It Wouldn't Be A Trip To Alex's Without Bad Movies

There were two movies I watched over my week away I hadn't seen before. Unfortunately, neither of them was any good. Not that I was surprised by that. I'd heard enough about both to expect it. What did surprise me was how one the films was even worse than I expected, but the other had so little effect.

2012 - I ended up watching parts of this at Papafred's house after I was eliminated in the first two minutes of our second game of Bang!. If this had come out the same summer as Independence Day, I'd bet the younger me of back then would have loved it. The explosions, the nearly constant fleeing, the destruction of notable landmarks, yeah, Early-to-Mid-1990s Calvin would have eaten that up, no doubt. Now though, as I watched them fly their little twin-engine prop plane through the rift that had opened underneath them, and saw a subway come flying out of a tunnel into the chasm, to most likely slam into the opposite wall (though I can't rule out the train landing safely in the part of tunnel on the other side and continuing on, just for the sheer absurdity of it), I was thinking, "Oh come on." I was also thinking about how, yeah, an adolescent me would have loved that.

I couldn't find a reason to care about any of the characters, except to note that some of the deaths seem sort of mean-spirited. Like the movie was saying "This person doesn't deserve to live for Reason X, Y, or Z". Maybe if the movie could have done things in a ludicrous enough fashion for me to laugh, it could have worked in the "Horrible enough to be funny" way some movies do, but it was lucky to inspire eye-rolling when it could manage to hold my attention (I kept wandering into the dining room to check on the progress of the game). Ultimately, I wasn't moved in any particular way while watching this. The fact it was CGI didn't help, but I didn't feel the danger the characters were in while things fall down around them, and it seemed as though catastrophes were always willing to wait just long enough for the protagonists to find whatever they needed to keep moving.

A bit like a video game where there ought to be a self-destruct countdown starting, but the villain waits until you've found or done something to trigger the cut scene where he starts the self-destruct. In this way you make your narrow escape with whatever it was you needed, when the villain could have started it sooner and possibly deprived you of what you were after. It can work in a game where you're aren't perhaps aware the villain is watching, but in this case, where the threat is the world itself, it seems odd, they have enough time to find someone Cusack knows with a huge plane and can takeoff just before the ash clouds arrive.

Punisher War Zone - I'm not going to even harbor the notion this was a good film, but I wonder if it would have worked better for me as a mindless action movie if I'd watched with a different mindset. It's sort of the same problem I think I had with Shoot 'Em Up. I was expecting more of Ennis' Max title work on the Punisher, but it wound up feeling like his Marvel Knights Punisher, which hasn't aged as well for me (especially in comparison to the Max stuff). The accents on the bad guys, the hamming it up of Jigsaw and Loony Bin Jim, some of the violence, and the use of Detective Soap, Frank's tendency to wander around in public view wearing his Kevlar vest with the Punisher symbol on it in plain sight, rather than at least obscuring it under a coat. All of it seemed to be telling me to not take it seriously. The attitude of the Punisher and some of the cops (Budiansky, in particular) says the opposite. They seem to be taking it all very seriously, so maybe I'm supposed to be as well.

If it had been some random movie about a vigilante, it might have worked better for me, but for someone who loves the Ennis Max stuff, it had me sitting there saying things like "Oh, Frank would never shoot people while swinging upside-down by his ankle from a chandelier", or "He wouldn't rush in like that without doing more prep work", or, "Why not use a grenade, or draw them to you?" and so on. At least Alex wasn't enjoying the movie, or he would have gotten pretty annoyed with me. Maybe he did anyway, but I think he was enjoying shredding it too much. So this one did make it to the "Horrible enough to be funny" category.