in confusion from the first action scene on. What the heck was going on? Close ups of a leg in space extending, jump cut to fist moving through the air, jump cut above to backflipping torso. What the heck?? No wonder Keaton wouldn't do the movie.

Also, one of the funniest things I've ever seen on tape was an MST3K back-stage clip of the Shoe-man hitting on Alicia Silverstone. Oh wait, that was B & R. Oh well, same guy.

I'm not too surprised someone could not like this movie, since it is very violent and features characters with questionable morals. I'd like to respond to them.

Leon: Yes he's an assassin. Is he a "good" man? The thing with Leon seems to be that he really a child. He does his job with such detached efficiency that the viewer has to doubt whether he really understand what he is doing. His paternal affection for a plant and his love of old cinema hint at an innocence that is somehow protected from his violent acts, and could in some strange way be the cause of his unnatural skill in his job. While Gary Oldman snarls and dances as he kills, Reno is just pulling a trigger. Are we supposed to like him? Is he a hero? Leon is what we call an Antihero. That is, a main character of the story with flaws or questionable morals. The movie challenges us to accept the enigma that is Leon, not necessary like him.

Matilda: Contrasting Leon in almost every way, there is Matilda. A young girl who is wise to the ways of the world, she wants to kill. Leon is the real child, an innocent, and the one with the power to kill. Matilda is also just coming into puberty. Don't tell me that when young boys hit puberty they don't want to look at dirty little pictures of adult women. Why would girl's infatuation be different? Her infatuation is more than a crush, she lusts his power to kill as well. Her blase reaction to Leon's preffsion "Cool" is not a battlecry for young middle-schoolers to start taking sharp-shooting classes in anticipation of a future career in contract killing, it is a jarring reminder that Matilda's life has been tainted with violence, that she now craves it and wants to be able to inflict it.

Leon's tutalege isn't moral. Leon is trying to be a parental figure, but killing is the only thing he knows. Its a twisted father-daughter relationship, founded on the promise of violence and complicated by sexual tension. Anyone who claims there is no sexual tension between the two is lying or blind. Is this crush glorified as cool and hip? Heck no. The clerk reacts in surprise and disgust, and Leon clearly sees himself as a father figure. Despite all of this baggage, a bond developes between the two, perhaps because they are two halves of a whole person. Together they are one.

Well anyway, this is all just my reaction to the movie. If you look a little closer, I'm sure you'll realize that this movie is not trumpeting "Have sex with older men with big sniper rifles!"

I was hesitant to watch this movie because a guy I knew in school was infatuated with this movie, and I didn't want to feel gothy for watching it. After i succumbed, I was infatuated as well. It stopped at dressing like the Crow, but I still dug the movie.

This movie is one of the few ever made that has everything going for it: tragedy with genuine emotion, incredible style, breath-taking images, hip dialogue, and truly kick-ass action. This is not only one of the very best action movies I've ever seen, it's also a cracking good story.

Every character has personality and style, and the bad guys, while brutal, still manage to be human. One doesn't loose sight of the grittiness of the story. The Crow isn't just taking out the trash, he's risen from the dead to exterminate four human beings. It's not pretty.

Not only that, but the Crow has the pleasure of show-casing one of my favorite unknown actors: Michael Wincott, as Top Dollar. No one plays a human reptile as well as Wincott. That slithery, gravely voice sends chills down your spine, I'm upset he didn't get more recognition for this movie.

I also have to hand it to the director, if you read the script for this movie you see the director made some really good choices in filtering a lot of promising but convoluted ideas into a whip-cord of a movie.

Although Blade was far superior to Vampires, which came out around the same time, it was lacking in some areas. Blade is clearly a comic-book super-hero movie, fixating almost totally on Blade's inner struggle and total supremacy over his enemies. You can only watch so many Faceless Guys in Black Jackets and Knit-Caps get pummeled before it gets tedious. The action is clearly in the "Boss Man stands on a table and bad guys throw themselves at him to be killed one at a time" which I've always found inferior to more realistic, down-and-dirty action. I kinda wanted the camera to move over a few feet to reveal the Nameless Baddie Geneterator that spews out the cannon fodder. I would have liked to see the Vampires get a little more personality. Instead we have the Wise-Cracking Vampire, the Sexy Vampire, and a whole bunch of Stoic Vampires.

However, Blade has some pretty good choreography, and Wesley Snipes knows his stuff, though I thought it was more than a little homo-erotic the way the camera focuses so lovingly on his massive pecs.

All in all, Blade does have a generous amount of moments that make you say "Hey, that's pretty cool," so its worth a viewing.

Sometimes a movie comes along that doesn't have any guns or cyborgs or yakuza ninja assassins and makes a damn fine movie. Watched this movie on a whim because it had Buscemi in it and I couldn't believe how good it was. You don't need to be trying to be in the biz to watch this movie, by the way, the comedy and the characters stand on their own.

It was not the best thing to come our way during the year, but then again, in my opinion, Star Wars really wasn't that great in the first place. The movie was clearly aimed too young for its core fan base, and it spent too much time focused on the pod race and Jar Jar's antics, but on the whole it offered enough excitement to be enjoyable. Every time someone switched on a lightsaber things picked up, especially the open battle and the final duel. However, I know I've seen Trainspotting a few too many times after I started wondering when Begbie would jump in and pummel Obi Wan for hanging out with a loser like Jar Jar.

Throughout most of the movie I kept asking myself "Is this awful or is it really cool?" I recognized many inventive and bizarre aspects, but they were all so alien and weird, I didn't have much to hang onto. I was in unfamiliar territory, and I didn't know if it was clumsy film-making or calculated originality.

As the movie ended, with on of the most questional closing lines ever, I realized that I had just watched a very twisted, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, very good movie. The low-budget and sometimes corny acting and dialogue are all part of the fun. Despite Hollywood's recent gang-rape of artificial reality, eXistenZ manages to be very original and very memorable.

In all, the movie spends its entire length saying "Stop watching for plot, or listening for good lines, or paying attention to the humans, just watch the dragon and wait patiently for him to return when he's not onscreen. We'll keep him visible as long as money allows, and tease you with off-screen cop-outs when we run out of money. In the end, when asked how the movie was, you'll say 'The dragon was way-cool!' and in doing so give it a favorable review."

So that's basically all you can do. The movie is just burning time with everything else besides the dragon. They take a super generic and flat script about a last dragon and something about half a heart and fill it with semi-name actors and vaguely familiar faces saying unchallenging and easy-to-swallow lines of dialogue in an effort not to offend you before the next dragon scene. The sword-fighting was of the "Swing at Each Other's Swords" school, but you aren't there for sword fighting anyway. The red-haired chick from Starship Troopers beats up the big blonde guy from the X-Files, David Thewlis sneers, Quaide grimaces. All you're left to do is wait patiently for Big Sean's voice to start booming, saying all the best lines of course, since he's the dragon and the audience is paying attention when he talks, and he does some dragonish things and generally shows off his computer-generated freedom. We're not expected to be interested in anything else, so everything else is uninteresting.

I can't understand why people were so down on this movie. It found its way onto more than a few Worst of the Year lists and was generally ignored by the public.

I enjoyed Crichton's book and the movie was quite faithful to it. Some parts regarding the eaters of the dead were a little silly, but hey, no more so than most of the stuff we're expected to buy from any other movie.

On the whole, it was genuinely funny and the sword-fighting action quality was a treat after countless Hercules cheese-fests. I was also totally satisfied with the way the movie handled the language problem. Although I wondered how Antonio learned the viking word for "grape," once again, a little suspension of disbelief goes a long way. This isn't a historical drama here, folks, but it is a satisfying two hours.

Man, they had some really cool elements in this movie. The art design and cinematography were great, and the idea of pitting a rag-tag crew of space-pirates against the Aliens has a comic-booky appeal. However, either this crazy French director or the revising screenwriters got WAY too obsessed with the bizarre and the disgusting. The botched-clone room was TOTALLY unnecessary and the ending was down-right awful. They also killed off one of my favorite unknown actors way too early.

They had a good thing going, but they screwed it up along the way.

Found this one in the video store and rented it. It's one of those quirky, quasi-comedies that's more interesting and weird than funny. It's a good one at that. It reminds me a lot of Being John Malkovich. If you enjoyed that movie you will most likely enjoy this one.