Once again, as tends to be the case with superhero movies, Captain America was pretty much what I expected it to be. I didn’t know much about this character going in, and so I was intrigued at the set up of the weakling who wants to help his country and do the right thing but is unable to enlist until a brilliant scientist gives him a chance to become part of an experiment to create a new super soldier. After Steve Rogers is transformed from a ninety-eight pound weakling into a super buff fighter capable of helping the Allies destroy the Nazis, the movie takes a turn I wasn’t expecting with a really delightful song and dance routine. But, of course, we must get back to the action when Captain America goes out alone to save his old buddy from the bad guys with the evil plan to take over the world.
The plot from there isn’t too important to recap. The bottom line is that the movie does a good job of being what it is. My one major critique is the same critique I have of a lot of action movies in recent years, and that’s simply that it’s too long. By the final half hour or so, I was ready to be done. I don’t know if I have a short attention span or what, but I generally think ninety minutes is a good length for an action movie, comedy, horror, mystery, whatever. Anything other than a serious character-driven drama should probably be less than two hours. And any single action sequence should probably be no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Now, I wasn’t timing the big climactic action sequence in Captain America, but it sure felt like it went on for a half an hour or so, and I wanted it be done about halfway through.
It’s strange: I don’t have any specific problems with the action sequences. There weren’t any moments that stand out as being gratuitous, but on a whole, it was just too much. I think the tendency in recent years is to always try to make the newest movie bigger than what has come before, but bigger doesn’t mean better. I’d rather have smaller, with more specifically chosen moments that really work instead of throwing every possible event at the screen, hoping that something will be amazing. I have a feeling of déjà vu as I write this. Did I write this same thing about Thor or X-Men? It seems likely.
So here’s my general advice to directors making the next big blockbuster action movie: go for a lean ninety minutes. The last thing you want to do is bore the audience with too much action. Plus, if a movie is ninety minutes instead of over one hundred and twenty, the theaters might be able to squeeze in an extra showing each day, which means the movie could rake in even more money.
Showing posts with label Action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Action. Show all posts
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Cop Out, The Other Guys, Predators, Star Trek
I’ve been sick the past couple of days. It was good timing to get sick since my semester is over, so I don’t have any papers to grade or classes to plan right now. In fact, there is no place that I have to be for about three weeks. So I’m glad I got sick this weekend instead of last weekend when I had dozens of final papers to grade. I wasn’t so sick, however, that I could not have done that work if I needed to. It was the type of stomach bug that is no fun, leaving me queasy and tired but no worse than that. The kind of sickness that you can plow through and try to ignore, but if you have the luxury of just taking time off, it’s better to take the time. And I was feeling just ill enough to not even want to do anything as active as reading. So I lay in bed and watched movies.
I wasn’t in the mood for anything serious that I’d have to pay a lot of attention to, so instead I glanced at some On Demand and Netflix options and chose some low-brow flicks that were exactly what I was in the mood for in that state: Cop Out, Predators, The Other Guys, and Star Trek.
Cop Out is an action comedy that has a fair numbers of laughs, thanks primarily to Tracy Morgan, but is also an actual buddy cop action movie with lots of shooting guns and such. My brother watched it recently (also while feeling bad), and recommended it, saying it was a lot like the eighties movies Fletch and Beverly Hills Cop. I think that’s a fair assessment. In general, it was decent, though not one I’d want to watch a second time. I have a few quick comments. One, it’s directed by, but not written by, Kevin Smith, which seems odd since Smith has a lot of funny dialogue in his scripts but is a fairly mediocre director. Two, Tracy Morgan is hilarious and makes the movie worth watching, which I don’t think it would otherwise be. Finally, I was intrigued, but not pulled into the story, by the major event that sets the action in place: Bruce Willis’s character’s daughter is getting married and wants a dream wedding. He can’t afford to pay the $48,000 price tag and doesn’t want to be shown up by the rich new husband of his ex-wife. So his desire to find a way to pay for the wedding sets ups the action for the rest of the movie. I was really annoyed by this. For one thing, $48,000 is ridiculous to pay for a wedding, especially if you can’t easily afford it. I wanted the character to acknowledge how stupid that was rather than do whatever it takes to make it happen. So the whole set up seemed to me to be a non-issue. I wasn’t really invested in whether he would be able to get the money because his reason for wanting the money was idiotic. Furthermore, his stupid macho pride in wanting to do it himself rather than accept the help of his ex-wife’s new husband was a real turn off for me. That kind of pride is a flaw that, were this a tragedy, should lead to the character’s downfall; but since this was a comedy, I was supposed to like the guy, which I didn’t. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but this big event that I think was supposed to make me sympathize with the character really had the opposite effect for me.
The Other Guys, like Cop Out is a buddy cop action comedy. However, instead of being on that line between traditional cop movie and comedy, this is firmly over the edge in dumb comedy territory (it stars Will Ferrell and is directed by Adam McKay, so it’s what you’d expect from them), and it made me laugh many, many times. Again, it’s the kind of movie I especially like to watch when I’m not feeling well, so it did the trick for me.
Predators also was exactly what I expected it to be. I saw the ads when it came out last year and thought it might be brainless fun, and it was. If you thought from the ads you might like it, then you probably will like it. If you thought it looked stupid, you’ll probably think it’s stupid. I mean, frankly, it is stupid. But it’s got badass aliens hunting humans, so what do you expect?
Star Trek, once again, was what I expected it to be. I had heard that this was much better than anyone expected from a new Star Trek movie, and I suppose I can see what people were saying, though I didn’t feel all that strongly about it. I guess the old Star Trek movies, and the show especially, were really cheesy, and this tones down the cheese quite a bit, but it’s still just Star Trek. There’s nothing amazing or especially thought provoking about it, and it even acknowledges the cheese factor and has fun with some tropes of the Star Trek world. For instance, Kirk is remembered for bedding green alien women, so he does that in the movie. There’s the stereotype of the one random guy in the red shirt who is sent down to a planet with the main characters and who you know is going to get killed, so in the movie there’s a sequence where three characters go on a mission, two are principles and one is a random guy who, sure enough, is wearing red and doesn’t have long to live.
My verdict: big blockbuster action movies and dumb comedies are particularly enjoyable when I’m in the mood to just turn off my brain or when my brain is running at half speed due to illness or exhaustion. So these four movies were a pretty good way to relax and distract myself from my grumbling stomach awhile.
I wasn’t in the mood for anything serious that I’d have to pay a lot of attention to, so instead I glanced at some On Demand and Netflix options and chose some low-brow flicks that were exactly what I was in the mood for in that state: Cop Out, Predators, The Other Guys, and Star Trek.
Cop Out is an action comedy that has a fair numbers of laughs, thanks primarily to Tracy Morgan, but is also an actual buddy cop action movie with lots of shooting guns and such. My brother watched it recently (also while feeling bad), and recommended it, saying it was a lot like the eighties movies Fletch and Beverly Hills Cop. I think that’s a fair assessment. In general, it was decent, though not one I’d want to watch a second time. I have a few quick comments. One, it’s directed by, but not written by, Kevin Smith, which seems odd since Smith has a lot of funny dialogue in his scripts but is a fairly mediocre director. Two, Tracy Morgan is hilarious and makes the movie worth watching, which I don’t think it would otherwise be. Finally, I was intrigued, but not pulled into the story, by the major event that sets the action in place: Bruce Willis’s character’s daughter is getting married and wants a dream wedding. He can’t afford to pay the $48,000 price tag and doesn’t want to be shown up by the rich new husband of his ex-wife. So his desire to find a way to pay for the wedding sets ups the action for the rest of the movie. I was really annoyed by this. For one thing, $48,000 is ridiculous to pay for a wedding, especially if you can’t easily afford it. I wanted the character to acknowledge how stupid that was rather than do whatever it takes to make it happen. So the whole set up seemed to me to be a non-issue. I wasn’t really invested in whether he would be able to get the money because his reason for wanting the money was idiotic. Furthermore, his stupid macho pride in wanting to do it himself rather than accept the help of his ex-wife’s new husband was a real turn off for me. That kind of pride is a flaw that, were this a tragedy, should lead to the character’s downfall; but since this was a comedy, I was supposed to like the guy, which I didn’t. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but this big event that I think was supposed to make me sympathize with the character really had the opposite effect for me.
The Other Guys, like Cop Out is a buddy cop action comedy. However, instead of being on that line between traditional cop movie and comedy, this is firmly over the edge in dumb comedy territory (it stars Will Ferrell and is directed by Adam McKay, so it’s what you’d expect from them), and it made me laugh many, many times. Again, it’s the kind of movie I especially like to watch when I’m not feeling well, so it did the trick for me.
Predators also was exactly what I expected it to be. I saw the ads when it came out last year and thought it might be brainless fun, and it was. If you thought from the ads you might like it, then you probably will like it. If you thought it looked stupid, you’ll probably think it’s stupid. I mean, frankly, it is stupid. But it’s got badass aliens hunting humans, so what do you expect?
Star Trek, once again, was what I expected it to be. I had heard that this was much better than anyone expected from a new Star Trek movie, and I suppose I can see what people were saying, though I didn’t feel all that strongly about it. I guess the old Star Trek movies, and the show especially, were really cheesy, and this tones down the cheese quite a bit, but it’s still just Star Trek. There’s nothing amazing or especially thought provoking about it, and it even acknowledges the cheese factor and has fun with some tropes of the Star Trek world. For instance, Kirk is remembered for bedding green alien women, so he does that in the movie. There’s the stereotype of the one random guy in the red shirt who is sent down to a planet with the main characters and who you know is going to get killed, so in the movie there’s a sequence where three characters go on a mission, two are principles and one is a random guy who, sure enough, is wearing red and doesn’t have long to live.
My verdict: big blockbuster action movies and dumb comedies are particularly enjoyable when I’m in the mood to just turn off my brain or when my brain is running at half speed due to illness or exhaustion. So these four movies were a pretty good way to relax and distract myself from my grumbling stomach awhile.
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