Cynical Cinema

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

The biggest problem with The Ruins is that it tries to be something it’s not. And by that I mean - it tries to be something new. And it isn’t. You see there are four hot college kids…stop me if you’ve heard this before…who go on a vacation to a foreign country…still with me?…and decide to check out an area off the beaten track that isn’t on the maps or the tourist brochures…is it different yet? Is it new? No? OK, how about this - there are plants. That kill people! Which is a little different. I guess. But the plants are not used for the scares. In fact, nothing is really used to scare us. And it’s supposed to be a horror movie. This supposed horror movie comes out July 8th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The thing is - the plants could actually BE scary if they were used well. The plants are able to imitate people, and cell phone rings, in order to lure people to their doom. This could be scary, or at least interesting. But this takes up about four minutes of the 93 minute running time. So the rest of the time we have the standard hot-teen-in-a-foreign-country horror cliches. Like, the fact that each of the hot kids takes turns being the sane one while everyone around is losing their minds. And the standard, gratuitous boob shot. The boob shot wouldn’t have made sense later on in the film, so they get it out of the way in a totally gratuitous way as early as possible. Then the cheesy, ridiculous lines that are supposed to be prescient - “four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear!” Come ON!

Then, of course, the torture-porn. The one kid, you see, is studying to be a doctor. So he knows when legs need to be amputated. Which is a great excuse for some seriously disgusting, over-the-top gory detail, which proves to be useless anyway, and certainly not scary. So, where does the “horror” come from? It isn’t the plants, because although they’re the villains, they’re underused. It doesn’t come from the gory gross useless flesh-cutting. And it doesn’t come from the people, who are just annoying. The best they can do are some vaguely creepy medical explanations from the vaguely creepy wannabe-doctor guy. So - there are no scares. And no scares in a horror movie makes for a bad horror movie. And The Ruins is certainly a bad horror movie.

Superhero Movie comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films. And it’s better than Epic Movie. For a moment there, I almost said that this was the equivalent of saying it’s better than nothing. But then I realized that I was wrong. Superhero Movie, despite being superior to Epic Movie, is not better than nothing. You are far better off watching nothing. In fact, you are better off seeing nothing, doing nothing, touching nothing and sitting in a sensory deprivation box for an hour and a half than you would be watching Superhero Movie. There are three main reasons it’s better than Epic Movie.

First, it has a story line. A loose, crappy one, but at least it’s there. Secondly, it’s reasonably understated without as many disgusting gross-out “jokes”. And third, I smirked once, when a guy spoofed that Tom Cruise Scientology video that has been circulating the web. That guy was really good. This was one more smirk than I had at Date Movie, which makes it a guffaw-fest compared to Epic Movie. The basic premise here is that superhero movies are going to be spoofed. So the people in charge of the film wrote a list of superhero movies. Spiderman was big at the time, let’s make that the main one. Let’s see…X-Men, Batman, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man…any more comic book movies we can think of? Nope? OK, let’s go.

So they take the nerdy photographer from Spiderman and turn him into the hero, with the hot girl he lusts after and the superpowers. Then they take the villain and put him in an Iron Man costume. And they throw in the guy who lights himself on fire from Fantastic Four, and add the parents-getting-killed bit from Batman. Then they add Professor Xavier from X-Men, and we’ve got ourselves a movie! Wait - you have the characters, now shouldn’t you write something for them to do? No? Just having them means the movie’s already done? OK…now, to be fair, there are twists. The Professor Xavier character is black, and cheats on his wife. The Fantastic Four guy sits on a Batman-esque gargoyle atop a Gotham-esque city. And the parent-killing is done to comedic effect. Sorry. “Comedic” effect. So…sound funny so far?

The cover of the DVD box features Leslie Nielsen, who at some point had some weight in movie spoofs, weight that disappeared when he starred in Spy Hard and Mr. Magoo in the mid-nineties. And even he’s only in this crap for about nine minutes. Pamela Anderson is prominently displayed on the box as well, because she is the second-biggest name in the film. She is on screen for maybe four seconds, total. No one else in the movie is useful or of note, so forget any further description of the cast.

The thing is, this would be a great premise for a film. With the abundance of comic book movies that have been brought to the big screen lately, there is ample material for a spoof. And at certain points, Superhero Movie seems to get that, if only for a moment. Like the big final scene where the real heroes crash into a nerdy superhero convention. There are some great comedic possibilities! But then…nothing. And that’s what this movie is. Just like Date Movie and Epic Movie and Meet The Spartans, this movie is a whole lot of nothing. Well, except that it’s worse than nothing. In that it will make you stupider simply by watching it.

Why do I bring up Epic Movie and Date Movie constantly? Well, because the people who distributed this DVD were smart about one thing. They did NOT mention those two piles of garbage on the DVD case. They mentioned Airplane!, which the producer, David Zucker, did indeed direct, and The Naked Gun, which he directed as well. They also mention Scary Movie, because their director wrote Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, which were no classics by any means, but was miles above this turd. However, in the years since those films came out, the producers and directors have obviously found something to like in the Epic and Date Movie and Meet The Spartans mold, and they have employed it here. With disastrous results. Seeing Scary Movie and The Naked Gun on a DVD box might make you want to rent this. Which is where I come in. To warn you against it. This movie will make you thirty percent dumber overnight, leaving you so badly illiterate that you won’t be able to write me a comment to say “you told me so”.

Shannyn Sossamon looks to be the Jamie Lee Curtis of the last few years.  After One Missed Call came out on DVD a few weeks ago, she adds to her horror resume with Catacombs, a new horror flick about the Catacombs that apparently exist under Paris.  This myriad of tunnels apparently also houses thousands of dead bodies that couldn’t be buried elsewhere.  Well, this is actually true.  And they are actually lined and paved with human skulls.  That seems far-fetched to me, but wikipedia says it’s true, so I believe.  There is a cult classic called Les Gaspards, starring a young Gerard Depardieu, that was filmed and set in the creepy Paris catacombs.  It was far, far better than this one.  Here’s an indication that should have tipped viewers off - Les Gaspards, (The Holes in English), had permission to film there.  Catacombs didn’t.  Maybe because the people in charge of the catacombs knew how stupid this movie would be.

But here’s the thing - this movie should be good!  This is one of only two major motion pictures that has made use of the creepiness of the Paris catacombs, one of the most naturally creepy places in the world!  So how can you make a non-creepy movie about it?  Well, you can do a movie like this.  Catacombs reminded me a lot of one of those jokes that goes on for ever and ever and then has no real punchline, or an obvious one.  For example:  that joke about the guy who stays overnight at a monastery, and hears some really weird noises, but the monks say they can’t tell him what it is.  They say “I can’t tell you, you’re not a monk”.  So he becomes obsessed with finding out, so he sets out to become a monk.  And he takes eleven years of theology, and four years of monastery training, and becomes a junior monk, and moves up through the ranks until he gets back to the monastery (all explained in FAR greater detail in the joke).  And once he gets there, he can finally find the secret of the bizarre noises.  So he opens the door and you know what he sees?  I can’t tell you.  You’re not a monk. 

That’s the joke, where the punchline is irrelevant, the fact that it took two hours to tell the joke is what is supposed to be funny.  That’s how this movie feels.  The ending is not only a sour punchline to a pretty boring film, but it’s also completely implausible given the rest of the film.  (And, for those of you who have seen this, completely forseeable for the people involved, which makes their reaction idiotic.)  Shannyn Sossamon is actually a very hot, very good actress, and I really hope she manages to move on to something other than annoying horror movies very soon.  Also starring in this film is Pink, the singer, who is bizarrely hot in a goth-freaky-chick sort of way.  She’s pretty good too, but this movie is so boring it doesn’t matter. 

Getting lost in this creepy place could be good for some scares.  Especially if, somewhere in the shadows elsewhere in the catacombs, there was a homicidal maniac wearing (for some odd reason) a pig mask.  But just being lost in a creepy place could make for ten minutes of fright.  Not sixty.  The beginning is promising, with Sossamon arriving in Paris to meet Pink, her sister, and being taken to this creepy rave party in the catacombs.  She drinks some absinthe, and the guys try to creep her out with a story about a crazy dude in a pig mask who may very well be the antichrist who lives in the catacombs and kills everyone he meets.  Although it’s supposed to be a silly story, we know very well that it will turn out to be true.  And therefore…silly.

The first twenty minutes are like some sort of bizarre, obnoxious music video, with lights flickering so fast that you can hardly make anything out, and the strobe effect obscuring the right things at the right times which could lead to a huge scare…but it doesn’t.  Even the flickering camera and lights can’t pull off the most obvious scare, which is intended to begin the proceedings.  More flickering obscures other seemingly important plot points - like, did the cops actually kill that guy themselves?  Or what…who knows?  Then the catacombs.  Which are dark.  And full of skulls.  And creepy.  For ten minutes.  Then there are the noises in the distance, which are not frightening at all, but rather irritating and lame.  Of course, she has to eventually meet another guy lost in the catacombs, because one woman walking around, alone and lost, for an hour would be…tedious?  But the new guy is useless and is gone quickly.

This whole movie is basically useless, and was gone quickly.  It premiered on a scary-movie channel in the States called FearNet, and disappeared onto DVD almost right away.  Likely, it will disappear from there soon too.

10,000 BC is unfortunate in that it occupies some distressing middle ground.  It IS too stupid to be a movie, but not stupid enough to be hilarious.  Which means it is just one long, boring, irritating, idiotic ball of suck.  This movie has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.  Ostensibly, it’s about a clan of cavemen from the mountains.  Cavemen who are not especially hairy, and who seem to have a fairly good command of the English language.  Which is fine, if you want to just assume that they know English, so the movie can be in English.  Like in Hunt For Red October, where all of a sudden they started speaking English.  That was fine.  We, the movie-goers accept that.  But the cavemen in this movie (so we don’t forget they’re primitive) talk in broken English.  Look - they couldn’t possibly know English.  It’s one of those suspension-of-disbelief movie devices.  Why not make them at least competent in English?

Then, the hero of the story kills a mammoth by himself, and becomes…the hero of the story.  But his heart is torn, because his new status means he will get to be with his girlfriend, but he knows he was only half-assed attempting to kill the mammoth, and whole-ass running away from it.  So, it being a matter of honour, he…camps thirty feet outside the village.  What?  It’s a good thing he does though, because it means he can see his gorgeous girlfriend (who wears makeup the whole time, by the way) get kidnapped by a marauding band of thugs on horseback.  Who speak another language!  With subtitles!  NO ONE KNOWS A LANGUAGE YET!  Make them all English!

Then the narrator comes in, several times, talking about “many moons this” and “many moons that”.  Ummm…OK…so now they’re native?  And the narrator, who talks like he is one of the tribe, is British?  Or is he modern…ancient…native…British…demented?  We just plain don’t know.  Or care.  What we DO care about are things like - why don’t they just call the mammoth a mammoth?  They’re speaking ENGLISH, why don’t they have the ENGLISH word for things?  Why call it a maddott, or whatever word they’ve invented.  And why does the bad guy have a computer-generated voice when he isn’t even speaking ENGLISH?  And at the end of the movie, when the good guys triumph over the aliens, did they do a ‘hip-hip-hooray’ cheer?

Yes, I said aliens.  And Gods, and supreme beings, and slavery, and pyramids, and a bizarre scene where the hero talks down a sabre-toothed tiger.  (By the way, THOSE things look bad-ass.  Why don’t the fight those, instead of the giant Moas?)  But anyway, who cares?  This movie stinks so bad that nothing could redeem it.  The great thing, usually, about caveman movies, is the loincloth-wearing brief glimpses of nudity.  Well…that and Ringo Starr.  And there’s none of that here - after all, this movie needed to keep it’s PG rating to reach a wider audience.  So no nipples, no nudity.  But lots of loincloths and exposed skin.  This, despite the fact that they’re in the mountains.  So, they’re basically wearing bikinis on a glacier.  And we’re basically turning this off at the twelve minute mark.

Seth Rogen was clearly the fat kid in high school. The funny fat kid, mind you, but also the one who was picked on a little. Which is why, in every movie he writes, the fat kid gets all the best lines. It worked amazingly well in Superbad with Jonah Hill, and it works almost as well in Drillbit Taylor, out tomorrow, July 1st, from Paramount Home Entertainment. The fat kid in Drillbit Taylor is played by Troy Gentile, who is almost as good as Hill in Superbad. It’s too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that promise.

Because really, Drillbit Taylor is nothing but a “prequel” to Superbad. The same characters are there - the geeky best friends, one fat one mild-mannered and skinny. Their third friend who is far geekier than either. And the fat kid is still actively trying to get rid of the even-nerdier kid, because he will bring them down in the eyes of the “cool kids”. So - the kids from Superbad, four years earlier. Seth Rogen co-wrote the script for this film with Kristofor Brown, and Judd Apatow produced the movie, so the pieces were in place to make something on the level of Superbad, if not Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin. But…this movie sucks.

It’s not Owen Wilson’s fault. He plays his standard, overly-sincere loser character. But the movie isn’t written to fit his style, his style isn’t adjusted to fit the movie, and he feels miscast because every scene he’s in is worse than every scene where it’s just the kids on their own. And Wilson is in almost every scene. He plays a homeless man who poses as a bodyguard to get hired by some kids to protect them from the high school bully. In order to do this, he poses as a substitute teacher at the school. Making him a homeless guy posing as a bodyguard posing as a teacher. Why is he homeless? He doesn’t have a substance abuse problem or a mental problem. And he seems to be more than willing to work for money - in fact, he’s going WAY out of his way to fake his way into this job…it doesn’t make sense.

Also fairly strange is the school bully. I don’t remember school having bullies like this, ever. Bullying in schools usually involved the threat of force and the teasing and the shoving, but never punching kids and beating them and attacking them on a daily basis. These bullies are implausible, but then if they weren’t so mean and violent, the little kids wouldn’t need a bodyguard. I guess. And the young kids are bullied their first day of school in grade nine by some kids who are 18 years old and clearly, at least, in grade twelve. So…how come they’re in the same classes? Are we to believe that the bullies have failed every single year they’ve spent in high school? Or just that nobody bothered to think that through?

In the end, these are the minor problems with Drillbit Taylor. The major problem, amazingly enough, is the script. Other than some truly memorable lines from Troy Gentile, there is nothing funny about the rest of the movie. At all. Owen Wilson is not funny. His character is not funny. His sexual conquest of another teacher at the school is not funny. The other two kids are not funny. The bully is not funny. And the concept, while kind of interesting on the surface, is never explored at all. This ends up being exactly like every other overcoming a high school bully movie, and might actually be the most predictable movie in years. The second we meet Owen Wilson, as Drillbit Taylor, we know exactly what will happen, in every scene, for the entire rest of the movie.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow have managed to turn standard movie arcs and plots into true gold. Superbad was so funny and smart that you forgot very fast that you had seen this exact movie many times before. Just never that funny. Knocked Up was a movie many others have made in the past - but writing it from the guy’s perspective was something the fifty-five movies like it had never thought to do. And it was so funny and smart that you forgot you’d seen it before. But Drillbit Taylor is not one of these movies.

I think the success of their oeuvre has made Apatow and Rogen such sought-after commodities that studios and producers will purchase absolutely anything they do. And if that includes a throwaway script that they wrote in high school and never edited and forgot about for fifteen years, then so be it. Which is, I think, what happened in the case of Drillbit Taylor. This movie is a total waste of time.

Ice Cube is actually a fairly good actor.  In movies like Barbershop (which was very good), he has shown he has the capacity to move beyond the tough-guy Vin Diesel-in-XXX type characters he plays, and also past the tough-guy-falling-down, Vin Diesel-in-The Pacifier type characters he plays.  And yet, outside Barbershop and the occasional scene in certain other movies, he has never even tried.  Once again, in First Sunday, he returns to the familiar formulas that have made him reasonably successful over the past few years.  The buddy that does dumb things and gets him into trouble, a la Friday.  The girl who has an eye for him, and wants to love him underneath that tough-guy-idiot exterior, if only she can find the heart in the man, a la Next Friday.  And so on and so forth.

 Most irritating of all in First Sunday is the supporting cast.  Every single character in this film is a cartoon.  Ice Cube and his stupid friend (played in this particular film by Tracey Morgan) are desperate for money, so they decide to rob a church.  A church populated by the hot chick, the crass granny, the evil deacon who’s embezzling the church’s funds, the kindly and understanding pastor, and the irritating, painfully flamboyant moron choir director.  The resolution of the film is almost as idiotic as the set-up, and the underlying theme of Ice Cube wanting to keep his son around him in the city could be played for some decent dramatic effect, but this film treats it just as a means to an end. 

There is nothing funny in First Sunday, and since it is ostensibly a “comedy”, that means there is no reason to rent it.

It’s a Boy Girl thing comes out tomorrow, June 24th, from Alliance Films. It’s a teen comedy with a familiar plot twist. The high school all-star quarterback and the really nerdy girl who lives next to him somehow switch bodies. And so now the nerdy girl learns all about being the football star, and the quarterback learns about being the nerdy girl, and they eventually fall in love with each other. Blah blah blah. These comedies are normally incredibly predictable, boring and painfully-PG. But there is good news here! This movie - is R-rated! There is nudity! And swearing! Maybe, just maybe, this one has a chance!

But NO! This is still the exact same movie as all the others. The smart chick who’s hotter than the head cheerleader, but no one sees it because she’s smart and nerdy and really into her grades and wants to go to Yale. The quarterback who can’t escape his destiny, the one who’s worried that this is all I’ll ever be! And even coming out of the mouths of people of different sexes, it’s still the same movie. And the hookup between the Shakespeare-reading hottie and the all-star athlete hottie at the end of the movie is the most painful cliche in high school teen comedies. I feel like screaming at the screen - Dude! It’s high school! You won’t be together for more than a year! It’s high school! This will not be the love of a lifetime here. You’re not going to get married. You are going to break up in college and sleep with everyone you meet. THAT is how this is going to work.

But the biggest sin this movie commits is not going all-out. It occupies some irritating middle ground between what could have been and what always is. If you’re going to show boobs and coarse language, and two hot people have switched bodies, go with it. Show the guy, in the hot babe’s body, playing with her boobs because he can. Show him hanging out in the girl’s locker room, looking at all the boobs. Show the girl “accidentally” grazing the boobs of the other hot chicks who are also naked. Show her (with her guy’s mind) trying to hit on a hot chick. Show the virginal, never-been-with-a-boy chick playing around with the new guy’s body, seeing how things work. Or reaching in a fascinated manner for other guys’ junk. There is potential for masturbation jokes, lesbian scenes, homosexual humour and general mayhem with actual useful nudity and the clever use of over-the-top profanity.

OK, this is the movie I’m seeing in my head. This is the movie I WANT to see. In fact, this may well be the movie I want to make. If you’re going to do a movie like this, go ALL OUT! Half-assing it is the worst thing you can do with the concept. And yet, this movie totally half-asses it. And it kills me. And it kills this movie. Samaire Armstrong is absolutely gorgeous, one of the hottest women in movies right now, and I assume that Kevin Zegers is some kind of gorgeous up-and-coming boy toy for the ladies. But that alone can’t be a reason to watch. And this movie doesn’t give you any other reason. So…don’t watch.

Walk All Over Me is a Canadian film starring Leelee Sobieski and Tricia Helfer.  You can tell it’s Canadian by Minute Four, and you can tell nothing cool is going to happen by Minute Nine.  And you can tell you regret renting it by Minute Eleven.  And you can stop watching it right then and there.  The premise of the movie is that Leelee Sobieski is Alberta, a hot small-town teenage girl who runs away from home after getting into trouble with some thugs.  She runs to Vancouver, where she decides to hide out with Celine (Tricia Helfer), who is either a friend or a relative.  Or something.  Celine, you see, is a dominatrix.  And I know the nerds out there are excited already.  Tricia Helfer?  Dominatrix?  Yes…yes…and they are hosting Battlestar Galactica marathons in order to prepare themselves to watch this.

But you know what?  Tricia Helfer does not get naked.  Leelee Sobieski becomes a dominatrix too, but she also does not get naked.  Then why bother having the “dominatrix” theme in the movie at all?  Because it means that this way Sobieski gets to spend the entire movie in fishnets and cleavage-boosting bustiers and spiked heels on CFM boots.  And it also means that much of the film will take place in weird rooms, and people “not knowing what that weird helmet is for” becomes the standard punchline to jokes that were never told.  But there is almost no actual dominatrix action whatsoever, it’s just the clothes that appear in the film.  Which would be fine if you were making a porno, but this movie takes itself almost seriously.

It’s one of those crime capers where bad guys are after a good guy because they believe he stole some money, and bad guys capture good guys, and new guys get involved, and new guys capture bad guys, and bad guys trade good guys with new guys.  One of those.  But Canadian.  Obviuously Canadian.  And therefore painfully boring and not too good.  Perhaps the idea was that putting Sobieski and Helfer in boob-showing shirts and fishnets and short skirts and hooker boots would distract people from the lack of plot, the poor acting and the senseless story.  And, in a way, that DID actually work on me.  After all, how many times have I mentioned it in this review alone?  And the clothes and girls DID keep me watching past the eleven minute mark.  But by then I had seen everything, and I wished I had turned it off.  So there’s my advice to you.  Eleven minutes in.  Turn this off and watch a fishing show.

When I bought my Blu-Ray player, almost a year ago, it came with 5 free Blu-Ray movies.  I had to fill out a little card checking off the movies I might like, and they would be shipped to my house.  Because it was almost a year ago, there weren’t many movies out on Blu-Ray yet.  So although I could grab Full Metal Jacket and The Prestige, the others were a crap-shoot, so I just picked the three I hadn’t seen.  One of those was S.W.A.T.  I think.  I can’t really remember.  In fact, I had completely forgotten I had ever placed this order, since it took eight months for it to arrive.  And when it did, it came with a not saying there had been a “slight delay” in shipping because one of the titles I had requested was no longer being made and they had to replace it with something else.  And maybe that something was S.W.A.T.  I sure hope I didn’t order it on purpose.

And that’s why the movie, although it’s old, merits a review.  Because people who are loving the Blu-Ray technology are buying up everything they can on that medium.  Every movie that’s out there on Blu-Ray gets serious consideration from the owners of the players.  And I am writing this to warn those of you who may want to purchase all these films to avoid SWAT.  At all costs.  It doesn’t matter one bit how good it looks on your TV, it is a giant waste of your time.  Yet another vehicle for Colin Farrell to play an Irish tough guy, SWAT concerns the LAPD SWAT team, the “toughest, meanest, best, coolest, heaviest, deadliest, most powerful, most bad-ass, most attractive fighting force in the world”.  Or something.

Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, LL Cool J, Samuel L. Jackson, and some other chumps train to be SWAT.  Farrell is getting a second chance at the team, one that comes after a dust-up with his out-of-control former SWAT team-mate.  I wonder if that preamble will be referenced later?  Of course it will!  For the first hour of the movie, the team trains.  And then they pass their course.  Much to the chagrin of their captain, who hates them!  We also get to see the evil antics of some foreign bad-guy.  He might be a drug dealer, or a human trafficker, or  a counterfeiter or a distributor of fake Faberge Eggs.  We have no idea.  We just know he’s evil, because he kills folks, and he will obviously eventually be the guy who faces off against the SWAT team.

So after an hour plus of six guys looking tough, talking tough, flexing and posing and saying bad-ass things to each other while wearing mad-cool sunglasses, there is actually…the plot!  Of the movie!  Which involves the entire city attacking the SWAT team, who respond by looking tough, talking tough, flexing and posing and saying bad-ass things to other people while wearing mad-cool sunglasses.  There is actually no story in the film, no compelling character, no single scene that’s cool enough to justify the action portions of the film…no reason at all to watch this hunk of junk.