Reviews

How is it that terrible movies like this consistently get fairly high rating on this site? Anyways on to the review.

Overall - Bad movie, this movie is slow paced, meaningless, lacking in characters and plot, and attempts to cover this up with a ton of music.

1. Gosling takes ages and ages to respond to anything, and for no reason. None of the dialogue in this film is particularly meaningful or dramatic, yet it takes Gosling up to half a minute to answer simple questions, and he does this for the ENTIRE movie. It drags basic everyday conversations into drawn out moments of awkward silence and makes Ryan come across as some sort of serial killer.

2. Slow motion overload. For a film called drive there isn't a lot of speed to this movie. Every other scene is shot in slow mo, and for seemingly no reason. Every time Ryan turns his damn head it becomes slow mo time.

3. Flimsy plot doesn't hold up. This storyline is crap, it is pretty basic, but because the underlying plot is so basic and it is so drawn out it is like watching an epic c rate movie. Epic as in slow and pretentious. Even the parts meant to be meaningful are not. Such as the last violent part, the one before that, the central conflict. Basically a criminal guy puts some money down on a race car so that Gosling can make some money driving it and split profits. His apparently retarded brother/partner or something decides he will steal from the East Coast mafia by knocking over a pawn shop. Correct, criminal masterminds best idea is robbing a pawn shop? No, he will actually set up a pawn shop robbery and then double cross them. But not until they get the money into their car, morons.

4. Violence in this film is gratuitous when it happens, which is rarely. I get the feeling they put it in just to keep people awake from all the slow mo shots of absolutely nothing going on while shitty music blasts.

5. I should have put this one first, don't see this movie because it take FOREVER for literally NOTHING to happen, as well as dragging out a fairly simple storyline that could have been done in half the time. Also, no real character development, at all.

I will give this movie 3 stars because there are some tense fighting sequences and some cool action and some decent camera work, but I would not recommend this film.

1. The camera work is not very good, it is mostly designed to try to thrill you. This means that you get way to much movement of the camera, and some action scenes have so many cuts they could give you a seizure. Even a scene in a room where characters are talking the camera moves annoyingly when you wish it would just stay still for a second.

2. Let's get this out of the way quick, the plot is nothing to write home about. The premise set up in the ad campaign is misleading. It goes 1 Ruthless Crime Lord, 20 elite cops, 30 floors of hell. In reality the ruthless crime lord is some guy who rents apartments to criminals, but he is ruthless. The 20 cops are mostly new recruits and about 15 are instantly killed off so not really 20. And finally the movie covers 15 floors, but the first 7 are covered in a montage so there's that.

3. Action. Well there is some good and bad here. There is some gore and brutality which can be intense but also feels as though they added it in solely for shock value at times. Too much CGI blood. There are fistfights, these are a mixed bag. Some fights are pretty awesome, while others seem uninspired, some people get kicked in the leg once and they go down and are out of the fight, same with some punches, it gets disappointing. In one fight the main guy is trying to hide from guys with machetes, the floor is littered with tons of weapons from guys who just tried to kill him and he has loads of time but this is an action movie so he obviously doesn't grab one. The action starts out cool but then you start to get mundane fights where he mostly just pushes people or doesn't really do anything spectacular at all, kinda hurts the film. Then the movie takes a hit when all realism goes out the window and you get fights that just don't matter anymore. There are 2 fights in the movie that just drag on forever. There is no meaning, people take massive hits that have no effect on them whatsoever multiple times and it drags on before finally ending. A guy gets his head smashed into a concrete floor very hard several times and keeps fighting. And this after he has been hung up and beaten in the guts for minutes on end. By the time it ends it feels as though you have watched the exact same moves 5 times already, especially the last fight where you see the same moves literally done the exact same way, same camera shot and everything multiple times, and some of these moves are pretty mundane. I felt as though I had watched 1 fight 6 times when it ended and was not impressed at all. That said there is indeed some cool stuff but by the end it feels like a mixed bag of very neat moments and long periods of uninspired mediocrity.

4. Finally there is one guy in the movie who looks white and cannot fight at all and appears in a fight scene he just looks awful his only move is to throw a 1-2 punch and then push a shelf on people.

I don't know if this will actually contain spoilers but I decided to check the box anyways just in case. This movie is garbage, unbelievably boring and cliché. Remember the exciting commercials? Well forget about them, the movie is incredibly boring for the most part. Two lead characters are actual seals, and unfortunately they are worse actors than guys from a Burger King commercial. You get to watch them deliver awful lines and also a terrible narration that gives away the end instantly, and lets just say that this ending is (Spoiler) something you would expect from a movie about a soldier and his wife about to have a child *hint*. You get to watch some horrible shaky cam stuff and some good camera work, and also some C rate briefings - apparently navy seals have very vague, casual meetings that explain nothing. The main villain's motivations are so obscure and outright stupid it seems like the writers were scraping the bottom of the pan for ideas, and then they threw in Muslim just for good measure (it's bad). Also it rips off the film Swordfish in a big way. Everyone in the movie sounds as though they are reading their lines just off-screen from some billboard or something, you might as well watch cardboard cutouts act. The battles have some decent parts but by and large are carried out with all the intensity of an accountant doing paper work. Also most battles involve the seals entering from a single door and advancing straight at the enemy who fails to hit any of them and firing without ever missing like some sort of aim-bot - it takes all the intensity out of battle, other than that they constantly get headshots from the backs of fast moving vehicles over rough terrain, so yaaaaa. Combine this with so much patriotism it could make your eyes bleed and that is the experience of watching this movie. You have been warned.

Why do people even make movies like this? Oh ya, because guys will be dragged to them by their girlfriends and they will still make a profit. Basically this movie is like any other remake of an old, boring horror movie: same old, same old. Sensationalist (meaning bad) acting, too many teenagers, retarded plot, people being stabbed by a dude who just shows up out of nowhere (how original). The characters in this movie even talk about horror movies and all the clichés, and how the killer must 'one up' these scenarios. Despite this, the filmmakers clearly had no ideas of their own, as they do these very same scenes they were discussing, and do not, indeed, up the ante whatsoever. Wes Craven is an asshole, and a shitty director/producer/anything to do with movies and he is getting rich off of this crap, so stand up, and say no to this piece of shite that brings nothing new to the table.

"In Bruges" apparently has some sort of fan base going on, with reviews on this site saying it might be the greatest movie of the decade. All I can say is that standards for movies are at an all time low. I will try my best to avoid giving spoilers for this movie. Basically about hit men in hiding, contemplating about their chosen profession, In Bruges seems like it should have a darker tone for a movie. Unfortunately, the result is a mix between some weird, heavy drama, and some terrible lines that aren't funny. We have the more sophisticated guy obviously paired with the younger retarded guy who botches his first job and feels the urge to yell whenever he's joking just in case you missed it, because the jokes in this movie are pretty bad. Add in some obscene language and it's all hilarious right? The only way this movie is entertaining is if you don't care about the plot and like midget jokes, but even then, the movie keeps throwing on a more serious tone that contrasts pretty terribly with the whole premise of the film and the comedic sections. Basically, In Bruges is a failure because it doesn't stick to any particular style and in so doing messes both of them up.

OK, maybe I'm being a bit hard on this movie as it is from the 1950's, but still. The main character, a doctor, could have been played by a block of wood, with the same level of emotions and depth. This movie is about pods that replicate humans without emotion in order to take over. This movie was remade as The Invasion recently. Anyways, back to the 50's. The premise sounds good, but it actually isn't, seems these pods can just take the form of people and when you sleep, they just suck your mind out. Wait, What!!! ridiculous, and then you are possessed and they burn the replica, convenient. The doctor and his friends and girlfriend attempt to solve the mystery of why people are acting funny in town, and overacted performances are everywhere. Women screaming, and a voice over that makes it seem like some sort of film noir. A love interest between the doc and his girl is a secondary plot line, giving the director an excuse to throw millions of horribly cheesy lines at us again and again. These lines are grimace inducing, you could make nachos out of them, lots of nachos. And according to the trivia on this website, they had to add on the alternate ending. I for one think that is a good thing because otherwise, you would have some open ended thing like some terrible modern movie like children of men.