I saw a blurb for this tonight at some unholy hour of 1145pm.
It looks like a cute little brainfart of a indiana jones rip off. Anyone see it?
Opinions.
I saw it last Sunday I think it was, and basically, if you can turn off your brain entirely, give up your last pinky hold on reality, then yeah, it’s entertaining. Maybe I haven’t seen a made for TV movie in too long, but I had problems with a lot of the acting. It was also very family-oriented, I think.
Yep, I saw it a few weeks ago. Definetly a turn off your brain TV movie. Think a TV Tomb Raider that tries to be smart.
Dear Og, was that a bad movie. Not in an entertaining way, either. It was just bad bad bad. It used every cliche imaginable, but without self-awareness. I think they thought they were making a good movie. Oh, I know what will be really dramatic! Let’s have them jump off a cliff into a raging river and survive unscathed! :smack: Let’s give the bad guys a really creepy scary name! How about…Order of the Serpent! Ooo! :smack: :smack: And we’ll make our hero so super-observant that he can tell how long ago you got a divorce just by looking at you, but we’ll also make him such an idiot that he just goes around playing with all the artifacts in the secret museum of super-powerful magical stuff. :smack: :smack: :smack:
Who writes this stuff?
Besides, there were so many things in it that were so completely illogical. Like the scene on the airplane. If she jumped out a couple of minutes after she threw him out, she couldn’t possibly have caught up with him as he was falling. But even if you accept that she somehow could have closed the vertical distance…by the time she jumped out, the plane would have moved a great distance relative to the ground. How did she close the horizontal distance? Can she fly?
I saw about 10 minutes of it. I saw bob newhart tell noah wyle that he was the only one who could save the world. He never said why, despite his potestations.
That was enough for me. I turned it off after that. Was I premature?
I was up very late…
and it was a made for TV movie on TNT. And for a made for TV movie on TNT, it was pretty good. (Of course, at the time, I was reading Angels and Demons and compared to that, it was brilliant.)
I tried to watch it last Sunday, since ALA was looking for mini-reviews from librarians.
I had to turn it off - if I’d been in the mood to watch a mindless movie, sure, I could have handled it, or if I was just looking for something in the background. But actually trying to watch it and pay attention? Nope, wasn’t going to happen.
Yep, it was terrible. I was excited about it, actually. An interesting premise, I thought. But the execution sucked. An utter waste of Bob Newhart – although it was kind of cool, in a freaky way, to see old Bob kicking ass – and Jane Curtin and Olympia Dukakis (both of whom I usually enjoy). Noah Wyle was cute, but that’s about all that can be said for him. I stuck it out to the end only because I was wrapping presents and folding laundry – if my chores had run out before the movie ended, I would have turned off the TV and gone to bed.
Gotta echo the other posters - bad bad bad. Watched it with my son and we both wanted to turn it off…
My mom and I are both librarians and we’re saving it on TiVo until we have some time some evening. I like bad movies.
Well, dangermom & dangergrandma – you are in for a treat!
Actually, I also like cheezy movies – I think you’ll enjoy it more than I did because you’ll be expecting it to be bad. I was dumb enough to think (or hope) it would be good.
Ha ha! Me too! I love watching stupid stuff while I’m folding laundry. I’m partial to those “100 Greatest Whatevers” shows. I think I would have enjoyed “The 100 Greatest Station-Break Announcements” more than The Librarian.
I agree that the initial premise was pretty good, but the execution wasn’t. So many things just didn’t make any sense. Like Bob Newhart telling Noah Wyle that the only person who knows about the artifacts is the Librarian. So it does make sense that we find out that Bob is a past Librarian. But what about Jane Curtin? The blonde bodyguard chick? The guards at the door? They weren’t Librarians, but they knew all about it. Huh?
I was arguing with my husband about that airplane jump. We turned it off shortly afterward, but only because we are old and it was getting late. If it had been earlier, we probably would have kept watching so we could argue some more.
It was definitely bad, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. It was pretty obvious to me that they knew exactly what they were making: A B-grade movie ripping off of Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, and every other similar movie.
I mean, come on. When a movie contains the lines “It’s trapped. These things are always trapped.” and “What’s with these crazy evil groups and their insect names?”, they definitely aren’t taking themselves seriously.
If you get toward the end, the two principal female characters (Sonya Walger and Kelly Hu) get into a fight over Noah Wyle’s character with one of them saying, “Get your own geek.”
That was the best part for me. Sadly, I have never had two hot looking woman fight over me like that.
I was surprised that Noah Wyle’s character supposedly had 22 degrees, but he never managed to get one in Library Science, yet he got a job as a librarian. Although it seems to that “The Librarian” didn’t actually do a lot of library work. He was more of an archivist or museum curator.
When did it say he didn’t have a library sciences degree? I watched it…ohh…3 times, I suppose. Yes, I know. I was with a bunch of friends so we decided to do nothing but watch all three showings of The Librarion: The Quest for the Spear in a row. We did go to Wendy’s during the second showing, though.
I liked it, in the “oh my god, this is such a bad movie, but at least they know it” kind of way. I think they realized part way though it was a bad B movie, and threw in every cliche imaginable.
Nerdy guy with lots of book smarts no life skills? Check.
Hot chick who can kick ass? Check.
Girl starts off hating nerd then grows to love him? Check.
Super evil group who needs one thing to take over the world? Check.
Girl in evil group wants nerd guy to rule world with her? Check.
One of the things I didn’t like, though, were the things that were just plain incorrect, uet five minutes of research could fix, such as:
The called the sword in the stone excalibur. Sorry, they were two different swords. The sword in the stone was just that…a sword in the stone. It may have had an enchantent laid upon it to not be removed till Arthur pulled it, but it’sd not Excalibur. Excalibur was the sword given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake.
The Spear of Destiny? Wha? Now, I don’t know much Christian “mythology,” but a guy I was with does. According to him, it is suppossed to be called the Lance of Longinus, Longinus being the soldier that stabbed ol’ JC. I guess “Spear of Destiny” sounds cooler. In addition, why did it look so ornate? A typical Roman soldier would have a crappy shaft of wood with a (probably bent) cheap metal tip attached. Not a fancy, gold inlaid, fancy-schamncy spear totally impractical for fighting.
A Mayan temple hidden in the rainforest? Well…I could buy it…if they didn’t show that it clearly sticks right up out of the damn forest! I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have been seen by anyone in all that time.
And, yeah, the whole “i’ll throw you out a minute ahead of me, yet still catch up to you” thing was horribly dumb.
But it was fun naming the artifacts before they were said. I totally called Pandora’s Box as soon as he walked by it.
Not that I’m defending the movie (which I enjoyed in a Oh-GOD-this-is-bad-but-I-love-Dr.-Carter-and-horrid-adventure-movies kinda way), but I’ve heard it referred to as “The Spear of Destiny” in a couple other places. The only one that’s coming to mind right now is on the short-lived-for-a-reason series Roar (which I also loved in a ridiculous fashion).
My favorite line in the whole damn thing. 
I kinda wanted to see the movie, but didn’t end up doing so.
I just thought I’d comment on this - the Spear of Longinus is consistently referred to as the Spear of Destiny in the DC Comics universe. I’ve seen the usage elsewhere, as well, I think.
Google for “Spear of Destiny” - a lot of hits.
Well, no offense, sweetie, but your average geek doesn’t look anything like Noah Wyle. This is another one of those bad-movie cliches – take a gorgeous guy, mess up his hair a little, put some glasses or a bowtie on him and call him a geek. Like putting glasses on a beautiful starlet and her hair up in a bun and calling her ‘plain.’
That was a good line, though. Also, seeing Bob Newhart whipping some kung-fu on the bad guys almost made it worth staying up and watching it to the end. Reminded me of when Yoda was smacking the force all over those baddies in the last Star Wars thing.
It was defintely a cheesy movie, but sometimes, you’re in the mood for it and they did a fair job of being cheesy. When I heard the title, I told the wife, “They’re not thinking of the Spear of Destiny, are they? Because that’s already found…” It’s located in Armenia now, I guess, but metalurgy tests date it only back to the 7th century. Wikipedia’s entry
It seemed like they had taken bits and pieces from other movies and assembled them together with bad special effects and cheesy actors (my roommate kept laughing at Kyle MacLachlan and saying “He’s such a bad actor”), most of which I found entertaining. Two things bugged me… first, was that they should have used a different artifact; and second, is the huge cliche that only the hero can overcome the puzzles/traps to recover the ancient artifact that can be used to destroy the world. I mean, if they had just concentrated on getting the first piece of the spear back instead of trying to find the other two pieces, the threat would have been nowhere near as big! I had the same problem with Tomb Raider.