Scott Pilgrim vs The Expendables. My Crazy Tuesday Double Bill.......

Tuesday is the best day to go to the cinema in Belfast.  £2.50 a ticket, good crowds and plenty of movies to choose from.  Even if you see a bad one, you don't feel ripped off (though Salt did test that theory to the limits).  So double bills have become something of a commonplace for me.  A few weeks ago it was Inception and The A Team.  We all know my ridiculous level of manlust for the first of those movies but The A Team was damn enjoyable as well.

So yesterday it was The Expendables, followed by Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

First up, The Expendables.  I've been looking forward to this all summer.  As a child of the 80's and early 90's, the idea of an ensemble piece with Sly, Bruce and Arnold was an impossible dream.  But here they are, all up on screen, at the same time.  Unfortunately, this movie was not made 15 years ago and therefore it was a small scene.

The plot revolves around a group of Mercenaries, who are hired to overthrow an dictator on a small tropical island.  And that's it.  But that's the whole point of a movie like this.  There is no need for a complicated plot, or deep character development.  We're here to see these guys blow shit up.  And therein lies the problem of The Expendables.  If this movie was made 15 years ago, when these guys were all big box office draws, it would have been epic and the budget would have been off the scale.  This movie unfortunately seems small budget, with all the action taking place on a small island or mainland America.  Even the opening on a ship relies on thermal imagery, and ends up looking like a cut scene from a video game.  There is no globe trotting plot, no glamourous locations.

The dialogue at times is cringe-worthy and it actually doesn't make sense.  One exchange was 'Who sent you?' Answer 'So does your mom?'.  What???  It doesn't even follow the rules of a simple conversation.  Again this wouldn't be so much of a problem if it had the humour of something like Commando, but the humour falls flat most of the time.  The story of how Randy Couture's character ended up with cauliflower ears was terrible.  Sly is much better than this.  This is the man who wrote Rocky, Rambo and their various sequels.  He knows how to write great dialogue but here the script really struggles.

I also think it's a mistake for a film like this to hire Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke.  These guys are great actors, and they add weight and believability to their characters.  Unfortunately, this really shows how limited some of these other guys are.  Anytime (Stone Cold) Steve Austin was on screen, trying to exert menace, I couldn't help but laugh.  Jet Li's broken English never helps, and he kept telling a story about needing money for his family, and it ultimately went nowhere.  Randy Couture was so bad he couldn't even pull off a joke.  And Sly is looking old.  He's creepily trying to look young with his eyeliner and drawn on 'stylized' goatee.  Why?  We know he's older than he used to be, but it's his experience that makes him vital.  He should be the Clint Eastwood of a film like this, instead of Roger Moore in A View to a Kill.

But enough bitching.  When this movie does get going in places, it's awesome.  The scene at the docks where Sly and The Stath (also good doing his best Stath impression) are escaping in the plane, only to turn around and 'send a message'.  Great stuff.  And when the team decide to go back to the island, the last 30 minutes are pure, visceral boy's own action.  This is where limited 'actors' such as Stone Cold and Couture prove useful and fun to watch.  But to me, there's not enough of this.  The film really takes too long to get going when it should start and finish with a bang.

As I alluded to earlier, this movie gives the impression that its budget was small.  In addition to this, I'm guessing there must have been some sort of clause that this movie was 15/pg13 rated.  There's definitely a better, grittier and bloodier version of this film waiting to be released.  Keep an eye out for a 'Director's Cut' on DVD and Blu Ray.

So overall, it was pretty much what I expected, though I can't shake the feeling that it was a missed opportunity.  However, I say, bring on The Expendables 2 with JCVD, Wesley Snipes, Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen.  So, onto Scott Pilgrim.........

If The Expendables is a throwback to Ye Ol' action movies of yore, I feel that Scott Pilgrim is trying to establish itself as the action movie for the future.  It is however, an abject failure.  I said afterwards that 'never before has a film been so loud and energetic, yet so ridiculously dull.'

I'll just admit it now.  I'm not a huge fan of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz.  Spaced, for me, was too busy patting itself on the back for cramming in as many cultural and geeky references as possible, that it was devoid of original ideas or humour.  Shaun of the Dead was okay, but hardly great.  The fact that it is even mentioned in the same breath as British classics such as Trainspotting, The Italian Job or Lock, Stock is laughable.  Hot Fuzz I definitely enjoyed the most of the three, but after watching it once, I have no desire to revisit it again anytime soon.

Scott Pilgrim is a continuation of Spaced.  It's so concerned with being as loud as possible, as full of geek references as possible, of being cool, that they forgot to make an interesting movie.

The problem starts with the structure of the movie.  Scott has to defeat 7 evil exes.  So if he's only on number 2, do you think he'll win?  Of course he will, it's all so predictable that every time he faces off against an opponent who is so much stronger and better than he is, that he will emerge victorious. 

The film also starts off with this cool, interesting editing style of speeding up and slowing down the action.  It throws up subtitles on the screen showing off the characters like they were items in an IKEA catalogue.  It shows pee meters being drained when Scott goes to the toilet.  That's pretty cool and original.  But when they continue this style for a full two hours, it grows tiresome very quickly.  The editing style is at home in a 2 minute trailer, but for two hours you'd swear Edgar Wright had gone to the Michael Bay school of editing.

Then there's the characters.  Do you really care about any of them?  Scott himself, played by Michael Cera, is a selfish, unlikable and stupid person.  He is defined as a loser, yet when he is confronted by these super evil exes, he suddenly becomes the most cunning, hardest and most determined person in the world.  Character development?  Who needs it?  Let's just have our characters able to do anything to suit a scene.  Ridiculous!  Then we have Ramona, the so called 'woman of his dreams'.  She's flightly, impulsive and not so nice.  She even tells Scott that she's like this, but he just has to accept it.  Please, can she be my girlfriend?  All of the evil exes were cliched ideas in one way or another.

Another thing.  If your movie is going to employ mind bending physics, or slow motion fights, then you, as the director or writer, have to justify it.  There's The Matrix, when bullet time is justified by Morpheus saying that in that world you are not able to break the rules, but you can bend them.  In Inception, all the action takes place in the dream world, and therefore gravity is manipulated.  In Scott Pilgrim it just is.  Some scenes take place in a representation of reality, others in a hyper unrealistic computer game world.  Is it a dream?  Do they have superpowers?  Why bother explaing it to the audience in any coherent way?  Just accept it.

But they don't just stop at computer game references.  There's a three minute scene which starts with the Seinfeld music and the riffs on that show complete with audience laughter and everything.  I've never walked out of a movie (and proud to say I still haven't), but that was stretched to breaking point at that moment.  Again, let's try to prove how cool we are by throwing in another couple of totally unrelated pop culture references.

So after two of the longest hours of my life, Scott and Ramona ended up together.  What a shock!  I didn't see that coming at all.  Sorry I guess I should have used SPOILER ALERT, but let's be honest, this movie was never going to end in any other way.

Crazy Tuesday double bill will of course continue.  I just hope my choices next time are a little better.  I guess I still haven't seen Toy Story 3 yet, so that's a definite.  Anyone with any ideas please comment below.

Until next time.......