Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

This must be the month of "crappy snoozefests with too much CGI" given the movies I've seen lately. Between "After Earth," "Oz the Great and Powerful," "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters" and now "Jack the Giant Slayer," I should have made June a themed month or something. This is getting really old, man. I need to shake it up or something. All this expensive but meaningless schlock is starting to wear on my nerves.

"Jack the Giant Slayer" isn't honestly as bad as those other films were. It's nowhere near the CGI-frosted horrors of "Oz the Great and Powerful" or the laughably pathetic acting of "After Earth." That much credit I must give it. It's probably the least bad of the four films on that list. Even while "Hansel and Gretel" was honestly a little more entertaining, I cared more about the protagonists in "Jack the Giant Slayer" since they were actually kind of likeable.

That doesn't mean it was good though. It just means that I wasn't pissed off when the credits started rolling. And the reason I wasn't pissed off was because it wasn't worth it to be since "Jack the Giant Slayer" is such a nothing of a movie as to barely be worth having any emotion at all over it.

What can I say about this? You already know the story. Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is a farm-boy who ends up trading a horse for magic beans, they grow into a giant beanstalk, they climb up the beanstalk, there's a land of giants up there, the giants come down and attack the kingdom, Jack and everyone else defeats them, happily ever after, the end. Just add a whole lot of CGI and a useless princess to rescue to it and you've got your movie. Great, let's move on, shall we?

Alright fine, I can't end it there. Talking about something too much is in my nature, after all. Jack is a standard hero-type who is bland as all hell because there isn't anything particularly special about him besides the fact that his name is in the title of the film. I liked Nicholas Hoult as Beast in "X-Men First Class," but there isn't much for him to do here besides gape at the majesty of the CGI landscapes and grin like a dope every time the princess Isabella (Eleanor Tomlinson) is on screen. Whatever.

They had a lot of leather hoodies in ye olde Darke Age, did they?

The far more interesting character is Elmont (Ewan McGregor), a soldier who is tasked with looking after Isabella, and who leads the expedition up the beanstalk to the land of the giants. Out of everyone there, Elmont is hands-down the most proactive member of the cast and under any other circumstance I'd just assume he was the main character. But alas, he is not. Elmont, a bad-ass who takes charge and performs more heroic actions than Jack does is relegated to being merely a background character who pops in every once in a while to be awesome and then leaves.

He and that glorious mustache are too good for this movie.

There is a side plot involving a dude named Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who I guess is the king's adviser or something, and his attempt at controlling the giants with a magical crown so that he can take over the world. I'm assuming he's the king's adviser since it's always the king's adviser who ends up being totally whacked and evil and traitorous. Why kings even had advisers I have no idea. All they do is turn on you.

All the Roderick stuff just ends up being kind of pointless in the end anyway. He doesn't get much accomplished and fails pretty catastrophically during an exceptionally short reign over the giants. But you knew that was coming anyway. I thought the whole thing was a pretty stupid plan from the get-go considering that the giants are far from immortal or unstoppable, and their numbers aren't exactly overwhelming. Roderick couldn't take over the world with just them even if his plan had worked.

Roderick also is not helped by his incredibly obnoxious and frankly confusing assistant, Wicke (Ewen Bremmer) who is this psychopathic wormy dude whom I believe is supposed to be intimidating but is more annoying than anything else, especially so when he starts killing off characters cooler than himself. But thankfully the film sends him down the gullet of a giant in the beginning of the second act, so we're not dealing with him for long. But since it's PG-13 we can't even have a satisfying death scene for him, because the movie always abruptly cuts away from any significant violence just before it happens. This is common throughout the film, makes it look watered down and wussy, and gets really annoying really fast.

By the way, at no point am I buying that Stanley Tucci is a threat to the king when the king is played by Ian McShane. Ian McShane passes more intimidating things through his GI tract than Stanley Tucci and his little minion. Although "Jack the Giant Slayer" makes McShane, the Eternal Bad Ass himself look ridiculous in chintzy golden armor that looks like paper mache, and keeps it pretty low key. So there is little of Al Swearengen to be found here. What a waste.

Seeing Ian McShane in that absurd outfit causes me physical pain.

I can't even get excited about Bill Nighy playing the head giant, Fallon, although his voice work is, as usual, excellent. That classic Nighy quirkiness is present, although Fallon, like everyone else, is such a cardboard cutout of a stock character that it really doesn't matter that Bill is doing a great job. Again, what a waste.

I totally believe that giant is real. Not at all fake looking. Nope.

I think the most significant idea that "Jack the Giant Slayer" had was to imply at the very end of the movie that civilization advanced to our modern age without hot air balloons, blimps, airplanes, satellites, or a day without total cloud cover considering that the last shot of the film shows a very real and still there land of the giants floating in the sky and out of sight past the clouds. Whatever. It's a dumb ending to a pointless film. I can't even get that mad at it since it doesn't matter.

A standard trailer for a standard movie.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Jack the Giant Slayer" is a pretty looking fairy tale as told through the lenses of the most standard and stock movie making machine you could assemble. It's got skill and craftsmanship on the technical side, but there's no imagination or innovation in the script, and like "Oz the Great and Powerful," it has virtually no soul. It's another 9-figure budget extravaganza that left me feeling like I wasted my time.

Haywire (2012)

Whenever you look at the poster of a movie and see something to the effect of "Starring Professional Athlete _____," it is seldom reason to have high expectations. A person crossing over from sports to acting is a risky venture that at best can seem gimmicky, and at worst can wind up being painful to watch. It's just hard to get excited about an athlete being in a movie.

Now, to be fair, this doesn't always end poorly. Vinnie Jones played European football. Schwarzenegger was a bodybuilder. UFC fighter "Rampage" Jackson made an awesome Mr. T. You've also got professional wrestlers like The Rock, Steve Austin and even Jessie Ventura who went on to be pretty decent actors. Plus, who could forget Andre The Giant in "The Princess Bride?" And of course there's NFL great Jim Brown of "The Dirty Dozen" fame. This isn't always a guaranteed tragedy...

Especially when you consider the incredible stew that former Oakland Raiders can get going.

...but then you've also got Michael Jorden, Hulk Hogan, John Cena, Dennis Rodman and Shaq. I don't care how many awesome action stars the sports world produces, there is no forgetting or forgiving the double whammy of "Steel" and "Kazaam." Say what you will about the rest of the bad actors the sports world has produced, at least Rowdy Roddy Piper could deliver awesomely bad one-liners. But with Shaq, you've got a guy whose film career killed the comic book movie genre for a decade. That puts a damper on the whole shebang. It's like saying The Galactic Empire was pretty decent apart from that whole Alderaan thing.

And do we even need to bring up "Shaq-Fu?"

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah. "Haywire."

Gina Carano is the athlete throwing her hand in the acting ring in this endeavor. The MMA fighter had only been in one film before, the Michael Jai White feature "Blood and Bone," although she was in "Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3" (true story). So for "Haywire," her first headlining role, they did what was either a brilliant or very stupid thing and surrounded her with a cast of some of the most amazing actors around. This my friends...is ballsy.

Think about it. You've got an untested athlete as your main role. Do you really want to put them on the screen next to Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton and Antonio freaking Banderas? Good gravy. If anyone is going to make a newbie look bad, it's these guys. At this point why don't they just throw in Liam Neeson, Morgen Freeman and James Earl Jones to make the bar even higher? Even co-star Channing Tatum, like him or hate him (I think he's pretty decent, actually) has a higher pedigree than Gina Carano. This is a pretty risky venture.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Gina actually managed to step up to the plate and hold her own next to the big dogs. I'm not saying that she's on the same acting level as Michael Fassbender, because it's not even close (although few are on his level), but it amazed me that she was as convincing as she was. She must have been getting some really good advice from her veteran co-stars, because the last thing she came across as was novice. She was confident and had a strong screen presence, which meant that "Haywire" was free to be what I was hoping it would be: a lot of fun.

"Best. Death. Ever."

"Haywire" is a spy movie in the same way that the "Bourne" series is. It's played on a more realistic level, so there's no super-gadgets, and the plot is always, without fail going to involve the hero getting double-crossed by their superiors. It's just the rule. If James Bond were played more "realistically" then they would need a new M each time because Bond would always have to end up killing them at the end of every movie because M would always sell Bond out. Because that wouldn't get old fast. It's actually more shocking if the spy actually has colleges that don't try to kill them.

Spy movie gripes aside, I found "Haywire" to be a very well made and entertaining film. Like I implied earlier, the plot is nothing you haven't seen before, since spy movies have such a rigid formula to their "twists and turns" that they are always laughably predictable, but it handles the story very well. Of course, the big reason most people would want to see it is to see an MMA fighter beating the snot out of A-list Hollywood actors. And that's another thing "Haywire" manages to do quite well.

The action scenes are really quite shocking with how convincing they are. They aren't as brutal as the "Bourne" series, despite those films having a PG-13 and this one having an R rating, but the hits all have a great impact to them. Every punch to the face or foot to the kneecap feels like it hurts. It looks so legit that I found myself wondering more than once if Gina Carano, who obviously did her own stunts, wasn't actually getting punched in the face. It would make sense considering her background, but still. Dang, that looked real.

 

 Ow.

Adding to the realism of the fight scenes was the fact that there really wasn't much, if any music going on during them. Any time Gina was fighting hand to hand, the only soundtrack was the hits and crashes of the actors destroying whatever room they happened to be in at the time. At first it wasn't noticeable, but eventually you do notice its absence, kind of like a void just sitting in the room with you. It doesn't detract or distract in any way, but it does add a uniqueness to the fight scenes which help them stand out from the slew of other movies that are very similar to it.

If I was going to complain about anything it would be two things. The first is that I was never fully on board with the way the exposition was handled. Basically, the first two acts of the film are a flashback of the last few days that Gina is relating to a dude whom she basically just kidnapped, I guess for the purposes of "If I don't make it back you have to tell someone what happened." Every once in a while we cut back to them in the car as the dude asks her "So then what happened?" As a plot device it works okay, but I never really saw the point of the dude she kidnaps. The movie really could have just been told chronologically.

The second thing that bugged me: the deer. That's all I'll say, but trust me when I say that your reaction will be "Well, that was random."

This thing is about to screw with you. Seriously.

THE BOTTOM LINE - I actually really liked "Haywire." I was drawn in by the cast, which contains some of my favorite actors ever, but I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all came together, something more than I was expecting considering the fact that the headlining star is an MMA fighter new to acting. It's a lot of fun. Recommended for a good solid action flick.