The inane ramblings presented
here by Scott Foy (aka The Foywonder) are strictly his own opinions
and do not necessarily reflect those of any other sane or insane person living,
dead, or otherwise.
You can email The Foywonder at foywonder@yahoo.com
or by posting on the message board.
Note: you will need to register.
|
MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE DISASTER MOVIE Been a long time since I missed a monthly update. Couldn't be helped. Sometimes the fates conspire. When it became apparent I would be missing the first week of November I decided to hold off and wait for 2012 to open. That's what you'll be getting this month, and tossed in for good measure is another stupefying disaster epic from our friends at The Asylum. But first, it is once again time for an annual tradition. Let me preface this year's annual list of movies I refused to pay to see by stating my opinion that 2009 was the lamest year for cinema in over a decade. This time last year there were movies that excited me to my movie-loving core like THE DARK KNIGHT, IRON MAN, GRAN TORINO, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, DEATH NOTE, RAMBO, THE WRESTLER, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN... This year even the good movies have been nothing to get too excited for and the bad ones have been more mediocre in a blah sort of way more so than outright flabbergasting. As much as I love Clint Eastwood and James Cameron, every trailer for INVICTUS bring to mind a South African rugby version of REMEMBER THE TITANS and nothing I've seen thus far from AVATAR has me feeling giddy with even a drop of the anticipation I felt going in to THE DARK KNIGHT or even DRAGON WARS, as hard as that might be to believe. Don't know how much of the blame falls on the writer's strike or if this was just an especially mundane year for movies, but even when compiling this annual list of the movies that looked so rancid that even I couldn't bring myself to plunk down hard-earned money to endure them I found myself not really feeling all that strongly about the majority of them, not like in past years when there were standouts that made me cringe even to speak their name. THE TOP 10 MOVIES I DIDN'T PAY TO SEE IN 2009 AND, DAMMIT, I PLAN TO KEEP IT THAT WAY 10)
THE SOLOIST Some of you may very well be scratching your heads right now puzzled as to how a Sam Mendes film could end up first on my list of the movies I refused to pay to see. I experienced total revulsion upon first witnessing the trailer for this vomitorioum of indie dramedy pretension earlier this summer. I do not give a damn if AWAY WE GO was warmly received by critics. For the two-and-a-half minutes of my life sucked dry just watching the trailer, every warning bell went off in my head while the very flesh on my bones began to crawl, desperately trying to make it up to my eyes to cover them with fleshy folds, no doubt. All the idiosyncratic claptrap and bile-inducing hipster attitude I have come to loathe with every fiber of my being from so many of today's art house dramedies were front and center in that trailer. No other trailer in the past 12 months garnered such a hate-inducing negative reaction from me like the AWAY WE GO preview did. I don't even want to ever sit through the trailer again let alone suffer through two hours of the movie as a whole. It certainly didn't help that Sam Mendes prior film, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, was so ungodly shrill I had to shut it off after less than a half hour in order to prevent me from picking up something heavy and throwing it at my flatscreen television to make Kate and Leo shut the hell up. No, I do not care if AWAY WE GO is actually a good film. Maybe it is. I assure you I will never find out.
YEAR END BLOWOUT
It was the end of the world as we know it and I really did feel fine. YOU WERE WARNED So boasts the tagline for Roland Emmerich's disaster-palooza 2012. But is it a reference to the belief that the Mayan calendar accurately predicts the end of the world in 2012 or a sly reference to what many film critics had to say about the film? It's like the other week when I was in the drive-thru at my local McDonald's. Right there next to the official sign asking you to call to rate their service someone working at this particular franchise put a little black sign up in the drive-thru window reading YOU WILL SOON STAND BEFORE THE LORD. Not sure if using the drive-thru to proselytize to customers is legal or something the McDonald's corporation would even approve of, but then I am still not sure if this sign was an attempt evangelize or merely a truth in advertising statement about McDonald's food. I mean if you're eating at McDonald's then odds are you will be standing before the Lord sooner rather than later. It's no secret that I am not a fan of Roland Emmerich. But as the old saying goes, "Even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut." Let there be no if, ands, or buts about it; Emmerich's 2012 is absolutely nuts for all of his 158 minutes. I firmly believe Roland Emmerich's entire life - at least his filmmaking career - has been building to this one insane orgy of Armageddon. If it doesn't erupt, it crumbles. If it doesn't crumble, it explodes. It if doesn't explode, it gets washed away. Planet Earth becomes one great big fire sale, if you will. Everything must go (down, preferably in flames)! All of it brought to you with the usual Emmerich logic-defying science, half-baked melodrama, overdone reaction shots, eye-rolling dialogue, and bipolar politics (Government conspiracies - BOO! Only government conspirators can save us - YAY!) Might as well just retire the entire disaster movie genre after this one; nothing left other than to destroy the entire planet outright. I say retire the genre's jersey. Hang good ol' #2012 from the rafters because there will probably never be another like it. Or will there? Directed
by a filmmaker most famous for making disaster flicks. 2012 is this generation's THE SWARM. Let me describe for you a scene that puts it all into perspective. The scene involves a character played by veteran actor George Segal, a character completely extraneous to the film; his only ties to the central plot being that he is one half of a cruise ship musical act with another extraneous character that happens to be the father of one of the main characters. Segal's character hasn't spoken to his son in years, presumably, from what we gather because his son married a Japanese woman and moved to Japan. There are hints of racism, but that makes little sense because his musical partner is black. Why they had a falling out matters little. What matters is that the end is near and time is running out to make amends. So he calls his son from the ship's galley. The young granddaughter he has never met answers the phone. He tells her he is her grandfather and really wants to speak to her father. She tells him she has to go into their bedroom to wake them up, which she does. Why is that a big deal? Because by this point in the film Southern California has fallen into the ocean, Las Vegas has fallen into the world's biggest sinkhole, the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park has begun to erupt, the rest of North America is under a giant ash cloud, Brazil has been obliterated by earthquakes, the term "holy roller" got a whole new meaning when the Sistine Chapel broke off and steamrolled over thousands of Catholics gathered at St. Peter's Square to pray, Hawaii has been reduced to just a series of volcanic eruptions, and this is just the stuff we have had visualized for us. Yet these two people are sleeping peacefully through all of this? In bed, sound asleep during Armageddon, as if they didn't have a care in the world. The little girl wakes them. Both look astounded to hear that grandpa is on the phone. The son holds the phone in his hand, looking at it, unsure if he really wants to talk to his father after whatever bad blood tore them apart. He relents; a smile of relief on his face. Right as he goes to talk - BOOM! Massive earthquake annihilates Japan. Cut back to George Segal, the expression on his face more concerned befuddlement than abject horror as he hears the final screams of his only family in the world before the line goes completely dead. No time to mourn. Ten minutes later, a monster tsunami will POSEIDON ADVENTURE the cruise ship killing him as well. With 2012, Emmerich didn't consider "overkill" a dirty word - it was his mission statement.
How the Robin Williams' comedy RV should have ended. Adding to its guaranteed future bad movie cult status is the fact 2012 will be totally dated in three years. Do you think Roland Emmerich ever stopped to realize his newest movie has an expiration date? One of two things will have occurred by 1-1-2013: something resembling the events of his movie, in which case who will care about this movie one way or another, or nothing of the sort, in which December 21, 2012 will prove to be the biggest non-pocalypse since Y2K. Me, personally, I don't buy into any of this 2012 hullabaloo. All you have to do is listen to any Mayan descendant as they try in vain to convince people that their calendar ending in 2012 has nothing to do with predicting the end of the world or any other doomsday scenario; the date is merely the end of their calendar's cycle - nothing more, nothing less. Roland Emmerich features a few of those Mayan descendants in his movie: dead on the ground after a mass suicide before an ancient Mayan temple. Message received. Neutrinos from the sun are heating Earth's core, which will in turn lead to the earth's crust becoming unstable in 2012, which will in turn lead to PhD’s in science to say things like "All out science; all out technologies; somehow the Mayans knew before us all", which will in turn bring about the end of the world as we know it and only a few thousand survivors aboard state-of-the-art "arks" being built by the Chinese in the Himalayan Mountains will feel fine. As 99% of the human race either get crushed to death as land masses collapse into a void, gets submerged beneath oceans of flood water, choke to death on ash, or are incinerated by fire or lava, we, the viewers of 2012, who all presumably die in one of the previously described manners, are expected to care about whether a failed science fiction writer turned world's greatest limo driver can get his ex-wife and two kids to one of the arks in Tibet before the Mayans say I told you so. They really should have cast The Rock instead of John Cusack and called it RACE TO ARK MOUNTAIN instead. First, Cusack has to race in a limo to pick up his family before the big one hits Los Angeles. Then they have to race in the limo to the airport as Los Angeles crumbles around them. Then they have to race to get the small plane off the ground before Los Angeles fully plummets into the ocean. Then they have to race to get the plane at a safe altitude so that the toppling infrastructure doesn't slam into them. Then they have to race to Yellowstone to get the top secret map showing the location of the arks from the crazy conspiracy theorist. Then Cusack has to race in an RV to get back to the plane as the supervolcano below Yellowstone begins to erupt. Then Cusack has to race to find the map in the RV, climb out of a crater after the RV sinks into the ground, and run to the plane as it begins to take-off as the eruption draws closer. Then they have to race to Las Vegas to find a plane that can get them to China. Then they have to race to get that plane in the air before the volcanic ash cloud envelopes them. Then they have to race to get that plane to a safe distance as Las Vegas plunges into an abyss and skyscrapers collapse toward them. Then they have to race to China before the world ends or they run out of fuel. Then they have to race to drive the expensive sports cars out of back of the crash landing jumbo jet after the landing gear is destroyed. Then, after the Russian billionaire they were tagging along with ditches them and the Chinese military refuses to take them because they don't have a ticket, they have to hitch a ride with some Buddhists to race to the Himalayan location of the arks before the gigantic flood waters come. Then they have to race to sneak aboard the arks intended only for the super rich and a chosen few. Cusack has to race underwater to dislodge a piece of welding equipment clogging up a gear shift that won't allow the ark to fully close its bay door or start its engine before the flood waters sink them or smash them to bit against Mount Everest. Screw that show on CBS; this is the amazing race!
We're used to actors outrun fireballs in action flicks. This is the first time I've seen someone outrun an apocalypse. SIX IDEAS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE 2012 EVEN MORE ASTOUNDING 1) Every narrow escape by Cusack should have been followed by the plumes of smoke forming a fist and shaking it in the air. Cusack concluding each narrow escape by sticking his tongue out at the devastation he has avoided and going "Beep! Beep!" would also have been acceptable. 2) Ditch the whole Earth's core overheating crap and turn 2012 into the ultimate FINAL DESTINATION sequel. Have the film open with Cusack narrowly surviving a near-death experience. Death becomes so determined to kill him it is willing to destroy the entire world just to get him. Still would have been better than THE FINAL DESTINATION 3-D. 3) Imagine as Cusack is racing to safety that every wall of smoke and fire, every approaching fautline, every toppling structure, is yelling at him in a kid's voice, "Two dollars!" 4) Have Cusack stand outside the ark holding a boombox above his head blasting "The Final Countdown" until the leaders of the world's hearts melt and they agree to open the doors to let the final survivors aboard. 5) Quetzalcoatl actually appears in the form of a Godzilla-sized monster assisting in the destruction of the planet. Cusack's young daughter with the hat fetish slays the beast when she puts on an enchanted conquistador helmet that was part of the fine arts collection Thandie Newton's character had been gathering to be kept safe aboard the arks. The film ends with the rest of the survivors making her their queen. 6) Cusack turns out to be the author of a series of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. He keeps using his page-choosing prowess to stay one step ahead of the catastrophe. For example, as Yellowstone erupts, he begins mumbling to himself, "Do I just run for the plane without the map and turn to page 19 or do I stay inside the RV until I find the map and then run for the plane and turn to page 38? If I choose the first, we'll live but we will have no idea where to go and die one way or another. Therefore, I am going to keep looking for the map. Turn to page 38. I find the map, narrowly make the plane, and we live to fly to Vegas. Hooray!" They should have made 2012 the first ever interactive "Choose Your Own Adventure" Imax movie and let the audience vote on what the character do next. 7) The final shot of the film should flash forward to Kevin Costner on a skiff recounting to Jeanne Tripplehorn the story of how the world became covered with water. The map tattooed on the back of Tina Majorino's back turns out to be the same one Cusack got from the conspiracy nut. 2012 is revealed to have been a prequel to WATERWORLD all along. Cusack is the author of a little read science fiction novel coincidentally titled "Farewell Atlantis", a tale of self-sacrifice aboard the space shuttle Atlantis (though Atlantis clearly has double meaning here). To make ends meat and pay child support, the divorced father of two works as a limousine driver for a Russian multi-billionaire. Nearly everything that happens to him is predicated on amazing coincidences. Cusack just happens to take his kids camping at Yellowstone National Park at a time when it is becoming geologically unstable. He just happens to set up camp right next to a loony conspiracy theorist radio show host who knows that the government has known for years that the end is near and even has a map revealing the location of the rescue arks that will save only a select few. Cusack just happens to work as the limo driver for a Russian billionaire and that billionaire just happens to have bought his way aboard the ark and just happens have just received the call to evacuate to China and just happens to need Cusack to chauffeur him to the airport. The wife's new husband just happens to be an amateur pilot whose flying skills will save their lives several times over. I could go on. The tag line for 2012 should have been SHIT JUST HAPPENS. Early in the film Cusack asks "What are the odds?" in regards to the crackpot's apocalyptic radio ramblings. In the world of Roland Emmerich's highly contrived imagination, you better bet on those odds. What
are the odds a husband would say to his wife that he felt like something
was trying to split them apart just seconds before a massive earthquake
rips the ground open right between them? What are the odds that the government scientist overseeing the research into the impending cataclysm would meet up with Cusack at Yellowstone and just happens to be reading Cusack's book (and behaves way too excited to meet a C-list author like him)? What are the odds Cusack would again bump into the Russian billionaire stranded at the Las Vegas airport and the guy just happens to have commandeered a Russian 747? What are the odds are that their low on fuel jumbo jet would make it to China because the tectonic shift just happens to have moved mainland China a few thousand miles closer to them? What are the odds the back of the jumbo jet just happens to be transporting sports car that can be driven out the back of the plane for a daring escape as it crash lands after losing its landing gear? What are the odds that Roland Emmerich's favorite word in the English language is happenstance?
"Look, daddy! Another plot hole!" Emmerich also relishes dishing out horrible deaths for decent human beings while letting horrible characters die with nobility. For example, Gordon, the plastic surgeon new husband of Cusack's ex, turns out to be a nice guy who just wants a family. It almost seemed as if they were setting up Cusack to accept that his wife had moved on and married a guy who is actually an alright fellow and makes a good stepfather; that extended family theme would have made a lot of sense dramatically at the end since the survivors are all going to have put aside their differences to rebuild society as one great big happy family. But Emmerich wants Cusack and Amanda Peet back together and that can never be with Gordon there. For committing the grievous sin of being the well-to-do new husband of the lovelorn protagonist's ex-wife, this nice guy, without whose piloting skills they would all have died three times over, gets unceremoniously sucked into giant metal gears and gruesomely crushed to death during the climax. Peet's reaction to the news that her current husband died screaming in agony as he was smooshed into a fine paste is to look distraught for about three seconds and then damn near begin making out with Cusack. The Russian billionaire's mistress turns out to be a nice gal who has just made some poor romantic choices in her life. She'll survive all the way to that ark only to get drowned while trapped in a containment chamber designed to keep the ark from flooding. Never mind that Peet, their son Noah (groan), and the Chinese family trapped in the outer chamber before hers (the one with the hole letting all the water in) does not fill up and leaves them with plenty of room to not drown begging for their life like she does. Emmerich kills her off just for the sake of killing of her. On the other hand, the Russian billionaire turns out to be a major prick willing to leave his mistress and Cusack and family behind to die after they did so much to help get him to China. Emmerich allows him to bravely sacrifice his own life while throwing his snotty brat sons to safety. Sure, the guy didn't intend to fall to his death, but it's quite obvious the way Emmerich staged the scene that his throwing his young son up to safety by his ankles before falling into a chasm was a triumphant moment of the human spirit - by a douchebag. On the plus side, the dog lives. Remember that scene in INDEPENDENCE DAY everyone hates when the dog outruns the fireball and slo-mo jumps to safety? He does it again with Caesar, the tight-rope walking wonder dog. The doggy rescue even ends with a character scooping the pup into their arms and giving the finger to another character. I remain convinced that finger was not directed at a certain other character but to us, all of us who complained about how asinine the dog outrunning the fireball in ID4 was.
When promotional stills from your disaster epic already look like they could have just as easily have come from the set of a Zucker-Abrams spoof of your epic disaster flick... All of the world's problems can be traced back to one thing. No; not the Mayan calendar. I'm talking about the President of the United States being black. No wonder the Glenn Beck's and Tea Partiers and so on are screaming about the end of life as we know it with Obama in the White House; they've all seen DEEP IMPACT, "24", and THE FIFTH ELEMENT; they know electing a black President means life-altering calamity is to follow. With all due respect to Danny Glover, I don't know Morgan Freeman; Morgan Freeman is not a friend of mine; but Danny Glover, you sir are no Morgan Freeman. When cataclysmic catastrophe comes I want Morgan Freeman as my black President. Something about Freeman's voice is just so soothing even when on the precipice of a cataclysmic catastrophe. Almost every line out of Glover's mouth smacks of an exasperated actor not happy with what he has to do in order to collect a paycheck. I do give Glover's President credit for being willing to go down with the ship. Well, technically speaking, the ship went down on him. Good ol' Emmerich; not just enough to hit Washington D.C. with a skyscraper tsunami, there's the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier swept up in it out front serving as a bulldozer. Alas, President Danny Glover's final words were not "I'm too old for this shit." As was the case with THE DAY AFTER TOMMORROW, no mention is ever made of Canada or the plight of its people. What does Emmerich have against Canada? My Canadian readers, you might want to take five minutes to put down that curling broom and the bottle of Molson's to figure out what this loony German disaster-meister has against your nation. Being this is a Roland Emmerich flick, there must be a humanitarian scientist and a heartless government jerk. Enter Chiwetel Ejiofor as Dr. Adrian Helmsley and Oliver Platt as Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser. Ejiofor deserves an Oscar for his performance here. In fact, he deserves every acting award this coming awards season. To give as good a performance as he does considering the utter bullshit that comes out of his mouth... Not just the scientific malarkey either. Those heartfelt speeches about the inherent goodness of humanity and the unwavering endurance of the human spirit, somewhere a ragtag inner city youth football team just lost the big game at the end against the more skilled team from the rich prep school because this guy wasn't there coaching them with one of these sugary pep talks to make them realize anything is possible if they work together. I lost track of the number of impassioned speeches Ejiofor gave, always with a straight face and extra heaving dose of gumption. My favorite being the one where he argues with Anheuser about going public with the news that doomsday is upon us. "Don't these people have a right to fight to save their own lives?" asks Dr. Helmsley? Anheuser's response should have been to just look him dead in the eye and ask, "Fight how? You and I are minutes away from hopping aboard Air Force One and flying to Tibet to get a seat on these space age arks straight out of science fiction movie that took years and billions of dollars to build. What exactly do you expect the average person out there to do? Have FEMA hand out dinghies and hot air balloons?" What appears to have been lost on Emmerich is that while Anheuser's tone often makes him sound like a total prick, if you listen to the content of his statements, a lot of what he says is brutally honest and often quite practical given the extraordinary circumstances. On the other hand, Dr. Helmsley's pretty speeches give off the stink of a well-meaning do-gooder who lets their emotions overshadow their intellect. For example, Helmsley complains how unfair it that the world's wealthiest have been allowed to buy seats aboard the arks; Anheuser informs him that without their billion dollar contributions the arks would never have been built; this is still supposed to make Anheuser appear to be a prick for siding with the upper class over the doomed common man. Helmsley's fervid speech to risk lowering the bridge and opening the door to let in the remaining passengers locked out on the docking bay - most of whom are presumably the same billionaires he bitched about being able to buy their way on board earlier - with only a few minutes before the first mega tidal wave hits their location despite Anheuser's perfectly reasonable (and given events to come, nearly prophetic) argument that doing so could potentially jeopardize the lives of all on-board; perhaps I'm a bit of an Anheuser myself, but FIVE BILLION PEOPLE ARE ALREADY DEAD~!, maybe less than half a million of the world's population will survive, at this point denying rescue to those remaining few at the risk of everyone else on the ark strikes me as a hard decision, not a deliberate act of cruelty as Helmsley proclaims it. About four or five different occasions Dr. Helmsley will have to completely recalculate his timeline because his calculations are way off. Anheuser pointing this out to him during this crucial moment when Helmsley is trying to convince the other world leader's his judgment is sounder; again, Anheuser is made out to be the bad guy. You know who is always right, though? The crackpot conspiracy theorist. As I wrote in another recent review that featured as paranoid conspiracy theorist as the guy right on the money: "Always remember that in Hollywood movies the fringe elements turn out to be the truthsayers. If what's been going on in our country lately were the subject of a motion picture the ending would reveal that President Obama really is an Islamic jihadist from Kenya secretly plotting to destroy democracy in America before revealing himself to be the Antichrist and Glenn Beck would be the right-all-along dashing leading man that exposes the truth and saves the world from unholy tyranny with the assistance of love interest Julia Roberts." Woody Harrelson's conspiracy radio show host isn't even of the Art Bell or Alex Jones variety; he physically looks and acts like the crazy homeless guy that believes the CIA is sending him messages through his dental fillings. But he's dead on accurate about the world coming to an end and the government having known about it for years. So crazy is Harrelson he will choose to die a volcanic death rather than live in a post-apocalyptic world without pot.
Woody Harrelson reacts to news that soon marijuana plants will cease to exist. THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW had a 72-hour ice age. 2012 gives us 30 days of Armageddon. Couldn't help thinking that this issue with the earth's core overheating and causing tectonic destabilization should still be an on-going problem but then I remembered this is scientific theory in a Roland Emmerich film; best to just keep telling yourself that at least this time nobody outran the temperature. The temperature, by the way, was about the only thing that did not get outrun at some point. Thank goodness they only remained at sea locked up in these arks for 27 days because could you imagine the funk emanating from the toiletries aboard a vessel of 400,000 after just a few hours? The arks survive and they move to Africa, the only body of land from which the flood waters have begun to secede. Actual dialogue: "That's why they call it the Cape of Good Hope." So for all you right wingers screaming about Obama's birth certificate and how he isn't a real American, three years from now we're all going to be Kenyans. Suck on that, birthers! Only one thing matters at the end of the day. Forget about whether John Cusack can reunite with Amanda Peet and make his family whole once more. Forget about whether or not Dr. Helmsley will actually make an accurate calculation and still find time to hook up with President's daughter Thandie Newton. Forget about the billions that perished. Forget about the end of life as we know it. Forget about the people on the arks preparing to rebuild civilization. All that matters is this: The waters were not high enough to submerge the highest peak of Mount Everest. The top portion of Mount Everest did not go underwater. Do you realize what that means? THE YETI LIVES! THE YETI LIVES! THE UNDROWNABLE SNOWMAN LIVES!
Ladies and gentlemen, The Asylum proudly presents the highest rated Syfy original movie in years. I kid you not. MEGAFAULT is everything you could ever want and expect from the first ever movie by The Asylum produced specifically for Syfy. With one exception: it's never boring. Credit where it's due - boredom is usually the Achilles heel of Asylum cinema, but not this time. MEGAFAULT is a fairly amusing piece of low rent disaster kitsch that keeps moving in a valiant effort to keep you from having too much time to think how detached from reality it is. Doesn't quite work out that way, though, not when a movie is as stupefying as this one. Let me assure you MEGAFAULT has many mega-sized faults and I'm not just speaking of those brought to life via computer effects. MEGAFAULT is so darn mega stupid it is practically begging for a guy and two robot puppets to be sitting at the bottom of the screen in silhouette ribbing it mercilessly. Like 2012, MEGAFAULT is more like a disaster flick reworked into a chase flick. Tectonic plates are shifting causing massive earthquakes that are brought to life as massive fissures unzipping at a break-neck speed as if they were ground swells generated by a gargantuan TREMORS worm on crank. These faultlines appear to be alive and functioning intelligently enough to give chase after speeding vehicles - even around curves!
THE FAST & THE FAULTLINE is what they should have called this flick. A mega earthquake threatens to rip the United States in half. A brilliant seismologist travels to the quake's epicenter in West Virginia where she finds the one black man in the entire state buried beneath the earth. They become immediate tag team partners after she digs him out. The faultline takes a breather every now and then before zipping along again to destroy random cities in its path that you don't normally see get destroyed in disaster flicks, like Lexington, Kentucky and Vail, Colorado. Why not Yazoo City, Mississippi and Monkey's Eyebrow, Arizona while you're at it? The plane the seismologist's husband and young daughter were in crash lands and that means we get the extra added excitement of watching the two of them constantly finding their way in to danger. This also means the seismologist has to help save us all from a tectonic apocalypse and also rescue her family before the snaking fissure reaches them, and doing so she'll need the help of the sad black man that keeps moping about his dead momma. Brittany Murphy has been cast as that brilliant seismologist. Shark jumped. Brittany Murphy clearly graduated with a degree in seismology from the same university that gave Tara Reid her anthropology degree in ALONE IN THE DARK and Denise Richards her nuclear physics doctorate in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH. When she's introduced at a Washington D.C. function by her mentor and FEMA head Dr. Rhodes (Bruce Davison, who clearly got the role after being spotted on the side of the road with a sign reading WILL STARE INTENTLY FOR FOOD), this allegedly brilliant seismologist fumbles with her index cards to give a speech about earthquake preparedness that sounded more appropriate for someone speaking to a group of school children. I'd come to realize as the movie progressed that this is how she'll always sound when she's talking, which, in retrospect, makes me realize that perhaps the casting of Murphy was pretty spot on after all. Even God could not believe how insipid her speech was so he decided to put an end to it with a massive earthquake. An unprecedented earthquake just stretched a 50-mile radius from West Virginia to Washington D.C., the Washington Monument has been destroyed and pillars of smoke can be seen coming from every direction, and all Dr. Lane's husband can do is whine because she's putting work before him and their daughter. Eriq La Salle is "Boomer", an ex-military mining demolitions expert with a bad habit of getting swallowed up by the collapsing ground. La Salle is a good actor - not here though. I'm fairly certain his slo-mo horrified reaction to watching his mother's house explode in a ball of fire should have elicited the chuckles it did.
MOMMA!!! La Salle appears bewildered in many a scene, as if he abruptly broke character time after time wondering to himself how he went from being a top star on a highly rated, critically acclaimed, award winning TV series like "ER" to being saddled with the second fiddle role behind Brittany Murphy in an idiotic Syfy movie about silly-looking computerized faultlines that chase people while fandom structures collapse or go boom. Great moment shortly after Murphy digs La Salle out of the ground. The quake roars back to life sending them sprinting for the helicopter. She is maybe seven feet behind him, nearly arms length at moments, and yet the director had La Salle turn his head and wave his arms more than once to yell "Come on!" at her as if she was lagging way behind and slowing their escape. If a major city is about to get hit by a powerful earthquake two minutes, do you really think there's enough time to contact the local authorities so they can organize and prepare a response? Dr. Lane apparently thinks so. The quake takes out radio towers leaving every plane in the Midwest flying blind, such as the small plane that strikes the much larger military transport plane with Dr. Lane's wife and kid. Authorities have confirmed the transport plane crash landed and confirmed casualties on the site but could not tell Dr. Lane if her husband or daughter were among the dead. Then we immediately cut to the husband and the daughter finding each other alone in the field next to the smoldering wreckage and with no one else anywhere to be seen. Boomer will earn his nickname by blowing up a port-a-potty as a distraction allowing himself and Dr. Lane to steal a helicopter to go find her family. The husband also tries to earn the nickname when he and their daughter hitch a ride with a truck driver whose gas truck will catch fire as pipelines on the side of the road get blown up by the faultline chasing them down the abandoned roadway. The husband pleads for the driver to stop so they can all get out before the tank finally explodes but the driver refuses telling them if he stops the truck they'll explode. Whaaaaa? I once watched a tsunami movie starring Corbin Bernsen where a bad guy used a weapon that generates tidal waves to launch one at the California coastline; Bernsen saves the day by using the weapon to generate a tidal wave from the opposite direction to cancel the other wave out; the two monster waves crash into each other horizontally right offshore of San Francisco. After that, I no longer feel compelled to question nonsensical science in disaster flicks. I've seen nuclear missiles used as welding torches to heal volcanic craters. I've watched nuclear missiles blast asteroids entering Earth's atmosphere back into orbit. I've seen satanic tornados thwarted by an enchanted gypsy talisman. At this point you can still make me shake my head in disbelief but you will not make me lose my mind trying to comprehend illogical disaster movie science. Speaking of science run amok, when is someone going to convince these Hollywood actresses just how unattractive massive collagen lip injections look?
Remember a time when Brittany Murpy didn't look like a New Yorker magazine caricature of Michelle Pfeiffer? The compromise is for the husband to climb out of the speeding truck and unhitch the gas rig from the back loooooooooong after it should have exploded in a cataclysmic fireball. Only after having done so does the flaming gas tank finally explode into a cataclysmic fireball. Did I mention I once saw a movie where Earth was saved from being incinerated by a solar flare by nuking the North Pole? The military has a surefire plan to stop Speedy McFaultine and in a shocking twist it does not involve nuclear weapons. Who needs nukes when you have a top secret satellite weapon which fires an invisible beam that can generate powerful earthquakes? But I thought Grazer-One was destroyed at the end of UNDER SIEGE 2? They must have rebuilt it and this time Steven Seagal is not around to teach them the error of their ways. The idea here is to cancel out the megafault by generating another earthquake to... Why am I even bothering? Should have had Corbin Bernsen do a walk-on to push the fire button. A General explains how this satellite that fires an invisible beam from space that can trigger earthquakes in enemy territory by freezing ground water. "Enemies won't even realize they've been attacked," explains the General. He's right too, assuming the enemy is blind and doesn't notice that giant beam of not invisible energy emanating from the sky. Needless to say this plan does not work. Now monster avalanches wipe out entire towns and the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park threatens to erupt. The original threat was the destruction of America. Now a global extinction event is at hand. At least this buffoonery brings about a hilarious sequence in which the citizens of a small town near Yellowstone walk down Main Street as the rubber soles of their shoes melt into the superheated ground; all are seemingly oblivious to the rising temperature until their skulls erupt into flame like Nic Cage transforming into Ghost Rider. Since science has already gone up in flames, human intelligence gets defenestrated for the finale as Dr. Lane and Boomer devise an ingenious strategy to head off the megafault - create a new Grand Canyon! Doing so requires them to race through a dirt pit setting off explosive charges, none of which look powerful enough to accomplish what is supposed to be happening, while the faultline after them keeps catching up and slowing down. This finale takes place in what is supposed to be a Wyoming dirt pit that looks suspiciously like the West Virginia dirt pit from the beginning of the film. It also looks like the same shots of a jeep racing past explosions filmed from different angles and then looped. The conclusion has Dr. Ducklips screaming her head off for her husband and daughter for what felt like an eternity until they magically appear from thin air in an open field for an emotional reunion. Where were they hiding the whole time and why didn't they answer her as she had a nervous breakdown screaming their names for two minutes? Before you get a chance to ask such questions Bruce Davison tells them they need to look at something that isn't there and could not possibly be seen until the camera blasts into orbit to give us a space shot of a gaping chasm in the middle of what was once the United States, a gargantuan canyon that looks to have swallowed up much of middle-America stretching into the Northeast. I'm going to miss those states.
On the plus side, Robbie Knievel now has something really cool to jump. Time to get dad's Sky-Cycle out of mothballs! MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW |
|
This website and all graphics Copyright
© 2001-2009 |
