Reviews

Wow. I would like to have been a fly on the wall when this piece of utter detritus was first pitched. I have not seen a movie so ridiculous, so badly written, so comically badly acted, so full of terrible clichés in decades, if ever.

Cung Le is devoid of any acting talent and would be well advised to not quit his day job, whatever that may be. Dolph Lundgren is obviously "past it" and looks like a total alcoholic has-been in this horrible production.

Blood flows freely, people die like flies, but acting and any genuine character development are absent and might not even have been able to rescue this turkey. I started laughing out loud at one point when even the fight scenes were so preposterous that even a four year old would not have believed them.

Save your money. Don't even wait for it to go to cable. Just don't go and say you did. You'll be better off.

What a ride! After having wasted 110 minutes of my life watching A Certain Justice - Puncture Wounds because I pressed the wrong button on the website purchase screen, I righted my wrong and treated myself to The Equalizer, which was the perfect antidote to one of the worst movies ever made.

Denzel gives a stellar performance. The plot has a few question marks, most of which are cleared up satisfactorily in the run of the film, but basically this flick has it all - action, action, action. I remember feeling just as excited when Bruce Willis and Danny Glover appeared in the first Die Hard.

The characters are well portrayed, the brutality is realistic and not utterly gratuitous, the empathy viewers feel is tangible. The plot unfolds like a good book and takes us through everything we need to stay glued to the screen and on the edge of our seats. The supporting cast is very good, but this is definitely a one-man show - and the credit goes to Denzel Washington.

I hope they make a sequel...and that's something I rarely hope or ask for!

Color me tickled - two of the most talented actors out there - Morgan Freeman and Scarlett Johansson in one movie, and Sci-Fi to boot!

After reading all the "goofs" and other demerits people love to post here, my response was a resounding, "So who cares?"

A movie is supposed to be a little bit of escapist heaven. A few hours off from life. A break in the continuous hammering from reality which most of us endure daily, hourly, minute by minute.

Lucy is an excellent escape. The end, almost spiritual, along with some of the wonderful pearls of wisdom that drop from Lucy's lips throughout this truly entertaining film alone were worth the ticket price.

And as far as the "myth" that we only use 10% of our brain being a fallacy, I personally have met many, many people around the globe who made me wonder if they were even using 3% of theirs. So, true or not, the "myth" does make for a rollicking good time, supported by a truly entertainment value provided by Johannson, Freeman and a cast of unknowns (well, at least to me before this!) who all did their best to make a marvelous bit of celluloid.

Go see it. And enjoy some popcorn, too. Lucy is prime popcorn-munching fare.

To Ehren Kruger, Michael Bay, Ian Bryce, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammar, Shane Dyson, Nicola Peltz and a cast of the hundreds of other equally talentless hacks who should be remembered for this, the worst movie of all times.

Sung to the tune of L Is for the Way you Look at Me, with heartfelt apologies to Nat King Cole, Michael Buble and absolutely anyone else who has ever performed this wonderful tune with its original lyrics.

S is the for suffering I endured

H is for making me want to hurl

I is for the very extraordinary inanity

T is for the time you stole from me

and S**T is all that you gave to me

S**T may all your careers be from here

S**T stinks no matter how you disguise it

S**T is what your this crappy film will always be!

What's not to like, I thought? It's got big names - Christian Slater, Donald Sutherland, Timothy Spall; it has action and the plot sounds feasible, plus it's in Sofia, which I have never seen...

Well, here's the truth: The rest of the cast is world-famous, too (in Bulgaria). The plot is so bad, I often found myself wondering if this was a high school drama class group project - you know, "Class, write your own screen play."

We open with a gent carrying an ominous briefcase entering a restaurant, apparently in Paris. A little girl swings nearby, giddily laughing and staring at her parents nearby... it is so obvious that the man with the briefcase must be an Islamic terrorist that the constant repetition of the scene throughout the film makes the penultimate bombing flashback completely anticlimactic.

This little girl is reintroduced to us in three incarnations - an ESL teacher in Sofia, as an exotic (but putrid) belly-dancer in what apparently is supposed to be the closest thing Sofia has to a titty-bar, and as a brazen, sunglasses-wearing stereotypical ice-cold killer assassin. The oh-so-clever use of wigs apparently is supposed to not only fool main protagonist Christian Slater into believing the woman to be separate people, but also the audience at large, and the rest of the cast as well.

The assassin, we are told, is a vigilante who has apparently been picking off Islamic fundamentalist targets one by one. We are privy, however, to the fact that she gets her targets via mysterious mobile phone texts.

Enter Donald Sutherland as the U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, who is Christian Slater's boss. Slater is an attaché at the embassy who is mainly concerned with the spread of English as a Second Language teaching in Bulgaria. Ambassador Sutherland decides that Slater should instead work with the (crooked, of course) Bulgarian police to solve the killings, because, after all, local authorities are incompetent (Bulgarians). Slater is, you see, an ex-FBI agent who left "the Bureau" because his wife and child were killed earlier and he is "trying to forget" everything. Mind you, this is dribbled out bit by bit throughout this long-winded, badly written epic production.

Intermingled with all this exciting (yawn!) action is a bunch of scenes with Timothy Spall, who is apparently a brilliant psychiatrist who just happens to be befriended with Slater's character and just happens to be the shrink of the wig-wearing assassin in all three of her persona. He, like everyone else in the film, is totally surprised by her cunning use of different wigs and has no clue the three patients are all one and the same person, probably because he spends most of the sessions with them "perfecting" really bad pencil sketches of them instead of actually asking them any deep questions.

Slater meets the wig-wearing wonder woman the first time at a very badly acted ESL school scene in which he is apparently functioning in his nebulous attaché capacity. He meets Wiggy the Assassin again with Timothy Spall as a belly dancer in scenes featuring the most appalling attempt by Slater to look as though he is not only in love, but in total lust, with her when she does some of the worst belly dancing ever caught on film. He is apparently supposed to be totally aroused by her even though his facial expression is more like someone who is about to vomit; perhaps the director should have asked Slater to achieve an erection and then zoomed in on the bulge in his trousers (if there is one big enough) to make perfectly clear that it is arousal he is trying to portray.

Intermingled between all these apparently human-interest building flashbacks and flash forwards, we are privy to the various assassinations and, bit by bit, how Wiggy came to be the apparently confused mess she is today. Each time she flashes back to her childhood in Paris, we see a little more of the bombing which killed her parents. Each time she goes to Spall the Shrink, she "blacks out" or "steps away," and occasionally we see flashbacks of her undergoing electroshock therapy or being confined in a padded cell in what is obviously a mental institution.

Everything culminates in the climactic "final" assassination: Wiggy is tasked with bumping off a bigwig "Islamic terrorist leader" who arrives in Sofia to fire up the "troops" so that "Islam can take over the world." Slater, who has in the meantime put together (in a host of very bad scenes of his doing supposed detective work at his embassy desk) that Wiggy's three persona might be the same person thanks to a faded tattoo on her right upper buttock, happens to catch sight of her and tails her to the site of the planned assassination. Here, the two of them engage in some very badly acted oriental martial arts style hand to hand combat which involves steel pipes placed handily on the ground nearby. Slater gets his butt kicked, assassination goes forward, the end is nigh and I won't tell you any more than that. If you really want to know, watch it yourself; suffice it to say it is hokey in the extreme.

My advice to Donald Sutherland: Find a new accountant if you needed the cash badly enough to be talked into making this dog. Same for Slater, along with the counsel that he may not want to do anymore scenes in which he is supposed to be in lust, smitten or horny for a woman as nobody was buying it. To the screen play author: Please don't quit your day job; your efforts are in vain and wasted. You have no talent; please refrain from further writing!

The Munsters, that kitschy, silly series some of us remember from growing up and being parked in front of the "boob tube" for hours has been lovingly and excellently given a new lease on life - 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

The pilot episode which easily could have been 90 to 120 minutes to really give us all a taste of just how excellent TV can be, was a smash. The acting from all participants was brilliant, especially the parts played by Jerry O'Connell (Herman), Portia de Rossi (Lily), Eddie Izzard (Grandpa) and Charity Wakefield (Marilyn).

NBC seems to be picking this series up and it will be a regular on my to watch list if it continues as brilliantly as it has begun.

One of the worst movies of all times! Acting is so horrible, the whole thing is a blast to watch and if on hallucinogenics (I wasn't) it would probably be even better. Sets look like they were build out of cardboard in someone's garage or basement, and the space ships seem to be constructed from old detergent bottles and mason jars. The script is so bad it made me laugh way too often. The best part was the "pirates," dressed in purple "nurse" costumes with mini-skirts and knee high silver boots! There's something for every stereotypical U.S. teenage male in this flick - a half-hearted female cat fight between lead "pirate" and the blonde bimbo captain (who has the best lines i the film), monsters that make 1950s black-and-white B-movie creatures look sophisticated, plot "twists" that evidence the writing skills of high school drop outs. The dialog and situations vary from the pubescent wet dreams of 15-year-olds to the worst of amateur night in screen writing class. The special effects (e.g. monster teeth) look like they were ordered from the back cover of a comic book, the "special effects" are cheesy deluxe! All in all, entertainment deserving of parody and not bad for a late night fueled by insomnia!

Here in Kuwait we take what we can get in English, especially if you don't know Arabic. This clodhopper came on one of the local movie channels and since the other choices this evening were even worse, I gave it a try.

I have rarely seen a more incompetent, badly written piece of shlock. This one takes the cake. Obviously the budget was low and what there was was spent on the sole "name" star - Stephen Baldwin, as could be plainly seen from the ridiculous sets used for ground control as well as the shuttle interior, which looked like it had been recycled in slightly updated form from one of those wonderful 1950s "C" movies.

The plot was just horrible, with so many ridiculous blunders and plot "twists" that the end product was ridiculously sophomoric. At one point I wondered aloud if this had been a high school drama class script, it got that bad.

As the "goofs" section points out, throughout the movie when the shuttle is flying around the moon and in the chasm, you can hear jet engine sounds which I found not comical but just sad. The actors themselves toss out their lines so totally unconvincingly and devoid of any emotional range that I think some of the lesser-known ones like Amy Price-Francis and Dirk Benedict were just phoning in their performance to get their (probably minuscule) paycheck.

Don't waste your time on this piece of dreck. If I were Stephen Baldwin, I'd been trying to get this one expunged from my filmography, it's that bad...

The sad thing about "Earthstorm" is that it shows to what pathetic depths the once-proud SciFi Channel has sunk. What happened there? There is still a huge market for science fiction, but NBC Universal apparently chooses to disregard those of us who like this genre and instead fill their broadcast schedule with clunkers like this as well as "pro wrestling," which is definitely fiction, just not "science fiction."

What a boatload of pure, unadulterated hogwash. Shame on Helen Mirren, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, and Ed Harris for being in this piece of absolutely Bush-Patriot-I'm An Amurrican Hero riddled crap. From Nicholas Cage I would never expect more, he is one of the world's lousiest actors anyway... I mean, have you ever wondered how come a piece of firewood seems to have more emotional range and depth? No spoilers here, none needed. This movie should be avoided at all costs, except if you are trapped on an airplane or possibly in prison or some other confined space with no other choice available to you... In my case, I was held hostage by a German woman I know and forced to see the dubbed version of this piece of utter detritus. I can tell you, dear reader, that having only shortly before-hand been subjected to the sheer agony that is Alvin and the Chipmunks by my nieces, 12 and 8, on a visit to the U.S. over Christmas, that piece of sheer crap was a million times better and ultimately more deserving of every prize that could be thrown at it than National Treasure: The Book of Secrets, especially if you see it dubbed in German. There is no greater "treat" (other than possibly being forced to eat dog excrement for dinner?) than hearing lines which must have been unbearably bad in English come out of the single-emotion, no-talent lips of Nick Cage as Ben Gates. And I pity poor Riley Poole for having accepted a terrible role as sidekick to an idiot in this ultimately boring, totally predictable piece of rotgut which plays to all that patriotic crap which has been rammed down the throats of Americans (and thus the world) since the 9/11 attacks on New York in the name of "patriotism" by the fascist Bush regime.