by Matt Nord

Created on: April 19, 2009

I wasted almost $4 and about two hours of my life on this poor excuse for a motion picture. It seems that Hollywood has come to the realization that you can digest a weak story, throw in a load of cheesy, video game quality special effects, a few mediocre big name actors and sell to the general public whatever comes out when you squat. This is just the movie that is going to have to endure my rant because I saw it last night. It's sad what passes for art these days (i.e. the past century...), be it Jackson Pollock, Andres Serrano, Creed or the Insane Clown Posse. Movies are no different. Take Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. Trying to cash in on Lucy Liu's Charlies Angels hit (although, who are we kidding; that movie was atrocious, too) and Antonio Banderes's... wait, what did he do that was any good? Oh right, Desperado, seven years earlier.

These action movies have seem to have come to the point where they rely so heavily on gun fights, fist fights, cat fights, whatever, that the story is secondary, if that. Unfortunately, when the action isn't even all that great, this doesn't even work. The thing is, we've seen it all before, and when a majority of the movies coming out are sequels, prequels, remakes (or the popular term nowadays, reimaginings) or adaptations of anything from comic books, comic strips, novels, childrens books, or the most recent, video games, it seems that an attempt at originality isn't even being made.

I suppose that it's hard to expect much of a story out of a movie based on a video game. The story actually isn't completely horrible for a video game, but the movie jumps around too much and doesn't really explain a lot of the secondary characters. It's doesn't build much character into the title character, either. Mark Wahlberg was a pretty poor choice for the lead role. In my opinion, he's not that great of an actor, but it's what we've got in the world, today.

Here's an example gripe: why, exactly, is the main antagonist, Lupino, going around killing all of the other users of the Valkyrie drug? It seems that he's the one selling it on the street for the Aesir Corporation in the first place. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And if the explanation is that he's finally gone off the deep end from using the drug, then why doesn't he just go ballistic and kill off his croonies? Also, if all of these said croonies have the same access to the drug that he does, why don't they use it at the end of the movie when may Payne starts blowing them all away? You know, give them a bit of an advantage!

Okay, there was the rant. It was just, basically, a really bad movie. Don't waste your time or money on it. I already did that for you. You're welcome. Now, go and rent Empire Strikes Back or something else worth watching.

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