20. Machete

Speaking of mediocre movies that take themselves too seriously…

Machete is not supposed to be a good movie. I understand that. I love that. I went to see it because of that. And for the first twenty minutes, I thought that Robert Rodriguez understood that as well.

But it doesn’t seem to have quite sunk in with him that when you make a bad, nonsensical popcorn movie, you can’t also wrap in a tremendously preachy message and expect it to play as anything other than a propaganda movie. And that’s what it felt like.

That’s not to say that the particularly exploitative moments weren’t occasionally perfectly assembled. There’s a moment where Machete swings through a plate glass window using the intestines of a still-living villain in the floor above. It’s so shockingly, delightfully trashy that you can’t help but feel you’ve already gotten your money’s worth. And Danny Trejo is pitch-perfect as the blank-faced mercenary hell-bent on a revenge mission. He plays it absolutely straight, but just in case you didn’t think he was in on the joke, here he is summing up the plot of the movie for a Lipton ad.

Yet for some reason, Machete is saddled with an incredibly preachy pro-immigration (or, more accurately, anti-anti-immigration) so insultingly low-minded it makes Lindsay Lohan’s cameo as a amateur porn star seem classy. I would say that I generally agree with Rodriguez’s stance in theory, though after the movie I would say I’m much more in favor of building a border wall, so long as it’s a wall between Rodriguez and his computer.

By the way, I know that Jessica Alba is generally perceived as a terrible actress by the movie-going public, but I have to say, after watching this movie, I think she is much worse than people give her credit for.



21. Robin Hood

Speaking of losing all the fun…

Robin Hood is one of the best heroes in both literary and cinema history. He’s the prototypical hero-outlaw, the one in whose mold all antiheroes are created and the character they’re measured against. But while most heroes seem tortured and have to spend most of their time glowering and stroking their lantern jaws, he seems to being having quite a lot of fun.

So anytime someone’s going to make a film about Robin Hood, I’m going to be there. Particularly if it’s someone as ideally suited to the task as my old boss, Ridley Scott.

But it seems like the whole movie was created after the world’s worst pitch meeting.

“You know how Robin Hood’s an archer? What if he used a sword for most of the movie, instead? Archery’s so dull.”

“I like it. But here’s an  idea: what if he didn’t spend a lot of time fighting at all?”

“What could he do instead?”

“Well, he could farm. And then maybe he could just hang around a dilapidated village when he wasn’t farming.”

“What, no Sherwood forest?”

“Why bother? He could just live in a small hold and have arguments with the owners for a while.”

“What about the Merry Men?”

“Oh, my gosh, I forgot.”

“Oh, they’re always having adventures. It’s awful. Can we get rid of them?”

“Well, do we need to have Merry Men? We could just have a few dour fellows who sleep in a shed outside the hold?”

“What would they do?”

“Who cares? We’d only check in on them occasionally.”

“Well, we’d need something else to fill up the movie, then.”

“Couldn’t they rob from the rich and give to the poor?”

“I’d rather we didn’t. Do we have to?”

“I think we do. But maybe they could do it real quick, just once, so that no one could accuse us of taking it out entirely. And that would still leave a lot of time to focus on something… duller.”

“Like what?”

“How about inner government workings only tangentially related to the plot?”

“I’m in shock. That’s perfect. I can’t believe we didn’t think of it earlier.”

“I like this guy. This guy’s on fire.”

“Definitely. We’ve hit it right on the head.  All right, keep it rolling. What else?”

“We, could we introduce a lot of characters we don’t care about, then abandon them for long stretches?”

“Could we? It’s like you’re reading my mind here.”

“And maybe… oh, no, I don’t want to say it.”

“No, go ahead. We’re really moving here.”

“What if Robin Hood had a dark childhood?”

“Oh my God. I love it. With flashbacks?”

“Absolutely. Constant flashbacks.”

“And maybe a hanging, portentous sense of unrealized destiny.”

“Just to keep things from getting too fun.”

“This is fantastic. All we have to do now is try to make Maid Marian dingy and unlikable.”

“Well, we have Cate Blanchett cast. She’s a good actress. What if she fights against the script and tries to rescue her character?”

“That’s the risk we have to take. Are we set?”

“Yes, I think we’ve got it.  No, no, wait! I’ve got something! The best possible ending.”

“Fantastic! Let’s have it.”

“At the end of the movie, - just for a quick second - we’ll see all the characters in Sherwood Forest, hanging out and being the fun, exciting characters they originally were!”

“What? Why?”

“To thoroughly depress the audience as they realize that this was the movie we could have made, instead of the one we did.”

“Oh. My. God. You’ve done it. This is perfect. Have we got all that?”

“Just finishing up some terse dialogue and… looks like the shooting script is ready to go.”

“This movie is going to be hugely disappointing. I couldn’t be more excited.”

“Wait ‘til they walk out of the theater, realizing that this is the same team that made Gladiator!”

“I know! It’s going to be awful for them.”

“I think we can all agree that this is going to be a decidedly mediocre movie that takes itself way too seriously. Everybody gets the rest of the day off.”

“Great work today, people. Just fabulous.”



22. Alice In Wonderland

Speaking of muddled, boring madness…

There’s a lot to like about Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. Say what you will about Burton, the man’s a visionary, and one of the few filmmakers working today whose works truly double as actual pieces of art. If you were to give me a choice of filmmakers to re-imagine Lewis Carroll’s playful children’s book, Burton would’ve been right at the top.

But sometimes Burton gets so tied up in whimsy, in quirk, in invention, that he misses the big picture. So instead of the cohesive, imaginative storytelling that marks his best work (Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, The Nightmare Before Christmas, etc.), we get a swiftly disintegrating film that never seems to quite rise from being a collection of clever new ideas. While I enjoyed much of the invention – particularly the concept of the Jabberwocky poem being an unfulfilled prophesy – I left the theater feeling unfulfilled.

Still, it’s not until the end of the film, when Alice’s quest dissolves into poorly-staged massive battle against a dull gray sky, that the wheels fully come off. A less than fearsome Jabberwocky appears, and Mia Wasikowska battles it in a somewhat half-hearted manner. I'm not saying they skimped on the weapons training, but at no point did I say to myself, "boy, that vorpal sword really is going snicker-snack!" The CGI creatures run aimlessly across a bare battlefield in poorly-visualized 3D, as the story fumbles around for a conclusion, and I’m left staring blankly at the screen, wondering where all the fun went.

23. The A-Team

Speaking of mucking around with source material…

It certainly seemed like The A-Team was a movie that couldn’t miss. The original show was beloved, but nothing about it seemed sacrosanct, other than the necessity to avoid mocking Mr. T’s propensity for pitying “foo”s.

The cast seemed likewise stellar. Who doesn’t love a winking, wry Liam Neeson? Or Bradley Cooper in full-on crazy mode? Not to mention a severly unhinged Sharlto Copley? And Joe Carnahan’s the sort of director who knows how to shoot an action sequence, even if it sort of seems that maybe that’s all he knows how to shoot.

And on some level, The A-Team did kind of work. Watching Cooper grin maniacally while firing on fighter jets from a plummeting tank is great fun. I especially loved the way Copley seemed to actually be a mental patient who had somehow wandered in front of the camera while they shot the movie.

But somewhere along the line, I felt like maybe the screenwriter hadn’t been able to finish the script, and had instead written “BOOM!” on each of the last 20 pages. During the big finale, when the team was supposedly enacting a strategy of deception and slight-of-hand, we instead saw about ten minutes of explosions, followed by a random Jon Hamm cameo, then credits.

I love a good mindless action thriller as much as the next guy, but even those have some sort of vague plotlines and recognizable goals. Most of this was just muddled, boring madness.

24. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

There are a few things you should know about me before I begin to review this film.

First, that I am a lifelong fan of all of C.S. Lewis’ writing. I was raised by this man. I can’t remember when I first read the Narnia series for myself, but I do remember that when we started reading them at the beginning of 4^th grade, my first thought was “oh, this again? I read these ages ago.” I read the whole series through about once a year. So if anyone’s going to be attached to the original work and fiercely resistant to changes a movie makes to the original books, I would likely be near the top of that list.

That said, I’m also a defender of a movie’s right to be its own creation. It’s necessary for a film to break from its source material in order to become a worthwhile creation, and the best examples of book-to-film translations – Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Pride & Prejudice, etc. – have shown a willingness to mix new ideas into the film, while maintaining a healthy respect for the source material.

The problem is when a film’s producers begin to view the original book as a loose map for creating a film, and make substantial changes to a story. While sometimes these decisions are tremendous improvements – Forrest Gump, the film, is a vast improvement over a decidedly mediocre book – I wonder if at any point the filmmakers say “hey, are our ideas any better than the ones that made this book so beloved by so many for so long?”

They certainly didn’t ask that this time.

The Voyage of the The Dawn Treader is not a terrible film. It’s not a good one, certainly. But it could be worse.

The problem with it is that it’s a wasted film. It takes a very good book, filled with adventure and epic discovery, and tacks on a number of cumbersome narrative devices. New characters are introduced, yet none of them are developed. New storylines are created, but often brushed aside in a headline dash for the big finale.

Now, I understand the need to try to create a Big Conflict in order to make this movie work. Much of the book is just people sailing around, looking for some old people they lost a long time ago. It’s tough to make that gripping. But if you’re going to add a villain, why not add a real villain? Instead, the filmmakers added a Green Mist, a magical substance that is the essence of evil, jealousy, and pride.

Go ahead, read that sentence again. I’ll wait.

How does someone even pitch that? How does someone say, “we need a villain character. Can we just add an evil green mist that tempts the characters to think only about themselves?” I’m baffled how that idea even makes it out of someone’s own head, never mind into an actual shooting script.

What’s more disorienting is that the Green Mist takes the form of the White Witch, a memorable evil character from the first two movies. She isn’t really there, but her form appears to tempt one of the characters to do… something (it isn’t totally clear what). Now, if this movie had decided that the White Witch would be a character in this movie in order to give the heroes a clear antagonist, I would have been aggravated, but I would’ve understood the need for it. But why bring back the character as a ethereal temptation? It’s like a movie that resurrects the spirit of Hitler – not to lead the enemy forces, but to tempt the American soldiers to switch sides. It’s thoroughly illogical in every aspect.

And that’s without touching any of the other glaring holes the movie possesses. The heroes are required to gather up the swords of all of the fallen Lords and lay them on a table in the middle of an island. If they do that, the Green Mist will disappear and evil will be conquered. Why? How? No one seems to care. At one point, one of the characters is magically transported back to this island without the faintest explanation as to how this happened, other than that it expedited the plot.

Adding to all the madness is the clear cut in production values from the first two movies to this one. The budget’s been slashed, and often the actors are seen acting in front of a blank wall, pretending that there’s a massive city around them that is quite patently not there. In a dramatic scene, a bunch of the sailors disguise themselves as everyday citizens and hide in the crowd in the slave market, before casting off their disguises and taking over the marketplace. The problem? The “crowded marketplace” only had about four or five extras in it. What was the budget for this movie again?

After a rocky road to get to the screen, the Narnia franchise was counting on a big box office in order to get to make another one of these films. Since essentially no one besides myself went to see this one, I think we can probably safely assume that’s not going to happen.

I’ve got to say, I’m relieved. I really don’t think I could deal with them mucking around with these books any more.