Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Movies that Disappointed Immensely…

Before getting to the good stuff that the movie industry produced by mistake I am forced to wade through two other titles, which can carry the shiny “I failed” bandana with a head held high, but I won’t be as hilarious about my next choice since I had a faith that these will offer a pleasant movie experience.

The biggest disappointment so far is “Transporter 3”, which is nothing but logical seeing it is a fabled sequel, but it seemed that with the second movie things were actually escalating rather than flopping. The movie formula was simple: little dialogue, impossible car chase physics, grumpy Jason Statham and enough shirtless time to please the audience. When a movie designed to entertain fails, it’s pathetic and sad, because we have witness cinema selling its main purpose to cheap CGI entertainment and now it can’t even do that. But let’s focus on the movie: Frank is supposed to transport a captive daughter of an Ukrainian eco minister to Odesa, while at the same time both passengers can die if they get out of the car due to explosive bracelets on their hands. It sounds fun to me, but when the daughter is played by an incompetent actress, who speaks English as a second language at an elementary level; the dialogue is focused on clichéd hidden threats, food and never exceeds a sentence of 7 words and there are exactly 5 real action scenes in an hour and 44 minutes, you get the picture.




If you have read “Inkheart” and fell in love with this hefty children’s volume that exceeds 500 pages, then the movie will make you weep. It can easily become the worst book adaptation of the century. To produce an acceptable 1 hour and 46 min movie, Hollywood stripped the book out of its magic, out of what captured me as a reader, out of its imagination and turned into a shiny plaster wrap. I know that when it comes to adaptations a certain ‘poetic freedom’ to condense a story has to be at work, but since when does that include rewriting a whole story. I am pretty sure that around the middle I asked myself, whether I had read the book correctly or whether something has run terribly wrong. For me it would have worked better, if the talent of the cast was used in a mini-series, which would stick closely to the book as possible and in 5 one hour long episodes deliver the story like it should have been. Looking at it like it is now I can only see waste of talented names such as Brendan Fraser, Helen Mirren and Paul Bettany, who try to get into characters that are 1/3 of what they were in the book and thus giving very bland performances. Something which isn’t their fault.


Here would be appropriate to suggest to Hollywood to hire authors with experience in fiction to work with the scriptwriters and give something else than an adaptation, remake or sequel.

3 comments:

Todd Newton said...

Gross. Speaking of Jason Statham, I watched most of In the Name of the King last night. In spite of its "impressive" cast (lots of big names), I couldn't even make it to the end. I think I am going to "review" it myself as an example of why Fantasy movies hardly ever get made.

Harry Markov said...

I actually enjoyed that one, but I didn't really get the gist of the idea, but there are times, when you need mindless entertainment despite of quality. It might have been the moment or my inflatuation with Jason.

Todd Newton said...

Bah, if I want to watch Jason *actually* act in a role, I will watch The Italian Job over again where he's only 5% of the main cast. That's just me, though.

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