American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1990)

Director: Cedric Sundstorm.

American Ninja 4: The Annihilation is an annihilation, you betcha, an annihilation of logic with its complete randomness as an action movie sequel that is totally defined by ninjas jumping up on All-American hairdo heroes. We are firmly in Canon Pictures territory from the very first scenes where an elite military unit runs through jungle terrain, which looks like a Southern California national park, firing off guns unconvincingly, like they’re on a Weekend Warrior retreat, at the threat chasing them, which are – you guessed it – ninjas! Yes, stuntmen in black pyjamas pop out from behind every surrounding tree with bows and arrows, picking off the grizzled dogfaces one by one until the survivors hop onto an inflatable boat, escaping by the river-bend when all of a suddenly sudden twenty ninjas jump out of the water, all of whom must be very good at holding their breath under water (they teach that at Ninja Academy, I hear). Watching from a great mountain overlooking the captured American G.I.s is a sneering evil British warlord, Mulgrew (James Booth chewing the scenery like the British ham he is) with a panama hat and binoculars, seconded by a masked super-ninja who wears a white hood and a white vest, looking like a New Romantic bassist who is full of mystery.

Cut to David Bradley as Sean Davidson, the tanned stud who talks like Owen Wilson and who replaced Michael Dudikoff as the American Ninja in American Ninja 3, which by all reports really sucked. Anyway, Bradley is best man at his black side-kick’s wedding and just when the rings are about to be exchanged, what do you know, but a beeper is heard and an important call comes through the Government, forcing Bradley and his tuxedo-wearing buddy to leave the bride at the altar and take the limo to HQ, no doubt paying tribute to the exact same scene from Navy Seals. In a boardroom with a framed picture of then President George Bush Snr, Gavin, their superior officer, gives them the scoop about what happened in the opening credits with those American Delta Force Commandos captured by ninjas in red pyjamas and held hostage by Mulgrew who we are told “above all, hates Americans!” However, Gavin the boss man wants to send both Bradley and his useless sidekick but Bradley warns his superior with the funniest line in the film: “This isn’t a game, Gavin! Those were NINJA!” So, our heroes parachute into a foreign country who are never told the name of, but looks like South Africa but should be called Ninjastan, and they meet up with a street-wise punk kid called Pongo who totes a shotgun and speaks in an accent that sounds like a synthesis of all accents. They get taken to some redneck bar to meet a sleazy contact with a hat and then a Roadhouse-lite bar brawl kicks off amazingly, even though everyone is on the same side. Then they are taken up into the sleazy contact’s office to hear the plans for their secret mission, but the evil Mulgrew (terribly acted by James Booth), a British Colonel Renegade Bad-Guy and his men bust in, shooting the sleazy contact in the hat and chasing our heroes in a Raiders of the Lost Ark styled sequence who manage to cheekily hide under some more hats. Thankfully there’s a sexy Peace Corps agent named Sarah (Robin Stille) who has terrible 1980s, Dallas-styled, big-hairdo and hides our heroes in her mortuary. In keeping with the tradition of the American Ninja series, all of these shenanigans feel like you’re watching a lost episode of The A Team where ninja costumes were sold in bulk.

Moving along, there’s a hilarious sequence where David Bradley and his sidekicks all wind up in a forest clearing chased by ninjas. So, he meditates with his legs crossed, doing the splits no problem, while having a profoundly spiritual moment assembling his high-tech bow and arrow. Then twenty ninjas pop out behind the trees once again and Bradley succeeds in hooting them with arrows and beating them up with his martial arts skills, even though in the background of each fight scene are a dozen ninjas hanging around, waiting their turn basically. Then Bradley realises there’s twenty more ninjas nearby and so he pulls out his playing-card-collection-mini-case of throwing stars and kills them all. Bullshit highlight has Bradley’s useless sidekick confronting three ninjas from his hiding spot, turning his gun on each, firing off one round - BANG - as the ninja dodges the bullet with precision timing, then he turns the gun on the next – BANG - and the second ninja dodges it also, and then he shoots at the third ninja – BANG – and you know what, the ninja dodges the bullet as well, all of them demonstrating reflexes with the slowness of the ancients. Our heroes are captured and there is an outlandish presentation of all the ninjas the evil Mulgrew has at his disposal, which the movie shows off in an overhead helicopter shot of blue, yellow, red and black ninjas all performing choreographed kicks on a mountain top, all for the benefit of an evil Arab general, Maksood, dressed in the Lawrence of Arabia get-up. Then the silver super ninja with an eye patch turns up and runs some new recruits through a training montage and there’s a balancing beam covered in shards of glass that one ninja slips on and gets it right in the undercarriage. Ouch.

With Bradley and his team now captured, handcuffed and tortured by the evil Mulgrew (who even intones to the tied-up Sarah, “all she needs is a stiff talking too!” Hi-ho!), one wonders where is Michael Dudikoff (a.k.a. the walking embodiment of every dated hair salon photo of the Kevin Bacon look) as Joe Armstrong, the original American Ninja, in all of this. Samuel Beckett presents Waiting For Dudikoff. For whatever reason Dudikoff opted out of the third film, money or pride, that’s gone now and he walks into the movie, standing in a church for some reason and teaching kids about the environment. Then Gavin the boss man turns up and tells him to save Bradley and save the franchise in another mission to Ninjastan, which is basically like the movie restarting from scratch. Anyway Dudikoff needs some time to think about this so we get a montage of him sitting by a campfire near his cabin by the lake, drinking coffee and making out like he’s in a Nescafe ad. Then he’s on the plane to Ninjastan, meeting Pongo the cheeky punk kid contact and being driven to the rebellion basecamp of Ninjastan, which looks like a post-apocalyptic quarry where everyone is dressed in leather despite the hot African sun. So, yes, Dudikoff has walked into Mad Max world, or Barter Town as it’s also known as, and fly-kicks a few toughs here and there to prove himself to the resistance while a grizzled rebel leader oversees the action from his tower, proclaiming, “We need men like him!” Anyway, all of this takes a long time, dragging out as if the director had to make a 90 minute movie for Canon, only had 60 minutes of footage in the can, and decided to just keep filming stuff to make up the running time. Finally Dudikoff makes a new ninja sword and strides through the morning sunlight, ready to rescue his friends, by which I mean the also-ran who replaced him in American Ninja III. In one bullshit awesome scene, we see him creep through the jungle wearing a white shirt and jeans, then he drops into a hole in the ground, and out he jumps IMMEDIATELY wearing his American Ninja gear, just like Clark Kent turning into Superman. Amazing.

Skip to the climax where the captured heroes are tied to wooden poles like Joan of Arc multiplied, flames at their feet and arrows pointed at their chests (in the case of actress Robin Stile, their expansive chests). Dudikoff sneaks in the back entrance, scuttling through drain pipes, beating up ninjas here and there, and even CATCHING AN ARROW BETWEEN HIS TEETH, SAY WHAT?!!! Then Dudikoff finds Bradley alone in the prison basement and unties Bradley who then proceeds to fight him and then Dudikoff stabs him a knife because Bradley was trying to kill him but don’t worry about it because that wasn’t Bradley just some ninja in a Bradley mask! Huh? Whatever, let’s keep on with the movie. Then Dudikoff knocks out one yellow ninja, puts on the yellow pyjamas, walks out casually into the imminent execution of his friend, and then kicks some butt while the Mad Max resistance force ride in with their pink Cadillacs and their shotguns to invade the evil ninja training camp. Then Dudikoff unties the real Bradley who proceeds to rescue Sarah from the evil Mulgrew while Dudikoff fights the super-silver-ninja with the eye-patch. Cutting between the two climactic fight, the Dudikoff match wins by a long-shot in the entertainment stakes simply because it ends with him high-kicking the evil super-ninja into a pile of boxes and then, in a traditional move of honour and respect practised by the ninjas long since scribes were able to record such traditions, he throws a grenade onto him and blows him up into a containable explosion. Ah, just like the ancient warriors would have handled it. With the camp overrun by the resistance, Dudikoff strides through the multi-coloured-uniformed dead bodies all around him and turns around to Bradley who killed Mulgrew and has Sarah at his side, and imparts some final words of wisdom from one American Ninja to another American Ninja:

“Sean... you can find me at the school.”

Well, not exactly a closing lines of the likes of ‘You know, this is beginning of a beautiful friendship,” but you know, it works to impart All-American values combined with the Ancient code of the Ninja, which is to stay in school, kids. Get a rad haircut like Dudikoff and catch arrows in your teeth.

Righteous Kill (2008)

Director: Jon Avnet

You know how it is when you’ve been a cop in the NYPD for over thirty years: “Most people respect the badge. Everyone respects the gun.” You want to protect 99% of the population from the 1% of “degenerates”” who prey on the innocent and you watch paedophile priests, swarmy yuppie rapists and white trash child killers go free because of the “lawyers.” You see young club skanks snorting “primo” cocaine or “blow” which is what they call it in the streets, and they are doing that shit in public toilets in fancy big-time clubs and you have to “flip” cute female legal cokehead secretaries to “rat” out their supplier who looks a lot like 50 Cent. You arrive at a crime scene standing over the dead body of Rambo the Skateboarding Pimp (that's a street name for all you not from the street) and the first thing you think to say is “We gotta find out who did this!” like the wizened professional that you are. Anytime you see a brother officer in uniform at a crime scene, you always have to ask, “How about those Mets last night?” You also have to contend with your Brian-Dennehy-sized chief, the weasel IA officers (that’s Internal Affairs for all you people who are not from the street) and a hot Carla-Gugino-shaped forensic specialist who always wants to have sex with you (Sheesh, can’t an old cop near retirement get a moment’s rest around here?!). Then there’s someone out there playing vigilante, murdering all the criminals who got away with it and they are making a RIGHTEOUS KILL and it is also the name of this cop movie that I watched, which is also funnily enough a RIGHTEOUS KILL of your time as well as your faith in the acting abilities of co-leads Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Boy, it’s been over a decade since Michael Mann paired together the two finest Italian-American actors together for the epic cops and robbers film, Heat, with that classic diner scene discussion between the two of them, finally uniting in the one scene two thespians often mistaken for each other. Well, neither actor have been doing much decent work since then, so why not pair them together once again? So, we have De Niro and Pacino playing two old partners in fighting crime, introduced in a title sequence montage where they shoot off rounds at a firing range while a remixed generic rock guitar tune underscores that these Old Dogs still got it. Yes, in a surprising casting move, De Niro plays a gruff, irritable cop who is seen throwing a tantrum coaching little league and in an even more surprisingly acting choice, Pacino plays a gum-chewing wise-ass who is seen beating an egghead at a twin game of time-clock chess. Yeah, so there’s a vigilante bumping off bad guys who our heroes wanted to see put in bars and once again the line of dialogue is heard, “I don’t know whether to arrest these guys or give them a medal!” which we haven’t heard since Magnum Force or Death Wish or every other movie that put together cops and vigilantes. A calling card is left behind on the dead bodies, written poems found at the scene of the crime and circumstantial evidence points to the fact that a cop is most likely doing it, compounded by the video footage of De Niro offering a confession of his “crimes” to the camera. The younger dogs, John Leguizamo and Donnie Whalberg as another set of partners eventually come to think De Niro did it too. Oh boy, this movie is leading me down one path, I don’t suppose SPOILER ALERT AS IF YOU CARE that they might switch it up and offer a plot twist, particularly with such clues when the grizzled old police chief has both cops in his office and says ‘The killer might be right in front of you and you wouldn’t even know it’ and then we see a scene start with Pacino at a crime scene speculating ‘I’m the killer and I walk into the apartment...’ Hey, I’m no detective but I think someone else may have made those RIGHTEOUS KILLS... wink-wink, hoo-hah, and who cares? Cue a re-run of the climax to Heat but with the roles reversed and there you have it.



Now I love cop movies, even the most cliched cop movies, but by those standards, Righteous Kill is quite the boring cop movie, featuring standard issue stuff that wouldn’t look askew in an episode of CSI or Law & Order or any other cop show in the last ten years. What really sinks it is its sole attraction, which is De Niro and Pacino together again, both wearing faces that look like beat-up catcher’s mitts and neither displaying much of the fire that gave them the recognition of high calibre actors. Take me down to Mugging Central because that's what we're dealing with here. I can only imagine actors like Gugino or Leguizamo or 50 Cent signing up to this film so excited to work with Taxi Driver and Scarface and then being stuck acting opposite guys who look like they are sleeping with their eyes open, delivering weak and forced banter such as the extended discussion of Wonderdog as a metaphor for drug-taking that would put Jim Belushi sitcoms to shame. I would have preferred this film more if they had starred two professional lookalike impersonators of DeNiro and Pacino, strutting around alternating between standard lines like "What am I, alone in this world?" and "Hoo Haa!" ad nausem, or even if they stitched together outtakes from the countless other films where these two played leather-jacket wearing cops stalking the streets of New York; Sea of Love and 15 Minutes partnered together to solve the mystery of the plot from a thousand movies!

The Steam Experiment (2009)

Director: Phillipe Martinez

The Steam Experiment is where a fat Val Kilmer plays a loopy college professor genius who has locked six people in a steam room because of global warming. Why? It’s an experiment, you see, to determine what will happen to humanity when the Mayan Calendar is proven in 2012 and the apocalypse will turn ordinary people into panicky idiots. It’s also a hostage situation with Kilmer imploring a local newspaper to publish his cockamamie theories about global warming or the six people who were lured into the steam room by Kilmer posing as an online dating service will all die from the rising temperature of the steam room. Basically The Steam Experiment is Saw but with semi-nude hostages and Val Kilmer hamming it up like Jim Morrison in a turtleneck sweater. So, it’s clearly better than Saw.

Talk about exposition: the film’s first act is basically a lot of characters repeating the details of the high-concept plot to each other. Kilmer tells the local news editor about his nefarious plan, then the local news editor tells detective Armand Assante about Kilmer’s nefarious plan, then Assante asks Kilmer to explain his nefarious plan, Kilmer than explains his nefarious plan to Assante, and then Assante asks Kilmer, “Let me get this straight: you’ve got six people locked in a steam room... because of global warming.” (Hey, why not repeat the plot ad nausem, it was the reason why I rented this Direct-to-DVD movie alongside Val Kilmer's expansive face on the cover) All the while, Kilmer plays the mad professor as a coy intellectual who is able to notice that the local news editor’s clock is five minutes fast and utters pithy, pseudo-philosophical lines like “If you want to play trivial pursuit, it’s on your head” and “We’re a nation of sheep.”

Even though Kilmer is top-billed, I think he only had three days of shooting on this project since he is only in it for approximately thirty minutes of screen-time. We have some surreal images of him at the start standing in front of a carousel at night, which I guess is supposed to signify how "nutty" he is and what a "thrill-ride" this movie will be. Then there are close-ups of his fat face with a thousand yard stare. The best stuff though is Kilmer being interrogated with Assante who basically mumbles his dialogue through his flappy-lips, the lower-class man of the streets up against the intellectual master-mind. Yes, there are lots of bits where Kilmer psyches out Assante by asking him questions like “Have you ever been to Italy, detective?” or commenting on his cheap cologne and insulting him in a high and haughty manner, “Your vulgarity is pathetic! It annoys me!” We also see Kilmer turning the tables on the ‘bad-cop routine’ by slamming his own forehead against the interrogation table and then takes everyone out to acting school with his performance of crazy with twitchy eyes and rambling about his father (About his controversial theories on global warming, “I could take the humiliation but he couldn’t...”), bugging out like nobody’s business. With such scenes, one can glimpse the mannered charm of Kilmer adding a bit of business to a dumb role and proving Chuck Klosterman’s pronouncement of Kilmer as an example of “advancement” – that is that Kilmer as a performer is so advanced that we might not understand his acting genius in such trash for years to come.

The majority of the movie takes place in the steam room with the hostages who includes Eric Roberts with a wavering Southern accent, Melrose Place’s Patrick Muldoon, a neurotic brunette, a neurotic blonde, a slutty waitress type who takes her top off in an extended slow-mo sequence to ‘Bolero,’ and then this Matt Dillion lookalike who plays the most over-the-top Italian-stereotype you could think of with scenery-chewing dialogue like “I’m from Booklyn, born and bred...” and “I love everybody, you know what I mean, forget about it!” (Naturally he’s the first one to crack and go kill-crazy in the steam room). Tensions escalate as the director desaturates the visuals with an orange lens flare and people start turning against each other – a stabbing here, a few nails to the forehead there, a suicide and a death match. The result of all this huffing and puffing is that we find out that Kilmer is actually a mental patient and all of this was possibly a fabrication in his twisted mind. TWIST! That would be too easy though. Big spoiler alert (as if you care): Patrick Muldoon is actually Kilmer’s doctor! Muldoon and his wife (the neurotic blonde hostage) actually volunteered for this experiment, which actually happened and Muldoon found that he and his blonde wife surviving the steam room was a profound life-changing experience (you know, like Fight Club but in a Steam Room... Steam Club). TWIST TIMES TWO! Final scene has the blonde wife standing by Muldoon’s study and discussing Kilmer:

“You don’t control him anymore. He controls you. Kill him and come home.”

Muldoon turns off his lamp very slowly. Ominous music. The End. Hmmm... What the hell? Way to blow my mind, movie. If I wanted to waste more of my time, I could extrapolate all the plot-holes from this last-minute development, but ah, much like the Average Joe’s response to global warming, I’ll leave it there as an impending problem that I won’t think about until I have to. Instead, I’ll stick to the basic pleasures that this movie offers – a fleeting glance of some boobs and a fat-faced hambone Val Kilmer. Hey, the movie even puts them in the same frame together!

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

Director: Stephen Somers.

The box office success of a live action Transformers movie consequently made the green-lighting of a live action G.I. Joe movie inevitable. When I was a child I used to have a small collection of G.I. Joes, a line of toy soldiers that were all blessed with individual personas expressed in cool code-names, weaponsm and costumes that were unique to them; the army man as super hero. However, I can’t profess to any great nostalgic love for G.I. Joe (the only Joe I can really remember is Sgt. Slaughter and that’s because he was also a WWF wrestler); I mean I didn’t even remember that there was a difference between Destro (silver-face) and Cobra Commander (sounds like Skeletor). So, after having endured G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I won’t be using any silly phrases like ‘This film raped my childhood!’ That’s unnecessary. The film is pretty appropriate to the franchise since it’s basically an extended cartoon, but made with wall-to-wall CGI rather than cheap Korean animation cells.

Film kicks off with a strange Alexander Dumas opening set in France, 1841, where a Scottish arms dealer named McCullen is imprisoned with a burning hot iron mask that sears itself to his face. Then we get a the title card “In The Not Too Distant Future,” which is always a promising sign in any motion picture since it always says ‘Hey, things are pretty much the same, but we use advanced technology that could only ever be invented in THE FUTURE.” Former Dr. Who, Christopher Eccleston makes a bad career move in sinking himself into this franchise, playing the Scottish heir to the McCullen line of arms dealing and treachery, selling the hot new weapon to the U.S. Military. What is this new technology? NANOMITES! Green CGI beetles that EAT TANKS! The Not Too Distant Future is NOW!




Now we meet our heroes charged with transporting the Nanomite missiles: Duke, a thick-looking white-guy hunk (played by Channing Tatum), and Ripcord (played by Marlon Wayans), his wacky black-guy comic relief sidekick. Yes, this is the Not Too Distant Future and we have moved on from questionable racial stereotypes! Now Duke and Ripcord are trading lame quips in their humvee when they are attacked by a spaceship that shoots electro-pulse lasers in Matrix-slow-mo. While every other soldier protecting the Nanomites is obliterated, our two heroes survive the multiple explosions and confront the alluring visage of the Baroness (Sienna Miller) who steps out of the spaceship looking like a model on the runways of Milan (dark long hair, tight skin-suit, and shades) and who also shares a mysterious back-story with Duke (yes, they know each other so it’s like a meet-cute on the battlefield). Then some mysterious super-soldiers drop in and defeat the mysterious bad-guys. There’s the silent killer-ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park), another hot model type in skin-hugging bodysuit but this time with red hair and is thus appropriately named Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), and a cockney guy built like a brick shit-house named Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agaje a.k.a. Adebisi in Oz). Who are these guys? Well, out pops a Dennis Quaid hologram, announcing that he is General Hawk and explaining everything with a voice that sounds like he’s swallowed a frog.

Duke: “What’s your unit?”
Hawk: “That’s classified!”

Cue to rocking Linkin Park styled music as the camera flies over the pyramids in Egypt for our introduction to the G.I. Joes. “The top men and women from the best units in the world,” croaks Quaid. “The Alpha Dogs!” As we see sexy female soldiers put on body suits that make them invisible, Quaid quips, “When all else fails, we don’t!” In no time at all, Duke and Ripcord have signed up to become G.I. Joes and grab back the stolen Nanomite technology. Before that we’re gonna need a montage set to an awful cover of T-Rex’s ‘Get It On’ as the two dunderheads suit up in Iron Man styled fighting gear (“Fully self-controlled fire power,” says Heavy Duty. “Perfect for a couple of cowboys like you two.”), shoot practice targets under Scarlett’s sexy gaze, and then are trained in hand-to-hand fighting by an unexplained Brendan Fraser cameo (Director Stephen Somers did the Mummy 1 & 2, so it’s like “Hey, Brendan, appear in my new movie and say ‘Go Joe!’ a lot”). Anyway, if you think this is ridiculous, the bad guys a.k.a. Cobra are also up to the task of equalling such over-the-top bullshit with a masked madman scientist injecting Nanomites into muscle-brained soldiers so that they “feel no fear, feel no pain, feel no concept of morality” (much like the people who produced this movie). All of this nonsense feels like you’re watching a James Bond movie but without the comfort of James Bond starring in it.

Now remember in Mission Impossible when they really pushed it with the one trick of spies pulling their faces off to reveal they were CGI masks? Well, G. I. Joe overloads on holograms – Eccleston appears in the G.I. Joe squadroom but it turns out he’s a hologram or Miller appears in Ecceleston’s jet but it’s like ‘Oh shit, she’s actually a hologram!” What’s the matter with the Not Too Distant Future? Are phones not acceptable forms of communication anymore? Another great technique that the film cannot get enough of is to introduce a character in close-up and then suddenly cut to a flashback that explains all their limited back-story and motivation. For example, evil ninja Stormshadow (white pyjamas) faces off against good ninja Snake Eyes (black pyjamas) when Cobra raids G.I. Joe HQ for the Nanomites. They face off, swords clash, and then Stormshadow says, “Hello, brother.” Cue flashback that shows them as little kids fighting each other for about ten minutes and making it clear that this film is targeted to children. The flashbacks help explain why the Baroness went from being the blonde airhead finance of Duke to his dark-haired heartless nemesis: Duke didn’t protect her dipstick brother played by Joseph Gordon Levitt who is quite a good actor (see Brick and The Lookout for evidence of this) and his presence is a puzzling sight, particularly when he’s top-billed in the credits but only appears in a total of three scenes (spoiler: he turns out to be the masked mad-man scientist who becomes Cobra Commander).



The action sequences are weightless. There is an abundance of CGI special effects, particularly in the extended set-piece where Cobra goes to Paris to blow up the Eiffel Tower, which they do in a scene that is like the opening of Team America: World Police but taken seriously (Consider this a live action remake pretty much). You see that they filmed a bit of location work in Paris (actually the Czech Republic masquerading as Paris) but used the old silicon chips to stick in flying super-soldier Iron Man suits and fast cars that whizz by unconvincingly through real French traffic. Oh, and Marlon Wayans puts on his million dollar super-soldier Iron Man suit and falls out of the team van with the quip, “My bad!” (Ahhhhhhh, the one-liner that never stops being funny! Thank you, Hollywood!)

What else can we mention briefly? Well, there’s the cat-fight hand-to-hand combat scene between Scarlett and the Baroness that had me thinking “Hello nurse!” and makes sure all those geeks watching this film have something to fantasise about. You also have Arnold Vosloo as Cobra’s Master of Disguise who is like Mystique in the X-Men movies but not female, naked and blue. There is the Marlon Wayans one-liner with regards to a Nanomite filled corpse, “Dead guys don’t breakdance!” Character actor favourite Kevin J. O’Connor pops up in the film for five minutes as a freaky scientist. There is also Eccleston turning into Destro in the climax with a silver metal face that makes him look like Kryten in Red Dwarf. The climax of the movie is an underwater version of the Star Wars Death Star attack with Quaid sounding the order, “Release the Sharks!” (the Sharks being the Joe’s vehicles but when he said that line without the context explained, I did laugh). In the end, G.I. Joe is a pretty dumb action film, but after awhile I was pretty bored, which is the worst crime that any movie can commit. At least I could use some semblance of imagination when playing with the figurines when I was younger, more so than what the filmmakers could dredge up from their bankrupt mind-tanks.

2012 (2009)

Director: Roland Emmerich.

I was challenged by my friends Gabby and Zak to see Roland Emmerich's latest environmental disaster opus, 2012. Thankfully I sat next to Gabby as to hear her comments throughout the two hour and a half epic.

1. Danny Glover appears as the President of the USA:

Gabby [re: his slurred speech] "Did he have a stroke? What's wrong with Danny Glover?"

2. Close-up on a fake Mona Lisa's smile (the real one saved in storage for the upcoming apocalypse) and then cut to the title "2012"

Gabby [laughs] "Alright... bring it on, movie!"

3. John Cusack appears as the weary protagonist:

Gabby: "John Cusack? I thought Nicolas Cage was in this?"

4. John Cusack continues to perform in 2012:

Me: "Is John Cusack even in this movie? I know he is physically, but I don't know about the rest of him..."

5. As another character remarks in astonishment at signs of the impending apocalypse...

Gabby: "They should have really called this movie "My God!" as that seems to be what all these characters say."

6. On the mannered actor playing the bow-tie wearing background scientist with a crutch:

Me: "What an eccentric performance. This man should win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor."

7. Thirty minutes into the exposition:

Gabby: "Would something blow up already?!"

8. As John Cusack drives his limo through a crumbling L.A.:

Gabby: "Everything is exploding!"

9. Cusack looks in the rear view mirror as they outrace the devastation:

Gabby: "Watch out! The apocalypse is right behind you!"

10. Russian characters are introduced who help Cusack and his family:

Gabby: "This movie is packed with bad accents!"

11. Danny Glover continues to act as the President of the USA:

Gabby: "Man, what happened to Danny Glover?"
Me: "He's too old for this shit."

12. Sparks fly between the concerned scientist and the president's daughter:

Gabby: "Ah, they're going to be repopulating the species!"

13. The Vatican implodes and crushes all the praying Italians:

Gabby: "What is this? A snuff film?"

14. More people are swallowed up by massive tidal waves:

Gabby: "This movie is becoming really unpleasant."

15. During the mass exodus, a dog saves itself:

Gabby: "Oh, fuck you!"

16. During the tension-free climax where the USA ark is almost colliding with Mount Everest:

Gabby: "Okay, that's it... I've got nothing. This movie has drained the funny right out of me. This movie broke me. You win, movie."

17. During the end credits, Woody Harrelson's name appears:

Me: "Hey, remember when Woody Harrelson was in the movie?"

Gabby: "Yes, that was when I could still laugh and enjoy the movie, all those many days ago..."