The other day I said that any modern-day action movie that tried to out-batshit crazy Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A. was doomed to failure. I said that because of scenes like these:
(SPOILER ALERT on this next one…)
But the more I watch these two Internet-only John Rambo trailers, the more I feel like I may have to eat my words.
It’s hard to judge based on trailers alone, but it seems to me that the reason that John Rambo stands to be far more successful at being viscerally exciting than the self-aware (read: “self-conscious”) approach of Shoot ‘Em Up is that it’s not setting out to be crazy. It’s setting out to be extremely violent, which is has some venn-diagram overlap with crazy but is not entirely contiguous with it, and thus far it’s really good at what it’s setting out to do.
If Shoot ‘Em Up is self-conscious, so are Road Runner cartoons.
That’s like saying “If Jet sucks, so does Iggy Pop and the Beatles.”
Nnnnnot really. I didn’t say it was as good as Road Runner (who is awesome), but it’s the same sensibility.
Right, but it’s the same sensibility decades after the original, grafted into an action context that doesn’t really work for it and mixed with some genuinely unpleasant bits of business and uninteresting fight choreography.
I dunno, I’m probably being unfair, because in the end it’s not “self-consciousness” that hurts that movie, it’s simply not being good–unfunny jokes, unexciting action sequences, gross-out stuff that’s just icky rather than entertaining, etc.
I thought it was funny, exciting, and entertaining.
And breathtakingly stupid, I’m not denying that. But there’s no reason it can’t be all four.
Let us agree to disagree!
No!