Iron Man 2 (2010)

Ludicrous, Insulting, Grossly Overpowered.

Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell deliver great performances, Don Cheadle and Robert Downey Junior are ok but far from interesting, everyone else falls flat.

The Losers (2010)

So right of the back of The A Team relaunch comes this. We hoped it would be the opposite of The A Team. Where we loved The A Team (tv show have yet to see film) for its cheesiness we wanted to love The Losers for its sarcasm. Where The A Team was all about ideals – the American way of life, justice, liberty etc, we hoped The Losers would be gritty, real life, without the cheese.

The Losers fails in a lot of ways to hit the mark. Don’t get me wrong its a reasonable action film, its just annoying because with the cast, I think it could have and should have been better.

The losers is a ‘elite special forces group with the American government’… sent into a bolivian jungle… to kill a drug lord… mission goes wrong… and all the other cliches follow. But I guess what did I expect from a Comic Book movie? There aren’t any surprises but its ok viewing if you want to watch some shit blow up.

In a film where the goodies look like badies and the badies look like goodies Jason Patrick was a nice badie. The Losers is comprised of Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Rogue (Idris Elba), Pooch (Colombus Short), Jake Jensen (Chris Evans), Cougar (Óscar Jaenada). Zoe Saldana is solid as Aisha Al-Fadhil.

There are some nice angles, nice scenery, nice big splosions, guns etc and it was fun to watch, its just not memorable enough and I struggle to find an excuse for them. With solid actors, four Studios behind the film including, DC Entertainment, Dark Castle Entertainment, Weed Road Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures and the backing budget of $25 million dollars its hard to understand how it is so underwhelming.

Kick Ass (2010)

Kick Ass is based on the comic book of the same name. Vaughn and Mark Millar met at the premier of Stardust and Millar pitched the comic book concept to Vaughn.

They hit it off, Vaughn bought the film rights and then Vaughn worked on the script while Millar worked on the comic. Vaughn directed and then co-produced it with Brad Pitt.

Vaughn shopped the script around but couldn’t get a studio to touch it, without changes namely ‘make the characters older’.

The Characters in true Superhero Order:

Chloë Moretz plays Mindi aka Hit Girl an 11 year old trained to kill, her opening line “Okay you c***s, let’s see what you can do now,” was enough to make the studios pass forcing Vaughn to finance the film himself. He then shopped it around as a finished film. Mindi is what Mathilda Lando (Natalie Portman) from The Professional would have grown up to be. Super props to Moretz those fight scenes were awesome!

Nicholas Cage is her caring dad Damon Mcready bent on revenge but at the same time a loving parent. Mindi shares his enthusiasm for killing and cool weapons. Cage is brilliant as the loving dad, and hilarious as Big Daddy his voice modulation when he’s in his superhero get up is so funny, I laughed till I couldn’t breath. Cage a comic book fan really portrays the character so well!

Kick Ass or Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a superhero by choice, admittedly he has no skills, or talents, or gadgets, or really anything superhero like. But the decision is made and after buying a scuba suit on ebay Kickass is ready for fighting crime… kinda.

The Superhero Wannabe

Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as Red Mist,
sure he’s got the cool hair, the props, the car and the better costume than Kick Ass but, well, he’s just not nice!

The film is hilarious, it feels a bit Fight Club or Shoot Em Up in some scenes. The fight scene choreography is excellent, its interesting to see Mindi in action, they really used Moretz’s height to their advantage. It was awesome to see Yancy Butler (Witch Blade) in it as well! I was stoked to see Clark Duke as Morty, I think this is going to be another guy we should keep our eyes on.

My fave Line
‘What’s the difference between Spiderman and Peter Parker? Spiderman gets the girl’.

Classic Scenes
Red Mist and Kick Ass chilling to Gnarls Barkley ‘Crazy’ in the Mist Mobile.

Hit Girl assasinating a room full of drug dealers, but don’t panic parents – Big Daddys got her back with a sniper rifle.

The second fight scene where Kick Ass is fighting / getting the crap beaten out of him and the attackers give up. The nerds in the store are hilarious carefully lined up filming for you tube.

Watchmen (2009)

Sooooo, let me start by saying I thought this movie bit the big one. It got to the point where I made the decision to go to sleep in the cinema rather then watch the rest of the film. Upon waking up I asked my comrades, “So did it get any better”? To which they immediately replied, “No”.

So what was wrong with it…

Plot: hmmm?
Still wondering what the plot was about as the film seemed to have a fairly obvious beginning, eg a retired superhero is murdered – makes sense the story line would then follow other retired superheros pondering the conumdrum of 1) Who did it and 2) Am I on the hit list and 3) Lets find who did and kill em. Instead it gets muddy, convulated and has no point at all, it just drags on.

Things that sucked the most:
Massive amount of violence against women eg rape scenes, ‘superhero’ shooting a women at point blank range whose pregnant with his child, to name a few.

Massive amount of blue wang. One friend when asked which movie he saw said, “The one with the naked blue guy”. Which says it all, the guy was blue and naked all the time to no effect, it was pointless and irritating.

Massive amount of violence – I love violent action movies, I love gun fights, punch ups, martial arts, I love Tarantino films etc. But there was something off about this film. The violence was too real, too defined, too graphic and too detailed. It was also 90% of the time no necessary to the story line or plot, hey we just killed a bunch of bystanders just for the sake of it. Whatever!

The Real Kicker:
So its a comic book movie and we instantly lower our expectations! We don’t expect a great plot, great script, great acting, we expect a bit more cheese and a lot of CG as filler. What do we expect at the very least from a comic book movie? An hour and a half of entertaininment. And that is the kicker for this film – Its just not entertaining.

The costumes were impressive and it was well cast but without a plot clever casting was not enough to redeem it. I personally felt on the way out that I should have bought the poster and stuck with that, avoiding the film altogether.

Top Ten Comic Book Movies

Darkman
Batman (1989) – directed by Tim Burton
Rocketeer
Iron Man
Hell Boy
Fantastic Four – Just remember it’s a kids movie.
Daredevil
Spiderman – Only the first one.
Josie and the Pussycats
X Men

Iron Man

Robert Downey Jr is fantastic as Tony Stark, Gwyneth Paltrow struggles with her flat eye candy role of his assistant Pepper Potts (a good name for a stripper) and wears the same look on her face for the whole film.  The CG is good and looks realistic so although you feel you are watching a comic book movie, it still has that feeling of realness about it.  Its a good comic book action flick, its solid but not great.

Be Warned:  The final scene after the movie has finished features a cameo with Samuel L. Jackson that wrecked the movie, taking it from something you could take seriously to a joke. The scene could have worked but Samuel L. Jackson in an eye patch with a leather jacket offering up SHIELD a superheroes club was lame. If he was in a suit smoking a cigar, taking himself seriously (he looked like he knew he was the punchline) it could have worked. I think people who leave before this scene will enjoy the film.

The Dark Knight

With an all star cast, massive budget and all the hype around this film I expected more from this.

The film starts strongly but towards the middle gets convoluted. The message gets confused and the focus shifts from a plot focus to an action focus. With a running time of 152 minutes one wonders how the film would have improved if the running time had been cut in half and more focus applied the overall quality of the script and story.

The special effects can’t be faulted and the sound was great.

Christian Bale is convincing as Bruce Wayne but unconvincing as Batman, Batman seems one dimensional, in the batsuit, you don’t have anything to connect to, the voice is awful and robotic, as always you can’t see anything of him other then his eyes and mouth, but with the batsuit used for these two films you can hardly see his eyes at all.  There’s only one scene where Batman seems real (landing on car with Rachel), but its too brief.

Gary Oldman is brilliant and the most effective actor in the film, he portrays Ltn Gordon as a person rather then a ‘character’ and this makes a world of difference.  Others who really delivered were Morgan Freeman as Lucius and Micael Caine as Alfred, they stole every scene they were in.

Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal are on familiar ground and while Eckhart delivers in the first half of the film, he’s flailing in the second half.  Maggie Gyllenhaal seems an odd choice as a replacement for Katie Holmes as they look nothing alike and little effort is made to rectify that.

Heath Ledger was strong in the beginning and his portrayl of the joker was compelling, towards the end he seems to lose his spark and the character begins to fade, losing most of the idiosyncrasies that made him interesting.  The swallowing and tongue chewing the only one that remained and it wears on you by the end of the film.