Deus Ex Machina

I just sat through a rather brutal and overwrought affair called The Departed.  It was a hit movie from several months ago, starring Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson (who, interestingly, got third billing), Leonardo DiCaprio (whom I like to call "DiCrapio"), Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alex Baldwin, and a plethora of others.

I'd heard so many good things about the movie, I was a little excited to see it.  Like most movies, my wife and I don't bother to watch first-run.  We have two children under 6 years old; theater experiences aren't all that fantastic for us; and we just don't like shelling about nearly $10 a ticket to go see a movie.  So, it's on Pay-Per-View now, and we thought this would be a good opportunity to finally watch it.

We actually started watching something else, the name of which I can't even recall now.  But it was so incredibly bad in acting and writing (great music behind everything though) we just couldn't stand to sit through its 94 minute run time.  So, we killed it and went with The Departed instead.

It started off good.  Soon after, it became a bit convoluted and a tiny bit confusing, at least for me.  My wife finally clarified some of what was going on for me, and I tried to keep up.

I've got to reiterate -- Matt Damon is a great actor.  He played, for the first time in my experience, a villain.  And not just a run-of-the-mill villain, but a rather weasely sort of back-stabbing, conniving villain.  He cheated and killed most everyone in the movie, including the ethnically confused character portrayed by Jack Nicholson.  Mark Wahlberg was an under-developed character but we get the impression that he's extremely committed to his cause.  That's good, because we don't get to identify with him as audience members very much, so using him as an archetypal anti-hero was all that remained, I suppose.

In summation, Matt Damon is recruited into someone's branch of mafia at an early age.  He goes on to the Massachusetts State Police Academy, becomes a State Trooper, and rises quickly to the rank of plain clothes detective.  At the same time, Leonardo DiCaprio is going to the same Academy a year or two behind Damon, and he also graduates, but is recruited by Martin Sheen, a captain, and Mark Wahlberg to the undercover division of the force.  There, he is placed deeply undercover, including an arrest for assault and battery to create a criminal record for him.  He then has an incredible stroke of luck when he beats the tar out of two mafia henchmen from Providence.  Rhode Island, I assumed, but I couldn't be certain.  At any rate, Damon informs Nicholson of what's occurred, and before long, DiCaprio is taken into the care of the local Mafioso.  He works directly for Sheen and Wahlberg, and is in cell phone contact with Sheen on a regular basis.

After months of work undercover, DiCaprio determines (because he scored 1400 on the SATs) that there is "rat" in the organization.  It's him, of course, but he also figured out there was another cop betraying his efforts.  That would be Damon, who called Nicholson from time to time in the movie and told him about various police activities, surveillance, and impending raids.  Nicholson always slides free, and before long DiCaprio discovers that Nicholson is also an FBI informant.  There is utter chaos regarding whom to trust and whom to accuse.  Eventually, to protect the identity of DiCaprio from the mob who come to kill him, Sheen is thrown from the top of a waterfront building to his death.  Now with no help, Damon and DiCaprio form a tentative and terse, not to mention short-lived, contact.

In the end, there is a lot of shooting and head-blowing-off that goes on.  I've never seen so many brains separated from bodies in a single movie, but then, I don't see that many movies.  The problem I had was that the movie pulled a maneuver that was frequently used during plays in ancient Greece and Rome, wherein a protagonist is pitted against a situation that is next to insurmountable.  In most cases, it actually is insurmountable, but to resolve the irresolvable problem, they would literally provide divine intervention.  The gods themselves would intervene and allow the resolution impossible by human means.

The technique was common.  A "god" would be lowered onto the stage.  An actor, portraying the deity, would be lowered onto the set with a machine to simulate a god descending from heaven.  The term given to the theatrical device was deus ex machina, or god out of the machine.

Now, it represents any piece of writing or filmmaking wherein some device not previously introduced is suddenly injected into the story to resolve the issue and make things possible that weren't before.  And what, you ask, does this lengthy and unnecessary explanation have to do with the movie?

Well, as things seem to be tidy and clean for Damon's character, and DiCaprio has figured out that he was the one on the police side providing information to Nicholson's character and providing the means for escape and elusion, DiCaprio sends a recording to Damon of a conversation he had with Nicholson.

I sat there, literally, confused as all get-out wondering how the heck DiCaprio got the recording.  I saw that he was in the theater, but couldn't understand how the recording came into existence.  Fortunately, DiCaprio explains in a phone conversation with Damon that Nicholson's character recorded it; and that he recorded everything.  He had, apparently, boxes and boxes of tapes from recordings he'd made, and had sent them to a lawyer.  After Nicholson's demise in the movie, those tapes, somehow, became available to DiCaprio.

Ah, deus ex machina at its finest.  We know, as the audience, that Nicholson was an FBI informant, and that there were at least two cops working under cover in Nicholson's organization.  Now we will soon find out that there was another cop working for Nicholson in the police force just as Damon's character was, and that character would save Damon's career at the last possible minute.  DiCaprio is killed trying to arrest and expose Damon, and then Damon kills the rescuer in order to pin the entire mole operation on him and thereby clear himself.  It all would have worked perfectly, except that for some reason, there is another instance of deus ex machina at the very, very end, and Mark Wahlberg murders Matt Damon and ties all loose ends together.

Whew!  Confused?  Well, that's partially my fault.  I've not done a great job of explaining the movie, but I didn't want to give a play-by-play plot recount.  Basically, one good cop, one bad cop, one mafia boss, one bloody movie.  Every one of merit in the movie is killed.  Only Alex Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg remain alive at the end.

It's the deus ex machina that gets me, though.  We haven't been told, as an audience, that:

1. Nicholson's character is recording every conversation he has with anyone.  This is important information and giving it to the audience ahead of its appearance in the movie would have been beneficial to making this aspect of the movie believable.
   
2. How DiCaprio came to be entrusted by the lawyer to whom all these tapes have been provided such that he would then have access to them.
   
3. That there is another cop on the Nicholson character's payroll.  That would have made the last half hour of the movie less ... well, deus ex machina, frankly.

Those three points may not kill the movie, but they did for me.  I think that you should show the gun over the mantle if you're later going to have a character pull the gun off its display and murder another character.  Not having a lot of explanation for these things makes them what I call "groan points" in the movie, completely removing any chance I may have had of suspending disbelief and actually enjoying the movie.

The cons: weak story at best, weak execution, too many rabbits being pulled out of hats, especially at the end.  The pros: well acted, very believable from a character portrayal standpoint, top-notch cast and director.  Heck, I even like Alex Baldwin and Martin Sheen's acting -- something I'm not normally accustomed to doing.

So, overall, The Departed was an okay movie, but I'm really glad I didn't see it on the heels of Good Shepherd.  That one remains one of my all-time favorites, and following it with this flight of fancy would have diminished it for me, I'm certain.

I recommend it on DVD or on premium channel; don't bother even paying the $3.99 for it from PPV.

-JDT-

Technorati Tags: movie review

Movie Weekend

My wife and I have been seriously in movie mode for the last couple of weeks.  We've hit the Pay-Per-View OnDemand thingy two weekends running trying to find something to entertain our over-active, under-slept minds.  With a two- and five-year-old running about bombarding our gray matter with Teletubbies and Dora the Explorer, it's nice to occasionally get a chance to see something addressed to grown-ups.

One of the primary problems with that, however, is me.  My mind doesn't suspend disbelief.  I've come to believe it may actually be some sort of neurological disorder (which explains a lot of other things too), but my wife simply says I'm not able to do it.  Not that I won't do it, because Lord knows I try, but that I am genuinely not able to do it.  So I have a tendency to ruin movies ... for everyone sitting near me.  I've done it to her so many times now she's getting as bad as I am about it.

Last weekend it was a couple of piles of steaming monkey feces called "Children of Men" and an even worse "De Ja Vu."  Neither of them were worth the hours invested in sitting in front of the idiot box to watch them, never mind what it cost me monetarily to pay for them.  Weak plots, overwrought efforts at tension and suspense ... all for some really bad movies.  While I don't want to make an indictment on the actors themselves, I've seen Denzel Washington be better.  And don't even get me started on the time travel thing.

"Children of Men" was just a long series of impossibilities all strewn together for the sake of trying to tell a human interest story without ever bothering to explain why we got to the opening premise of the movie in the first place, which was so pivotal it kept pulling the viewer (me) out of the plot anyway.  If you're going to offer a premise you'd better be able to offer some sort of explanation for it so that the rest of the movie isn't hinged on something that can't be explained.  Duh.

... and, my loving wife has informed/reminded me that we also sat through another, even bigger pile of rubbish called "The Fountain", with what she terms the "nice-to-look-at Hugh Jackman".  (He's not, as she puts it, Johnny Depp nice, but nice just the same.)  I won't even go into that one ... I've never been so unable to follow a movie in my life, and I sat through "2001: A Space Odyssey".  I'll leave it at that.

This weekend we made better choices.  The first of which was "Breach", an adaptation of the Robert Hanssen espionage case that the FBI broke back in 2001 about seven months before the 9/11 attacks.  It's a good movie, but full of what I'm sure represents artistic license in the story.  Don't ask me why; the intriguing tale of a man that sells out his country for ego and what he claims is "patriotism" is surely an interesting story factually recounted.  Especially when he got away with it, duping the entire U.S. intelligence community for 25 years.

Anyway, it was a well-acted (for the most part) and very good story.  It has its weak spots, as do all movies; in particular the ending.  It could've been done more powerfully, but that's just my opinion.  Still, a very good movie.  This was my second viewing.  The first was on a plane trip to or from Puerto Rico for business (I can't remember whether I was coming or going now).  This time I was watching on a screen that was marginally larger than the 9" CRT of the Boeing 757 I was riding at the time.  I also had the benefit of our surround sound system for dialog, too.

But the movie we chose tonight was probably the best movie I've seen in a number of years ... no fewer than three, and maybe more.  It might be the best movie I've seen since "Saving Private Ryan," but then, I don't get to the movies much anymore, and we don't watch them regularly.  That disclaimer is only to shore up the fact that I state that this was the best movie I've seen in a long, long time -- your mileage, of course, may vary.

The movie?  "Good Shepherd", with Matt Damon, Robert De Niro (who also directed), Angelina Jolie and William Hurt.  The plot centers on the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency and its role in the events preceding and immediately following the botched and embarrassing Bay of Pigs escapade of 1961.

Since the movie's an old one by most standards, and most everyone reading this couldn't care less for my plot summary, I'll simply state that the movie is brilliantly written and acted.  Matt Damon was on camera a lot, but spoke very, very little.  He captured and conveyed so much in his silence that it was incredible.  And Angelina Jolie, while not a brilliant actress in my estimation, was very passable as a CIA operative's alcoholic wife.  The other players did their roles well, and it was a great piece of work.  Not an edge-of-your-seat kind of movie, but still thick with plot and story.   The last half hour of the movie is an intense and interesting series of events involving Matt Damon's son, his fiancee ( a Soviet operative who decides to settle down and leave the spy game), and the U.S.S.R. counter-intelligence operative.  A really great twist at the end there, and it makes for a good ending that wraps the movie up well.

Overall, if I were a movie critic (and God knows I critique everything anyway), I'd have scored this one very highly.  Very highly indeed.  If you haven't seen the movie, and are looking for a good way to pass almost three hours, this is a good one.

Matt Damon, as an aside, is fast becoming one of my favorite actors.  I haven't seen him in a lot of stuff, but everything I've seen him do has been great work.  From "Good Will Hunting" to "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy", he's showing me a lot that I never thought I'd see from him.

Anyway, I recommend "The Good Shepherd" highly.  I actually got into the movie, and like I said, that's a rare, rare thing for me.

-JDT-

Technorati Tags: movies, movie review, random thoughts

"It was Beauty Killed the Beast."

All right, I’ve sat through King Kong one and a half times now, and I’ve got to say that, as movies go, this one didn’t annoy me anywhere near as much as others I’ve seen lately.

Maybe because the whole premise is so fantastic you have to at least partially suspend disbelief to even sit down to watch it. I don’t know if that’s the case though, because I thought that about Superman Returns and still had issues. Maybe it’s because the movie has had a soft spot in my heart since I was a child. Maybe it’s because the thing is a tragedy about a big gorilla misunderstood by the world. Or maybe it’s because the CGI of Kong was perhaps the greatest drawing I’ve ever seen, and it was magnificently animated.

Whatever the reason, the movie didn’t bug me … too much.

There were issues, of course. Why, on an island in the middle of nowhere, are there dinosaurs co-existing with gargantuan primates? What happened to the other primates? We see carcasses, but no evidence of what may have happened to them. We see huge sauropods, creatures that I assume were either Velociraptors or similar, and huge reptiles similar to komodo dragons. The bats are huge, the mosquitoes are huge, the millipedes are huge and the scavenger worms and insects are huge. Cockroaches and crickets and spiders, oh my! – all the size of small dogs. Can bats with a wing span of twelve feet even fly? Is that even possible physically? I know the fruit bat is big, but it’s not that big. This thing was like a hang glider.

Okay, so they’re big. And they’re in a completely isolated environment … on an island. Where things like FOOD SOURCES and SPACE are limited, and DROPPINGS from these extremely large animals are going to have to be broken down by something in a big hurry to prevent disease from running rampant. Maybe that explains why things that scavenge and come out in the dark are huge too. Huge and head-swallowing.

So, an isolated island yet to be discovered by western science in the early portion of the 20^th century isn’t all that hard to buy. It’s the fact that the place seemed riddled with constructs of man. It’s the fact that somehow, someway, a mountain gorilla from Africa found its way there and then mutated into a 25-foot high monster that the natives worship. Okay, where’d the dinosaurs come from? Where did all these wonderful things come from? I guess they could migrate there from other places, and then over the course of millions and billions of eons as evolution requires they become the things they are. But there are problems with dinosaurs having survived on an island, and then mountain gorillas coming along in the same time line. Sort of a problem for the native life there too … or did they evolve from the mountain gorillas eventually? Did that occur before the gorillas became gargantuan? If so, what triggered that mutation? Africa is a large continent, and the mountain gorillas are only mountain gorilla sized there; on an island, is it the drinking water that makes them grow? If so, how come the native humans haven’t grown? And if they evolved from the primate life there, shouldn’t they be huge, too?

So I’m confused by the whole island thing. And the fog; what’s with the fog? In the previous incarnation of King Kong, the explanation for the fog was that it was produced by gases emanating from a vast oil store beneath the island. In this movie – there’s no explanation at all. (This movie, however, at least showed the audience that Kong was the last of his kind, a species on the verge of extinction for whatever reason. No one ever explained that in either of the other movies before.) That’s fine; ultimately, the fog bank is necessary to obscure the island and make it more mysterious, but there has to be some reason why ocean winds and tides don’t sweep the fog bank away. I lived in Daly City, for Pete’s sake – it’s foggy about 300 days a year, but even there they get a day or two of sunshine a month. A permanent fog bank? Please.

Jack Black, however, was great. He played about as slimy a character as I’ve ever seen him portray. This clever shyster was a performance equaled only by his portrayal of a nerdy arms construction technician in The Jackal, in which his arm is blown off by Bruce Willis while testing the device he’s constructed. He was good; very good. In the end, we don’t know if his character is the antihero or the villain, but he got away with everything he did. His character closes the movie with an attempt at a poignant line that only accentuates his own foolishness and P.T. Barnum-style spin on reality. (That is to say, he never accepted responsibility for the deaths of the movie crew, the ship’s crew, the citizens of New York, or Kong. He blamed Naomi Watts for Kong’s death, in fact.)

Some scenes in the movie were actually so well portrayed, they creeped me out a bit. When the movie crew is being accosted by the native population, I was able to actually sense the fear and confusion of the actors in the scene. It was kind of scary to see the islander pole-vaulting over breaks in the rock to reach the ship in order to abduct Naomi Watts. There was some really creepy undertones to the ceremony in which she’s offered to Kong. All of those things were very well done, and I think Peter Jackson really captured something so completely foreign to those of us that haven’t experienced tribal cultures that it frightens us. The language is alien, the religion is alien, the culture is alien, the entire setting makes us feel unable to protect ourselves and confused. We have no way to connect and relate to what the natives think, feel and believe, and there is no way to communicate with them to try to arrive at understanding.

They also don’t seem very interested in communicating. They attack with what seemed little provocation and with nothing in mind but slaughter. As an audience member, I was a bit horrified that the westerners had no way to say they had come in peace and didn’t mean any harm … and that the natives didn’t seem to care. Their dogged persistence in taking Naomi Watts was disconcerting too; the westerners weren’t even safe back in their own ship. Knowing they held superior fire power and technology did not deter the natives from taking what they wanted … we just never got to see or understand (and, there probably wouldn’t be any way to understand) why they so wanted her. She’s a pretty girl, but come on.

The plot’s a familiar one, so I won’t go into that. There were some clever things they did, though, that I really liked. They showed the desperation of the people in the depression, and they contrasted that nicely with the money and opulence of those that were successful during that time. The dichotomy was almost laughable, and that’s very accurate. There was almost a classe-style difference in the US at that time, and the brief look at the differences the movie gave was well-done. Also, the actress Jack Black’s character was trying to hire for the female lead in his movie backed out, so he was rattling off a list of actresses that he thought would make suitable substitutes. When he said “Fay”, the young “Preston” to whom he spoke said, “She’s doing a movie with RKO and isn’t available.” That was brilliant. (The only movie that Faye [Wray] would have been doing at that time would have been the original King Kong, in case you’re not aware. She passed away in 2004 at the age of 96, and her only real claim to fame was still being clutched in Kong’s hairy paw.)

The unveiling of Kong for the movie could have been done better, but the animation of the lead character was nothing short of spectacular. The way he moved, the way his fur reacted to his movements, the play of the light and shadow on his fur (each little tuft lit and shadowed and moving), the imperfections in his face (his head was a bit lopsided, one of his lower canines was larger and protruded more than the other, the wrinkles on his face and the folds of his skin weren’t symmetrical, his eyes were two different sizes … I could go on and on about the detail of the CGI), the way he did gorilla-like things – Kong was practically impossible to distinguish from a living ape. That is, until he interacted with Naomi Watts, at which time he became clearly an ape in love. Oh well … it is what the movie’s about, after all.

I haven’t seen anything as visually beautiful as Kong in CGI animation since Jurassic Park. Say what you will about that movie, its creatures were among the best drawn in history. It was really hard to recall that they weren’t actually dinosaurs in the movie. There have been lots of animated characters throughout the history of movies, and each time I see one they get better, but Kong was fantastic beyond my ability to express. Even Spider-Man (Spiderman) in Spiderman (Spider-Man) 2 wasn't as well-animated as Kong. If the producers and animators of Hulk by Ang Lee had done as good a job with him as this crew did with Kong, that movie would have been much more successful, I’m sure.

Okay, maybe not.

The movie was weak in places. Naomi Watts was a bit hollow and wooden, and she didn’t have a lot of speaking lines, considering. She also left me wondering with whom she was actually attracted, Kong or the male lead (whatever his name was … I honestly don’t know, but the character was referred to as “Driscoll”). But, that is by design, since the real story is not guy and girl, but girl and gorilla. The scene on the ice is the tell-tale for that, but the scene where she’s doing her vaudeville act for Kong is the one that tells us that they won each other over. They even watch the sunset together and express “beautiful” together, each in their own way. I thought the ending, for all the spectacular CGI involved, could’ve had more punch. Kong kept gettting larger and smaller throughout the movie. The other CGIs in the movie didn't seem anywhere near as realistic, in particular the stampeding sauropods. There is no explanation of how Kong was fed or his droppings handled on the voyage back to New York in a vessel that clearly wasn't large enough to house him. How did they keep him sedated? That much chloroform released on a small ship, especially in the hold, will probably kill the passengers and crew. The scene with Kong atop the Empire State Building was actually a bit anticlimactic for me, but overall, the movie did what it was supposed to do – entertain.

And for me, that’s really unusual. I liked it.

-JDT-

More Movie Woes ... I Can't Win

So, there I sat, trying to be a kid again and doing my best to suspend disbelief. I mean, come ON – you HAVE to do that to SOME degree, right? Just to accept the movie at its premise?

I didn’t feel well, and of course, that never helps. It’s not my favorite character, either, although movies of this nature really help me because you don’t have any expectation of adherence to any semblance of reality. And, of course, the role was already defined and has been set in concrete by another actor in another movie, and against his performance and appearance as that character all others will forever be measured. At least by me.

The movie was Superman Returns, starring Brandon Routh as Kal-El of Krypton. I wanted to see it, but as is my nature over the last several years, I refuse to pay theater prices for a movie that I’m not going to get to sit through pleasantly. (I’ve already groused about that in another entry.) So, I wait patiently for these things to come to cable where I can watch them against my ordinary cable bill and not enjoy them more inexpensively. As I recollect, the last movie I saw in a theater was Spiderman, back in 2002 (thanks to my loving, if pesky, wife for the updated timeline on the release of that "blockbuster" movie). And, I must say, I should have waited.

Anyway, I was really anxious to see this one, so I went Pay-Per-View rather than wait another few months for it to come to the premium channels.

And, I must say, I should have waited.

Okay, it was an all right movie, but goodness – what have you brought Superman to of late? I figured Lex Luthor would exploit his weaknesses – doesn’t he always? – and I figured there’d be tension and conflict and the “Oh no!” moments of any movie. But please, people, at LEAST be CONSISTENT with the garbage!

The ending? I’ll suffice it to say that the movie, at 2:35, was about 35 minutes too long. I thought that time could have been better spent revealing more about Luthor’s world conquest plot or depicting the heroic return of Earth’s greatest defender after a five-year absence than it was dragging the characters through forced clichés.

I won’t belabor the point too much, but let’s be honest with the characters, at least. Let’s stay consistent within the confines of the “reality” established for the characters. And someone PLEASE give Lois Lane a safe sex pamphlet and caution her about multiple partners and birth control, please! Ugh.

Superman’s allergy to kryptonite isn’t as strong as it was prior to his trip to Krypton’s former location, evidently. Or is it? The movie couldn’t seem to decide. And it’s a darn good thing the Fortress of Solitude is so convenient and easy to access, or the whole movie would have had no monumental cataclysm. And aren’t we fortunate that Lois Lane has become such a sleazy slut? There’d be no touching closing scene without it, not to mention a rescue scene that wouldn’t have been possible. Why, she’d have died 45 minutes too soon without her promiscuity to save her.

Of course, there’s always the possibility of a sequel, and Superman did a pretty poor job of protecting himself from future kryptonite attacks at the end, spilling metric tons (tonnes) of it into the Atlantic Ocean. He also was careless about handling his magical crystals, considering that he must have known how dangerous they could be in the “wrong hands.” Don’t Lex Luthor’s hands count? And since good ol’ Lex is credited with having nearly killed Supes before, doesn’t it behoove the Last Son of Krypton to be a little more careful – or even more FINAL – when dealing with Lex? (Let’s face it, any of us would have killed him to avoid future problems. You know it, and I know it too. Moral standards not withstanding, the world is a better and safer place when terrorists are eliminated and prevented from resurfacing, isn't it, President Clinton?)

In his absence, I’m not sure what the world did to get by without Superman, but I’m sure with terrorism at an all-time high and the ever-increasing tension in the middle east, he’ll be kept fairly occupied now.

I was a bit disappointed with the choice of Brandon Routh as Superman when it was initially announced last year. The first pictures of the actor in the “new” suit showed that, physically, he wasn’t nearly as perfect for the part as the former Superman, the incomparable Christopher Reeve. And the portrayal of the Man of Steel wasn’t as strong, either. I can’t tell if that’s because of the way the movie was written, or because of the actor’s lack of skill, or if he’s just too much a pretty boy to carry the role off. Whatever the case, Routh’s Superman wasn’t at all like I’d hoped it’d be, and it left me feeling nostalgic and not very happy with the movie. And when did Lois Lane find the fountain of youth? Wasn't she a grown-up in the last outing? Now she's barely in her twenties, a child. I guess she's aging "gracefully."

So what else is new? When am I ever happy with a movie?

I liked the X-Men: Last Stand movie better. It’s also ridiculous, so I’m less cynical right out of the gate. But, they got carried away too. The old deus ex machina device so common in plays of antiquity was not left out of that effects-fest either. Heck, they went one better and never put her in the machine to begin with; she started out ex machina and that’s how they resolved everything at the end. Weak; downright pathetic. And yet, still a bit stronger than Superman Returns. That could be due to my lack of familiarity with the X-Men in general, though. Not knowing anything about them (or at least not much), I was at a disadvantage when presented with the fantastic laws-of-physics-altering mutants. All I could do was shrug and roll my eyes. For all I know, though, they were at least being consistent with their characters and “universe.”

Nope, Superman Returns can’t say that. In retrospect, though, the original Superman movie had to resort to a time-travel scene for Superman to save the day, so I suppose this wasn’t any worse than that. It just felt worse, somehow. Maybe it wasn’t. The only comic hero movie I've seen and really enjoyed in the last several years was Batman Begins. And it had problems, too, but not so many as this one.

All I know is, next time, I’m waiting for HBO.

-JDT-