Cynical Cinema

Uwe Boll does have a sense of humour.  It may not be a very good one, but it exists.  After all, he can laugh at himself to the point where he inserts himself into his movie Postal in a scene where he says his movies are funded with Nazi gold.  He then makes what he must think of as a joke about being aroused by children, and pays Verne Troyer his salary in Nazi gold teeth.  If the idea of any of this makes you laugh, then Postal is the movie for you.  Actually, no.  Postal is still not the movie for you, because I have just described the funniest scene in the film.  Postal is a movie for nobody.  No one should ever see this movie.  But I do have a few extra copies lying around.  The first four people to send me an email, at eric.bollman@ottawaradio.rogers.com will get a copy of this DVD.  But you would have to be a masochist to do so, and I will make fun of you if and when I receive that email.

The rest of the “humour” in this “comedy” comes from an effort to be as offensive as possible.  Nazi jokes, holocaust jokes, dead children jokes, Uwe-Boll-gets-shot-in-the-balls jokes.  At the very least Boll acknowledges that he is reviled in the critical community and attempts to make light of it, but his sense of humour really sucks.  It’s like he received and Offensive Joke Book from 1989 and threw it all up on screen.  “After I’m done with her, she’ll look like she’s been hit in the face with a mayonnaise truck”.  “I had to roll her in flour and look for the wet spot”.  Then there’s Dave Foley doing a very creepy full-frontal scene. 

The basic premise is that some kind of weird cult gets mixed up with a terrorist cell led by Osama Bin Laden, and a bunch of hot babes, Dave Foley, and Zack Ward pull out a bunch of guns and massacre men, women, children and terrorists.  The gun battle scenes really do look like they are straight out of the video game, which I guess is supposed to be the point.  But this video game must have been a really bad, really stupid, lowest common denominator type of game, if this is the movie that it spawned.  There is a scene where Uwe Boll fights the creator of the video game Postal, a man who is furious at what Boll has done to his game.  You kind of wish they had killed each other off and the movie had stopped at the 20-minute mark.

There is a special feature on the disc where we get to see Uwe Boll in the famous publicity stunt where he boxed his critics.  It’s virtually identical to the Raging Boll featurette on the “director’s cut” of Alone In The Dark.  And it’s still the most original thing on this DVD.  Postal came out August 26th from Peace Arch Entertainment.

Every now and then I watch a movie I know I will hate just so I can make sure I give every film released an equal chance. One of those movies was Resident Evil: Extinction, which I watched today. The first two Resident Evil movies redefined awful. They made absolutely no sense, and had cheesy special effects, and featured some of the most embarrassingly lazy dialogue ever created for a film. This third one is no exception. In this one, Milla Jovovich returns as the zombie-dispatching hot chick bad-ass. Here’s something that irritates me. Zombie movie purists. The people who get angry when you call these creatures zombies when they clearly aren’t. You see, the “zombies” in Resident Evil are created by a virus, and they aren’t dead people re-animated, they are just sick people. The “zombies” in 28 days later are infected with rage, they are not re-animated dead people. Who cares. If it walks like a zombie and talks like a zombie (aaarrrrrhhgghghhh), then it’s a zombie.

Two more things that irritate me. First - when an actress in a movie is naked, but strategic hand placement and sheet placement and objects obscure your view so that you can’t see any of the “good bits”. If you want to see that actress naked, then this will irritate you, not titillate you. If you don’t want to see that actress naked, then that means you don’t care if she is naked or not. In which case this will irritate you. Resident Evil: Extinction is R-rated. Why not just go for it? In Resident Evil, not only do they open with this scene, they hammer it home over and over again. You see, Milla Jovovich is a clone. Or something. It doesn’t matter. These clones of Milla exist in some kind of embryonic stage, suspended in bubbles of water. As clones in movies tend to be. It would, of course, make sense that these clones be naked. And they are. It would not, however, make sense that they would be covering their own chest with folded arms, each hand placed carefully over a nipple. That does not make sense.

The second thing that irritates me is when people say “lock and load” in a serious manner. Unless it’s Steven Seagal. Then it’s hilarious. This phrase was immortalized by John Wayne in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima (an average war movie at best), when he used it in a serious manner (going to war) and also a humorous manner (going to get drunk). Ever since, it has been a horrible cliche. It certainly gives one the impression that the screenwriters sure couldn’t think of anything original to say, and that at least they KNOW “lock and load” sounds bad-ass. After all, they’ve heard it in so many other movies. You know the guy in Resident Evil is a tough guy, because he says lock and load before the good guys do battle with some bad crows.

OK. One more thing that irritates me. When nerds on the internet say “the movie stays true to the video game”. It’s a video game. A movie staying true to it is not likely to be a good thing. Staying true to a book? That could be good. Even then, sometimes it’s a bad thing. But when you’re lifting a plot from a video game, you are likely to have a pretty thin plot. So you have to juice it up with something else. Like Angelina Jolie’s boobs in Tomb Raider, or a bonkers techno soundtrack in Mortal Kombat. Here’s the thing. If staying “true” to the comic book, or the book, or the video game is important to a potential viewer, then it is important only to those who have read the comic or the book, and played that video game. Even then, it is likely important only to those who have PLAYED (read: obsessed over) that video game. Which is like four hundred people. Anyone else watching that movie will have no idea what’s happening, and will not care at all.

Not that I am reading this about Resident Evil: Extinction. (Although I have read that about Silent Hill, which was a colossal waste of a movie also.) I have no idea how close in spirit, tone, or plot points this film was to the video game. If the video game had only three plot points, which seems likely, then I can only surmise that the movie is extremely close. The world is a post-apocalyptic wasteland (remember - Resident Evil: Apocalypse? Now this is Resident Evil: Post-Apocalypes.) There are a few survivors, one of them is Milla Jovovich on a motorbike who plays Mad Max. Or Kevin Costner from Waterworld. Some evil guys are doing some evil things at the cleverly named Umbrella Corporation. That’s it. That’s the plot. And even that’s not done well.

That being said, Resident Evil: Extinction IS the best of the three films, which is not saying much, I know. It’s kind of like saying No Strings Attached is the best N’Sync album. The only way to justify that opinion if someone asks you is to say “well, it IS”. And yes, I had to look up that N’Sync reference. Which only makes me hate this movie even more.

With every hit-man movie, there are certain cliches that must be observed. Great hit-man movies have only some of them. Bad hit-man movies have all of them. Hitman is a bad hit-man movie. Those cliches are - there is a a massive shootout in a hotel or an apartment building, a shootout that kills dozens, maybe hundreds of cops, because who cares if cops die? This hotel shootout likely involves one or more characters crashing into other peoples’ rooms, and almost certainly ends with the hitman escaping, either by leaping off a balcony or by disguising himself as one of the dead riot cops. The killer then has to go after his own bosses for some reason, because they set him up. These bosses always work for a shadowy, never-explained organization that operates outside the CIA, Interpol, MI5 or what have you. The hitman never fully understands the complete setup himself, and there is always a woman around to help him learn more about himself. (Quite often a goth-chick who gets off on the danger.) Also, the number TWO hitman in the world is always resentful of the number ONE assassin, and goes after him. There is almost always female nudity, the number ONE assassin is always the “good” guy, and there is a target he just can’t kill that sets him back on the path to decency. (A child, a woman, or an old high school friend.)

Movies with some or all of these features are as follows: Assassin, Assassins, Fulltime Killer, The Professional, The Specialist, La Femme Nikita, Point of No Return, Ghost Dog, The Killer, Prizzi’s Honor, Le Samourai, Pulp Fiction, Panic, This Gun For Hire, Killer, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, Smokin’ Aces, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Whole Nine Yards, 2 Days in the Valley, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Shoot ‘Em Up, Crank, Kill Bill, Kill Bill 2, The Transporter, The Transporter 2, Grosse Pointe Blank, Red Rock West, Fallen Angels, Time and Tide, and many many others. Every one of those movies (with the possible exception of Point of No Return) is better than Hitman. Hitman uses every one of those cliches, mostly to startlingly bad effect. The Hitman in question is played by Timothy Olyphant, who for some reason appears to be channeling, or at least emulating, Keanu Reeves. Why, I wondered in watching this, would someone go out of their way to ACT like Keanu Reeves? And by that I mean an inanimate carbon rod. Olyphant plays Agent 47, a man who has been, along with many others, groomed from birth to kill people. His only name is 47, and he gets that name from the last two numbers in the bar code tatooed on the back of his bald head.

If secrecy is the idea here, and this group of hired killers is a bunch of “ghosts” who are never identified or seen, there are no witnesses ever, and no one is sure they exist…what’s with the barcodes and bald heads? Wouldn’t a bunch of people with shaven heads and barcode tatoos on their scalp be the most easily identifiable group of people on Earth? Wouldn’t EVERYONE notice them? If you saw a guy like that in a bar on Canada Day, you would tell your friends. If you saw a guy like that moments after a president is assassinated, perhaps you would tell…the police? And if I were one of these shaved-head-barcode-tattoo hitmen, I would wear a hat. I would treasure my anonymity. I would attempt NOT to stand out from a crowd. But then, I don’t kill people. And, judging by this movie, that should get me laid whenever I like. Of course, there has to be a woman who falls for the hitman. And seeing as Olyphant has the personality of a plum and the charizma of a bowl of wheat germ, the only identifiable reason she could have to fall in love with him is that he did not kill her.

And so…there are many people I have not killed. Should Scarlett Johanssen and Cate Blanchett and Famke Janssen all want to leap straight into bed with me simply because I did not kill them? This movie would have me believe this is the case. I now assume that whenever I meet a beautiful woman, she will likely beg me to have my babies simply because I left her alive. I asked my girlfriend if this was why she was with me, and she said that indeed it was. I have left her alive over the course of these past four years, and as such she is not only indebted to me, but also madly in love with me, since I spared her so generously. Single guys - I do this as a public service! Next time you see a hot girl in a bar, walk over and whisper in her ear - you’re still alive, right? And when she says yes, then you say that you should celebrate that continued “living” with some sex. I have recently learned that no woman can resist this level of charm. Just try to say it with no emotion or charm (think like Keanu Reeves). It can’t fail.

Hitman is very true-to-form, in that when hitmen have to fight each other to the death, they don’t do so with guns. They have their own code of honour, and they usually use their fists or other weapons. In this case, swords. Olyphant clearly purchased his pants at the same place they made Bugs Bunny’s fur. You know how in the Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny can seemingly produce objects at will by yanking them out of his fur? Olyphant’s pants are similar, in that he can yank swords out of them. Swords that would have made it rather difficult to have that naked-boob sex scene earlier without chopping off some important parts. Swords that would have made it very difficult to do that running-through-the hotel and leaping-from-the-window thing without chopping off some important parts. Or, perhaps, that is why the sex scene never gets to actual sex. He has chopped off some important parts while carrying swords in his pants.

All you really need to know about Hitman, and about the contempt this movie has for it’s audience, is this: When the assassins and executives and bosses and women and gun runners travel all over the world, the place they are is displayed on the bottom of the screen. Like this:

MOSCOW (Russia)
LONDON (England)
CHICAGO
PARIS (France)

This movie thinks that we are smart enough to know what country contains the city Chicago, but dumb enough to need it spelled out to us that Moscow is in Russia. That is, this movie believes that we, the audience, are dumber than marsupials. Judging by the fact that this movie made 40 million dollars, domestically, at the box office, an awful lot of us actually are.