BEFORE: I'm not a big sports guy, as you may know, but I've watched a bunch of sports movies, as you also know. And I'm working two or three days a week at a big sport-ball arena, the one in Brooklyn. I was warned in advance that the Brooklyn Nets SUCK and so I'm trying my best not to get too attached - but they did beat the Denver Chickie Nuggets on Sunday, a fact that some people who work in concessions did not even realize. We're much too busy to, you know, WATCH the game, much in the same manner that I work in a movie theater and I'm much too busy to watch what we're screening - or, you know, I'm eating my dinner while the film screens. But then last night a very close and exciting game against the Orlando Magic Kingdom, it looked like the Nets would lose by just three points but someone scored a three-point shot just before the buzzer and the game went into overtime. The situation repeated, OT was almost over when the same player hit ANOTHER buzzer-beater with three seconds left in the game, and that put the Nets on top. I had to punch out, I can't be accused of being on the clock just to see part of a basketball game for free - so I left with two seconds left and the Nets ahead by two, they got this, right?
Oh, very wrong, one of the Magic players scored the THIRD three-point buzzer-beater of the game and the Nets once again found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Again, not a sports guy but something tells me that the games don't get closer or more exciting than that, if you're a fan you probably went through a whole roller coaster of emotions. So yeah, this is me not getting too attached.
Cate Blanchett carries over from "Rumours" and today's film just HAS to be better than that one. This completes her three-day residency at the Movie Year, she makes the year-end countdown and I think you can probably guess how I'm going to get to "The Naked Gun" from here.
THE PLOT: An infamous bounty hunter returns to her childhood home, the chaotic planet Pandora, and forms an unlikely alliance with a team of misfits to find the missing daughter of the most powerful man in the universe and open the planet's vault.
AFTER: One interesting thing about my new part-time job is that I had NO idea how varied the audience is for a basketball game. Basketball is an American sport, I know it was first played in Springfield Massachusetts, invented by a P.E. teacher named James Naismith. But it's nationwide and somewhat international now, of course if the Denver or Orlando team plays in Brooklyn, I would expect fans of those teams to come to the game, including a few who maybe travel around the country. What I wasn't expecting was to meet people from all around the world who want to see a Nets game while they're in NYC, and they're willing to pay for the seats and snacks and then they come to my station to buy beer. Thank God it's craft beer that I believe in, I'm not sure if I could sell Bud Lite or Michelob or something, that's kind of against my religion. But when there's a language barrier, I'm not bad with French (4 years in high school) or German (2 years, plus a German grandmother) and over the last four years I've picked up some Spanish from the porters who clean the movie theatre. "Basura" means "garbage" and "cucina" means "kitchen", so I sort of started there and thanks to Sesame St. I knew the numbers one to ten. "Poquito" is a little bit, and of course I can say "buenas nochas" or "mañana", I also now know the words for "raccoon" and "squirrel", beyond that I can just use Google to translate. I spoke German to a guy from Austria last night and was able to recommend a lager beer to him, and a couple weeks ago there was a guy from Norway and I know exactly two words in Norwegian, I can say "beer" and "bottle opener". That's come in handier than you might think, more than, say "hello" and "goodbye" for me. (I knew a guy from Norway in film school, and yeah, we drank a lot of beer together.)
So I know a little bit in a bunch of languages, and that reminds me of "Borderlands". I see bits and pieces from a lot of different franchises reflected here, there are parts that remind me of "Star Wars" (bounty hunters, rolling droids, Imperial-like soldiers) and there are parts that remind me of "Mad Max" (desert wasteland, rolling truck convoys, big muscular maniacs wearing various face masks). Other parts feel like bits from "The Fifth Element" or maybe "Avatar" (wasn't the alien planet in that film also called Pandora?) and throw in a little bit of the X-Men (cosmic woman with fire-bird powers) and this is a real mish-mash. Yes, of course, I know this is based on a video-game, but not one I've played so I really don't know how much of the alleged theft from other franchises was done in the course of making the game, and how much is new old stuff borrowed to make this film. Does it really matter?
Of course I WANT to like this, but I maybe know just a bit too much about what's copied from those other franchises and re-assembled and re-purposed there. I mean, I guess if you're going to steal, you steal from the best and you cobble it together as best you can, even in "Star Wars" you can put together a spaceship or a pod-racer from various parts and it might fly when you need it to, but also break down when it's most inconvenient. See where I'm going with this? This film does move very fast and some parts are very entertaining, but I have a feeling that if I start to pick it apart it won't be hard to find some break in logic that will halt my enjoyment very fast. The motivations of Lilith's mother in sending her away from Pandora is one example, this story proves to be quite fluid, and the film can't really decide if Lilith being cast out by her mother and raised by space miners was a good thing or a bad thing.
The film was a financial bomb, Lionsgate lost like $80 million on this, but all the promotion increased sales of the video game, so same conundrum, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Can it be both? Does one balance out the other? Did people not want to see Cate Blanchett in an action role as a gunslinger? Well, she was in that one Indiana Jones film, so she's done action pics before, however her main body of work is in drama, and you might think a silly video game sci-fi film would be beneath her, but apparently you would be wrong to assume that. Hlaf of the cast seems more like the type you'd cast in a comedy, so all of that kind of tracks. But again, as with "The Out-Laws" trying to nail a heist film, comedy film and romance film all at once, it's hard to be so many things at once. Here it's action, comedy and sci-fi all rolled together and overlapping - can you imagine "Mad Max: Fury Road" also trying to be funny? That just wouldn't work. I'm trying to be very nice with my rating but being so derivative and also not focusing on one genre are some pretty big drawbacks to overcome.
Directed by Eli Roth (my former SDCC booth neighbor, director of "Knock Knock" and "The House with a Clock in Its Walls")
Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Martha"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "The 355"), Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "Haunted Mansion" (2023)), Ariana Greenblatt (last seen in "Barbie"), Florian Munteanu (last seen in "Creed III"), Janina Gavankar (last seen in "Encounter"), Benjamin Byron Davis (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Olivier Richters (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Gina Gershon (last seen in "Blockers"), Ryann Redmond, Bobby Lee (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Haley Bennett (last seen in "Till"), Steven Boyer (last seen in "Hustlers"), Attila Herrmann, Hunter Troy Rothwell, Harry Ford, Paula Andrea Placido, Riana Emma Balla and the voice of Jack Black (last seen in "Dear Santa")
RATING: 5 out of 10 holographic face masks
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