Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Public Enemies - A Lesson In Fail

I am not one to do movie reviews.  I am not a movie connoisseur.  But I am so moved by this movie that I need to tell you right now, after having gone to the midnight premiere.

Moved in a way that makes me want to vomit.  This is, hands down, the worst movie I've seen in the past two years.  I wished it was over after the first half hour.  The sheer amount of hatred I have for this movie could fill Santa's sleigh for several Christmases.  And maybe critics will call it "art."  But let me tell you:

If you thought Transformers lacked a plot, this movie made Transformers look like The Dark Knight.  It has no plot.  I'm not exaggerating.  I can't even summarize this movie because I don't know what the fuck happened in it.  Novel-writing 101 should tell you 7 minutes into the movie, you need an inciting incident.  There is no inciting incident.  I don't care about the characters because there is no characterization and no link with the audience.  I couldn't decide who I wanted to die more (and rest assured, I wanted everyone to die).  I tried so hard to like somebody, anybody, but I couldn't give a damn about a single person.  By the end, my friends and I were rooting for Bale to blow a hole through Depp's head so we could leave the theater.

By the end, I wanted to blow a hole in my own head.

Mostly, this makes me horribly sad, because I never thought I would see the day when Johnny Depp and Christian Bale would make a bad movie apart, let alone together.  This isn't only a bad movie.  This is Meet-The-Spartans-bad.  This movie has no redeeming qualities.  These are A-list actors!  How could they watch this movie and let it out into the world?  Now, I have an intense need to watch Sweeney Todd, Pirates, and The Dark Knight to remind me that these two actors are actually good.  I can't believe this thing got halfway decent reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  I have officially lost all faith in critics.  I don't care how artistic you think this movie is (and if it's art, than my novel must be Shakespeare-caliber work), it has no entertainment value.  I'm not being biased at all when I say if this movie got 57% fresh, Transformers deserves 95% at least for having cool special effects and causing audiences to want the Autobots to win.  The cardinal rule of novels, movies, whatever: I need to care about the characters.  They had no motives for doing anything.  They had as much motive as I would have if I randomly decided to punch myself in the face right now.  Well, actually, I would have a motive, because then maybe I could get amnesia and forget about how my two favorite actors failed so epicly.

And I wish I was blowing this out of proportion, I really do.  Unfortunately, I'm not.  I'm not even mad I wasted six bucks.  I got a lot of laughs out of it, so I'm going to pretend it was a comedy and call it a day.  I'm mad Johnny Depp and Christian Bale took on this project in the first place.  Did they fail to read the script?  Did they not realize the director was Michael Bay, minus cool CGI, plus living in his mother's basement with a five dollar camera and two dollar lighting system? Did they think, "Gee, I really want to screw up my career in the biggest way possible.  Whatever shall I do?"

TELL ME.  Because I am in total disbelief.  I feel a lot better about my novel now, because I'm firmly convinced I could write better dialogue on the toilet.  While smoking weed.  I guess that's a plus.

2 comments:

  1. Ouch! That sounds horrible. I was thinking of seeing that movie...I am thinking again. I mean usually something with Johnny Depp (LOVE him in Finding Neverland) and Christian Bale (did you see the version of Little Women that has him in it? He's so adorable!) would be good...what is Hollywood coming to? Seriously, these days...I prefer British films.

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  2. Wow. That sounds... pretty horrible, actually.
    Except why is it that whenever someone tells me that this book/movie/song is the worst thing they've read/seen/heard in their life, I immediately want to go and see it for myself?

    As far as this movie goes, I'm going to have to wait for it to come out on DVD, though, because even though I want to see it, I'm certainly not going to spend *money* on it...

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