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Hello, my name is Mike and I am an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan boy. Although AHnold's (a name which I'm using for the rest of this review) movies aren't the highest caliber, they are still entertaining as hell. How can you not like Predator, Total Recall, Last Action Hero, OR JINGLE ALL THE WAY!! "DASHA DANCA PRANCA VIXEN COMMET COOPID DONNA BLITZEN..AAAHHH!!!" The movies he is in are extremely special to me. He adds a certain bit of "oomph" to every flick he stars in and that's what makes this review so heartbreaking to write. You see, I was extremely excited to see this movie. The trailers weren't always the best, but it's AHnold and he's back! In the trailer he says cool things and fires guns and kills people! Plus it's directed by the fantastic Jee-woon Kim. So, honestly, what the fuck happened?!
Well, I'll tell you what happened. Writing this movie happened. According to IMDB.com, there were up to four writers for this piece of shit. Seriously, four writers. Four writers that needed the phrase, "You wanna play? LET'S PLAY" three times in this movie. No, I am not making this up. That cliche phrase was said three times in this movie. If that doesn't scream mediocrity then I don't know what is. Every piece of dialogue in this movie is extremely cliche. For comedy relief, the word "shit" is used so frequently, that I'm not even sure it's a swear word anymore. We get close ups to various actors going, "shiiiiiitttt" and the audience just laughs and laughs. In my head I didn't know what to think. I thought I was missing something. Then I realized I was in a heavily Mexican neighborhood and the person usually saying those lines was Luis Guzmán, but I digress. The only statements and cliche lines I wanted to hear came from the man himself, AHnold. Every time he said something, hell anything, I cracked up. He was not a let down, but he was given shitty lines. I'm probably going to say this at the end of every paragraph, but before going into this film, I knew it wasn't going to be an Oscar nominated movie. It's AHnold and I understand this, but this is easily his worst written film.
Jee-woon Kim. Ring a bell to any of you guys? Of course it does, I'm on the coolest god damn website on the planet. In case you have lived under a rock next to Patrick from Spongebob, I'll let you in on a little secret. He is one of my favorite directors of all time. He has done many movies including, but not limited to; A Tale of Two Sisters (which was a fucking solid ghost film), The Good, the Bad and the Weird (which is an immaculate heist/action flick that everyone needs to watch immediately), I Saw the Devil (where a guy beats the shit out of another guy with a pole, a record breaking 40-50 times (I counted, but forgot how many times he hit him)). The reason I bring these movies up is because Jee-woon Kim is a sick director. He doesn't direct shit. He has done it all and can prove that can tackle any genre he goes against. I Saw the Devil was one of the most violent films I have ever seen. Most of his films are pretty violent and when I saw The Last Stand was rated R for "Brutal Violence Throughout", I was ecstatic. What I got was pretty much the complete opposite from everything Jee-woon Kim. The violence in this movie was so tame that it could probably have been rated PG-13. The ending shootout (another thing I'm going to vent about) is the only thing that was worth watching, violence-wise. It really didn't feel like a Jee-woon Kim film and this displeases me greatly. Most of the "big kills" were pretty much all done with CGI and even the non-huge kills (that didn't involve someone, ya know, exploding) were CGI as well. The close up knives going into people's legs were all practical, but only lasted a few seconds.
Speaking of the ending shootout, yeah that's pretty much the only thing to watch in this film. The last 30 minutes was the only interesting part of it (kind of like The Avengers). We get to see people exploding, AHnold on a Gatling gun (with a highly fucking annoying Johnny Knoxville that, thank the gods, is only in this film for a scene in the beginning and like ten minutes in the end, spoiler alert, but I don't fucking care) and some cliche lines that leads up to people being dead. It was the ONLY saving grace of this film. The entire movie leads up to this one scene. What leads up to this scene you ask? Well a shit load of talking that is! It makes Reservoir Dogs look like Independence Day. It's extremely fucking boring and the entire time I'm just waiting for AHnold to fucking kill someone. The cops do stupid things (like not shoot out the tires to the car when the helicopter was RIGHT behind it), there are long talking scenes that involve dialogue which we already know, and we get to see Forest Whitaker almost have a heart attack the whole fucking time. His only role in the movie is to swear a lot and look mad. He's pretty much useless, but as I said..this is an AHnold film, I wasn't expecting it to be legendary, but I could have asked for a little bit more action?
All in all, this movie is a giant, boring, cliche. AHnold is the ONLY thing worth watching in this film and even he shows the decomposing effects of his classic "acting". He's often emotionless, but the scenes he's in is just awesome. He does the job perfectly and that's the only way I'll recommend this flick. This movie had a lot of build up (in my eyes), but it just didn't deliver. Every character is a cliche and seeing Peter Stormare trying to pull off a southern accent was just hysterical to watch. All in all, wait for this on DVD. It's a typical action flick, without the action. It's hard to rate this movie because I don't want to sound like an ass and give it a low rating, but I feel a little heart broken. AHnold is one of my favorite action stars of all time and each one of his flicks is extremely special and different, but we have seen all of this before. Nothing is new here and I am extremely saddened to give this flick a 5/10. It's boring, super cliched and only fun to watch when AHnold is on screen.
Also: No pictures in this review due to me typing this up at school and the internet here is slow as balls.
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Originally Posted by Primetimeloser
I believe that is a bit high.
