There are always a lot of contenders for dumbest movie of a given year. I wonder what would be the smartest movie of 2008 (that didn’t also suck as entertainment)?
I watched about the last fifteen minutes of Wanted on cable last week. And, yup, that was enough to establish it had some world-class stupid.
The scene where whats-his-name was attacking the bad guys headquarters. He used a horde of exploding rats as a diversion. Then he walked in with a couple of guns and started shooting people. The problem was that there were hundreds of bad guys and he only had two guns. Even magic movie guns run out of bullets eventually. But not a problem for our hero. When he shot the bad guys they repeatedly died in such a way that they hurled out a loaded gun with their dying spasm. And all of these guns landed in our hero’s hand. And yes I mean landed in his hands. As he was shooting he would just drop a gun when it ran out of bullets and then hold his hand open. A new loaded gun, fresh from the guy he had just killed, would then drop into his hand without him having to even reach for it. I have to assume he was bothering to shoot people just for the enjoyment of the act because I presume, if he had wanted to, he could have arranged it for the guns to shoot themselves and kill everyone in the room without him having to even be there.
Turns out that scene is available on YouTube. Enjoy.
Save for two - the Batman and Robin equivalents, who they brainwashed into thinking they’d just been the stars of a TV show, where they’d played…well, themselves.
Though they do eventually get around to murdering them - a group of villains kidnap them, and drop them into a tank which appears to contain a giant…indeterminate tentacled thing. (Strangely circumspect, considering the rest of the book, actually. Drop, tentacle, blood slick.)
That is the stupidest thing I’ve seen since Sarah Palin’s farewell press conference.
Watching that, I’m reminded again: this movie was totally freakin’ awesome. And Timur Bekmambetov awesome at that. Really, why didn’t this whole thread end with post #2?
The circular bullet thing was one of my favorite parts about the movie, because that was when, it seemed to me, the movie just said “OK, we know this is completely inplausible, but we’re just having fun with our own estof ablished laws of physics”.
All in all though, what I felt when I watched the movie was “In America, thousands of comic geeks are weeping right now”.
The first time I watched this in the theatre, it was ok. Not a film for repeat viewing. The whole plot, concept, and backstory of *Wanted *makes it an interesting but ultimately forgetable film of 2008.
There is a scene from Idle Hands which is way better. One of the more awesome films of 1999. Go! Go! Bufallo!
Whew, that was over the top. Equilibrium did it classier, I think, and Shoot 'Em Up had more fun. Impressively ballstastic, though.
See, I could have handled that: I’ve enjoyed stories from the point of view of bad guys before. My problem with the movie is that the filmmakers seemed to think that they were good guys.
Because stupid is never good. Action movies are good but stupid action movies are bad. Comedies are good but stupid comedies are bad. Horror is good but stupid horror is bad. Don’t excuse stupidity just because of the genre - it’s an insult to the genre.
Didn’t the first Transformers come out in 2008?
I haven’t actually seen the movie, but based on that clip, I think I’m going to have to. Because that was freakin’ awesome.
It worries me that that is the best scene in the movie. I do want to see the movie, but it’s like seeing the preview and the movie has nothing to offer whatsoever outside of the preview.
But on that note I’ll go into it with about the same level of expectation I had when I saw Death Race or any of the Transporter movies.
Well, considering I absolutely loved Ultraviolet, I’m kind of immune to stupid physics for the sake of style. Bending bullets ? Sure, go to town ! Shooting because you’ve got shooter DNA ? Why not ! Healing mud baths ? Dude, feel free. Fate speaking through a Morse code of loom errors that started in Ancient Sumeria or something ? Be my… wait, WHAT ? Are you kidding me ?!
Yup, that’s the point where the stupid became overwhelming for me. Morse code in Ancient Sumeria. Christ.
Nothing in all of the movies that have come or will be could ever top the stupid that comes when someone *sticks their gun inside of another person’s skull and runs through a room shooting other badguys through the skull. *I guess dead people can run backwards at full speed for a mile or so, good to know.
*He was shooting people with a **fucking **skullgun. *I almost got in a fight when I saw this in the theater and started laughing hysterically in the middle of this climactic scene.
If you watch the entire movie, this has an explanation. Not that it makes a lot of sense, but it is not unprecedented within this story.
It’s all based on a comic book, incidentally.
Actually it was binary. No word on if the names were in ASCII, EBCDIC or some other encoding scheme.
Brian
A wizard did it is not an explanation.
I read the comic book series. Coincidentally, I thought it was pretty bad also. But for reasons different than the movie.
As stoopidly awesome as that scene was, the car-flip scene was also worth a look, as was the trainwreck, IMHO.