Gamer: I liked it better when it was called "The Running Man"

In the year 2034 a large scale online game called “Slayers” allows people to control convicted felons and them face off in a life or death struggle. But a wrongfully convicted soldier named Kable looks to change this by bringing down the online worlds’ evil architect, a man named Castle.

From its chaotic beginning, which dumped the audience into one of the online Slayer battlefields and left them to dangle as they tried to figure out just what was happening, to the obscenely pornographic levels of violence throughout the multiple battles Kable (a sadly underutilized Gerard Butler) went through in order to get to Castle and gain his freedom, Gamer was an absolute mess of a film which failed to be entertaining. The only thing the directors (there’s your first sign that a movie is not going to be Oscar worthy, the need for two directors) seemed interested in was trying to show newer ways to dispatch human lives. There were no redeeming qualities to the characters, no logic to the story or any remarkable special effects.

If you’re looking for a film that somewhat successfully entertains an audience while positing and even attempting to answer the big moral question of whether allowing prisoners to win their freedom by participating in a death match for the amusement of the masses, check out 1987’s The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger and keep a safe distance from Gamer.

Grade: D-

Legion: When good premises go bad

A group of survivors has taken shelter at a truck stop after the apocalypse. All hope seems to be lost until they are visited by the archangel Michael, who has joined them in order to protect one of the survivors who is baring the Messiah.

The premise behind this film was that God was angry and had essentially lost faith in all of human kind. Therefore he unleashed the apocalypse in order to rid the world of most of the bad apples and start again. Michael intercedes in this for he loves mankind and believes that man can change. On paper the film sounded like it could have been an intense theological thriller, however you do not watch a film on paper. Legion failed on every level to be anything close to entertaining. The characters were unlikable, so much so one halfway through the film one started hoping that God’s little reboot would work. The story was never fully developed and the plot had major holes in it. So director Scott Charles Stewart decided to see how many inept shoot outs or car crashes he could plaster on the screen in order to kill the rest of the film’s running time when the characters weren’t emotionally bashing one another or spouting dialogue for which the term “dreadful” would be complimentary. Worst of all he turned the character of Michael into a pseudo “Terminator” who seemed more worried about killing folks than protecting the mother of the Messiah and carried more guns than a Special Forces unit.

Uninspired, dull and silly, Legion was an insipid waste of time.


Grade: D-

Date Night: A good watch for married people

Phil and Claire Foster are your typical married couple with jobs, kids and a number of other responsibilities and problems which have made their lives somewhat stale, especially in the romance department. To rekindle the romance, they head to the big city for a date night, but when they take the reservations of the Tripplehorns at a fancy restaurant, their evening takes an interesting turn.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey made for a terrific on screen couple and each was able to bring their own unique comedic style to the table against the backdrop of some truly outlandish situations and circumstances. Carell delivered the laughs with his dry style while Fey was able to make the audience chuckle with her sharp wit and reactions to being a “fish out of water” as Mrs. Tripplehorn. The laughs were there, but director Shawn Levy also took the time to show how Phil and Claire were feeling when they were not being chased by thugs or working the pole at a strip club (one of the more hilarious comedic bits in the movie). Without the serious conversations between the two of them regarding where their marriage was going or why the romance had stopped and what they needed to do in order to reconnect, Date Night could have been nothing more than a series of slapstick setups with no real heart to it. Thankfully however, there were those quiet moments where Phil and Claire were able to talk and draw the audience in.

Date Night has its amusing parts which were punctuated by the fact that its main characters were easy to relate to and faced the same problems most real life married couples do (minus the whole being mistaken for another couple and then having to endure a number of crazy situations in order to clear their name thing).


Grade: C+

Iron Man 2: Another average sequel

Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, has made the world a safe place again. But his days of being a superhero might be cut short after he is asked by the US Government to hand over his incredible suit and its technology. He also faces the threat of a new villain named Ivan Vanko, who teams up with one of Stark’s corporate rivals in order to destroy not only Stark Industries, but Iron Man himself.

Credit needs to be given to director Jon Favreau, screenwriter Justin Theroux and Robert Downey Jr. for they tried to further develop the character of Tony Stark and make this sequel stand out in its own way. Downey still played him like the narcissistic ego-manic with a good heart and a desire to make the world a better place that audiences could not get enough of in the original but there was also a tinge of self-destruction to him this time around. Stark looses faith in himself and his ability to be the hero the world expects him to be, and Downey was able to portray this devolvement masterfully. The audience felt the weight of the world on Tony’s shoulders, when they weren’t busy chuckling at his sharp witted retorts, and for an actor to accomplish a feat like that in a comic book adaptation is remarkable. Another enjoyable aspect to the film was the relationship and interplay between Downey’s Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts. Their snappy dialogue and crackling chemistry provided plenty of laughs and tender moments. However these juicy bits of character development and intrigue were overcome by an inordinate amount of tedious backstory which made the film drag and the audience loose interest. Add to that a couple of lackluster villains in Justin Hammer (an uber sleazy Sam Rockwell) and Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke, who looked like a ghetto version of Dr. Octopus when he had his suit on), some mediocre action sequences (including the final showdown between Iron Man and Vanko which redefined the term “anti-climatic”), plus Scarlett Johansson's lack of any meaningful screen time (we only get to see her kick butt for a minute or so) and you get a so-so action film which wasted the efforts of its two greatest assets, its lead actors.

It’s true that Iron Man 2 is supposed to serve as a sort of pre-cursor to a number of other Marvel comic book film adaptations that will be heading to the big screen in the coming years, (Thor, Captain America and The Avengers to name a few), but setting up all of these other characters and stories could have been accomplished without watering down Iron Man 2 so much that it became more of a tedious exercise than a good old fashioned popcorn flick like the original was.

Grade: C