Review – Sherlock Holmes A Game of Shadows

Last week I went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Overall the film was a disappointment. While there were times I laughed at the comedic elements of the film I later realized that this wasn't Sherlock Holmes.

While Robert Downey, Jr. has an interesting interpretation of the world's greatest detective the film too often fell into a campy feel. I can live with the camp.

The first real problem was the violence. The number of people killed by Holmes & Watson was staggering. At one point Watson is firing what looks similar to a BAR at German guards at a weapons plant. I lost track of how many people he slaughtered with a weapon that wouldn't be developed until the tail end of the First World War (about a quarter century after when this film takes place).

Inside the factory where that battle took place were enough artillery shells to last part of a weekend during the Great War. Some of these shells appear to have been capable of deploying chemical weapons..... another thing developed after the War was in full swing many years later.

In any case gun play was uncommon in Holmes canon. It seems to be the first course of action in this adventure. The explosions and shooting were very out of place.

There also seemed to be no real mystery involved in the story. Holmes knows that Moriarty is up to no good at the start. Most of the film is just to drive Holmes into confrontation with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Basically a bad retelling of “The Adventure of the Final Problem.”

On the plus side I did enjoy the musical score. So many movies these days have forgettable music, it's nice to have a movie with something more memorable. Earlier this year I saw the new Conan and was disappointed at the crappy music, nothing like the awesome score by Basil Poledouris. Musical scores these days leave much to be desired especially compared to what we had in movies twenty to thirty years ago.

So to summarize; if you liked the first film in this series you should at least enjoy this one. If you didn't like the first film you'll probably dislike this one even more. Overall I give it a 4 out of 10.

Pros:
*Nice music
*Good action flick if you forget it's a Sherlock Holmes film

Cons:
*Too much bloodshed by Holmes & Watson
*No mystery involved
*Moriarty's moronic plot
*A little too silly at times

More Movie Reviews

Over the years I have written some other movie reviews on another blog. Below is a list of some of them with links to the original reviews. Most of these are war films.

The Blue Max: The story of a German aviator during World War I and the class struggles in Germany at that time. One of my favorite air combat films set during the Great War.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A German boy befriends a Jewish boy who is in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Several parts of the story don’t make real sense, but it is a power film all the same.

Breaker Morant: Set during the Second Boer War. Tells the story of Australian soldiers on trial for murder.
“War changes men’s natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men, the tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations….Soldiers at war are not to be judged by civilian rules… even though they commit acts which calmly viewed afterwards could only be seen as unchristian and brutal….. We cannot hope to judge such men unless we ourselves have been submitted to the same pressures, the same provocations as these men whose actions are on trial.”

The Dawn Patrol: World War I air war movie. Errol Flynn & David Niven star.

Hell’s Angels: Another World War I air combat movie. Some very innovative stuff in it considering it was made in 1930. This one was made by Howard Hughes.

Joyex Noel: A mediocre telling of the story of the Christmas Truce during World War I. Not a terrible film, but it doesn’t live up to the potential of the real event.

Review - Green Hornet

Despite my better judgment I went to see Green Hornet today. It sure was a let down even when not expecting much. At best this film was lame, at worst it insults rather than honors the character and its creators.

There were no good performances from any of the actors. Seth Rogen (the Green Hornet) was annoying, David Harbour (D.A. Frank Scanlon) was one dimensional, and Chrisoph Waltz could not even manage to play an entertaining villain.

The Green Hornet and Kato have little reason to begin crime-fighting other than for kicks. As they stumble around trying to climb the ladder of the underworld they have no goal other than making a name for themselves. They have no idea of what they are doing or the death and destruction they will cause. There is nothing heroic about these heroes.

The original concept of a hero that pretends to be a villain to help bring down the underworld and other forces of evil is great. A great idea to help keep the villains from using innocent people as tools to use against heroes…. If the bad guy thinks you don’t care about the innocent he won’t go out of his way to threaten them.

Bad jokes, poor acting, Seth Rogan’s annoying voice, and a lame story all make this a terrible movie. In an age where comic book hero movies are becoming more and more mainstream it would have been nice for the Green Hornet to get a fair shake in terms of taking the character seriously. If Batman were treated as poorly as the Green Hornet was in this film there would have been an uprising of the fans (okay, there was Batman & Robin…. But that did cause trouble and forced a much needed reboot for the Batman film franchise).

I’ve listened to a number of the old Green Hornet radio shows. Any one of them was better than this movie.

Anyway, don’t see this one.

(as an added note I do plan on checking out The Green Hornet Chronicles, edited by Win Scott Eckert. I’m certain it will meet my expectations better than the movie)

Review - Futureworld

***WARNING – SPOILERS FOR A THIRTY-FOUR YEAR OLD MOVIE***

Westworld (1973) was an awesome movie.  It had all sorts of cool stuff including a fancy resort where people could live out their fantasies, androids, gunfights, Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin…  well Richard Benjamin in a serious role.

Hey, you've got Futureworld in your eye

 

Three years later the sequel was released, Futureworld!  The Delos resort has opened two years after the disaster at Westworld.  Over 50 guests were killed and 95 staff were inured or killed during that mishap.  Now, in the far future year of 2002, they claim to have worked out the problem and are again open for business.  The Westworld area has been shut down and the new Futureworld has been added as an option for the guests.

A couple of reporters are sent to do preliminary work on a news story about Delos.  They have names, but that isn’t really an important part of the story.  Now a protagonist should basically be a character or characters in the story that the audience is supposed to care about and identify with on some level.  Then when they face the obstacles and challenges of the story we actually give a rat’s buttocks what happens to them.  Our protagonists for Futureworld are lame and annoying.  I was hoping to see Yul blow one of them away at some point.

The Protagonists

 Anyway, these two characters go to Delos for their story.  The male lead, we’ll call him Todd for the sake of argument, had an earlier encounter with a man who supposedly came from Delos and had important information for him.  This man, not Todd, is assassinated and all Todd finds on his body are news clips of various important world leaders who have made recent trips to Delos.  Instead of letting the police handle things I guess Larry decided to just steal the evidence from a murder scene and try to create a great story about it.  Needless to say Todd looses all of his objectivity and is out to ‘get’ Delos…  sorta like a real reporter in 2002.

During the whole trip and arrival at Delos we are continually told how safe everything is and how nothing could possibly go wrong.  After the eighth or ninth time I hear the reassurances I was certain we’d have a repeat of the Westworld disaster.  They weren’t going to use the same story again were they?

Anyway our two protagonists go to Futureworld instead of Medievalworld or Romanworld, it’s the fancy new addition to the resort and it also happens to be the name of the movie.  After a simulated rocket ride they arrive on the ‘spaces station.’  There are cool things to do in Futureworld, including skiing on Mars (where the snow is red and the gravity is one-third of Earth’s), spacewalking around the space station, and other activities.  However there are really two activities that people go to Delos for, I’ll go into those in detail down below.

The Future looks a lot like the '70s

Our Todd and the female reporter don’t get to do much fun stuff before they are pulled away into the bowels of Delos to see how things actually operate.  It is revealed the reason nothing can go wrong this time is that nearly all the staff are now androids so that human errors can’t cause another disaster.  That can’t be good.

We next get a strange scene where a demonstration is made of some sort of dream recorder.  Our female protagonist is strapped in and falls asleep and her dream is shown on a video monitor for all to see.  It involves some strange bad guys harassing her and then she is rescued by The Gunslinger.  After he saves her they begin a strange dance and end up in bed together making out.  It is the most absurd scene in the movie and does not seem to make too much sense since before leaving on the trip she watched the video footage of The Gunslinger going around Westworld murdering people.  Strange what turns some people on.

This scene made me cry because it was so stupid

The real purpose of that scene was to get Yul Brynner’s name on it and make people think something awesome was going to happen.  I guess I can’t blame him for doing it, he may have needed some extra cash and got a chance to make-out with Blythe Danner.  It’s just a shame that was the last performance he made on screen before his death.

The movie continues with our heroes…. I mean the main characters of the movie… stumbling around in some restricted areas of Delos.  They meet an engineer and his out-of-date android, ‘Clark.’  With his help they uncover the real plot of the movie.  Delos is replacing world leaders and generals and such with organic androids which are indistinguishable form the originals and totally loyal to Delos.  Yikes, world conquest from an android brothel!

Clark, the real hero of this movie, and all he did was cheat at cards

As the protagonists attempt to escape (and that engineer guy that helped them gets killed) but are confronted by organic androids of themselves that were going to replace them and write good stories about Delos.  The androids happened to decide to wear the same clothes as the originals so we have no idea who won the life and death struggles until the last minutes of the film.

As might be guessed from a simplistic film from the ‘70s the originals defeated their android duplicates and pretended to be the androids in order to escape Delos.  And as they escape Todd turns to the director of Delos and appears to give him the finger.  In actuality I believe he was giving the audience the finger because we had to sit through all that… the exploitation of Yul, the under-utilization of Clark, and the rather lame story.

Oh well.  At least Westworld is still awesome.

SEX & VIOLENCE

The actual purpose of Delos is for the guests to fulfill their dreams of sex and violence.  The androids do whatever the guests want including being their sex slaves.  Many of the androids are also designed to be murdered.  Charming.

Additionally, back in the movie Westworld, they explained how the resort’s weapons worked.  They had heat sensors that would be able to tell the difference between a living being (it would be warm) and an android (it would be room temperature).  The weapons would work only against the poor room temperature bastard and the guests would be fine.  So the androids are room temperature… that’s kinda creepy considering the other use for androids is sex.  Delos is a necrophliac’s dream come true.  Now they just have to add on Whitechapelworld so the guests can try their hand at stalking and killing prostitutes.

FINAL GRADE

I’d have to give this film a four out of thirteen.  There was a good idea buried in there somewhere, so that’s worth a couple of points.  There was a cool cover of the Famous Monsters of Filmland that featured Clark the andoid, so that’s worth another point or two.  I’m rounding up to four since I’m a generous and awesome person.

This rating makes it worth watching for background noise as you do something else.  It is suggested you watch Westworld first to get the whole backstory.

If you’ve seen Futureworld please let me know what you think.

Piranha 3D!

About a week ago I went and saw Piranha 3D. It was a very entertaining flick. As a kid I loved horror and sci-fi moves. Saturday afternoons and nights were filled with all sorts of great movies. Commander USA was my favorite hero in those days.

Earlier this year I made the mistake of seeing Clash of the Titans in 3D. Not only was the film mediocre but the 3D effects looked like an after thought. Piranha 3D was made for 3D and looked to be a great use of the technology.

As I said the Piranha 3D was very good, bordering on awesome. There are a few things I might have done a bit differently but it is just a creature feature I don't need Oscar winning acting and a preachy storyline. This film delivered. I'd give it an 8 or 9 out of ten.

Not everyone finds this movie appealing. The gore and sexual content is certainly not appealing to everyone, but that's why they make other movies. However there is one critic of the film that requires special mention; James Cameron.

Cameron worked briefly back in the day on Piranha 2: The Spawning. He got screwed over and I can agree with him that his name should not be on that film. Its just he seems to think he owns 3D now because of Avatar.

In an interview for Vanity Fair, or some magazine like that, he said of Piranha 3D he said: "...that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D."

Cheapens the medium? Reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films of the 70s & 80s? Sorry to break it to him but Avatar's lame storyline also cheapens the medium. A story about a white guy going native and being the only who can save some noble but primitive people... sorry Jimmy that story used to be told in the old days, but it is pretty dated and borderline racist.

3D is made for science fiction and horror and action movies no matter how good or bad their stories are. It boils down to special effects just like Avatar did. I'm pretty sure there will be no huge demand for a Steel Magnolias 3D or Driving Miss Daisy 3D, that's because 3D wouldn't add anything of value to those films.

Finally, 3D is still overrated. While it was interesting to see, I could easily do without 3D effects in film. I certainly would never buy one of those new 3D televisions that are being developed.

Anyway, if you like creature feature type horror films go see Piranha 3D, you might like it. If you don't it's not my fault.