September 7, 2016

Mindless Action: Gone Wrong

Mindless action isn't necessarily devoid of plot or proper character motivation, because when you leave too many elements of a movie neglected, seriously bad things can happen...




A Good Day to Die Hard: You shouldn't be shocked to learn the fifth installment in the Die Hard series is the worst, but we never recommended anyone watch this movie. Even when people say "oh we'll watch it anyway, just to see how bad it is" we say: don't bother. The worst parts of this film are the back and fourth between McClane and his son, and 50% of that is them relentlessly yelling each other's names. (Actually, the worst parts of this movie might be the needless, unaddressed, and seemingly endless slaughter of innocent civilians, but it's hard to focus on those parts with all the "JOHN!" and "JACK!"ing.)





The Glove: Look at that poster, read that tagline! What could possibly be bad about this movie? Oh only that it's one of the most BORING movies we've ever watched in mixed company. Our buddy picked this out of a stack a few years ago and he's still not lived it down entirely. The titular glove shows up like it was shot long after the main film, it never really fits into the larger story and takes up almost no screen time! Also the main detective (played by John Saxon) is a lousy drunk who's terrible at his job and refuses to pay his child support. A better tagline for this movie would be "an asshole detective tries to solve a humdrum crime while we wait for an amazing robo-glove to save the day that almost doesn't show up". 





Chappie: Oh how we wanted to like Chappie, but not only were the character motivations questionable throughout, this film location hopped more than The Stuff and for arguably flimsier reasons. One moment the hero is at Die Antwoord's hideout, the next he's run back to his office only to run right back to the hideout. It's a mess. And we were extra disappointed because this was a forgettable mess, rather than a fun mess.





Mitchell: I can't imagine watching this movie without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew relentlessly mocking it. We've never tried, but thinking about it makes me uncomfortable. There's the world's longest, slowest and least action-packed car chase ever committed to film, the most skin crawling "sex" scenes, and it took me far too many viewings to actually understand the plot of the thing. And don't even get me started on the hero's theme song! But, as unbearable as it might be on it's own, it will always be one of our top five MST3Ks.





Prototype X29A: This movie was on our to-watch pile for months before someone finally picked it. Everyone was convinced the phrase "psychosexual dreams" on the box was going to make it a winner for better or worse. But when we actually tried to watch it, it was a SNOOZE fest. One of our friends fell asleep early on only to wake up at the end demanding to know why everything was blowing up, sadly we had no answers for her and we were paying attention!



Bonus movie:


Doctor Justice: To be fair, we did not finish this movie. Maybe someday we'll give it another shot, I mean look at that cover art, action happens at some point! But the 45 mins we made it through was another snooze fest. Seriously though, John Phillip Law, Paul Naschy, and Gert Frobe? How on earth did it end up so dull?!



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