Jesus, what a failure.
- Paul Bettany is not good in this. He's just there. No attitude, no presence. The painted-on cross looks goofy.
- Cam Gigandet. Sorry pal, you may be the nicest guy on earth but you simply can not act. I've seen you in Never Back Down, Pandorum, Twilight, The Roommate, Easy A, The Experiment, The Unborn, even Burlesque. There's nothing.
- I haven't seen one episode of Nikita 2010, but Maggie Q might have peaked in terms of badassery in LIVE FREE and in terms of hotness in MI3; she's a complete failure in this one. She's never once looking good, never works in the action scenes and any attempt at doing emotions is just laughable. She's Gigandet bad. Milla Jovovich curb stomps this role. Even Musketeer Milla.
- Karl Urban is in a world of hurt. He's the only one understanding one of the ways this movie could have been any watchable (read: JONAH HEX cheesy) and the camera just works against that direction. Stewart actually thinks this is cool, epic, emotional. Serious. Urban gets a bunch of cool poses, but his character is absolutely one-note
- Christopher Plummer is still alive? He does is best doing Von Sydow in Judge Dredd but gets less scenes to work with.
- There's Charles Widmore from LOST. He's lost, and told to shut the fuck up. So he does.
It's JUDGE DREDD without Rob Schneider, but also without Sly, the cannibals or Armand Assante. This might have one of the dumbest, most cliche scripts I've heard in months. The story is idiotic, there's never any tension, no climax, no thrill, no surprise. The score does not relate to the images seen. Even at 88 minutes it's still slow as fuck. Endless scenes of Bettany cruising around on a futuristic motorcycle in nothingness. Many quiet scenes that are clearly supposed to evoke emotions, like deep sadness, loneliness, regret over lifelong loyality to the church or having been a mindless killing machine for years don't work. Nothing has any impact, it's just moping, wooden acting not even involuntarily funny as in Episode II. Everything just feels stale and dry, lifeless. And the world is boring. As in Dredd, the movie begins in an interesting Mega City and leaves for a mostly empty, dusty desert that is just boring to look at. Without any cool bits like Mean Machine.
Now, the big one, the action. Another failure and I'm baffled why. The fights in Legion weren't bad (in fact I loved every scene with Kevin Durand), but here, there's no momentum, no impact, just Bettany jumping around and throwing Van Helsing left-over gadgets. It certainly doesn't help that all of his enemies look like the shitty CGI creatures from I AM LEGEND (and their sleeping bags? Oh, they'll remind you of said Van Helsing. That vampire cowboy Urban actually does spend time with this drooling legion of CGI penis monsters is just unbelievable. At least VH had three hot chicks, and Roxburgh fun with his flamlboyant overacting) or that it's never clear what super powers a PRIEST actually does have. He doesn't feel like a Blade, you never get a feeling he's actually SO good priests like him replaced the army (in one scene, Q throws stones in the air and Priest runs over them wuxia style - in another, you're supposed to believe Priest dies when he gets stabbed in the shoulder). The action is just horribly filmed, and it's not even because of overuse of slow-motion or shaky cam. It's not that you can't see the cool stuff going on, there simply is none.
And it's the kind of flick that thinks you're stupid. There's a way too long introduction (which completely forgets to show the important past between Bettany and Urban, you get no idea why Urban feels so betrayed), a specific simple scene gets shown several times to remind you of it and any twist and beat gets telegraphed from a mile away. Did I mention that Urban's plan is completely idiotic as well? His plan is to drive a train into one of the big cities, then release vampires to kill everyone. Even though it's idiotic (what does he do in case he wins? hang around with the monsters that look like the one from Will Smiths Men in Black music video?) it could easily work, but he fails at that because he's just notifying the one who'll eventually stop him.
3D is so-so. This makes Jonah Hex look like a really good time. Malkovich and Brolin did a great work. No one does in this one.
