BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 7: THE EXPENDABLES

In the summer of 2010, the NBA was thrown for a loop when LeBron James, by any measure one of the two or three best basketball players in the world, and an athlete of astonishing and brutal grace, joined fellow All-Star Chris Bosh in signing with their mutual friend and fellow superstar Dwyane Wade on Wade's Miami Heat. It was widely considered that the teaming of three of the NBA's ten best players (evaluating Bosh generously) and two of the top five essentially made Miami the favorite to win the next several league championships. Wade, after all, had already won one. With such an array of talent in a league that, more than any other team sport, is a league of stars (phrase © FreeDarko), how could they not?

Though they've had some spectacular moments, reality proved a little more complicated. My beloved and long-suffering New York Knicks left a sizable testicle print on Miami's collective forehead on Oscar night, and Miami's current five-game losing streak is the top trending topic on Twitter as of this writing. Merely assembling big stars has not translated into instant success. You still, as the poet said, have to play the games. And this leads us, naturally, to The Expendables.

Long-time readers of this blog—I love all five of you dearly—will remember the odd mention here and there of The Expendables last summer and early fall. When it finally came out, life and finances prevented me from seeing it, and the generally lukewarm reviews made me not particularly care. Still, it's not as though I wasn't going to see it, it simply became the sort of thing I waited to receive in a little red envelope.

Much like the 2010-11 Miami Heat, The Expendables subscribed to the philosophy that one could achieve dominance through the collection of stars. Sly Stallone, a man whose very name conjures fond memories of explosions and violent death in the mind of the sophisticated cineaste, co-wrote, directed, and starred. Sly decided to take advantage of being Sly to call as many large and/or muscular practitioners of the fine art of ownage as he could think of, the idea being that an all-star team of swaggering fucking badasses could win the movie equivalent of a championship, which is to say, that it would own that much more, by the strength in numbers theory.

There are two flaws that present themselves even before we get to the movie. The first is, in Sly's desire to get EVERYBODY, he failed to convince two very important members of the genus “everybody,” namely Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, to participate. Van Damme, hilariously, declined the role he was offered because he felt the picture lacked significant redeeming social value—which is why Jean-Claude Van Damme is so goddamn fucking fascinating, the man is so sublimely strange—and Seagal, also tellingly, passed because of a beef with the producer. It wasn't as though as Sly wasn't in charge of this shit; if he'd been thinking, he'd have shitcanned the producer in favor of Seagal and rewritten Van Damme's character so that he was running a Boys and Girls Club in Watts or some such.

Flaw 1a, while we're on about casting laziness, not securing Danny Trejo immediately and irrevocably disqualified The Expendables from being the kind of movie it aspired to be. Stupid action movies where shit blows up have Danny Trejo in them. He was in fucking xXx, for shit's sake.

But even if you take flaws 1 and 1a as subjective and unfair—which they are—there's still flaw 2, which is the identical problem the Heat find themselves having this season: you still have to play the games. You can get Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lungren, Randy Couture, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Terry Crews, you can get Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to make cameos, Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke for non-ownage scenes, and the underrated David Zayas to ham it up in the Danny Trejo role (it's to Zayas' credit that he even comes close to Trejo-level awesomeness), and sure, hey, that's enough testosterone to make any shit you need blown up officially on its way to kingdom come. But you still have to play the games. In this case, write a script that makes sense, and point the camera in the right direction so that the ownage is captured on camera.

These two qualifiers are not, to put it mildly, fucking rocket science. Writing a screenplay isn't as easy as it looks, but writing a screenplay for a stupid action movie is easier than a lot of genres. Sly, don't forget, has been nominated for an Oscar for screenwriting (for Rocky), so it's not unreasonable to expect him to know how to do stuff like creating characters and map out beats and create something at least coherent. As for the directing, that's an iffier proposition, but you would think Sly had at least been part of enough successful action movies, and movies in general, to know that the whole point of a movie is that you see what the fuck is going on.

You would, if you thought that, be wrong. The Expendables fails on every conceivable level on which a movie can fail. Even the most cursory glance at the rest of this blog should make it perfectly clear that I'm not pulling some snooty film critic bullshit. I damn well know better than to expect thought-provoking works of sensitivity out of Sly. But I don't think I'm amiss—especially as an ardent defender of the staggeringly fucktarded yet unfailingly entertaining Tango & Cash—in expecting Sly to at least deliver a presentable action picture. WHERE YOU CAN FUCKING SEE WHAT'S GOING ON.

This is the most puzzling and infuriating aspect of The Expendables. You can't fucking see anything. I was restlessly screwing around on Twitter while the movie was on, trying to regulate my breathing and not break shit. Here's how it went:

I think I'm going to watch The Expendables tonight. Whether it sucks or rules, it should still be fun to tweet/blog about.

All right, Sly, don't suck, or it's straight to your room with no steroids.

Things, however, went downhill quickly:

The Expendables is like a Dogme 95 picture shot on location in Sly's subconscious: badly lit, simplistic, and not as good as you'd think.

If the whole picture is this underlit I seriously might stalk Sly and ram a light meter up his ass.

My friend Abe chimed in at this point, informing me that there was going to be a fight scene between Jet Li and Dolph Lungren that would set a new standard for visual incoherence and editing; “watching it is like rolling down a hill.” Since we weren't there yet, I continued slogging through:

There's nothing wrong with The Expendables a good writer, director, camera crew, and editor couldn't fix.

I think Sly let his plastic surgeon edit this movie: "Hey, it's called Final Cut, he'll know how it works mumblemumble."

Hey, another one of those explosions that only kills people who don't have speaking parts! (Ed. Note: you know shit is fucked up when I—I, for fuck's sake—am complaining about explosions)

Damn shame Statham's trapped in this piece of shit. In a real movie, the scene where he owned all those guys on the ball court woulda ruled.

This whole movie, David Zayas is grumbling to himself "if I was still on OZ, I woulda killed the shit out of Eric Roberts in the 1st scene."

Another really bad sign: Mickey Rourke isn't the biggest plastic surgery casualty. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, SLY????

Christ, what fucking bullshit. Jet Li does NOT need Sly to save him from Dolph Lundgren. Jet wipes the floor with any of these guys.

(At that point, I replied to Abe's thing about the Li/Lundgren fight, which was even worse than he'd said: “I think the editing in the Li/Lundgren fight took five years off my life”)

Podcaster, and fellow sophisticated cineaste, Asim Burney then, rightly, pointed out: “more importantly what's up with Eric Roberts' teeth?” A damn fine question. Eric Roberts' teeth are certainly fucking bizarre in The Expendables. My theory: “Must have fucked them up chewing on scenery.”

By this point, we were past the point of no return anyway (by which I also mean that The Expendables is worse than Point of No Return, that stupid Bridget Fonda remake of La Femme Nikita):

So....I guess we never find out whether Sly or Stone Cold won that fight. Woulda been nice to know, in an action movie. (Ed. Note: if that fight was resolved in any fashion whatsoever, I have no idea; all I know is Stone Cold was beating the fucking fuck out of Sly, and then I blinked and Sly was running away and we never saw Stone Cold again. I swear, I was paying attention. I was totally squinting at the screen trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with the lousy lighting and the shitty editing, and I have no idea what happened to Stone Cold. This is not good.)

Sly makes Michael Bay look like Yasujiro Ozu. (Boosh, motherfucker. What has two thumbs and knows how to name-drop? This guy, madames et monsieurs)

Sly spent $85 mil on this shit and forgot to bring a tripod and lights. (Ed. Note: actually $80 mil, but the point still stands)

Wow. The Expendables really sucks THAT bad. You'd have to replace the Ghostbusters twinkie with a dick to really get a sense of the scale.

Which is basically all you need to know about The Expendables. It sucks a dick of a size that took Harold fucking Ramis' intellect to calculate.

I'm really kind of stunned by just how bad The Expendables actually is. It wasn't even like I was expecting it to be good. My standards for this kind of picture are not ambiguous, nor are they exacting. I want to see men with muscles deal violent death. I want large explosions; in certain cases one well-executed and well-timed explosion will suffice. And in the intervals between violent death and explosions, I want the men with muscles to be cool. For this last, you don't even need to write dialogue for the motherfuckers. Better yet, shut the fuck up. Michael Dudikoff didn't talk a lot, and he was cool (I don't want to hear any shit out of any of you, American Ninja 1 & 2 were both quality entertainment, and Avenging Force rocked). Danny Trejo doesn't flap his yap. Hell, even Alain Delon managed to hide the fact that he was kind of a shitty actor by shutting the fuck up, and Alain Delon rode that clever bit of strategy to status as one of the great icons of international cinema.

No one in The Expendables knows when to shut the fuck up. They bicker like retards. Jason Statham has this whole underdeveloped subplot with this woman—because no matter how bad a movie The Expendables is, it's not so divorced from reality that it would ignore the fact that Jason Statham has not gone an hour and forty minutes without having sex since his movie debut 12+ years ago—and Jet Li has this laboriously dwelt-on, and ultimately false, backstory about needing money for his family. Now, I know Statham has to get laid because he's Statham and Statham gets laid, but we didn't need to torture Jet with long dialogue scenes when we all know goddamn well his ingles isn't that great if it doesn't have any fucking point. Look, when I'm telling you you talk too goddamn much, it's time to take stock of your entire existence because holy shit. That's like Julie Taymor cracking on you for wasting money.

Sly's central fuck-up—I was about to say “original sin” but the movie wasn't that bad—is his failure to understand that language, be it verbal or cinematic, has meaning. His characters' idle, pointless chatter undermines their status as badasses, and he waves his camera around in an equally idle and pointless fashion. Even if he did hold his camera still, there's about five minutes total in the entire fucking movie that's lit well enough to even see. And even if he'd lit properly, the action is cut so that it is literally impossible to see who is doing what to whom at almost any point. That tweet about Sly making Michael Bay look as restrained and elegant as Ozu (famous for his long takes and exquisite compositions), that's only barely an exaggeration. At least in Michael Bay movies, the compositions are legible enough for you to realize, oh, yes, that's Megan Fox's ass. That whole fucking stunningly awful fight between Jet and Dolph, you never see Jet complete a single move. It's like Sly let a four-year-old with a severe cognitive impairment edit the entire picture.

In the wrong sort of mood, I'd interpret the fact that Sly's making a sequel to The Expendables as a sign that he was personally trying to get me to start taking heroin. But making sequels is what Sly does. And, shitty as The Expendables is, it made $200 mil. So, sure, it can exist. But fuck if you're gonna get me to sit through it unless Sly stops off at Home Depot for some clip lights and gets an editor who isn't tweaking his tits off while having a seizure on rollerskates (EDIT: Looks like, per Total Film, someone other than Sly will be making that call, as he won't be writing or directing! I HAVE INFLUENCE, PEOPLE! Ha ha HA!!!).

Remember. It takes more than stars to make a movie. It takes enlightenment. Heh heh heh . . .

WHY CAN'T WE BE FRIENDS?

Lethal Weapon 3 was one of the first movies I saw through a critical lens. I had, to that point, liked movies and not liked movies, but never really got into why. A while before, I had had the experience of watching The Addams Family movie and thinking to myself, “Wow, this plot is really stupid.” Then, in California visiting a friend of my parents (a professional writer), we happened to go out to the movies one night, and the only thing playing was The Addams Family, and as we were sitting waiting for it to start, my parents' friend asked me “So you've already seen this. Did you like it?” and I replied, “Yes, it's fun, but the plot is really stupid.” When the movie was done, he smiled at me and said, “You were right about the plot.” This is not just a Fisher Price My First Critical Assessment story, though; proud as I was of myself for noticing something like that, I started doing it more often, bringing us, relevantly, to Lethal Weapon 3, which I walked out of going, “Jesus Christ, that was really fucking stupid. The gang stuff was like they were trying to rip off Boyz N The Hood, except they fucked up because they're a studio and John Singleton actually cared about the movie he was making and getting stuff right.”

Yes, I developed my love for the word “fuck” at a very young age, but let's look at that again. A 13 year old boy walked out of a Lethal Weapon movie and thought it was stupid. If you do the math, and think about how stupid an action movie has to be for a 13 year old boy—who, despite a burgeoning erudition and an intellect that even then was considered quite fierce, was still a 13 year old boy—to find it stupid . . . yeah, if you're staring off into middle distance and exhaling slowly, I don't blame you.

Lethal Weapon 3 is a classic case of a franchise losing an accurate sense of where it came from. The first Lethal Weapon movie, it cannot be overstated, was an action movie with a handful of dumb jokes and funny lines. It was not a goofball stupid fucknut screwball comedy pratfall fucking thing with explosions. Also, the first two movies featured truly evil villains whose villainy had international implications. They were, in short, grown-ass man Evil White Guys In Suits. The villain in Lethal Weapon 3 is fucking bland. He's an ex-cop gun dealer developer manqué. Sure he might deal with some big-timers in the gun business, but he himself is a low-level dickface who, sure, kills some people and is not a nice person . . . but he isn't a proper Evil White Guy. He's more of a Mildly Unpleasant Caucasian, in the grand scheme of things.

The first two movies, bizarrely, managed to seem more realistic despite the fact that the Evil White Guys all had helicopters with machine gun mounts that they could fly around Malibu and downtown Los Angeles with no one noticing and massive armies of mercenaries capable of feats of badassery such as scaring Ed O'Ross (Ed O'Ross was fucking Viktor Rosta, okay? You scare him, eres chingón, 'mano) in the nightclub scene in the first movie where Gary Busey does his Liddy lighter trick. So for Lethal Weapon 3 they decided, hey, let's make the villain more “realistic”!

Only problem is with that approach, you actually have to make him resemble a real person. The bad guy, at one point, goes into a police station to personally kill a subordinate to keep him from aiding the cops. The fact that he manages to obscure his face from all the security cameras is supposed to make him seem all smart and shit, but when Internal Affairs cop Rene Russo reveals the existence of a brand new camera from exactly the angle they need to get a good shot of him, they know exactly who he is. Anyone who managed to stay a criminal long enough to be in charge of other criminals does not do that kind of shit. Bringing up The Wire in this context is like using C-4 to open your front door, but you never saw Avon Barksdale running around inside the fucking police station shooting witnesses. You get to be in charge by not acting like a fucking retard, and the villain in Lethal Weapon 3, Jack Travis or whatever the fuck his name is, is a fucking retard. That shit at the end where he's driving the tractor toward Mel at like two miles an hour and shouting out thirty different stupid variations on exhorting Mel to confront his imminent demise, and Mel stands there and watches him slowly inch toward him before picking up a MAC-10 with armor piercing bullets and finally shutting him the fuck up . . . sorry. Try again.

Then there's the whole thing where the bad guys have street gangs as their muscle. More bullshit, and in this case a truly weird attempt to capitalize on the currency of “hood” pictures like Boyz N The Hood and South Central (Menace II Society hadn't come out yet) by being exactly like the stupid portrayals of gangs in 70s and 80s movies that the cycle of Los Angeles-based “hood” movies were a reaction against.

Danny Glover has a big freakout and crisis of conscience after he accidentally shoots a gang member his son is friends with (don't ask, it's just more bullshit) but he pulls himself together over a truly saccharine funeral scene, scored to Boyz II Men's a cappella hit “It's So Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday” in some of the cheapest sentiment seen in early 90s Hollywood.

Don't fucking get me started about Joe Pesci in this movie. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam originally left him out, having some explanation about him having gone back to New York, but some dumbass exec thought people liked him, so he was written back in, utter superfluous other than to give Mel someone to make fun of. Such a waste; it's really painful watching Joe Pesci humiliate himself like this.

Surprisingly, the one thing that doesn't suck in Lethal Weapon 3 is the thing that, in a movie this stupid, should logically have been the worst offender: Mel's courtship of Internal Affairs investigator Rene Russo. First of all, with the shit Mel and Danny get up to in these movies, Internal Affairs should be up their ass. Second, Mel is enough of a dick to her that it makes her kind of sympathetic, so that when Mel is randomly over at her place and sees that she has a Three Stooges screensaver he's the one who has to stop being a dick to woo her; whenever it's the “tightass” character who has to “loosen up” the romance always seems fake. Especially since, in this case, she's doing a very valuable job: keeping cowboy assholes like Mel from violating procedure and blowing half the fuckin city up every five minutes. Also, since the two of them are totally emotionally 12 year old boys, it's both a cute romance and a plausible life partner match.

It's weird, with only one thing handled well in the entire picture—with the exception of some of the action scenes (but not all, the Joe Pesci at the hockey game one sucks wildebeest dick)—Lethal Weapon 3 ends up not being a total loss. You'll laugh, but I think that alone makes Rene Russo's one of the most underrated performance of the entire 90s. Consider she's the one thing that keeps this fucking movie from being a capital offense, and consider that this was 1992, the year of Marisa Tomei's Oscar (a clear sign that Oscar was showing the love to less-than-stellar movies), and I think you gotta talk about her as a Best Supporting contender that year. (Ed. Note: we're conveniently ignoring the fact that Angela Bassett, who wasn't nominated, should have won for Malcolm X, which should have swept every imaginable category for every award in the fucking universe that year; no, the author is not still bitter).


Lethal Weapon 4 is a huge improvement, by only being kind of stupid, though it's still a ludicrous mess and the action has long since abandoned the pretense of realism with which the first movie flirted occasionally. And Mel's Martin Riggs, by this point, had long since become more of an overgrown teenager than the legitimately crazy and dangerous motherfucker whose legit craziness in tandem with his fearsome fighting skills gave the movie its name.

The addition of Chris Rock as Danny Glover's new secret son-in-law is forced, and seems motivated more by “Hey, Chris Rock just re-invented himself as the greatest comedian in America [Ed. Note: irrefutably true circa 1998] and we can have him come in and do some shtick for a couple scenes, let's do it” rather than his character having anything more to contribute. His scene where he and Joe Pesci just stop the movie to riff to each other about cell phones for an hour, great as they both are, could easily have been cut with no problem.

Or, alternatively, replaced with more scenes of Jet Li owning motherfuckers. It should be no surprise, as a highly sophisticated cineaste with extremely refined taste, that I am a massive Jet Li fan. Evaluating his technical abilities as a martial artist is best left to people who actually know what the hell they're talking about, but I'll speak to the elegance and artistry of his moves, which make the direct and brutal moments like the one in Lethal Weapon 4 when he disassembles Mel's gun with one hand while his eyes are going “Man . . . seriously . . . go fuck yourself” all the more shocking. If anything, Jet is too good in Lethal Weapon 4; it's a stretch when Mel and Danny kill him in the end (sure, Jet's anger at his brother's death clouds his judgment, but that's a fucking lame excuse: when he's in his own movies Jet channels that anger into a mountain-leveling earthquake of kung fu, a bad guy apocalypse). To top it all off, the dude can act, too.

Jet's presence in Lethal Weapon 4, even if the movie itself wasn't a marked improvement over its immediate predecessor, would make it all okay, and he is most of what the picture has going for it. The “we all love each other” vibe of the supporting cast is hard to dislike, even if most of them don't really serve much of a purpose in the movie, and the scene when Mel, Danny, and Chris go to interrogate Triad boss Kim Chan at the dentist and accidentally all get fucked up on laughing gas (which is laced with truth serum or something, who knows) is very funny. But the story is clunky and lurches around all over the place, and poor Calvin Jung is saddled with the job of being the one token good Chinese guy who's tasked with explaining the entirety of Eastern culture to Mel and Danny. (I'm sure he was longing for the days when his only line in the picture was saying “Man, fuck you” to Robocop, at least one some level).

Really, neither Lethal Weapon 3 or 4 is much use other than giving the cast a chance to all hang out with each other again. You could do worse for a late-night cable movie than either, but the real Lethal Weapon experience is to be found in the first two movies. You know, when Martin Riggs really WAS a lethal weapon. The last two movies are profit-seeking engines powered by jokey-jokes and car chases; this would be okay in a series that didn't start out as promisingly, but is a bit of a letdown here.

However, in spite of that, it's not as though Lethal Weapons 2-4 are complete departures from the original. The elements taken by writers less talented than Shane Black and turned into the diminished quality sequels were there in the first movie. They kid around a bit, and ultimately it all comes back to family and how nice it is to have one, whether the one you're born into or the one you choose. It was subtler in the first movie, and the sequels could have correspondingly been subtle about it or taken it in different ways. But it was always there, and that's why as dumb and bad as Lethal Weapon 3 and 4 can be, they are not complete departures. They were always in the cards.

THE FANDOM MENACE

It is time to address a plague upon popular culture. Being as I am a serious intellectual, a student of literature and history, and a lover of language, let there be no mistake that I use the word “plague” without levity and with proper respect. Remember when Old Testament God (back when God had balls) unleashed his decahedral fuck you on the anti-Semite Pharaoh? He came up with some good ones:

---Changing the water of the Nile to blood (fucking trippy, see The Shining for proof)
---Egypt shall teem with frogs (the French are an acquired taste . . .)
---All the dust shall become lice (with all the sand in Egypt, that's even worse than it sounds)
---Swarms of flies (been to a barbecue lately? That shit sucks)
---All the livestock will die (God's tough enough to deal with them becoming vegans)
---Festering boils (yuck)
---One motherfucker of a hailstorm (self-explanatory)
---Locusts (one thing I really dig about Old Testament God, He knew when to stick it in and break it off; the flies should have been bad enough, but sometimes you gotta remind motherfuckers who's God)
---Darkness (sounds kind of all right, especially to nocturnal types like me, til I remember how bad my uncle flipped out the winter he spent in Stockholm when the sun never came out)
---The slaughter of the first-born (“Too Jewish.” ---Hedley Lamarr)

But one thing that, without any of this other shit being necessary, would have brought the Pharaoh to his knees would have been to set loose some fanboys to post thirty times a day on Pharaoh's message board. Holy shit fanboys are fucking annoying.

Now, I'm a nerd myself. Let's be perfectly clear, I am not putting all of nerdity on blast. What I'm talking about is the kind of shithead who offers the following type of complaint following an extremely generous review of a comic-book FX movie:

“When are you planning to hire someone to review these kind of movies who actually likes these kind of movies?”

and offers the suggestion

“[Hire] someone who's enthused about the films in question.”

Now, full disclosure necessitates the concession that the author of the above quotes does offer an articulately composed defense of this position, and those quotes are taken out of context. However, the sentiment is fucking odious. Not only does the idea of a critic paid to gush indiscriminately about big-budget FX pictures do nothing but serve the interests of the evil-white-guy-run multinationals who in turn run the studios (which contradicts the whole point of big-budget FX pictures, which is to have men in armored suits keep the world safe from evil white guys), the whole fucking point of being a critic is to discriminate.

Fanboys cannot handle the idea of their chosen object of fandom being reviewed by anyone other than a fanboy. Movies are not the only medium where this happens—Old Testament God help any music critic who dares to admit s/he still likes The Bends and OK Computer best when reviewing a new Radiohead album—but the movie bitching is the most obnoxious, considering that the movies the fanboys get all bent out of shape over are so insubstantial.

The bile vented over Ang Lee's Hulk movie, for example (which I liked, but me and my buddy saw it smashed out of our minds on tequila with our feet up on the railing at the Ziegfield, and when you have that much style, my friends, the petty concerns of mortals are irrelevant) and the nuclear Internet wars over whether the Louis Leterrier one (which I haven't seen) was better really pissed me off. Not only because of the nastiness involved, but because the fanboys would even turn on critics who liked their favored version for not liking it for the right reasons. Or for mentioning Lou Ferrigno. I hate to break it to all them, but the Hulk comics fucking suck. The TV show had the same cultural merit as The Rockford Files, only if James Garner was green and less articulate. Sure, I'm all for someone trying to make a good movie out of that bullshit, but the movie needs to be judged as a movie, not by whether the director committed blasphemy by using the Frank Miller origin story rather than the Jack Kirby origin story (I honestly don't care whether there's any real comic that both of them wrote for).

Another point regarding summer action movies with a shit-ton of CGI. When a critic calls out an action movie for having shitty action scenes, that's not an automatic indicator that the critic doesn't like action movies. Let's take me for an example, since this is my blog and I know more about action movies than the Pharaoh knew about getting fucked in the ass by God. When I see, say, Transformers, and I say, say, “These action sequences suck hammerhead shark dick,” I'm not saying this as some tweedy shithead who can't handle anything more violent than the introspection in a Bergman picture. I'm saying this as a guy who knows what the fuck good action is. It's the car chase in The French Connection. It's Jet Li fighting Fujita. It's Daniel Craig chasing the parkour guy in Madagascar. Hell, just so you know I'm not pissing on CGI, it's Neo fighting a hundred Smiths. The action scenes in Michael Bay movies suck because he cuts so fucking much you can't see what the hell's going on anyway, and they're so goddamn long, and in Transformers they're between these big, generic robots where you can't even tell who the good guys and who the bad guys are. They are thus shit. And I'm the target audience for Transformers, I had all the toys when I was a kid, I read the comics, I would have been more than happy to enjoy a Transformers movie. But, ya know, it's gotta make sense as a movie. Or, at the very least, you should know who the good guys and bad guys are, since I know Michael Bay wasn't making a philosophical statement about moral ambiguity (though if he was that would be some delicious trolling).

Getting back to Iron Man, where this all started, I saw the first movie and liked it, because the idea of Robert Downey, Jr. headlining that kind of movie was bizarrely hilarious before you saw Iron Man and made perfect sense afterward (by which I mean, of course, that he was really good). Some of the effects were kind of cool. But the action scenes were the least interesting thing in the movie. Again, not because I have something against action movies—bitch please—but because they weren't interesting. CGI robots fighting against each other are fucking stupid. In order for an action scene to be interesting, the hero needs to be kind of an underdog. Take Jet fighting Fujita again, Fist of Legend. Jet's a little guy. Fujita's six foot plus. Jet's whole trip is that he's graceful and his moves are breathtaking (though he can do one-armed pushups and other tough guy stuff) whereas Fujita can hammer nails through boards with his hands, break dude's necks with his pinkie, and is completely, utterly, totally invulnerable to pain. How does Jet beat him? By shooting lasers out of his fucking hands? Nope, by listening to what Funakochi told him: “If you learn to adapt, you'll always be invincible.” Jet adopts Fujita's style, learns his self-mind-fuck to nullify the pain, and eventually cuts Fujita's head off with a sword that he's swinging with his belt. Badass? Badass. Now take Iron Man as a counterexample. He's already invulnerable, to the extent where the way they had to make him an underdog in the climax (of the first movie) was by making the power on his suit low for some contrived, retarded reason. Which, ya know, doesn't make the movie not good, but in order for a climactic battle to have any weight, the adversary needs to be more badass. Iron Man's too fucking awesome for anyone to put up a good third act fight, which, hey, if you're going to have a problem, your protagonist being too cool is a good one to have, but nonetheless, it's a debit for an action movie.

Anyway, back to the point. The only reason to care about fanboys is that now that the movie business has evolved to the point where their bread and butter is fanboy-driven franchises, suddenly a bunch of poorly socialized obsessives are dictating the thrust of the modern cinematic narrative. Now, I say this as a poorly socialized obsessive. But even though the summer is entirely devoted to making fanboys happy, the motherfuckers still aren't satisfied. Any critic writing a review of a comic book movie needs to have read every issue of that comic thirty times and hold the exact same set of opinions on it as the fanboy. Even if those criteria are met, some other fanboy, in a rival camp with a different set of opinions, is going to declare that critic's opinion worthless. This is why the Internet sucks.

Now, being a nerd with a blog who's in the process of being very cranky about movies, I'd be a gigantic hypocrite except for one thing: what I'm pissing and moaning about is that I want there to be variety out there. Sure, the odd comic-book FX picture is nice. The Dark Knight was great, the first couple Spider-Man pictures were fun. But I want choices. What the fuck's wrong with putting out something like Lawrence of Arabia as a summer blockbuster? Or The French Connection? Or an SF picture with ideas, rather than just “Hey, there's some aliens! Hey, let's blow 'em up!” (granted, Inception, if it delivers, could satisfy this particular desire). Why the fuck do we have to wait til December to get intelligent pictures, and why the fuck do all of those have to be so fucking depressing?

But, no matter what kind of pictures there are coming out, we need to get off the critics' balls. We need to remember that no matter how many hardcore devoted fanboys there are out there, civilians are where the money's made in this business, and they need to know whether it's a good movie, and insider lingo alienates civilians. Fanboy circle jerks are better kept to blogs no one reads.

Wait, what . . .?