Sarcastic Movie Reviews

Remember the golden age of Hollywood? Actors knew their place.

You’d never see Vincent Price in a western and you’d never see the “Carry on Gang” in a film noir.

What the hell happened?

It used to be that bad comedies were the bread and butter of a Paulie Shore, or a Rob Schneider. You didn’t go to see “Bio Dome” for entertainment. You went because the theatre was air conditioned and your apartment was 120 degrees inside, or because the police were closing in on your location and you needed a dark place to hide.

Sometime in the past few years all sorts of respected actors decided that their BMW was looking ratty and that their guitar shaped swimming pool needed a tuning.

Cuba Gooding Jr., appeared in “Boat Trip”, Robert De Niro appeared in “Meet The Fockers” and Gwyneth Paltrow appeared in “View From the Top.”

How much does it cost to polish your Oscar anyway?

Are these people on crack? Did they actually read these scripts before agreeing to do these turds?

You can now add Robin Williams to the list.

Now I admit, that I’m not a huge fan of Robin’s, but he has done some decent flicks.

“Mrs. Doubtfire” made me chuckle, “Good Will Hunting” was pretty good, and I even liked “Jumanji” but I’m pretty sure that I was drinking heavily at the time.

Even his bad films were uniquely horrible.

“Popeye” took huge clanking balls to star in. You have to respect a man who can appear in a movie THAT bad and still manage to get a decent table in a restaurant that doesn’t have a clown as a mascot.

This guy is bullet proof.

So why the hell is he starring in this?! He’s just taking acting gigs away from that guy who played Screech on “Saved By the Bell.”

The plot boils down like this:

Workaholic dad has grown estranged from his obnoxious teens. His asshole boss makes unreasonable demands, that causes him to cancel his family’s vacation at the last minute. Rather than admit to his wife that he has to put his work above his kids, he comes up with a brilliant idea to keep the work assignment secret and fools the family into driving across the country in an R.V. so that they can spend time together (while he gets to a city on the west coast in time to make big sales pitch).

Ahhhh the road trip.

Yes I know that this seems like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” but it’s totally different.

For one thing, it’s not at all funny.

Do you know what happens when you attempt to drive an expensive and complex vehicle that is a rental over great distances?

If you said “exponential damage to the interior and exterior” then give yourself a cookie.

Here’s the bonus question for a spicy burrito and diet Coke:

“What kind of people will this uptight family meet in a trailer park?”

If you said “Randy Quaid’s annoying Hillbillie family” from the movie “Vacation” then you get a half point.

Let’s not stop the parade of plagiarism here kids.

What kind of wilderness road trip would be complete without an attack of nature’s comedic critter… the raccoon?!!

While it’s true that bears are funny and skunks are stinky, there’s just nothing quite as mischievous as the little outlaws with rabies.

Why, I haven’t laughed so hard since Harold and Kumar battled one on their way to White Castle.

*sigh*

Does this sad trend in movies mean that in 20 years I can expect to see respected actors like “Ed Norton” or “Liam Neeson” remaking “Car Wash” or “Xanadu”?

That’s not to say it’s all bad though.

If you have to take your 8 year old out to a movie and your only other choice is going to yet another animated movie in which the fat guy from “The King of Queens” plays a runaway salted peanut, then all is not lost.

It’s stupid, it’s predictable and it’s boring, but people fart and Robin Williams gets attacked by raccoons. If you’re in grade school this thing is better than ‘The French Connection’.

I knew things weren’t looking good. The premiere was at 9pm on a Thursday. You know what that means don’t you? It means that the newspapers can’t publish a review of the movie until Saturday which means that the studio gets the video game geeks to shell out millions before word gets out that the film sucks.

It’s like finding out that your blind date has a great personality.

This ain’t gonna be pleasant.

I soldiered on despite me trepidation because there have been a couple of good movies based on video games haven’t there? Ok, so besides “Doom”, “Alone in the Dark”, “Super Mario Brothers”, “Final Fantasy”, “Tomb Raider”, “Wing Commander”, “Street Fighter” and “Double Dragon.” 

It’s like a Stephen King flick.

Once in a while there’s a decent one that makes you forget about all those television adaptations with spider clowns and time eating pac men (I still can’t believe that cross eyed bastard is rich).

Where shall I begin? Well, as usual we have a little girl who makes disturbing drawings in her spare time. Think of it as Hell’s fax machine. Anyway, her parents are freaked out by the whole thing and so her mother decides that the best course of action is to turn off her cell phone, and engage the police in a high speed chase into a deserted mining town in the middle of a rain storm.

Who the hell is her mother, Britney Spears?  Why not hit for the cycle and slam back a 40 of Jack Daniels while you apply makeup in the rear view mirror?

Long gone are the days when some little boy with a bowl cut hairstyle menaced the screens. Today’s devil child must be a chick and have long brown or black hair that is stringy enough so that her beady little eyes can peer out from her bowed head.

Another trend that’s really bugging me is this whole jerky walk thing that evil creatures do. It’s like they all have polio or something. I’m sorry but am I supposed to be afraid when evil clearly needs a knee brace? It’s like being attacked by one of “Jerry’s Kids.” If you see the short bus pull up, you’ll still have a good 15 minutes to get away while they lower the ramp.

Getting back to the mother. After she has an accident (like you didn’t see that coming) she awakens to find herself alone in the car and her child is missing. After a few entertaining moments in which she is harassed by char-broiled demon babies she meets the hot lesbian looking cop who was chasing her.

Anyone up for a tickle fight? Where’s that kiddie pool of lube when you need it?

Fortunately due to the 15 year old boy factor, both mom and the carpet munching
cop have to remove any extra clothing that would get in the way of displaying their great racks.

Wearing a leather jacket? That’s not going to turn transparent if I spray liquid on it. Write something in so that she can get rid it.

Ok, I’ve got a bucket of goo here. Who shall I spray it on? What? The cop’s shirt is made of a high quality polycotton blend? Forget that. If I squint hard enough I can almost make out the mom’s nipples. Let’s hose HER down.

The rest of the movie breaks down like this:

The boob twins walk around in a winter wonderland, except that instead of snow falling to the ground it’s ash.

Occasionally a siren sounds and the sky turns black. This is followed by swarms of man eating cockroaches, a shirtless guy with a metal pyramid for a head who carries a huge sword, semi-naked headless creatures who spray stuff at you and of course the obligatory little girl who always runs away and cries and never ever shows her face.

Somehow whenever the mother is about to be impaled by a giant sword or consumed by something evil, the siren sounds and the nightmare ends.

It might be Hell, but it’s still unionized.

In the middle of all that is evil lays a church. It’s no church you’ve ever heard of and it’s inhabitants make the Children of the Corn look welcoming.

In between sirens (when the minions of Satan are sleeping), the chosen ones run around the city gathering canned food. I don’t know how long this town has been burning but I don’t remember seeing a Wal Mart kicking around. How often are the shelves re-stocked at the deli? They must be getting down to eating artichoke hearts and shoe polish by now wouldn’t you think?

I’d like to go on but I can’t. The projectionist put the final reel of the movie in upside-down and backwards. The funny part was that for a full 2 minutes no one knew that it was a mistake. People thought that it was some cryptic dream sequence and it was only when the lights came on that everyone realized that it was a mistake.

After almost two hours of nothing making sense, the Titanic could have fallen from the sky and crushed a banjo playing goat and no one would blink.

I’m SURE that the final 20 minutes make TOTAL sense though (cough cough).

Have you ever seen one of those street magicians who steals your wallet while they distract you with their left hand?

That’s kind of what “Lucky Number Sleven” is all about.

In the movie Bruce Willis explains about a con called the “Kansas City Shuffle” in which “when everyone is looking to the left, you go to the right.”

The same can be said about the plot. At first you think to yourself that this was a clever movie with interesting plot twists and snappy one liners. Then when you start to describe it to your friends you start to see the Buick sized holes in the plot that somehow you missed while you sat in the movie.

Yes dear readers, I just bought a vacuum from a door to door salesman. I signed up for a time share in Florida. I accepted a drink from a stranger and when I woke up this morning my underwear was missing and there were Polaroids scattered across the room.

I’ve been had!!

How could I be so stupid? I got so wrapped up with the style of this movie I completely missed the fact that it doesn’t make any sense.

I feel like my high school English teacher who gave me high marks for bullshitting book reports on books that didn’t exist.

The movie opens when Bruce Willis kills a guy in a train station and then wheels the corpse into the back of a waiting truck. Another guy gets gunned down on the street, and another gets killed in a parking lot while three more get killed in a Jet Li meets James Bond action sequence.

So far I’m enjoying this movie WAY more than “Brokeback Mountain”.

Josh Hartnett is puttering around in his friend’s apartment when Lucy Liu knocks on the door and surprises him. Lucy is a big fan of the television show “Columbo” and her powers of deduction would shame Sherlock Holmes. She quickly picks apart Josh’s lame story of how he ended up in his buddy’s apartment and yet somehow she isn’t all that concerned by it.

Josh isn’t concerned when he is abducted by some dim witted criminals and forced into agreeing to murder a rival gang leader’s son because they think that he’s really his friend (who has racked up $96,000 in gambling debts to these sharks). He’s also not concerned when he’s abducted by the rival gang and told that he has 4 days to pay the $32,000 gambling debt that his friend has racked up to them. Josh it seems, suffers from a strange disorder in which he doesn’t feel fear.

It’s one thing to not be afraid of being killed for $100,000+ in gambling debts that aren’t yours, but it’s quite another to be stupid enough to agree to kill another mobster’s son to get out of trouble.

Call me stupid, but that still leaves the problem of one gang leader whom you owe $32,000 to and then there’s that little thing of having killed his son.

It’s like asking me to gut a chicken with a butter knife in the polar bear enclosure of the Bronx Zoo.

Disorder or not, Josh isn’t brain dead is he?

Now he goes back to the apartment and he explains his predicament to Lucy who not only doesn’t seem concerned about his dilemma, she asks him out on a date.

Hey Lucy, why don’t you just take him to a cozy café in Iraq? Maybe you can get a quiet table under an American Flag. If you draw an insulting cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed you get 10% off the bill too.

Give me a freaking break.

Josh ping pongs back and forth between Morgan Freeman’s penthouse and Ben Kingsley’s penthouse who just “happen” to be across the street from one another. Both men are deathly afraid of one another and yet Morgan Freeman wants the hit he’s putting out on Ben’s son to look like an accident.

Why you ask?

No you don’t. They fill the voids in logic with really witty dialogue.

Bastards.

You won’t even think about that question until the car ride home.

The plot starts getting really complex and the bodies start to pile up until right at the very end when they attempt to pull a “Usual Suspects” ending on us.

 It’s riiiight about then that you wake up and smell the roofies.

“Hang on” you say, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why would Bruce Willis do that?”

The simple answer is that he wouldn’t.

The screenwriter spent so much time patting himself on the back that he missed some crucial moments of logic that would derail the whole thing.

It’s like that math exam you did where you forgot to carry the 2.

It’s close to being right, but you still get a “D”.

What the hell. I’m like that English teacher I had back in high school.

Even though it’s wrong I’ll give it a “C+” for style.