Red Dawn (2012)

I love action movie cheese, whether it's "Top Gun" or "Point Break" or anything starring Dolph Lundgren. But there do exist a few films deemed classics in the "badly awesome" category that I am not a fan of. One of those is the original "Red Dawn." I know it occupies a special place in many hearts, but for some reason I could never get behind it.

There's a lot of reasons to like it to be sure, be it the amazing cast or the stunningly absurd plot that screams out for high-octane action movie shenanigans, but I honestly slept through most of "Red Dawn." I have a hard time pointing to exactly the reason why, but there's something about that movie that just makes me drift off into a stupor worthy of post-Thanksgiving dinner. Considering that there's a calculated 2.23 acts of violence every minute of the film (seriously, at the time it made the Guinness Book of World Records), it's quite an accomplishment to make something that action-packed boring, but hey there it is.

I always found "Red Dawn" inexplicably dull, and because of that I didn't like it. Well, that and it was really creepy watching it knowing that there are people in America who look at it like it's a precognitive documentary. Honestly it made me feel a little queasy because it was like looking at the world through the lenses of their paranoid, gun-nut, conspiracy theory laden crazy goggles. It's an unsettling feeling.

That's a thing I want to watch: Alex Jones' spank material.

So sure. Remake it. Whatever. At this point I'm not even going to rant about them remaking everything. At least it's a remake of a movie I don't care about. It could be much worse. And when a movie has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years after being completed (true story, it was shot in 2009), you know you're dealing with some quality material, am I right?

This is going to suck, isn't it?

Well, the answer is unfortunately "Yes, it did suck." This is not a good movie. Not even by the standards of unnecessary remakes is it a decent film. It's barely coherent in its narrative, the plot does the impossible and is even dumber than the original, all but one of the characters are essentially walking cardboard cutouts spouting dialogue equivalent to a dog gnawing on a squeaky toy, and the admittedly plentiful action is squandered by the watered-down PG-13 rating. I would ask how something this easy is messed up so much, but honestly there wasn't much to work with to begin with, so I can't even be that mad about it. It's not like I'm surprised it sucked. I'm just tired.

All that being said, I still liked it better than the original. At least I stayed awake this time.

You know what the deal is at this point with the story, and little has changed from the original in that respect. Very early on, a foreign army invades America, and with a pillaging that would make the beginning of any fantasy movie proud, the townsfolk of Spokane, Washington are promptly slaughtered and interned. Escaping from the invader's clutches is a group of high schoolers who decide to flee into the woods and fight the good fight, calling themselves The Wolverines and eventually throwing a big enough wrench into the enemy's plan as to suggest eventual victory in the near future. Since "Red Dawn" doesn't feel the need to have an actual ending.

Cower in fear, North Korea. She's going to make duck-lips at you.

In the original film the invaders were the Russians. And in 1984, I'm sure that made some sense. In the remake, it's North Korea. It was supposed to be China, but when MGM decided they didn't want to make them mad, since it might eat into the box office sales in...well, China I guess, they changed it to North Korea, a place where barely anyone has electricity let alone a movie theater to go to. It's not even worth it to mention how stupid the idea that they could successfully invade us is. But I'll still say it. That's stupid.

The whole invasion is explained to be possible because of "a new weapon" that destroys all communication or something, kind of like an EMP, except North Korea's stuff is immune due to a MacGuffin they needed for a third act plot device. Of course, the film never explains how all the radios and TVs and communication that was not protected is still working after the invasion, but there I go nitpicking "stuff that doesn't matter" like the buzz-kill I am.

Our main heroes de jour are played by Chris Hemsworth (pre-"Thor"), Josh Hutcherson (pre-"Hunger Games"), and Josh Peck (post-proving he's a terrible actor). There's also Jeffery Dean Morgan and Brett Cullen who show up to throw some acting chutzpah at us, but they are extremely underused. So overall the cast is alright, but then again, among The Wolverines we've also got Adrianne Palicki, who played Wonder Woman on the failed TV reboot, and Isabel Lucas, who was the Decepticon in "Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen" who could turn into a human (since Decepticons can do that now), so I guess we've got to pick our battles here.

"I'm the only reason you're watching this, aren't I?"

When the cast is good, it's pretty darn good. Morgan and Cullen are of course great, but Hemsworth is carrying the movie nearly the entire time, being the best actor of the main cast by as far as Thor could chuck Mjolnir. It also helps that he is given the most interesting character, being a soldier recently back from the war who has some issues, but obviously becomes indispensable when North Korea attacks. Hutcherson is okay, but he has the same problem most of the cast has, being that his character is so anonymous that he kind of fades into the background, and it's a struggle to even remember his name. Even Will Yun Lee, playing the essentially nameless Big Bad doesn't really do much besides get killed via impossible convenience, although he is fairly intimidating.

But when the cast is bad, it becomes borderline unwatchable. The worst offender of this is Josh Peck as Hemsworth's younger brother. I knew I was going to hate this character the instant he showed up as a hotdogging quarterback who ends up costing his team the game because he felt he could win it single-handedly. He was mistaken. And true to that character trait of selfish impulsiveness (which is about the only one he has), he ends up getting one of his friends killed at a later point in the film. I thought that perhaps that may have proven to be a learning experience for him, but nope. Not happening. He doesn't learn anything and ends the movie the same character he started as despite suffering horrendous loss. What a character arc.

And Josh Peck is such an unlikable actor that it really is nails on a chalkboard for me to even look at the damn guy. And it took me the longest time to place where I'd seen him before. At first I thought he was that mattress selling prick from "Devil," but then I finally realized where I'd seen him before.

IT'S THAT LITTLE TURD SMUGGLER FROM "ATM."

Of course it is. Why wouldn't that be the actor they got for "Red Dawn?" He's only the most soul-punchingly obnoxious and irritating actor I've seen since Ryan Reynolds or Dane Cook. Sounds like a great time. Make him one of the heroes. In fact, make him essentially the main character, as he's one of the few who survives till the end. Fantastic. I'm glad I'm watching him in this movie.

Aside from the shortfalls of the cast, the rest of the movie does tend to make itself not boring by having a good amount of bombs, bullets and guys screaming "AAAAAARRGH!" as they shoot the enemy troops, all of whom seem to have the survival instinct of a duck with a sexual attraction to spinning helicopter blades. The problem with all of that is that pretty soon scenes start feeling less like a cohesive narrative and more like a slideshow of explosions that happened in no particular order. "Red Dawn" will jump from scene to scene with no lead-in or establishment of when or even where we are in relation to the thing we just saw, making the story quite hard to follow. And it's not too long before it starts getting really hard to care one way or another.

 It's the amazing Wolverine Brothers, Douche, Square-face and Talent!

By the way, isn't it nice when we don't have to see blood during our sequences of horrific violence? Much like "Alex Cross," there's a shocking moment in "Red Dawn" featuring a sniper rifle. But in this movie, instead of the chest, the person gets shot in the head. But don't worry! Just because the dude would have gotten his head half removed with that large-caliber bullet doesn't mean we have to see blood. Because just like real life, that's a very tidy affair. They wouldn't have even had to wash the carpet he fell on. Man, why can't every violent action movie be PG-13? It makes it so much better!

"Red Dawn" feels to me like a 5 hour long TV mini-series that was trimmed down to an hour and a half and released in theaters. And that compression does make it go by at a very brisk clip, but at the cost of knowing what in the world is happening. I'd prefer it as a mini-series. And maybe if it had been a series we could have actually gotten to know the characters instead of just knowing them as "The annoying one," "The one with the weird face," "The black one," "The one Josh Peck got killed," and Chris Hemsworth. 

I don't know what else to say, honestly. "Red Dawn" isn't the worst remake I've ever seen, but some of that probably has to due with the fact that I never liked the original. So even if it did suck, hey it's no skin off my back. I just don't care.

Check out the trailer for "Red Dawn." BTW Chris Hemsworth is not nearly as prominent in the actual film. Of course.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Red Dawn" is relatively harmless, and the action is admittedly plentiful, but it's ultimately not worth the time or effort it takes to get the disc, put it in the player, go back to the couch, hit play, chapter skip through the previews and commercials, play the movie, and then sit there for an hour and a half. There are better things you could be doing.

ATM (2012)

Ah. Hello, American Investor. Welcome to the third and final part of my "IFC Midnight Trilogy Weekend Thingy." For the past three days I've been watching some movies from one of my favorite film distributors, IFC Midnight, and writing down my thoughts about each one. The first film, "Kill List" was an intense, tripped out crime drama that I found to be quite good. The second one, "The Corridor" would have been more enjoyable had it made a bit more sense.

For the last film, I took a look at the thriller, "ATM." Like the other two, this one was sold to me on the premise alone. All I did was read the back of the case. Other than that I had no idea what I was in for.

Reading the description I thought that "ATM" had some promise. The concept was that three people are trapped inside a walk-in ATM in the middle of the wintery night by a masked man who won't let them out. I'm sure that very concept sounds dumb to some people out there, but keep in mind that I was one of the few people who liked "Phonebooth," so you can't blame me for being slightly optimistic.

I think the thing I like about movies like "Phonebooth" is that they really tend to humanize the characters. You really get to know someone when you're trapped in a box with them for a few hours, and as long as the actor does a good job, there's some real drama to be squeezed out of a situation like that. I mean, as long as the characters are not horrifyingly stupid. I mean, can you imagine being trapped in a small space with a bunch of absolute idiots?

Wait. That sentence sounds eerily like foreshadowing. What the hell am I in for?

Well, I guess it had to happen eventually. I had a feeling that I may finally come across an IFC Midnight film that I hated in this little experiment. And well done on that, because "ATM" was freaking terrible. I hated this goddamn movie. Hated it. Hated hated hated hated it.

I almost want to watch the film again, and from beginning to end chart down and record on a minute by minute basis everything about "ATM" that pissed me off. Trust me, that could fill a novel, but most of it would be me simply typing YOU ARE STUPID as hard as I possibly could type it without breaking my keyboard, so it would get redundant pretty quickly. That and I would have to watch "ATM" again, and screw that.

Okay, so let's get this over with, because the less I have to relive the experience of watching this turd the better. The film begins with David and Corey, our two male leads. David is played by Brian Geraghty, who you may remember from "The Hurt Locker," and he's playing your "average Joe," which means he's quite bland and has no real characteristics that make him memorable in any way. Corey is played by Josh Peck, who you may remember from nothing unless you watch Nickelodeon, and he's the comic relief, which means he's the biggest douchebag you've ever had to suffer through.

God, just looking at him makes me want to put my fist through the monitor.

Just imagine if some sick mad scientist combined Jonah Hill and Dane Cook, made him a fratboy with a New York "Ey, buddy, I'm walkin' 'ere! Fowgitabowdit" attitude, then got that abomination onto the Multiverse drunk, and put him in a stressful situation where he could not physically stop talking because of nerves.

Isn't it a special occasion when you just know the next hour and a half is going to be like reeds under your fingernails after a character has been talking for less than ten seconds? And the amazing thing is that I really do believe that "ATM" wants us to like this piece of septic runoff. The movie honestly wants me to NOT want him dead?! At this rate one of us will be dead soon either way.

Don't you dare try to stop me...

Rounding out the cast is professional Nichole Kidman clone, Alice Eve as Emily, who is meant to function as David's love interest. I say "meant to" because what she actually does is provide 110 lbs of dead weight that does nothing useful at all, and simply sits in the corner, flails about, and whines "I can't!" whenever she is asked to contribute to their escape. What I love most about that is the fact that on the interview on the DVD, Alice referred to her character as "strong." Lady, your character is as useful as Princess Peach is to Mario. Don't flatter yourself. Your character sucks and you know it.

So the three of them wind up going to the ATM in the middle of the night, and we find the first dumb thing of the movie. David seems to think that at 1:35 AM, when it is literally -3 degrees outside, it's a good idea to park about 100 feet away from the ATM. He parks halfway across the damn parking lot. Perhaps he read the script and knew that would make the killer's job way too hard if the car was closer.

"Jerry, I don't see nothin'!"

"No, jus' kip lookin' dare. Does'r'sum noice crappies right in dare."

"Oh yah, Jerry, now I sees 'em. Oh yah, dem's good eatin's."

#ijustwroteabettermovie

Then, when they are all inside the ATM, the killer just stands outside. He never says a single word. I'm serious, too. Not once in the entire film do we a) hear the killer speak or b) see his face. Hell, I can't even be 100% sure that it's a "he." At no point do you get the slightest explanation as to why he's doing what he's doing. And I know what they're going for with this: the idea is that it's really scary when there's no rhyme or reason to violence. But even the most chaotic evil villains tend to have some kind of reason for it. I mean, The Joker had a method to his various kinds of madness. And when he talked about it, that's when you realized how sick and scary he was.

Imagine if The Joker hadn't said a word in "The Dark Knight?" Do you really think that scene in the hospital where he turns Harvey would have been the same if he had just handed him a gun and pointed to Harvey's coin? No, it would have been stupid. Instead we got dialogue like "Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos? It's fair." It's at points like that when we see how twisted and warped The Joker is, and that's what makes a memorable villain.

Seriously, Team Rocket is more intimidating than this guy.

There's so much stupid going on that it really becomes difficult to list it all. The most problematic thing about "ATM" is that it asks us to believe that the killer has them completely screwed when I lost count of the number of times that they could have made a break for it without the killer ever knowing. Because here's the kicker: the killer leaves all the time. On several occasions he's snooping around out back, just doing whatever, and the three doofuses just stay there like he's right outside the door. Usually they end up having the same conversation every time consisting of David and Corey switching back and forth between wanting to stay and wanting to go (seriously it's like the script flipped names at points as far as characters state of mind goes) and Emily whining and saying "No! You can't go out there! Please don't leave me!" because there's no way she's attempting to survive this, and she has to drag everyone else down with her.

These really do become forehead slapping painful to watch, especially when it's paired with dialogue like:
David: "I can make it! I'll be halfway across the parking lot before he knows I'm gone!"
Corey: "Yeah?! And what about the other half?!"

"Me and my Tin Tin hair will run like the wind!"

Ugh. Just ugh. That's all I can say to that stupidity. I mean, what do you want me to say to a guy that doesn't realize that, assuming the killer is not indeed The Flash, David will probably be out of the parking lot by then? Does Corey really think that the killer can run more than twice as fast as David? See what I mean about the whining? It's an hour and a half of this.

And while I realize that not everyone is capable of defending themselves in a freaky situation, I really can't get behind characters who are so disinterested in surviving. For example, I counted no less than 5 objects inside the ATM that the characters could have used as weapons to defend themselves, and many of those would have probably been pretty effective, especially if they attacked the killer together.

And before you go off thinking that perhaps they didn't have it in them, guess what? They totally kill a guy they think is the killer. Yeah, that probably needs a little explaining. About halfway through the film, a guy wearing nearly the exact same outfit as the killer walks into the ATM. Corey and David immediately jump him, beat the holy hell out of him, and David ends up strangling him to death with a cord. Now, why the killer let this guy just walk into the ATM when he'd killed two other people at that point for simply being in the vicinity I have no idea. But that's not the point.

My point is that the two of them took a guy down, and they are both clearly okay with the thought of killing the person tormenting them. And yes, they are greatly upset by this intensely stupid occurrence, but the fact remains, they have it in them to take someone out. So why don't the three of you grab that steel trashcan, that bottle of liquor and that pen and open that door, tackle that parka-wearing nutjob and start swinging, smashing and stabbing until he no longer occupies this realm of existence!

What? Did you use up all your encounter and daily powers or something?! KICK HIS ASS!!!

Oh, I'm sorry, I forget. You must not want to live. And you know what? After seeing this movie, I really was rooting for the killer, because he was doing the world a favor by killing these idiots.

And there is no scene that exemplifies that more than a scene near the back end of the film where David and Emily, as the killer is pounding on the back wall of the ATM, in other words CLEARLY in no position to know where they are, and telegraphing exactly where he is, run outside to aid Corey, who was stabbed earlier during his escape attempt. After making it to Corey, they pick him up. Now, at this point I should remind you that the killer is still behind the ATM, and does not know they're gone. There is also a functioning car not 20 feet away from them. For $10,000, what do they do?

That's correct! They drag Corey back inside the ATM to die of his wounds! Because THAT makes sense!

YOU DON'T DESERVE LIFE.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "ATM" is bad. Ungodly bad. I can't remember ever seeing a group of protagonists I hated more. This is making my "Worst of 2012" list. It's not even enjoyably bad. It just hurts. Skip it, and punch anyone you see watching it in the face.