Olympus has Fallen

Basically a two hour long advert for Gerard Butler’s career, this film, of which he is a co-producer, sees him play Mike Bannon, a washed up bodyguard rotting away in the U.S. treasury.  When his president falls apart by being taken hostage and all the president’s men get killed trying to put him back together again it’s up to Mike to save the day the American way, i.e. running around shooting everything, before nuclear armageddon sets off.

 

Cue two long hours of mindless violence where everybody tortures everybody else, but saves the real humiliation for the top woman in the film who gets beaten up and damm near stripped as the film seemingly tries to tell women that all their freedoms only exist because of male sufferance.

 

Forget patriotism, forget plot, forget Morgan Freeman or Aaron Eckhart, because this film isn’t about any of those things.  This film is about how quickly Gerard Butler can kill North Koreans and how messy a process he can make it.  The other White House gets taken down film this year, appropriately named White House Down seems just as bad, though at least the plot is a little more plausible.  So whatever you do, wait for that one to come on Netflix or into the bargain DVD section.  Don’t waste any money on Olympus has Fallen.

Watchmen

One question; why wasn’t Rorschach the only character in this film?  Besides the Comedian, he’s the only interesting character in the whole film, which sadly proceeds along slower than a snail entering the twilight of its life.

 

So we have a big blue man, a dead lesbian (again why?) some posh British bloke who named himself after Rameses II and a bunch of other equally boring superheroes/vigilantes running around keeping Richard Nixon in office into 1985.  Okay not quite but by this point I’d stopped paying attention whenever Rorschach wasn’t on the screen.

 

With a background of the U.S. and the Soviets about to go to Nuclear war, we watch as the idiots bumble their way towards uncovering a conspiracy with only one nuke explosion to console us when Rorschach isn’t on the screen.  I don’t know what Alan Moore thought of this, but I’m sure his comic upon which the film is based is so much better, so I’d say read that instead.

Tank Girl

Anyone who’s read the comics will know how iconic this character has become; yet the film is a watered-down, dumbed-down, Americanised version of the British comic.  Tank Girl does not get repeatedly wasted, end up in a home for social misfits or create a child with a TV for a head after mating with a Kangaroo.  Jet Girl doesn’t save Richard and Judy from being shot down while stoned up to their eyeballs.  Adolf Hitler doesn’t return from the dead in a pineapple shirt to survive the end of the world in the Australian outback.  And Barney’s nowhere to be seen!  It’s wrong, plain wrong.

 

Instead Malcolm McDowell walks barefoot across broken glass before losing his head, but not until after he’s shown how not to torture someone with a straightjacket.  Then we get Kangaroo jazz poetry and arguments over whether it’s Count Chocula or Count Duckula but I always preferred the guy off Sesame Street.

 

Bad rap follows and the tanks a crappy Sherman rather than the T-34 or Tiger tank that is clearly merited.  Seriously how hard can it be to find a T-34?  Russia’s full of them; there’s one in Herefordshire for pity’s sake.  If they ever make another Tank Girl film they’ve got to use a T-34!  As for watching it, it does have Malcolm McDowell in it, so that’s something.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Let’s face it, if Episode II had been about Yoda painting his hut and Dagobah and tending his swamp garden, it would still have been miles better than the train wreck inside a sinking ship that was Episode I.  Here Anakin has to keep Padme safe from his own raging hormones while Obi-wan heads off to get an accent in posh accents from Count Dooku as played by Christopher Lee rather than Daffy Duck.

 

Boba Fett and his dad are in this one along with loads of proto-stormtroopers and octopus druids.  Lots of lightsaber, nice battle at the end and a trademark scene of an arm being cut off from Mr Lucas make for a wonderful film if you’ve sat through a four hour long History exam and would have been happy if someone told you the evening’s entertainment consisted of hanging upside down until you had a vision of pixies dancing around a campfire or passed out from the blood rushing to your head.

 

Beyond that Samuel L. Jackson sports a purple lightsaber but fails to make the grade required for Snakes on a Star Destroyer to become a film.  Still we get to see some baby Star Destroyers and Ian McDiarmid plays up the machiavellian Palpatine exquisitely to make this film the best of the prequels.  A nice fare for a Sunday evening when your girlfriend/progeny are recovering from your ranting about how Episode I was the greatest crime in cinematic history.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Right, we’ve mated a human and a machine, killed KHAN!!; fought off some Klingons and reintroduced Humpback Whales to the 23^rd Century, what’s next?  Oh I know let’s go and meet God.  Okay.

 

That’s basically the thrust of the fifth Star Trek film, as Kirk, Spock and McCoy find themselves hijacked by Spock’s crazy half-brother, Sybok, to head to the centre of the galaxy to meet God.  Long story short, it isn’t actually the almighty but a nasty alien who’s taken the mantle for his own nefarious reasons.  Add in some Klingons for authenticity and you’ve got a Star Trek film.

 

This film isn’t so much bad as funny.  With Uhura doing her best MILF striptease, Kirk and Spock attacking a city on Unicorns and Spock giving Kirk the greatest surprise of all time, you’ve got a film that deserves cult status, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.  While easily the worst of the movies featuring the Original Series cast and a poor follow-on to the four films that preceded it, this is still an enjoyable movie and no Star Trek film collection will be complete without it.

Moonraker

Okay, so the Moore films are silly anyway, but Moonraker takes it to a whole new level.  Never has a film been quite so cheesy.  Jaws, the best of all the villains Moore had to face, goes from the sinister figure he was in The Spy Who Loved Me, to a figure so comical he’d give Jar Jar Binks a run for his money in the sweepstakes for most annoying idiot.

 

Anyway a crazy Frenchman, after feeding O to his dogs, decides to go for the cut-price real estate by moving himself and a load of nice looking people up to space, with everyone left behind being killed off by gas from an orchid.

 

Cue Bond doing lots of stupid things with amphibious gondolas, spacesuits with lasers and a cable car.  Still there are good bits like the approach to the space station and point where Bond and new lady Holly Goodhead are looking out into space and Jaws just walks up behind them.

 

However this was clearly a step too far for the Bond franchise which is why the next two films, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy were decidedly low-tech in how they presented themselves.  Alright if you want something to fall asleep on the couch to but when it comes to quality there are plenty of other offerings on the Bond buffet that will actually deliver value.

Star Trek Insurrection

Okay so First Contact’s a hard act to follow in anyone’s books but even if it wasn’t, Insurrection would still have been a bad film.  Basically Picard and co fight some facelift-obsessed aliens to secure the fountain of youth and ensure Picard’s new bird gets to literally live happily ever after.

 

Cue lots of explosions and people screaming complete with a space battle that’s more of space happy slappy but does have one really big explosion.  Throw in a little moralising, a corrupt admiral and you’ve still got a crappy film.  Worse, Patrick Stewart’s an executive producer, which can’t be seen as a career highlight.

 

Given that the plot is essentially that high-ranking figures in the Federation have sold out the principles they’re supposed to stand for, this could have been a really good film; a completely different yet equally brilliant follow-on to its critically acclaimed predecessor.  Indeed the original script had Picard losing everything but his principles, with his ship, his career and his reputation all going down the space chute.

 

Instead we were given a neutered down version that provides such delight as tips on safe shaving of partners in the bath, how to rumba and the best way to bash a drone with a phaser rifle (okay, that’s actually a good bit).  Still there are worse films out there (Star Wars Episode I for example, which came out the same year), but really this film is at best a backing track to the much better Generations and First Contact.  If you want to skip it and go straight to Nemesis, no one’s going to mind.