#88 Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) (Colin)

My name is Colin and I love Speed. Not the drug, amphetamine, I don't trust a drug that gets you in the mood for making sweet lurve only to find your John Thomas has shrunk to the size of a pea. I off course mean the 1994 film starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

Professor Homer J Simpson from the Institute of Cinematic Excellence, sums up the plot of the film far better than I can....

'.......a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city keeping its SPEED over 50, and if its SPEED changed, it would explode! I think it was called, 'The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down.'

And the film really is an edge of the seat action packed thriller as you wonder can Bullock keep the same anxious look on her face for the full 90 minutes. Actually I'm being harsh, Bullock was very good in the film and had a great on screen chemistry with Reeves. But it really was Reeves who shined and successfully managed to shake of his Californian surfer stoner dude stereotype. Excellent!

The film was a great commercial success, enjoying rave reviews and making a nice healthy profit. This led to a problem; the studio wanted to do a sequel......

#88 Speed 2: The Boat That Couldn't Slow Down

Plot: Bloke hacks into ships navigation system and sets it on a collision course with an oil tanker. That really is it! There is a reason why the baddie of the movie, John Geiger, (played fairly well by Willem Dafoe, but wasting his time trying to make the dogs dinner of a script come to life), does this and it involves poisoned, revenge, blah blah. I'll be honest, I totally missed it as I was so bored I decided to try to find out how to disable my tracker pad on my laptop as it has an annoying habit of moving the cursor to random places. If you're interested, then for a Sony Vaio it's fucking difficult.

After the roller coaster, fast paced action of the first movie, surely someone at the storyboard meeting should have twigged that the plot for the sequel really wasn't up to scratch. A recently leaked document from the plot outline meeting, would suggest at least one person did.

Dave Madeupname: So, Mr de Bont, (The Director of Speed 2), Speed was a real success and I must say that I'm and indeed all of the shareholders are very excited to be working on this project with you.

Director: Thanks Dave, I'm really psyched and itching to get going. We've got an idea and it's exciting, dare I say it'll smash Speed 'out of the water' *giggles to self*

Dave Madeupname: Excellent, so first off then, where will it be set? A train? A plane? A space rocket? *chuckles around room*

Director: A ship!

*Silence*

Dave Madeupname: *laughs* very good. (Director looks blank). You're serious? Ok...... Yep, we're screwed!

Verdict: They sure were! I mean, who in their right mind would base a movie with the word 'Speed' in it's title, on a ship which barely goes beyond 5 knots?

The problem begins with Keanu Reeves or rather the lack off. Reeves was on board, (for once, no pun intended), for the sequel right up until the last minute. He changed his mind, probably 5 minutes after leaving the fictitious plot meeting above. Actually this is not too far from the truth, once Reeves had read the script he all of a sudden remembered he was taking his band on tour, oh and he's actually involved in another movie. And his goldfish has just been taken ill.

Whatever the real reasons, Reeves dropped out and was replaced with Jason Patric. Here is the second problem, Patric sucks in the lead role, (playing Officer Alex Shaw). Wes nailed it when in his blog he said, 'Jason Patric gets out-acted by a boat’, (spot on and best put down so far sir!). Patric oozes about as much sex appeal as Ann Widdecombe in a mankini, (unless you're called Boris, in which case ding dong), he's as butch as Christmas and as diverse an actor as a lump of 2 by 4! And that's his good points. The film sorely missed Reeves and Patric just does not cut it as the replacement.

Sandra Bullock is also very poor. Annie was a fun likeable character in Speed, now she seems to have turned into a neurotic airhead. Bullock just seems to have turned up for the ride, (seriously, these puns are not intended. There are enough 'dad gags' already). There is no effort, the 'comedy' moments are cringy and embarrassing to watch and this time her character is about as likeable as George Osbourne at an Olympic ceremony.

However, when you get Patric and Bullock together you have the next problem. They act like 2 complete strangers, not like 2 young people in the first few months of a relationship. When Alex decides to propose, it really was a shock because he looks at her about as lovingly he would a pile of ironing. I can only assume Alex needs a green card or something. Overall, Patric and Bullock share about as much chemical reaction and spark as distilled water.

The actual film itself is slow paced, far too long at nearly 2 hours, badly scripted, poorly acted and one of the worst sequels I've ever seen. I was so bored watching this tripe, that I started making crap jokes, (as normal), to get me through it! For example, on board they meet a deaf girl and we discover Alex, can read sign language, (there's no beginning to this man’s talent!). In my head he can't, so when he tells Annie that she says 'you're beautiful', in my head she responds and signs, 'fuck off, I asked where's Neo gone and whose that talentless prick you're with?' Small minds eh?!

When UB40 start playing, (yes really UB40, performing ‘live’ on the boat), I start to wish the boat would just blow up already. But I persevered and I can report that nothing happens very slowly and the big budget ending is spoilt by an extra. Near the end of the very long boring movie, the cruise ship smashes into the island and, as it ploughs down a street, crowds of people run away ‘terrified’. Apart, that is, from one extra who is in a phone booth and does the most half hearted dropping of the phone and looking scared you've seen. It looked more ‘ho-hum’ rather than, ‘Shhhiiiiitttt, there's a big bastard boat heading towards me!’

I think it says a lot about the film when even the extras just can't be arsed!

Summary: It's hard to put into words how bad this film is, but I have tried! I think Simon Pegg sums up sequels best in a recent tweet:

'@simonpegg: I get sequels when the story is continuous. They become instalments in a grander arc but when a story finishes, it should be left alone.'

I couldn't agree more.

Scores:

Speed: 10/10

Speed in Speed 2: 1/10

Overall: 2/10

#88 Speed 2: Cruise Control (Wes)

#88 Speed 2: Cruise Control

In this list there are movies that make me sad because I have to watch them. Not because they are tragically beautiful like Into the Wild or Grave of the Fireflies, but because I’ve successfully avoided watching them since they were released. Speed 2 was the first of these movies.

Annie (Sandra Bullock) and her policeman boyfriend, Officer Alex Shaw (Jason Patric) decide to go on a cruise holiday together. Unfortunately the cruise ship is also the target of John Geiger (William Dafoe), who hacks into the ships autopilot. After evacuating most of the passengers, he makes it so it so the ship can’t be steered or slowed down. As Alex, Annie and the crew try to get control of the ship, they realise that it’s headed straight for an oil tanker and director Jan de Bont realises this film is headed straight to the bargain bins. 

Speed was a great movie. Dennis Hopper was a great villain, Keanu Reeves played Ted (Theodore) Logan grown up as a cop really well and Sandra Bullock was cool and kooky and everything you want Sandra Bullock to be in a movie. It had charm and it had a good chemistry between it’s characters.

But the best thing about the movie though, was the bus not being allowed to slow under 50mph or it would trigger a bomb. Such a great concept, that even The Muppets Tonight parodied it when Sandra Bullock was the guest star (the theatre will be blown up if the ratings drop below 50). It was tense and exciting, but most of all, it was fun. There were so many ways to make things difficult for this bus that it really was one of those movies where you feel genuine exhilaration. Speed 2 was set on a boat.

Not even a speedboat (until right at the end), but a cruise ship…

What was Jan De Bont thinking when he came up with the story for this movie? If you look at the Wiki page for this movie, then you’ll learn that hundreds of ideas were given to him for this sequel. The screenwriter for Speed (Graham Yost – who wasn’t involved in this movie), had a great sounding idea about a plane flying through the Andes mountains, but it can’t go higher than 10,000 feet. Father Ted parodied Speed with a milk float that couldn’t go under 4mph (it's hilarious, watch a clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L90BduGKuTo). Writing this I came up with the idea of a train or something. Basically ANYTHING BUT A CRUISE SHIP!

I guess the only good thing about this boat idea, was locking it on a set course. If they’d had a plot similar to the original Speed and they just had maintain a certain velocity, but could go anywhere, then it would be a case of pointing yourself at Ireland and hoping you don’t run out of petrol.

The fact that this film was released the same year as Titanic, makes it even worse. To me it seems like one of those movies where they try to ride the theme of something that’s popular that year (much like film studio The Asylum does). However, in Titanic when the ship went too fast there was tension and tragedy. By the time something actually happens in this movie, you’ve lost all interest and you really don’t care if the ship blows up, or if the villain gets away with it all.

The lack of acting doesn’t really help matters in this movie either. I normally really like Willian Dafoe, but even he can’t save this turgid mess. His maniacal grinning may have served him well as Norman Osbourne/The Green Goblin, but here it just doesn’t work so well.  Sandra Bullock is kooky, but just a bit flat and she doesn’t have that same charm as she did in the first movie. Jason Patric gets out-acted by a boat.

What makes things worse is the fact that Jason Patric and Sandra Bullock are the worst onscreen couple since Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia. There’s such a lack of chemistry that you could be forgiven for thinking you was looking at the list of classes available to take at Hogwarts.

This film is slow, badly acted and has a script that sounds like it was written in crayon. So that’s now sixteen years of blissful ignorance of EXACTLY how bad this movie is flushed slowly down the toilet. 

Even Keanu Reeves turned this film down when he read the script, and he was in The Matrix Revolutions. I think that should tell you all you need to know. 

#89 Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (Wes)

#89 Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

So hands up anyone who’s ever heard of Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. Nobody? Well I’m not surprised, although I feel that I somehow should be. This movie, which was also a Gameboy Advance game, doesn’t generally appear on any lists of movies based on video games due to the fact that the game was based on an early version of the script. So for anyone out there, who’s looking for bad movies to watch, this can easily be overlooked (let’s face it, movies based on video games are a perfect source of awful entertainment).

Not having heard of this movie, but knowing that it was an action film, kind of made me happy. How bad can an action film really be? With the exception of pretty much every Steven Seagal movie, most action movies can surely be described as a “nonstop, rollercoaster of a movie”, right? Surely reviewers should be searching their thesauruses for words that can be used instead of thrilling, gripping and high octane right? Right?

Former FBI agent Jeremiah Ecks (Antonio Banderas) is called in to investigate the kidnapping of the son of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Robert Gant – played by Greg Henry). He was kidnapped by former DIA agent Sever (Lucy Liu), after she discovered that Gant had injected a nanobot assassin into his sons arm and was smuggling it into the country. Ecks and Sever eventually team up to fight against the corrupt Gant, who was also responsible for the deaths of Sever’s husband and child and who set up a car bomb that had convinced Ecks that his wife was dead (she also thought the same about Ecks and married Gant).

Yes the plot really is that flimsy, but overly complicated at the same time. Such a rare feat for an action movie, that I was almost impressed. It was as though the director, Kaos, decided that the time honoured tradition of a basic plot and loads of cool fights and explosions just wasn’t enough for his movie and he had to try to inject some story into it too. Unfortunately the story was just nonsense that detracted from the fight scenes and explosions.

I think that there’s probably a very good reason that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the king of action movies. He’s bloody massive for a start, so you can maybe suspend your disbelief for a few hours and enjoy him taking on entire private armies (Commando), lethal alien hunters (Predator) or classes of tiny children (Kindergarden Cop… hang on…). He can barely speak his lines, so the people writing scripts for him know not to bother putting in pesky words that may spoil your enjoyment of seeing him killing bad guys (or all humans if you’re watching The Terminator). Of course that is until he does dispose of one and then dispenses an awesome pun, that for a moment stops you thinking this could all be real, but makes you laugh so you can forgive that. So how do Banderas and Liu compare?

Antonio Banderas has starred in many action movies in his career. The excellent Desperado would be my highlight, but he’s also been in the family action trilogy Spy Kids, played opposite Sylvester Stallone in Assassins and even played the classic swashbuckling hero Zorro. So how is it that he doesn’t seem to know how to act in this movie?

His performance was so wooden, that I was worried that if he stood still for too long he would take root. Even Pinocchio would have given a more convincing performance. The last time I saw a performance that was as wooden as his, it was in a booth at the seaside and involved a man with a large nose beating his wife and stealing sausages.

Not only does he make a rather subdued performance in acting terms, but he also mumbles through the script like a he was starring in a school play. A school play about a man whose mouth is full of marbles and who is slowly turning into a wooden effigy of himself. I’m sure this could have been a result of the awful script though, maybe if there were a few more action movie type one liners to say he would have been more spirited.
 

Lucy Liu isn’t much better. She walks around in a trench coat for much of the film not smiling, and that is somehow supposed to convey the fact that she’s a cold-hearted assassin I think (everyone knows that the most important part of being an assassin is looking cool), but a cold-hearted assassin who has kidnapped a boy to protect him. I’m really not sure where they were going with this…

Amongst the bad guys you have Ray Park as AJ Ross, who is underused again (like in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace). Park is a skilled martial artist, but his fight scene against Liu is just badly choreographed. After the success of The Matrix, you’d maybe hope that the standard of martial arts in movies would go up, but unfortunately, this movie is less Jackie Chan and more Jackie Collins.

The action scenes can be described in with one simple word: Explosions. Boy does Kaos like to blow things up. In fact he seems such a fan of blowing things up, but so inept at directing, that a new career in party decorating could just be around the corner for him…

When things aren’t exploding, then Sever is shooting at people. I can only imagine that she didn’t learn her aiming skills at assassin school, but actually in The Death Star Shooting Academy. Her aim is that of the average Imperial Stormtrooper (and not those mysterious unseen ones that Obi Wan Kenobi describes as being accurate shots – but that’s a rant for another day). She certainly likes to shoot though, no matter how many of her targets she misses, as long as she can use a lot of different guns, she seems content. A full list of guns used in this movie can (worryingly) be found here: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Ballistic:_Ecks_vs._Sever

That pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with this movie. It’s all style over content. But whereas in an action film like Point Break, where style is important, nobody forgot that entertaining the audience, even in the parts where things aren't blowing up, is the most important role of the movie.

Simply put, if you like explosions then this really is your movie. I actually enjoyed it a little. It’s not something that I would choose to watch again, but as a Sunday morning hangover movie, you could do worse. Of course you could always do a lot better too, but sometimes a lot of explosions and people shooting at things is all a beer addled brain can cope with. Michael Bay must be so happy at this fact.

#89 Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002) (Colin)

If there is one thing I can not stand, it is video game tie ins with films. Usually a games company will have a ton of generic platform games all ready to put a movie 'skin' onto. So if Warner wanted a video game to tie in with the new Harry Potter film, they'd ask someone like Eidos to produce one for them. Eidos would pull out generic platform game number 5, make the characters of the game resemble the characters off the film, then knock off early for a spiff and kit kat.

This may explain why these games are normally linear and a one dimensional load of drivel. Without doubt the worse games I've ever played were movie tie ins, (eg, Beowulf or The Fantastic Four) and they act only as a means to earning more money for the movie studio. That is, except for Ecks vs Sever.

I mention the whole movie / video game tie in thing, because before Ecks vs Sever the movie was released, Ecks vs Sever the game was released on Game Boy Advance. Based on a early script of the film, it was a first person shooter which looked and played like the original Doom game. It enjoyed critical success and from reviews I've read, was a really good game. After the movie was released a sequel to the GBA game was also released and again was well received, unlike the movie.

So we appear to have one of the only video games which was produced to tie in with a movie, that was actually rather good. Even more strangely the movie has been slated and if you believe the reviews, is inferior to its video game counterpart. I've not played the game, but I continue the hunt for a copy and I will revisit this blog and review once I've played it. But for now I think the critics have been way too harsh and I'll tell you why.

Plot: Thin though it may be, there is a plot!

Former Defense Intelligent Agent, Sever, (Lucy Liu), kidnaps current DIA director, Robert Gant's, (Greg Henry), son, Michael after discovering Gant, who has turned rogue, has injected a nanobot assassin into Micheal's arm to smuggle into the country, (she also dresses him as Marty McFly from Back to the Future, but this is never explained why). Sever would quite like this nanobot, not sure why, maybe she collects them. Former FBI agent, Ecks, (Banderas), is brought in to track down Sever and they become bitter enemies.

During the film we discover Michael is actually Ecks' son and that Gant is now married to Eck's wife. Both Eck and his wife think each other is dead after Gant staged their deaths with a car bomb. Sever's husband and son were also killed, we learn, after a botched mission by Gant. Ecks and Sever then realise that Gant has destroyed both their lives and unite to bring him down.

Obviously they succeed, this is Hollywood after all and the nanobot is recovered and destroyed via a bullet to Gant's arm which contains said nanobot which Ecks presses a button, destroying nanobot and Gant. Phew!

Oh, and along the way, there are one or two explosions.

Verdict: If you are looking for an unique cinematic experience or a film which examines taboos and constantly pushes the boundaries in morality and taste or a cerebrally challenging movie, then this film is probably not for you. If you like guns, explosions and Lucy Liu in a tight black number, then we might have found your new favourite movie!

This film is an out and out action movie and that's it. Plot is thin, dialogue is kept to a bare minimum and every minute is packed with, well, action. It's a Ronseal movie and does what it says on the tin.

The movie is directed by Kaos, which sounds wanky, (it is), but is actually the directors real name, (Wych Kaosayananda), shortened. He obviously knew what he was doing and how this will sound, but fair play, it does slap you in the face with a clue to what sort of movie this will be. A Choatic, (in action, not storyline) film!

The action never stops. It is relentless and if it moves it's either shot at or blown up. If it doesn't move it's either shot at or blown up. I re-read my notes from the first 5 minutes of the movie, (Another explosion, smoking, explosion, drinking, explosion, slow motion walking, another explosion), and it pretty much carries on like this throughout the movie. The pace is fast, loud and over the top.

Banderas is ok in the lead role. He looks the part, grits his teeth in the right places and nearly convinces me he is upset at losing his wife. Or his favourite gun. I can't remember which. He does have a tendency to whisper though and I frantically had to keep turning the volume up so I could hear him and not miss the plot, (luckily there was no plot to miss). I did have to turn the volume back down pretty sharpish though as within 30 second there was another loud explosion!

Liu is equally as good and does her best to do what she was paid to do. Try to look sexy, mean and fire a lot of guns. She must have read the script, looked at her pay check and laughed so hard, she may have done a little wee. This is because she barely says anything throughout the entire movie. I can only think of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 who was paid more and spoke less.

One of my favourite parts involves Liu spending 5 solid minutes just constantly firing guns. As each weapon runs out of bullets, she upgrades and upgrades until she is firing a vehicle mounted machine gun, again for what seems like forever. Now, I wasn't counting the amount of bullets fired, but my conservative estimate would be around 1 million. Total kills was easier to count at just one! Her kill to bullets fired ratio is very poor and she has successfully knocked The A Team off the top spot for lack of dead bodies vs ammo fired!

The ending is in keeping with the rest of the movie and reaches a real crash bang wallop finale. There is some hand to hand combat which reminds me of The Matrix, but unfortunately The Matrix Revolutions. Ultimately though, the bad guy gets killed, Ecks and Sever make peace and several pyrotechnic shop owners in LA take early retirement and move to the Bahamas.

So as you can probably tell, I actually liked the movie, which brings me back to the critics.  I do think they were being harsh, sure the plot is thinner than own brand paint, the acting will not win Oscars and overall, it's just a bunch of meaningless explosions strung together, but I think they miss the point and the point is this is supposed to be just a bit of fun. Sometimes we all need a movie to sit down with a lager and a pizza to, with the sole intention of switching the old grey matter off and watching things go BOOM!  It's entertainment and that is all this movie is meant to be and actually, it's pretty good at it. As for the overall video game / film tie in thing, I've a feeling this topic will feature again fairly soon......

Summary: Basically if your movie's dialogue is shite, the actors are average and the plot is non existent, then chuck in a load of explosions and the audience will watch whatever shit you produce.  Well, that's Kaos theory.

Scores:
Plot 0/10
Explosions 10/10
Overall 7/10 - I rather liked this, although the movie should probably have had a straight to hangover release.

#90 An Alan Smithee Movie: Burn Hollywood Burn (Wes)

#90 An Alan Smithee Movie: Burn Hollywood Burn

For those of you out there who don’t know what an Alan Smithee movie actually is, I shall give you a quick explanation. Sometimes a director makes a movie that is interfered with by the movie studio so much that they no longer wish to be associated with it. If this happens then they could have made the choice to request the directors credit to go to Alan Smithee (this practice was formally discontinued in 2000). If you want to see a list of these movies then you can do so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_smithee

This however just leaves me with two questions... 1) Why aren’t more of the movies that Colin and I are having to endure “directed” by Alan Smithee? 2) When Arthur Hillier (who was also the director of Love Story) asked to credit this movie to Alan Smithee did the studio worry just for one moment that they really did have a pile of steaming excrement on their hands, or did they see this as some sort of clever marketing angle?

The premise of this movie is pretty simple really. What if you make a movie that’s absolutely diabolical, but you can’t credit it to Alan Smithee as that’s actually your name? Alan Smithee (Eric Idle), makes an action movie called Trio, which brings the talents of Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg and Jackie Chan together (all played by themselves). The studio keeps interfering with the movie and eventually Smithee steals the only copy of the final cut and goes on the run threatening to burn it. Whilst in hiding Smithee meets, and is eventually aided, by the Brothers Brothers (Coolio and Chuck D), two independent filmmakers who try to help him negotiate with the studio so he can re-edit it.

Now this actually sounds like a good premise for a movie and bring filmed in a mockumentary style really could have worked quite well. Add to this actors, and even producer Harvey Weinstein parodying themselves and their industry and you have to question what went wrong.

I quite liked this film at the start of the movie. Stallone, Goldberg and Chan were all brilliant parodying themselves and the script actually starts off quite funny, but unfortunately this doesn’t last very long. If this was a Comic Strip style TV special, then it could have worked so much better, but what was about half an hour of good material was stretched into nearly an hour and a half and it just gets pointless and dull very, very quickly.

The script was written by Joe Eszterhas, famous for writing Basic Instinct and Showgirls, which if I’d known beforehand, may have given me more of an idea of the level to expect. In the movie Smithee refers to his movie as being “worse than Showgirls”, and I for a moment was taken in by this self-deprecation (but only for a fleeting second, as I'd already sat through over an hour of this crap before this line). Unfortunately the script is really too up its only arse to be very good.

The person who gets the worst of the script is Idle. Whenever he’s onscreen you just end up cringing at exactly how bad his lines are, none of which are helped by Idles awful performance, at the end of the movie him turning his cap around and saying “cool” is more embarrassing to watch than watching the legs uncrossing scene in Basic Instinct with your mum. You’d think somebody of his comedic talents would be able to spot a terrible script a mile off, but then again you’d also expect that of most of the other actors in this movie.

The Directors Guild of America officially retired the Alan Smithee pseudonym after this film was released, as the name became more widely known amongst the movie-going public (although for a film that only grossed $45,779 in the US, you have to wonder how). I can only assume that Arthur Hillier was thanking his lucky stars that he was able to distance himself from this movie just in time.

If you want to watch a decent mockumentary, then watch This Is Spinal tap. If you want to watch a movie that satires Hollywood and the film industry, then watch The Player. Just do yourselves a favour, if someone gives you a copy of this movie, then take Eric Idles lead and burn it, you’ll thank me for it later.

#90 An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1997) (Colin)

Alan Smithee is the name a director uses when he / she wishes to disown or distance themselves from their movie. For example Chris Sivertson may be quite rightly ashamed of his new movie, I Know Who Killed Me, so in the credits and on the movie poster rather than using his real name, he will use the pseudonym Alan Smithee. This is used by this movie as a kind of an in-joke or in other words, in that the lead character and director is called Alan Smithee and also in the title, the director is credited as being Alan Smithee.  In other words they are trying to be more clever than they actually are!

Plot: Alan Smithee (Eric Idle) has just finished an epic Hollywood blockbuster, but after the studio start to interfere and start making major changes to the picture, Smithee steals his movie and goes on the run. The movie we are watching was supposed to be Smithee's film, but is now a documentary about the film, as the film is now stolen. This is not the greatest film in the world, no, this is the tribute!

The documentary follows the studios attempts to recover the movie from Smithee.

Verdict: When the cast list includes Ryan O'Neal, Coolio, Chuck D, Eric Idle, Jackie Chan, Whoopi Goldberg and Sylvester Stallone, you expect a decent movie. Indeed after watching the first 10 minutes, that expectation grows. The 'A' listers ham up their roles fantastically, especially when one of them is clearly not known for their action hero roles (Chan). Goldberg as a cigar chomping, foul mouthed diva is funny and Stallone's willingness to mock himself lend to some laugh out loud moments.

The problem starts after 10 minutes, once Smithee does a runner with his movie. For no reason the movie slows down and moves along as fast as Bernard Manning to the salad bar. Which is run by a Pakistani gentleman. It does not get going and the story is retold and retold over and over by the characters.

I actually zoned out for a good 20 minutes during the movie and I did not miss a single thing. The situation was as it was. It's a bit like, if you miss Hollyoaks for a month it's really easy to get back into as there is no story whatsoever and what little there was, goes nowhere fast. The style of the film is also rather annoying and at times it seems very confused. Basically it's a documentary and the characters speak to the camera with another minute piece of the plot. However, we start off by being told that this IS the story, i.e, it's already happened, that there is a conclusion and this is the story of how we got there. But then it seems to change its mind and now it's a case of, this is the story, it's still happening, join us as we try to resolve this, (no thanks!).

The other problem is that the movie chops and changes between the characters dialogues constantly. It makes the film feel disjointed, muddled and confused. In fact I think the timeline is a bit skew whiff, as the characters talk about a development that just occurred but they are still in the same room, clothes and time of day that they were in before the event had happened. So not only are they talking bollocks but about bollocks they wouldn't even know yet!

They chuck in a little 'comedy' from time to time but to be honest I think it's just to see if we're still awake, (I wasn't). When one piece of dialogue zooms out and we realise the character is having a blowey, I didn't 'LOL', I was just thinking 'at least someone is getting some enjoyment from this movie'.

I will confess, I already have a problem with Eric Idle in that he constantly shuns Monty Python as he feels it's beneath him and he's so much better than that. Well if this is the type of movie he goes for instead, then he must be living in cloud cuckoo land. There was a mocumentary by the BBC recently, 'Holy Flying Circus', in which Eric Idle, (played by Steve Punt), refuses to do anything unless he gets paid a lot of money. All I can say is I can now see how spot on this impression was.

As for the other actors, as I say, Chan, Stallone and Goldberg play their parts well, but the rest of the cast just add filler to what basically is a 22 minute one off TV comedy, stretched over an hour and a half.

Summary: In F1 they have an expression for when their tyres very quickly turn from high quality and grippy to disintegrating useless crap. They call it 'falling off the cliff' and that is exactly what this movie does, but with a Tom Daley double pike with twist for good measure.

Scores:
Boredom 10/10
Falling off cliff 10/10
Overall score 2/10. If it was based on the last 90 minutes it would be a big fat zero!