Why?
Good point, no extraneous plot there. But pornos have precious little characterization as well. They are quite limited in their appeal, if you know what I mean. I did not watch Birthday Girl in hopes I would be able to fap to it.
If you’ll allow me to suggest a TV example, Joan of Arcadia was a goofy show about a girl who talks with (not to) God, her family, and friends. And it was also a very gritty police procedural, shot with a heavy blue filter. The two sides just never managed to work as a whole, and if they just canned the entire police drama, it would (a) never have been missed, and (b) would have massively improved the show.
For the same reason that no other superhero movie doesn’t explain the powers, unless you are assumed to already know the reason. People want an explanation for things in movies that couldn’t happen in real life.
It’s why “a wizard did it” is such a frustrating answer to anything.
Isn’t that mentioned in the trailer? I know it’s included in the summary on the DVD box.
Doesn’t help when you watch the movie on cable. I had the same experience with Birthday Girl.
To me it not so much the plot change itself as the tone change – the brutality of the Russian guys is really jarring after the relatively sweet and tender first half of the film.
I know the original poster specified movies, but Charles Dickens often did the same thing in his books.
“Well, now that I’ve developed a bunch of humourous characters and showed them in various funny, satirical vignettes, it’s time for the fun to stop and get back to the real plot which is a bunch of half-baked malarkey about long-lost grandsons, inheritances, murder mysteries and what have you.”
Yeah, but the source of the superhero’s powers isn’t that interesting. Yes, the audience should know the sorts of things the superhero can do, otherwise he can just pull out his Bat Shark Repellent when he meets a shark. But who cares whether Hyperman can fly and cut guns in half with his mind because he found a mystical scarab on an archeological dig, or was bitten by a radioactive wombat, or was hit by a glowing meteor? Spending more than five minutes on the phlebotinum is a mistake, because the phlebotinum isn’t interesting, the character (hopefully) is interesting.
Do you have a blog with reviews like this? Cause I’d totally click on that.