Quantum Of Solace

I struggled as to how best review this movie.

On one hand it is a pretty decent action movie that opens with a car chase quite possibly designed to be used as some form of bizarre foreplay.

On the other hand it is now the third in a series of movies starring James Bond but not actually being a Bond movie, kind of like Never Say Never Again.

All my gripes about this latest Bond offering are best summed up in the cartoon below...



You can plainly see where the film makers have taken their inspiration from.

It also feels very much like a middle film, lacking anything remotely like a satisfying ending. The acting is good, the story is largely solid and it is a well put together movie.

Overall I'd say that you will enjoy most of Quantum of Solace, just don't expect to have your world rocked.

Rating: B

Max Payne

An insipid and poorly written action movie trading on the popularity of a video game franchise.

God I would love to see that quoted on the DVD sleeve.

I'll clear this up right away so everyone knows where we stand. Max Payne 2 is one of my top 5 best games ever. But I'm not here to review the games, I'll leave that to people with better taste in hats than I, I'm here to review the movie.

It opens well, a nice film noir sort of feel, and uses a couple of nice effects that really help to set the tone. Then it quickly abandons these in favour of randomly changing between rain and snow. I'm not kidding, watch for it, on one occasion in particular we swap from a miserable downpour to snow piled high in the space of about 5 minutes movie world time (about 4 seconds real time). The schizophrenic weather conditions are truly laughable, more so when you notice that there's never any slush, just puddles or pristine white snow depending on the producer's mood.

I won't touch on how the movie has butchered the story of the first game because then you could call me on the bias issue, instead I will judge the story on it's own merits. Max Payne suffers from the rare condition known as Mansion Scene Syndrome, whereby a movie tries to cram too much plot into too short a time (named for the Da Vinci Code) except in this case they've tried to fit an entire game into an hour and 40 minutes.

When I say that they tried to fit the game into 100 minutes, I mean a very distilled version of the game that quite frankly left the whole experience confusing and unfulfilling like a sandwich made of ejaculate between two slices of damp bread.

At no point can you understand any of the characters' motivations, Mona Sax seems largely unfazed by the murder of her sister which is probably a good thing as Mona is almost completely superfluous to the plot. Bravura becomes convinced Max is a good guy and not a cop killer because of... well, gut instinct or something. Payne you are told constantly is an emotional wreck with a death wish but determined to first bring his family's killers to justice, and you can't help but feel that this is the movie makers trying to cover for the fact that Mark Wahlberg is a bad actor.

Plus at times you will suspect that Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges was very much aware of the fact that they changed Bravura from a white guy to make sure that they had a black guy in a prominent supporting role. Why does Hollywood still feel the need to throw in a token black guy? There are plenty of good black actors out there making good movies, why change an existing character just so you can parade him around on screen going "Hey, we're ok, we got one, look."?

I'm not quite sure what the point was with Rothaford Gray's scene in the opening, except to say that Max is an emotional wreck with a death wish but determined to first bring his family's killers to justice. The characters are ALL FUCKING TWO DIMENSIONAL and you couldn't care for any of them, not even Max.

The plot stumbles forward drunkenly before tripping over it's own feet and falling flat on it's face just in time for the big gunfight finale. Speaking of which, for the series defined by Bullet Time the movie thankfully keeps it to a scant few (and well executed) scenes, sadly these are also the only real action scenes in the movie.

I should say that the whole scene when Max takes the Valkyr and starts tripping is AWESOME, it is really well done. The effects of the Valkyr are well portrayed but I can't help but wonder why anyone would take a drug that incapacitates you with mortal fear. Though why do all the 'V' slogans sprayed over the walls still show a syringe (other than trying to copy the game) when the movie makers decided that Valkyr should be a tasty beverage so that they could get a lower rating from the MPAA?

My final point, why the fuck would you try to get a low rating on a movie that is based on a gritty and gruesome series? The games aren't meant for children, so why would you try to make the movie so?

And the musical score is crap.

I really, really wanted Max Payne to be good. I wanted a gritty film noir that captured the essence of the game, what I got was watery dross and a desire to seek a refund.

Rating: D

Postal

An utterly pointless movie punctuated by some genuinely hilarious comedy. Forget the whole "tasteless" nametag that has been applied to this movie (largely by the creators), this has been added by the film makers to increase the movie's hype since it pokes fun at Arabs.

The whole 9/11 scene at the start was supposed to grab everyone's attention and think that this movie pushed the boundaries, it doesn't. The scene is designed solely to outrage an American public who are still reeling from one of their few moments of true homeland terrorism.

Most of the movie is entirely forgettable, even though a midget gets raped by a thousand monkeys and about 30 children get killed in a shoot-out at Germanyland (or whatever it was called).

I did appreciate when Uwe Boll poked fun at himself during the Germanyland scene, that was one of the genuinely hilarious scenes. Anyone remotely familiar with gaming and the internet knows that there are many theories about Uwe Boll, like how he must use Nazi gold to finance his movies because no one in their right mind would pay to make such flops, or how he must hate video games because he butchers the plots. In Postal he admits to using Nazi gold (and even pays a performer with gold teeth) and after getting shot in the balls admits that he hates video games, and for a couple of minutes, God help me, I actually liked Uwe Boll.

But that quickly passed because, as I said earlier, Postal is largely forgettable. I can feel the entire movie draining from my mind as I type this, I'm fairly certain that there was an angry cult as well as Arab terrorists.

You can pass a couple of hours watching Zack Ward try desperately to forward his career or you can go watch something decent.

Ugh, Erick Avari, you should have known better. I actually respected you.

Uwe, content. Content! Content! Content! People recognize that you can be a good writer, hell with a doctorate in literature you could be a great writer, but you keep going for cheap half baked shite and running with it because you want to get the film out. My only other advice is stop butchering video games, it's an experience that can't be recreated on the big screen, and if you alter the story you will only end up pissing off your fans (aka, your audience).

Rating: U (but a step in the right direction, it wasn't all horrible)