THE JUDGE SAYS: Oil covered shaved-chest men roll around on
the ground together to the delight of adolescent boys everywhere!
You have to think for a moment and
guess who is the target audience they are shooting for here? Could it be the
overwhelming number of Greek mythology enthusiasts we have in America. That seems to be a viable option, but my best
guess is they were aiming for males, ages 10-25, who have been raised on WWF, or
whatever they call the fake wrestling these days, whom are still oblivious to
the fact that if you get all excited watching oiled up men grope each
other, that doesn’t make you tough, that makes you AWESOME! Well, at least
that’s what I think they believe.
Anyways, as far as the story line
is concerned I would expect something epic. You know “epic”, as in it’s
definition, not necessarily from a poem, but referring to the plights and feats
of a legendary hero. Not, as you may have heard this week from a person wearing
florescent rimmed sunglasses at Coachella ,”Its was hella sweet, Bon Iver
played as the sun was setting behind them, it was sooo EPIC!” And of course
EPIC is pronounced in a drawn out deep guttural voice. But enough of my predictions,
lets get to the movie.
I press PLAY. Queue Socrates quote.
Next? You guessed it, BONDAGE! No joke, seriously. First shot is of a bunch of
naked dudes gagged and bound in a bright gold cage. Some dude walks into the
room straight off the Eye’s Wide Shut set wearing a mask and cloak. My best and
only guess at this point is Zed and the Gimp are going to walk through that
door next. Oh, wait, it was just a dream, pshheewwwww. That was close, I almost
had to hit fast forward in the first 10 seconds.
The next 40 minutes is a blur predictable
character building scenes coupled with sprinkles of “Mom gets her throat
sliced” and “conniving traitor ends up being unfair.” The one redeeming quality
of this segment of the movie is that the bad guy, Mickey Rourke, talks like
Yoda. But not in a wise way, more like he’s done entirely too much cocaine in
his life to remember his lines. It’s rather comical. After only one scene I
found myself rooting for him. Well, what-do-you-know, he rewarded me for my
loyalty in the very next scene when Yoda had the traitors balls smashed with a
sledgehammer. Very graphic. What’s even better is this mutilation only came
after several poignant emasculating insults which cut deep into the fabric of
what it is to be a man. You would think the traitor would not be pleased with
his newfound ballless self. Turns out this quasi eunuch is pleased to serve out
the rest of this movie as Yoda’s henchman.
Surprisingly enough, we find
ourselves over half way through the movie before you get one of those, “you
gotta be f’n kidding me” moments. The storyline remains intact when finally the
bad guys double cross the good guys and corner them on a boat. The good guys “genius
strategic maneuver” to evade the bad guys was to wait till the last second and
jump off. I guess the bad guys never noticed they were endowed with the same
physical ability, that being the ability to jump. Needless to say, jumping and continuing
their pursuit would have been a far better life choice than simply stopping,
turning to see a tidal wave, and cower to wait for their inevitable death. My
description might have led you to believe the bad guys proximity to the tsunami
was much closer, but that was not the case. As a matter of fact, everyone was
on the same boat deck, and the wave started at least a mile off shore giving
everyone ample time to find safety. Several other issues that arise with this
scene are one, what was the God thinking when he started the wave, and two, how
does jumping into a rock crevice along the shore protect you from drowning as a
100 foot wave passes by?
So this God Duderonomous or
something, was given explicit instructions not to interfere with the humans
fight. If he did not obey his penalty would be death. For some reason he was so
overwhelmed with worry for the good guys safety that he sacrifices his
immortality to get them out of trouble.
Remember now, this is a God. He
has all the capabilities that he can imagine at his disposal to save them. So
what do he do? Tidal wave! Yep. A tidal wave. It seems he didn’t notice the
people he was trying to save were on a boat. That was whicked smmmaaatt. Just
as a quick update, Yoda continually gets 10 second check-ins where he never
fails to kill a man, whether it’s justified or not. But back to the “how do you
not drown under a tidal wave”, as was previously questioned. There are two
lines of thought here. One, Duderonomous put up a protective shield around them
off screen once he realized this wave he created was an extremely poor choice of
methods to save his pals. And two, which is most likely, they needed an excuse
to oil them up. I was joking back in the beginning of this about oiled up
wrestlers, I take that back, because they are literally “oiled up.” That was a
tidal wave of oil for some reason which left them all slick black and shiny.
The fact that they were covered in sexy oil pretty much eliminates my thought
that Dude put up a shield, so we are just going to have to go with the good
guys can hold their breath a lot longer than the bad guys.
As we get toward the end we begin
to see Yoda’s plan come to fruition. It is evil and creepy but he actually has
a very interesting view on immortality which differs from the Gods. His goal is
to have the Gods battle the Titans, both of which are “immortal” under any
standard definition, except of course when fighting each other. The idea is after
they conveniently all kill each other and Yoda, with his army, will be the most
powerful being there is. So by pillaging all over the globe and planting his “seed”,
aka raping every woman in the world, “There will never be a moment when the sun
sets on my blood.” Pretty despicable, the whole raping thing, but none the
less, an interesting viewpoint on immortality. Thereby making him immortal and
hopefully creating a box office franchise.
Once this is explained all well and
good, you’d think we could just get on with our mano y mano final battle, but
no. Everyone back to their corners, regroup for another 15 minutes of sword
fighting. At one point I thought they must have stolen the Simpson’s choreographer
from the fight when Bart says “I’m going to keep punching, and if you run into
it, its your fault.” Then Lisa says, “I’m going to keep kicking, and if you run
into it, its your fault.” You could blatantly see 3 guys in the corner who all
took turns hitting each other in the shoulder. That must have been a long shoot
that day. Then I fast forwarded through what appeared to be several cool new
ways to chop a mans head off, until I saw Zed’s Gymps reappear from the opening
scene. Turns out they were the Titans who were now unleashed to fight the
lightly golden bronze chested Gods. They go though the motions blah blah until
we get to the title fight. YODA VS. GOOD GUY #1. Yoda is dealing out a thorough
ass whooping until he gives this douche-bag a moment for his final words. What
does Yoda get for this brief show of respect? Shit on! He gets shit on I tell
you. This jerk stabs him in the foot, pins him on the ground, then steals Russell
Crowes slow-knife-in-neck-fatality from Gladiator. That pissed me off. I really
thought Yoda had a chance here. He would have been a much more viable character
for a sequel.
Overall, what you’re going to remember from this one
is that Mickey Rourke is a cool ass dude and this Henry Cavill has a weird effeminate
yell that will not work well in action movies. Unfortunately he actually landed
the lead in the new Superman franchise. Which goes to show you, that movie is
going to blow goats. People laughed at Robert Downey Jr. as a super hero, now that’s
a billion dollar franchise. So when rebooting Superman they chose an effeminate
model. Solid choice. Well, thank you for reading, and until next time, GB².
