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Fifteen years ago Bill and Ted took a seriously silly journey to the underworld, and this one is seriously freakishly disturbing. Imagine if Bosch and Dante were 21st-century geeks and they collaborated on a graphic novel (and maybe that’s a good description of Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis’s book *Hellblazer,* upon which this is based, but I don’t know cuz I’ve never seen it).
Are they puppets? Are they some sort of clay-animated figures? Or are they some kind of beasts hitherto unknown and the likes of which the world has not seen again since? It doesn’t matter. The creatures Rankin & Bass brought to life in their animated holiday specials are so much a part of my psyche that I no more think about their nature than I pause to consider what constitutes the air I breathe.
That teaser trailer — you know the one I’m talking about — with the fat old ex-superhero struggling to get into his spandex costume? It left such a bad taste in my mouth whenever I contemplated the film that must go with it. I imagined a gang of former masked crusaders called out of happy retirement, reluctantly huffing and puffing their way back into action, replete with very unfunny cracks about getting fat and old, and probably with an even more unfunny getting-into-shape-a-la-*Rocky* sequence thrown in for good measure.
The story of Australian cult figure Kelly — a 19th-century Robin Hood–esque outlaw, child of an underclass of Irish immigrants — is a tricky film, punctuated by bursts of staccato surrealism and bitter humor, hard to love unreservedly but easy to appreciate for its ambition. Heath Ledger (The Order) finds a wary, cautious groove as … more…
This live-action 1960s Disney furball adventure flick is lot less charming than it surely was back in the Kennedy era. Poor Lobo! He’s not bad, he’s just misunderstood, even by his own film.
Compulsively compelling, in the same way that you just can’t help but glance through the Weekly World News while you’re standing online at the supermarket checkout.
A thoroughly absurd homeless-men-as-prey-for-gun-happy-rich-schmucks action flick. Lacks all suspense and mystery, though it thinks it has some sort of social conscience. It does not.
The words I keep coming back to, the ones that seem to fit this most astonishing of films best, are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful.’ The old-fashioned senses of the words are what I’m talking about: Peter Jackson has given us a grandly eloquent film that inspires more terror and more awe than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I can compare my reaction to it only with the moviegoing experiences of my childhood, when the hugeness, the all-encompassing-ness of movies in all ways — emotionally, viscerally, visually, aurally — first astounded me, when ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ and Darth Vader’s stormtroopers horrified me to such a degree that I can still feel it.
This isn’t what I was expecting. I figured on clanging swords and thundering cannons and lots of swashbuckling, but this buckles far less swash than I imagined it would. I was expecting pulpy action adventure that was a whole lot of movie fun — I wasn’t expecting pulpy action adventure with real smarts and genuine heart and a grounding in reality.
Forget that this is based on a ride at Disney World, and a pretty sorry one, at that — know that it’s a wonderfully exhausting, refreshingly unironic, delightfully old-fashioned swashbuckler.
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