Reel Entropy

Well, if a body count is what you want, You’re Next delivers.

The film follows four siblings and their significant others through a dinner celebrating their parents’… something or other. After 20 minutes of boring pipe-laying establishing family turmoil that’s supposed to be representative of… something or other, a group of masked men start killing them all, finally giving the audience reason to pay attention.

The most outstanding feature of You’re Next has been the critical response. Before wide release, it was a darling on Rotten Tomatoes. After real people began to watch it, it fell precipitously to 73 percent, where it stands as of this writing.

That tells you all you need to know. You’re Next is a movie made for well-schooled horror fans. It’s a medley of tropes that are both played straight in some parts of the movie but subverted in others, which allows the genre-savvy to see anything they want.

What does this film offer the average moviegoer? Not much.

The plot is solid, but razor-thin. The acting is largely terrible, except for Sharni Vinson’s main character. Experienced horror director Adam Wingard is a quiet pilot who doesn’t do anything too jarring with the camerawork.

There are 16 gore-filled, squelchy kills in this movie, and that’s pretty much it. There’s a purity about it that’s very attractive, and the action is fake enough for the faint of heart and intense enough for real thrill-seekers.

Maybe, just maybe, the poor acting and barely-there plot is the director’s method of overtly making the to-be-killed characters unsympathetic and making the plot unimportant, satirizing common horror films that pay just enough attention to humanizing the cannon fodder and fleshing out the story that it becomes a problem. It’s his way of saying… something or other about the state of horror movies today.

Or maybe this is just another sub-par slasher movie.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a senior staff writer for the NT Daily. He is still laughing about Ben Affleck.  For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back in a couple of weeks for a review of Insidious: Chapter 2.

Since Hollywood really started ramping up sequel production, there have been some legendary dropoffs in quality from first film to second. Freddy Kruger, The Matrix and even Star Wars are tainted by the blatant cash-grabs that came after them. While once in a blue moon the same creative team is retained and they actually understand what made their first movie successful, bad sequels have become a fact of life in American cinema.

I knew all of that going in, but Kick-Ass 2 broke my heart.

The sequel to the 2010 hit picks up where its predecessor left off, with Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) training Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to be a more competent hero while Red Mist (Christopher Mitz-Plasse), now calling himself the Motherfucker after devising a new costume from his mother’s bondage gear, lurks in the background.

Then the plot takes an immediate left turn for no particular reason and focuses on Hit-Girl trying to adjust to normal life and a dejected Kick-Ass joining a group of costumed vigilantes lead by Captain Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey does not support the violence in this film). Then it takes another left turn and becomes a pretty standard hero vs. mass murderer movie.

While the first Kick-Ass was about as much fun as it’s possible to have at the movies, Kick-Ass 2 is the opposite of that. This isn’t just a bad sequel. This film is a corruption.

Instead of music that is either hand-picked for its cultural significance or beautifully composed for a specific, important sequence, Kick-Ass 2 frequently features one build-up riff that was used in the first movie and never plays the payoff. Instead of subtly exploring themes of heroism, bravery against stupidity, young sexuality and parental relationships, Kick-Ass 2 breaks out a gong labeled “identity theme” and bangs it for a couple of hours.

Worst of all, while both feature high school aged main characters, Kick-Ass was all about breaking out of the meandering inconsequentiality that looms over that stage of American life and making a real, if fantastic, difference. Kick-Ass 2, the main body of it at least, is about Hit-Girl trying to get a date.

Even on a character-by-character basis, this movie doesn’t miss the point of its predecessor as much as it actively runs in the opposite direction. Motherfucker combines his Superbad-style awkwardness with mass murder, a combination that isn’t as fun as it sounds. Hit-Girl, the supremely confident assassin, learns that she should be unconfident when faced with more trendy fashions. Nicolas Cage’s extended cameo gives way to Jim Carrey’s (Jim Carrey does not support the violence in this film).

All that, and the movie retains the ultra-violence (Jim Carrey does not support the violence in this film) and strange objectification of minors that made the original controversial.

As easy as it is to make fun of Carrey for his about-face and point out that everyone knows it’s not real, he does have a point. The first Kick-Ass was about teenage angst matched up against the drug trade. The story was told through violence, but at least the story was told. In Kick-Ass 2, the violence comes in more of a meaningless barrage that audiences are supposed to laugh at.

It may seem like these criticisms are too relative, but Kick-Ass was everything a movie can and should be. Other, similar films need to do something to stand out, but this one could have built directly on its predecessor’s success and no one would have batted an eye. It doesn’t.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a senior staff writer for the NT Daily. After a brief hiatus spurred entirely by how awful Kick-Ass 2 is, he’s back! For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back tomorrow  for a review of You’re Next.

Elysium is too long and tries way too hard to be District 9.

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s second big-budget venture doesn’t go down nearly as easily as his first. Elysium follows Max Da Costa (Matt Damon), an ex-con who can’t catch a break. At work, he is forced into a radiation accident that will kill him in five days if he doesn’t get to the titular pay-to-play rich people utopia in the sky and its magical, Pokemon Center-esque healing pods. Moon Heights Gated Community’s genocidal secretary of defense (Jodie Foster) is also involved in this story. Kind of.

Listing the things that are bad about Elysium is as simple as listing the things that are on the screen at all.

It’s a metaphor driven movie, but all metaphors — every single one — are too obvious to be thought provoking and heavy-handed enough that they’d quell all thought anyway.

Law enforcement officials are robots? Never seen that before!

Spanish-speaking denizens of Earth slums dream only of going up to a richer land full of white people and often go there illegally for the medical care? I’m sure I don’t know of any countries that share that relationship in real life!

The dialogue and story details are bad. Blomkamp’s hectic camerawork doesn’t work for all the scenes in this movie, and during the action scenes that it will work in, he frequently and seemingly at random interrupts everything with a long slow motion shot.

The acting is almost uniformly terrible. Foster is made of plastic in her role. Sharlto Copley, known primarily as the very annoying star of District 9, is even more annoying in Elysium as a sadistic bounty hunter. He’s supposed to be sinister, but doesn’t even slightly come off that way. Damon is apparently the only competent member of the cast, and it might only be by comparison.

The film was very reliant on District 9 in its advertising campaign, and that’s the biggest clue about the ideology that went into making it. With similarly-styled content, camerawork and even prop design, Elysium is clearly supposed to be a repetition of Blomkamp’s first success.

But the problem is, though District 9 is just as heavy-handed, that film has sympathetic characters the audience can attach to. And its action sequences aren’t hatefully choppy. And its script isn’t dumb. Really any directly comparable metric is worse in Elysium than in District 9.

So… why watch Elysium?

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He is very uncomfortable with the Fiat commercial sexualizing the American Revolution. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back this weekend for a review of Kick-Ass 2.

2GUNS is… so… bizarre!

The… buddy cop? movie pairs Drug Enforcement Administration agent Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) with Naval Intelligence officer Micheal Stigman (Mark Walhberg) as robbers — at first. After robbing a bank where they thought a Mexican drug lord (Edward James Olmos) was stashing his American cash and finding $43 million of the CIA’s money, a wild series of double-crosses ensues and pairs the duo as cops against both the cartel and the corrupt agency.

This movie is worth a watch for the cinematographic discord alone. To say it’s a light-hearted movie about dark subject matter is a half-truth, but that’s the simplest way to put it.

The plot is a veritable circle-jerk of U.S. law enforcement agencies at each other’s throats to the point that the cocaine trade is an afterthought. Narrative expectations are largely satisfied, but not… quite. An all-star supporting cast somehow includes James Marsden and Bill Paxton.

And of course none of these aspects are used for social commentary or raising cinematic quality, but they make the movie more interesting. Normally, that’d be points off for lack of ambition, but there’s too much that’s random about this film to know what director Baltasar Kormákur was going for. Some of the more jarring points include the setting being vague to the point that the audience never really knows whether they’re in Mexico or Texas and Earl’s (Paxton) out-of-place mafia scariness.

The movie also has plenty of objectively good and bad elements, and counting those might be the best way to evaluate it. Walhberg is quicker-mouthed and funnier than any character he’s ever played, and he betrays his rarely-tapped talent here. The action is fairly spectacular, not bad but just short of something special. Though it avoids genuine intrigue, the plot is amusingly convoluted.

On the flipside, the movie gets progressively worse and more generic as it goes on. It feels longer than it is, which is always a bad sign. It does that annoying thing where the first sequence is in the middle of the movie, but everything else is in chronological order for no discernable reason.

Maybe I’m overthinking 2GUNS and it’s really just an average action movie, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t fit within traditional narrative structures.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He does not sleep. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back this weekend for a review of Elysium.

It’s important that The Wolverine be a good movie, and… it is… kind of…

The film follows Marvel’s indestructible-yet-oddly-sympathetic superhero (Hugh Jackman, who also produces) as he wanders to Japan to say goodbye to a man whose life he’d saved in World War II. Set after X-Men 3, Logan fights depression over killing Jean Grey (Framke Janssen) and is reluctant to return to violent heroism. However, a bizarre combination of plots make him the only line of defense for Mariko Yashida (Tao Okamoto), who is/will become one of the most powerful people in corporate Japan.

Modern American superhero trilogies have been around for 13 years now, and The Wolverine instantly becomes the best part three the trend has produced (no, it’s not technically the third movie in a series of three, but the basic character arc indicates that blah blah blah it’s a part three OK? Deal with it). Comparing it to such catastrophes as Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight Rises is a low bar to set, but it’s fun to see the end of the story arc executed well.

Because The Wolverine is the only movie in its class that’s not completely stupid, I like this movie a lot more than I should. It’s not like the movie is bad, exactly. The action is wild and fun, particularly the bullet-train sequence. Wolverine’s odd chemistry with samurai culture is on full display, and they don’t get too far on the romantic or anti-foreign sides of the scale. Jackman is up to par, as usual, and the Wolverine he brings to life in this movie is particularly emotional. Comedy is well-placed and genuine.

Sadly, speaking objectively, The Wolverine’s flaws do outweigh its good points. The dialogue always has a poorly-thought-out undercurrent, and though it never becomes stupid outright, some of Logan’s lines are pretty wacky. It’s tough to track some of the characters’ motivations. The last act kind of falls apart.

It’s good. It should be good. It needs to be good. It’s… OK. Older fans of the comic book character will get to see a good storyline brought to life, along with great if obscure villains like Silver Samurai and Lady Hydra. Fans of the film character, now his own entity, will get to see him finish his journey, for once in an acceptable film.

It’s just not as good as I want it to be.

X-Men: The Days of Future Past is scheduled to come out next year, and is a prime candidate to completely alienate comic fans from adaptations if it’s done poorly. That’ll probably be just OK too. Dealing now with time and multiple Professor X’s and Magneto’s, the X-Men cinematic universe is teetering on the brink of incredible silliness. Here’s hoping they do it right.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. If you spoil Breaking Bad for him, he might actually kill you. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back tomorrow for a review of 2 Guns.