Movie Reviews for People with Small Kids: Quick Hits

In which I review movies that are probably too old for Redbox now, because finding a babysitter and having the disposable income to get a night out to the movies is only slightly more difficult than building a life sized replica of the Great Wall of China out of Legos.

I’ve been neglectful in my movie watching duties lately, hopefully this makes up for it.

Iron Man 3

Possibly Robert Downey Jr.’s last solo movie as Tony Stark and that might be a good thing. This time, he’s struggling with PTSD following the events in The Avengers, which seems a bit odd since he seemed perfectly fine after having his military escort convoy blown up, waking up with a battery surgically attached to his chest, being held hostage for a few months, and having to fight a close friend to the death, but it gives the writers an excuse to let Tony ignore most of the character growth he’s made in the course of three movies, and it lets them set up the idea that the Iron Man armor is a woobie for him: his security blanket and the only place he feels safe.

The plot involves a series of explosions blamed on the terrorist, the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) as well as the production of Extremis by AIM head Aldrich Killian (Guy Pierce.) Extremis is a technobabble MacGuffin that lets ordinary folks have superpowers.

Tony’s friends sort of take the sidelines again, and while it’s fun to watch RDJ be the charismatically dysfunctional Tony Stark, I feel like if this were the last solo Iron Man movie, I’d be okay with that. Not because I particularly liked the ending which feels a bit too Deus Ex Machina, but because I think future sequels will start to see Tony Stark go the way of Jack Sparrow who was great, then good, then okay, and now whose movies I greet with a “meh.”

Now You See Me…

Four magicians seemingly rob a bank on the other side of the world while performing in Las Vegas, and it’s up to Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, and the woman who burned down Hitler in her movie theater in Inglorious Basterds to stop them.

It’s a fun, entertaining heist movie. The leads are likable, the story moves quickly, and like any good magic show, it’s all about showmanship. You may know where the film is going, but it entertains you along the way, and really, that’s all I ask for the $1 I pay to rent the movie.

The Great Gatsby

A tale for our time about rather disgusting rich people, class, social status, and excess wrapped in a Baz Luhrmann movie. It helps you stomach the ending if you visualize the future Great Depression wiping out the wealth of the Buchanans and one or both of them taking a high dive from a Wall St. skyscraper.

Movie Reviews for People with Small Kids: Jack the Giant Slayer

Welcome back to the semi-increasingly irregular feature whereby I review movies that most of you have probably already seen because they came out during the Hoover Administration, and getting out of the house to see a movie involves finding a babysitter which is only slightly more difficult than constructing a life-size replica of the Taj Mahal out of fast food straw paper and French fries.

I know It looks impressive, but if you lean up against a wall, you’re going to be buried under 2000 tons of greasy potatoes and paper.

This week is Jack the Giant Slayer.

“They’re called Altoids. Seriously, have some.”

Fairy tales briefly became the hot ticket item in Hollywood for a brief period when everyone realized that no one had any original ideas anymore and that all of these characters were in the public domain so producers wouldn’t have to dip into their cocaine and hooker funds to pay licensing fees to anyone to make a movie about Jack and the Beanstalk or Snow White.

But since only one of these movies made anywhere near enough money to get a sequel greenlit…

The one with Kristen Stewart, seen here.

 

Hollywood moved on to more superhero movies (“Which is a trend that will never die!”) so sadly, there will be no sequel to this film, which would be sad, because presumably, the giants would have upgraded their weaponry too and I would have laughed at a giant stomping through London wielding an oversized flame thrower. The third movie in the trilogy could have been a crossover with Pacific Rim.

Call me, Hollywood.

Anyway, this movie is not going to win any awards for originality, as it sets up its threat, hero, love interest, and Deus Ex Machina right in the prologue, so you know exactly where you’re going.

So a magic bean later, and Jack is off to the land of giants with Ewan McGregor to rescue the princess and keep the giants from invading the land, while our human bad guy Stanley Tucci is trying to do the opposite, hoping to get an army of giants with which to take over the world. Stanley is controlling them via the aforementioned Deus Ex Machina which is a crown forged from the heart of a giant that compels all of the other giants to do what the man with the crown says, and you’re probably guessing that Jack is going to get his hands on this at some point, because of course he is. He’s the hero.

The tale is engaging and light-hearted enough that you can forgive its lack of originality and just enjoy it as a innocent diversion. There is some violence, but nothing overly graphic.

Characterization consists of the standard archtypes: McGregor is the tough, competent, fair military man, Tucci the mustache twirling villain, Nicholas Hoult the peasant Jack who has a noble heart, and random fantasy princess #367 who wants to be free and marry for love.

The giants also get short shrift, and there’s no real motivation to their desire to come down to our world other than that they think we’re tasty and no real explanation of why they consider their world (which looks pretty lush and verdant) as a prison instead of their home.

All in all, it’s a decent family movie that won’t really challenge or offend you, but is charming enough to make you like it despite its flaws.

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Star Trek into Darkness

For those who came in late, this feature isn’t about finding a family friendly movie, but is about the problem of being a movie geek who used to spend 2-3 nights at the cinema a month dealing with the fact that finding a babysitter is hard and I refuse to be the sod who brings a toddler along to a 2 hour+ long PG-13 movie expecting them to sit still and be quiet, so my nights out to the movies are limited to about 2-3 a year, thus all of my movie reviews are generally of stuff that came out last year because Redbox is my new best friend.

(Though, if they’d like to kick a check my way for the endorsement/advertising I just did, I’d consider them my bestie and totally pass notes with them in class and let them cheat off of my tests. Check Yes or No, Redbox.)

But I got to spend some time with my old man this weekend and we caught this movie because he’s been a hard core Trekker since the 60’s. And while I’ve been a Star Wars nerd since my first viewing as a toddler in 1977, I eventually came to like Star Trek during the 80’s with the movies and the Next Generation. So I’ve been looking forward to this movie as well.

I liked the 2009 reboot of the franchise which introduced us to the old crew again, this time in an alternate timeline, which I found to be a brilliant solution to the conundrum of a reboot to Star Trek, which was how do you keep the obsessive Trekkers on board who love the original series and show them that you respect what came before while introducing something new and in many ways shocking what with (Spoiler alert for a four year old movie here) blowing up Vulcan and all.

So how does this movie stack up against the 2009 reboot and how does it stack up against the old movies in general?

Pretty good and good, respectively. Putting them in order of my preference, I’d say:

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
3. Star Trek: First Contact
4. Star Trek Into Darkness
5. Star Trek (2009)
6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

There. That’s the spoiler free review. Everyone else, I assume you want to hear my opinions about everything else in the film, so join me after the fold:

Movie Reviews for people with small kids: Date Night edition

So the wife and I got a babysitter Saturday night and headed out to wreck the town, which for me mostly consists of going out to dinner and seeing a movie that isn’t a year old.

So we went to see what everyone else saw this weekend: Oz the Great and Powerful.

Part of the challenge of doing a prequel is that you know exactly where the characters are supposed to end up at the end of the movie. A good director will side-step this problem by making the journey and the characters interesting enough that you want to see how the characters ended up there. And other directors will give you spunky kid Darth Vader woo-hooing and awkward ‘romance’ scenes that must have been written by a celibate monk who has not actually seen a human woman or any interaction between the sexes.

Anyway, Oz rests on the titular character and as long as you go into it with that in mind, it is an enjoyable film about a man caught up in extraordinary circumstances who lies, bluffs, and fakes his way through it until he becomes the man he was pretending to be. James Franco’s performance is great as the insufferable, sleazy carnival magician conman who cons his way into becoming a hero and figure the people of Oz believe in, and he is largely responsible for carrying the movie.

Franco is a cad, who abuses his assistant (Zach Braff), seduces young women with lies, refuses to settle down with his childhood sweetheart (Michelle Williams) because he doesn’t want to be a good man, he wants to be a great man like Harry Houdini or Thomas Edison. When the husband of one of the objects of his affection wants to beat the tar out of him, he hops a balloon into a tornado which drops him into the land of Oz.

I joked about how this movie could all be the result of a vivid hallucination of a dying man, but I’m not joking when I say that this is a distinct possibility. Oz finds himself in a world where he becomes the most important person in the world. His childhood sweetheart is a powerful good witch. His assistant is his flying monkey butler. And he is able to work a miracle for a little girl in Oz when he couldn’t do the same in Kansas. It’s an interesting thought anyway.

Despite the marketing, the witches are definitely in the background and their stories fall a little flat, especially Mila Kunis’ Theodora who gets seduced by Oz and has her heart broken. Her transformation from innocent girl into a cackling, screaming wicked witch is a bit too fast and a bit too contrived for my liking. Rachel Weiss is definitely in the background, but does a good turn as her own wicked witch who has lied and schemed her way to the top and definitely doesn’t feel like stepping aside for another liar to take her place.

Michelle Williams does a good turn here as Glinda, giving her personality and humanizing her a bit from the sugary sweet version in the Wizard of Oz (who was actually pretty horrible.) She sees through Oz pretty quickly, but is determined to give the people the leader they hope for and can believe in anyway, even if it means going along with a huge con job.

Overall, the journey is a compelling one, the characters are likable, and the resolution is a pretty great.

I would recommend buying tickets for this one.

Movie Reviews for people with small kids: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Normally, I’d come up with some forced analogy to explain why it is that I’m reviewing a movie that came out last year, such as it’s easier to walk into Mordor in a bright yellow tutu carrying a sign that says “Found: One magic ring. Contact me for details” than it is to find a babysitter and get a night out.

Quiet, you!

But I did it! Woo!

And what kind of a nerd would I be if I didn’t use one of my semi-annual dates to drag my poor, patient, beautiful and forgiving wife to see the first part of Peter Jackson’s effort to turn a 250 page book into 9 hours of cinema. I imagine if Jackson ever got a treatment for War and Peace, that the universe just might suffer heat death before the final movie was shown.

For those concerned about Mrs. Dread, she enjoyed the movie and got a nice seafood dinner out of the ordeal, so we’re all good.

Alright, on to the movie:

For the record, I saw this in 2D 24fps and I thought it looked great. I know there’s been some debate about the higher resolution, but I guess I’m a traditionalist.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (and from now on I’ll just be calling it the Hobbit because it’s a giant pain in the behind to continue to type out the full name) tells the tale of Bilbo Baggins, who, the prologue helpfully reminds us is the old hobbit in the Lord of the Rings movie, by featuring a 15 minute flash forward to the day that Bilbo leaves the Shire again and passes the One Ring onto his nephew Frodo, played once again again by Elijah Wood.

Seen here in the alternate ending to Return of the King where he kept the Ring and spent his days cannibalizing hookers.

Bilbo starts writing the account of his adventures to Frodo, which considering this is supposed to take place the day Bilbo leaves the Shire again means Bilbo must be one hell of a speed writer.

From the flash back that happens during the flash forward, we get the tale of how the Dwarven kingdom of Erebor grew rich and powerful and found the Arkenstone which is a very shiny, very big gem that will be important in another 7 or 8 hours. It alludes that its king slowly went mad with greed before Smaug the dragon invaded the kingdom, burned the city of Dale to the ground and turned the mountain into his lair.

The Dwarves are forced to leave their home, the local Elves don’t help them at all, and our Dwarven protagonist gives them the stink eye. And then we flash forward, then flash back and we’re with younger Bilbo just before he moved to England and roomed up with Sherlock. Bilbo meets Gandalf who unwittingly to Bilbo drafts him into Gandalf’s next adventure. Soon he’s off leaving behind his quiet home and warm bed for dealing with trolls, stone giants, goblins, orcs, and wargs.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to the material in the new part of the story. Radagast the brown, a sort of hippie wizard peer who enjoys mushrooms as much as Gandalf enjoys smoking weed. Through Radagast, we’re introduced to the giant spiders of Mirkwood and the new villain of the Necromancer voiced by the man voted “most British name” 10 years straight, Benedict Cumberbatch. This gets all the bigwigs from the first Lord of the Rings trilogy together to talk about how Middle Earth is going to hell in a hand basket and they should probably do something about it.

Jackson does a decent job of flushing out the characters of the dwarves, who are mostly just background characters in the book and Thorin goes from being sort of a dick in the book into a sympathetic character. And Bilbo is likeable as the everyman underdog who is constantly surprised by the chaos he finds himself in and surprised by how much he sort of enjoys it.

The movie is long, but the pacing is fast and the movie never seems to lag that much, save at the beginning, with old Bilbo and Frodo trying to tie the movie to the Lord of the Rings. I can understand why they did it, but it’s the weakest part of the movie to me.

Martin Freeman does a superb job as Bilbo, giving him an everyman/unlikely hero quality that makes you root for him. The scene where he walks through an empty house after the Dwarves have left and you can see him fighting with himself over whether or not to embrace the adventure is amazing in what it accomplishes.

Richard Armitage as Thorin is likewise a compelling protagonist. A character full of anger over the lot life has dealt him, pride in his bloodlines, history, and position, but generally someone who is a good person whose goodness has been continually challenged by life’s hardships.

I don’t have much to say about Andy Serkis’ Gollum that hasn’t been said before. Suffice to say that the man continues to elicit a mix of sympathy and revulsion for the fallen creature so that you understand Bilbo’s decision to spare his life.

Go check it out in the theaters over the holidays. It’ll be time well-spent and it’s worth the $16 dollar cost for two tickets you can pick up at Costco. Heck, it’s worth the full price, but I always by my tickets at Costco anyway.

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

Welcome back to our semi-regular feature wherein I continue to review movies that are six months old or more because it’s easier to get a 1,000 monkeys to write MacBeth (even accounting for the flinging of poo) than it is to get a night out to the movies some days.

Today is a very special movie review. It’s a movie that I’ve thought was awesome since the first moment I heard of it. It epitomizes modern American cinema in a way that few others have. After viewing it, there is only one question remaining:

So great movie or greatest movie?

 

Abraham Lincoln takes a look at the complex man that was our 16^th president. A man who started out his life infected with the same sort of white supremacist beliefs that many American men held at the time, who through seeing the evils of slavery and confrontations with radical abolitionists including Fredrick Douglass, gradually evolved from someone who wanted to keep slavery legal to someone who wanted to end it and expatriate black Americans back to Africa to someone who embrace emancipation and accepted equality (as much as anyone in his day did anyway.) A man who skated the edge of constitutionally acceptable behavior (and arguably crossed the line a few times) to try and save the constitution and the Union. And someone looked at him and said, that’s nice and all, but wouldn’t it be more awesome if he were an 80’s action hero who killed people with an axe and he had a black sidekick?

So right away you know you’re in for a good time.

It looks at the institution of slavery from the point of view we might have had if were studying for an American History final at 2am the night before the test and we decided we’d study better if we were baked.

“Like, Dude… so slavery… you’re like living off the work and labor of others. Sort of like a parasite or a vampire. Dude, you’re like a vampire. What if the South was full of vampires and slavery wasn’t about unjustly profiting off of human misery because you’re a greedy, racist bastard, what if the South was eating slaves? Like literally eating slaves…”

Whoa…

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is pure 100% cheese. It’s what would happen if Lethal Weapon met Buffy the Vampire Slayer at a party, they both got drunk and sired a kid in Wild, Wild West’s bedroom.

For those of you now imagining crazy Mel Gibson making out with Sarah Michelle Gellar, I apologize. For those imagining Joe Pesci making out with Kristie Swanson, seriously, what is wrong with you?

Abe witnesses his mother getting killed by a vampire. Tries to kill that vampire. And a montage later (because what cheesy 80’s style action flick would pass up a chance for a good montage training sequence), he’s out there killing vampires with his silver lined ax while rising through the political establishment to become the President where he kicks off the Civil War to put an end to the Southern Vampires once and for all.

It all culminates in a fight sequence on a locomotive carrying silver to Gettysburg atop a burning bridge that is just glorious in how over the top it is. And that’s not withstanding the logistics of Lincoln getting the results from the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, collecting all of the silver in Washington DC, having it melted down to munitions, packing it all up, and having it shipped to Pennsylvania in time to make a difference when the battle only lasted for three days. What I’m saying is that I think Abe might have called up his good friends Bill and Ted and borrowed their phone booth to set all this up.

Whoa…

Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is definitely worth a spin if you appreciate over the top bad movies, enjoy a bottle of wine with your movies, or just appreciate good ol’ American cheese. And most of the time, it beats the work of a thousand monkeys, except for that one draft they wrote where MacBeth was a Terminator. That was awesome.

Movie Reviews for people with kids: The Amazing Spider-man

Alright, it’s time for another movie review for people with small kids, which is once again less about finding a suitable family film than it is a running joke about how it’s easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle (without cheating and putting it through a wood chipper first) than it is to get a night out with my wife.

Today’s review: The Amazing Spider-man.

Okay, it was less amazing than it was, well, okay.

After Sam Raimi seriously screwed the pooch on the original franchise with the cinematic abomination that was Spider-Man 3: Dance, Dance, Spidey, it was pretty clear that the Sony had one of two choices: hand the rights of the character back to Marvel with a profound look of shame on their face or reboot that sucker.

They went with the latter, and we got The Amazing Spider-man, another origin story for Spider-man in case you had forgotten the details in the last ten years.

How does it hold up to the original? Pretty well. In fact, I’m going to commit nerd heresy and say I like the Amazing Spider-man better than the original Spider-man.

That’s not to say the movie doesn’t have some pretty big flaws, it does, but so did the original, and most of them were personified by Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson, who thankfully, is absent from the reboot.

The ‘romance’ angle of the original Spider-man movies did not age well for me. It was full of levels of angst, misery, and general  passive-aggressiveness that scientists were concerned it might trigger a singularity of ennui that would burn out humanity’s capacity for emotion and leave us all walking around like mindless zombies shambling through our day trying to find some emotional validation by sharing every facet of our lives with one another in short 140 character or less bursts of speech.

Some scientists say this has already happened.

Regardless, Amazing does away with the general pervasive feeling of misery, which may anger long-time Spidey fans, but was refreshing for me.

Peter Parker is your typical teenager, provided he were played by a 29 year-old movie star with 3% body fat.

The kid is angry at his parents who abandoned him even as he still idolizes them. He’s less a nerd than someone whose manner and behavior isolates him by choice. He gets picked on by one bully after standing up to him on behalf of another classmate. We’re never told he’s particularly smart, but he does later construct his own web shooters. Overall, you get the impression of a kid who is smart, good at heart, but someone who also isolates himself and makes poor decisions because he’s an angry kid.

Rather than treating us to endless scenes of Peter admiring a girl from afar, the movie puts us right at the moment where he decides to ask Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) out and she says yes, which, seriously movie, well done. Then the more they find out about each other, the more they like one another. The overall chemistry is great, there’s no angst (yet), and you get the sense of two people who genuinely like spending time with each other and would be good and lifelong friends even if they got married. Also Peter reveals his superhero identity to his new girlfriend on their first date, which is awesome. I hate the arbitrary secret identity plot that usually makes no sense. If you’re going to be introducing a girl (or guy) to a world of 7 foot tall man-lizards, it’s nice to be honest about it.

Anyway, Peter finds out his dad worked at Oscorp, so he heads off to visit his dad’s old lab partner, gets bitten by a spider, gets powers, hands over a formula that lets his dad’s old lab partner turn himself into the giant man-lizard, and feels sort of bad about it, so he goes out to fight him.

Along the way, the writers remember that Uncle Ben is supposed to die, so he does. Aunt May is supposed to worry about Peter, so she does. And giant man-lizards are supposed to go out and tear it up, so he does.

It’s a flawed film with several dropped plot points, like what was up with Peter’s parents? Did they screw with his DNA in utero in the hopes of carrying out cross species genetic fusion? Why did Peter suddenly stop searching for his uncle’s killer? What was up with the evil Oscorp bureaucrat who suddenly became Sir Not Appearing in this Picture?

But I can overlook a lot of things in an action movie if it’s fun and the characters are likable and the Amazing Spider-man delivers on both.

Movie Reviews for people with small kids: Dark Shadows

Welcome back to movie reviews for people with small kids, the part of the show where I review movies that have been out and reviewed to death by other critics, but which I’m only getting to now because I have two small children and organizing a night out with my wife is as challenging as directing an all honey badger reproduction of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Honey badger don’t care to sing “When You’re in Love.”

And wow, am I behind on my movie reviews. I’ve got four in the pipe for this week. And… wow… is it going to be a long week.

Let’s start with 2012’s Dark Shadows in which Johnny Depp continues his social science experiment to see if women and People magazine will still consider him the sexiest man alive despite the fact that in each successive movie he’s in, he looks more and more like the Queen of Naboo.

Johnny Depp seen here expressing disappointment in your tariff and trade policies.

Dark Shadows is about Barnabas Collins who immigrates to America with his parents, their servants, and the creepy servant girl Angelique who is smitten with him from an early age. His family builds a fishing business, the town of Collinsport, and Barnabas grows up, has an affair with Angelique, but ultimately breaks it off because of the differences in their status, whereupon Angelique is now a witch who kills his parents, magically hypnotizes his new lover Josette into jumping off a cliff, and curses Barnabas into being a vampire while simultaneously cursing his entire family to ruin. And Angelique arranges for a mob of angry peasants to entomb Barnabas in a coffin secured with chains and bury him alive.

And all of this happens as part of the prologue. So yeah, right there is the problem with this movie in a nutshell.

Plotlines whiz by at the speed of a crazed bat or appear out of nowhere or disappear completely and the entire exercise seems choppy.

The romance between the recently freed Barnabas and Victoria takes place almost entirely off-screen resulting in a plot that goes from they just met and she looks like his dead love to they’re in love in the next scene. At one point, a character who’s done nothing really up to that point in the movie turns out to be cursed as a monster which had never been eluded to before, and she tells her family (and presumably the audience) to “deal with it.”

I get the feeling that a lot was cut from the script or movie is what I’m saying.

It’s a Tim Burton movie, so it’s weird, but it never achieves the level of oddity that would make it quirky or interesting, it’s just odd for odd’s sake and the whole exercise feels tired and cynical, like Burton and company are just coasting on the laurels of their past good movies in order to continue cashing a paycheck, and while I can’t blame them for that, I can recommend that you just skip this title. There are worse ways to waste your time (and good Lord, I’ll get into Battleship later this week) but there are infinitely better things to do too. Take the dog for a walk, play catch with your son, macramé yourself a Jack Skellington doll, or rewatch Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands and remember the good ol’ days.

“macrame Jack Skellington”… Okay, seriously, there is nothing you cannot find on the internet.

Movie Reviews for people with Small Kids: Snow White and the Huntsman

And time for another edition of Movie Reviews for people with kids, wherein I review movies that are six months to a year old, not because I’m lazy, but because being a parent with small children it is easier to get a turnip and a wombat to mate successfully than it is for my wife and I to get a night out.

Interestingly enough, having a wombat wake up in bed with a turnip is the plot of Hangover Part 3: the Wombatening.

It’s not. I just like saying wombat. Wombat. Heh.

This week, I take on Charlize Theron, Thor, and a block of wood in the cinematic, uh… experience: Snow White and the Huntsman.

Kristin Stewart shown here conveying the incomprehensible human emotion “Happy”

Let Mortal Wombat begin!

Ready…. Fight!

Alright, so it’s a movie based loosely on the fairy tale. Charlize Theron plays the evil queen, who pretends to a be a prisoner of an evil magic army, so that the Snow White’s father, the king, will fall in love with her and marry her, so she can kill him in their bed chamber, open the castle gates to her real human army, and steal the kingdom for herself and her creepy brother with whom there is an implied incestuous inclination.

All well and good so far, but then the Queen opts to keep the child whose father she murdered and whose throne she just usurped alive, imprisoned in a tower in her castle. She has no reason to keep her alive at this point. She doesn’t know that Snow White is the key to her immortality, she just spares her life, but locks her away forever presumably.

Queen Charlize has not read the evil overlord list.

My noble half-brother (or in this case, step-daughter) whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

In fact, it’s useful to have the list open while watching this movie, because you’ll be able to spot all sorts of problems with Queen Charlize acting like a clichéd evil overlord and not like a woman who just executed a smart, ruthless plan to seize power.

Here’s a list of her shortcomings that I came up with:

I will not order my trusted lieutenant to kill the infant who is destined to overthrow me — I’ll do it myself.

Later in the movie, when Snow White has grown up, the evil Queen discovers that if she just eats Snow White’s heart, she’ll be immortal and powerful forever. The evil Queen dispatches one guy to her prison cell without backup or guards guarding the door to the tower and Snow White promptly escapes and locks her idiot brother into her cell.

• I will hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not know about.
• My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

Snow White’s method for escaping the castle is to slide into the sewers through an open hole that is big enough for a man to crawl through. Amazingly enough, the Queen doesn’t order her minions to block the entrance with a grate or iron bars or something that would let sewage through but prevent people from using the sewer tunnel as an access point to her otherwise secure castle. Suffice to say, this decision comes back to bite her in the butt later.

I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money.

When Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, the Queen’s brother (the aforementioned idiot) suggests getting Thor the Huntsman to go and get her. Thor refuses to do it at any price until the Queen intimates that she can resurrect his dead wife which she can’t do, so, I’m not sure what they thought would happen when he found out, but predictably, he helps her escape.

I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.

Seriously, villains… this never ends well. Stop it.

I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.

Late in the movie, when Snow White has raised and army and stormed her castle and killed her soldiers, the Queen unleashes a flying, shapeshifting, metallic, magical swarm creature that cannot be killed and is wiping the floor with Snow’s troops. The question of why she didn’t just unleash this thing when they were all outside of her castle or why she never used this thing to go breach the castle of her enemy the Duke is never answered.

But having a villain who falls prey to stupid behavior isn’t the only problem of the movie or even the biggest problem of the movie. That falls to Snow White… our aforementioned block of wood.

I’m happy!

Okay, Snow White is what is generally referred to in fiction as a Mary Sue. She is a character whose positive traits are told, not shown to us. She is innately special because… she is. She makes everyone fall in love with her without doing anything, pledge themselves in loyalty and sacrifice their lives and happiness for her because she’s so darn special. But she never actually shows us that. She mostly walks around looking a bit stoned, so that when she finally has a bite of the poison apple, you’re hard pressed to tell that she’s unconscious. If you strapped her to a dolly and kept her upright, you couldn’t tell the difference.

Kristin Stewart shown here conveying the human emotion: Sad.

Chris Hemsworth does a serviceable job as the Huntsman, but really, the story lives and dies by the Queen and Snow White and overall, I was a bit let down.

Given the two movies based on Snow White that I’ve seen this year, Mirror Mirror is definitely the better one.

Snow White and the Huntsman is good for a $1 rental, but not much more.

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Lockout

Welcome back to Movie Reviews for People with Kids. It’s a place for folks (like myself) who find it easier to build a full scale replica of the Bismarck out of toothpicks than secure a reliable and trustworthy babysitter on a Friday night, although sometimes it’s been so long since I’ve had a date night with my wife that I’m tempted to offer the job to the first person I meet on the L.A. subway.

Aw, come on, Honey, kids love clowns!

So I’ve reviewing movies that came out 3 months to a year ago that I find in Redbox when there’s nothing good on TV.

Tonight, there’s action. There’s romance. There’s crazy Scottish gangsters. There’s SPACE PRISON! That’s right, it’s time to look at Lockout.

One man in a facility out to rescue the hostages from a group of terrorists. In space, no one can hear you DIE HARD.

Guy Pearce is Agent Snow. He doesn’t even need a first name. He’s just Snake, er… Snow. So you know things are about to get frosty.

In your face, dude…

Snow is arrested and accused of murdering an undercover agent and is going to be shipped off to MS One… The SPACE prison. Yes, at some point, the United States government has said, “Screw the normal Super Max prisons we could easily build down here on Earth for a few million dollars, we’re going to build a SPACE prison that will cost billions of dollars” and they now incarcerate the worst of the worst in SPACE prison. Where they keep the prisoners in stasis which really kind of makes prison pointless, doesn’t it.

I mean, part of the deterrent of prison is that you’re awake, locked in a cage and your every move is controlled by agents of the state that don’t particularly care for you and don’t mind beating you with batons or tasering you if you step out of line, as well as dealing with all of the other psychopaths who might also want to shank you or stitch a bomb into your colon.

See, Dear, he could teach the children useful first aid skills!

 

Getting sentenced to take a ride into space where you’ll sleep through your entire sentence before being released back into society at exactly the same age and told don’t do that again, seems less like a punishment and more like a holiday. I mean sure everyone you know and love will probably be dead, but you’re a psychopath who’s the worst of the worst so chances are good you’ve already killed them and eaten them yourself with a nice Chianti.

Anyway, I digress…

SPACE Prison! Is being visited by the President’s daughter, Maggie Grace, who is a typical girl in distress who is visiting SPACE Prison! after hearing rumors that the stasis process turns some of the psychopaths into gibbering idiots or even more psychotic lunatics, and her security details ends up setting off a chain of events that ends with her as a hostage, most of the station crew dead, and Snow sent up to get her, find his old partner, get the evidence that would exonerate him, and get everyone happily off the station before the Space Police (Yes, the Space police, what’s your point?) blow SPACE Prison! to smithereens, which appears to be the only job of the space police, because absent some shady Ferengi, there’s not a lot of crime happening in space, people.

No, I’m not saying all Ferengi are criminals, I’m saying the existence of Ferengi should be considered a crime.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the entire SPACE Prison is outfitted with enough firepower and weaponry to fight a pitched military battle in space, because, of course it is. I mean, who knows when the Martians will randomly show up to SPACE Prison and attack.

No, no, this film is too silly for us and that should tell you something.

Guy Pearce does a decent job playing Random 80’s Action Hero #237, and Maggie Grace is equally competent as his reluctant partner and love interest and the movie has all of the requisite steps along the way you’d expect from a big, dumb, 80’s action movie, including plenty of explosions, one liners, and skydiving from low orbit. And a resolution to Pearce’s B-plot that completely and utterly defies any semblance of logic that the film tried to maintain.

It’s a stupid movie, is what I’m saying, that makes no sense if you stop and think about it, so you try not to and just enjoy it for what it is: a modern take on the 80’s action genre.

It’s on DVD in Redbox, it’s worth a dollar and 95 minutes of your time if you look back on the Golden Era of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Russell, and Willis with fondness or if like me, you hear the worlds SPACE Prison! and immediately know that this is a cinematic event you simply must see.