Ok, I’m at blockbuster video looking for a movie for my wife and I to enjoy. I walk down the rows of movies, seen it, seen it, seen it, ahhh here’s one. Ablaze. I pick up to box and it seems cool. A movie about an arsonist, a police investigation and firefighters. I’m thinking ok; I’m interested. I read on and its got a few actors I recognize but then I see the name Ice T. ok, cool. I love Ice T. He is great in Law and Order (SVU?), so this seems like a great role for him. Must be good. I’m getting it.
So I get home and show it to my wife. We are both excited about watching what should be an interesting move. So Bam, into the DVD player it goes. We watch for a while and start to look at each other, both thinking about the same thing. Hmm, ok the dialog is a little cheesy but the plot seems to be moving along a bit. I’ll get better. Then enter the bad special effects, bad plot twists, even cheesier dialog and exit Ice T. Pretty soon we are both laughing so hard about just how bad this movie is, that we decide to stop torturing ourselves and turn the movie off.
Now I have rented a few movies that have been bad in my life, but usually I say hell, I’ve spent the money, I might as well finish watching it. But NO! This one was so bad that it was painful. I mean what moron put this piece of shit together and said yeah, “I’ll put my name on this and expect people to watch It.” what company watch this and said “oh this is great, yeah we’ll publish it?” (20th Century Fox by the way) And for the love of God, what did Ice T owe someone to actually appear in this movie?
Is it too much to ask that Hollywood not wipe their asses with a piece of paper and call it a script? People, If you see this movie (ABLAZE) Run away. It is the worst movie I have ever seen.
Ablaze sounds like one of those straight-to-video movies that have been so damned abundant. They pretty much all suck, but which sucks the most, we may never know.
Have you not seen the other straight-to-video pieces of crap Ice T has been in? For years, he’s been in substandard movies doing what is supposed to be called acting but isn’t. I liked his music, but I’m sorry, the man was never meant to be an actor. When you rent a movie with him in it, you tend to get what you pay for.
Sorry, Criminal, but I’ll have to agree with Kismet’s assessment of Ice-T’s “acting”. Although he seems like a very cool guy on screen, he’s definitely in the Kim Basinger / Sean Young school of wooden acting.
As far as Ice T, I guess you’re right. He is not the kind of Actor(yeah I use that loosely) that can make a script better. He is only as good as the script.
Really the only stuff I’ve seen him in is TV shows. He has a great part in LaO SVU. I haven’t seen him on the big screen much, I guess I was expecting too much. lol.
Now that I think about it. It was a straight to video movie. While I was at the store I thought it was another movie I had heard about, but I was wrong. Very Wrong.
Criminal, if you want to see a good, not great, straight-to-video thriller starring Ice-T and a couple of firefighters, then definitely check out Tresspass. It’s an underrated little gem and the description sounds similar enough to Ablaze that this may have been the movie you were thinking of.
I think that if you checked levels of cocaine metabolites in blood for the producer/director/key execs for some of the worst movies, you’d find a very strong correlation between high drug levels and horrendous product.
I was there. I suffered through the movie (picture me doing little rabbit ears in the air here). And call me stupid, but I thought Ice-T would be OK in it. But Oh Sweet Jesus! was this bad. I should have known that the beginning, which had 10 minutes of bad effects credits, that no one would ever make it through this piece of crap to see the end credits. The other tip-off during the credits: Tom Arnold. Enough said.
During a car crash scene I looked at my husband and hoped aloud that the characters would go into some sort of coma and wake up five years later, in a better movie.
FLC went to the restroom. Came back. “Did I miss anything?” he innocently asks. “Only the continued torture of my soul!” I shreik. I can’t begin to describe what was worse: the meaningless housefire started by a kid taping toilet paper to a model airplane and setting it on fire, followed by a laborious collapse onto the floor as he circled in the hall, or the totally unrelated woman-in-labor “plot line” of the woman that was going to name her child Rocky. And the nurse? Why, it’s the maid from Diff’rent Strokes! Hearing her say “Horseshit” made my skin crawl.
I’ve seen Rollerball. I’ve seen Toy Soldiers. Hell, I’ve seen alot of the movies off Lifetime. But they don’t hold a candle to the spirit-killing mind pollution that is this movie.
You don’t have to be pretentious to ask for a coherent plot, workable script and decent acting. Gee-whiz special effects do not a movie make. And 98 out of 100 studio release lack plot, script and acting. Sure, you may get one of the three, maybe two, but for $10.00 (and with a $150 million budget), I want and expect all three.
By god, if one has to be labeled pretensious to demand the finer things in life–movies with plot, actors with depth, more scripts adapted from the fine work of existentialist authors…being able to add the letter U to words like “colour” with impunity, even though I’m not British…perhaps some decent double-cream brie now and then instead of that processed shit that passes for cheese in the story nowadays…
If that is what has to be done, then do your worst! Label me “pretensious!”
