May Movie Reviews

I'm always lazy this time of year. In the fall I'd be playing and reviewing games left and right, but lately I've just been laying around, playing old games I've already played and watching the Venture Bros.

In the spirit of summer laziness, I give you not four movie reviews, but four mini-reviews presented as one review!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - In an attempt to keep the X-Men license while banking on the popularity of what is arguably the most popular X-Men character (at least as far as the movies go), X-Men Origins: Wolverine does what the title says by telling how Wolverine came to be. It does this mostly by taking the 2001-2002 6-issue Origin comic book series, bastardizing it, then adding some stuff about the Weapon X program. To help fill out the cast, they add characters like the Blob (who never had anything to do with Weapon X in the comics), Gambit (who is barely recognizable as Gambit), and Deadpool (who the writers basically raped with their portrayal). Top it all off with some jarringly bad CGI and what you've got is a movie that manages to be worse than X-Men 3. Final Score: D

Star Trek - I think everyone had some doubts about this one. The same director as the mind-numbingly dull Mission Impossible III, a cast of young and mostly unknown hipsters, and the fact that out of ten previous Star Trek films maybe half were good doesn't exactly sound like a recipe for success. So you may be shocked to hear that the end result is actually the best Star Trek film so far. Each of the cast members manages to perfectly capture their character. And, without giving too much of the plot away, the writers managed to create a Trek story that is easily accessible to new fans, completely disregards all of the Trek that came before it, and yet does it with a logical explanation. If there's a must-see movie so far this summer, Star Trek is it. Final Score: A

Angels and Demons - Well before the The DaVinci Code hit theaters, I'd read all of Dan Brown's books. And while Brown might not be the best writer, and his claims of artistic and architectural accuracy are often as fictitious as the characters, the man does tell an interesting story. As much as I enjoyed his books, I hated the movie adaptation of the DaVinci Code. Still, I'd dragged my wife to see Wolverine and Star Trek, and she wanted so see Angels and Demons, so with some trepidition, I went. And I'm glad I did. Angels and Demons is a much better movie. The pacing is better, the acting is better, and the story works better as a movie. Mystery fans , especially those who haven't read the book, might want to check this one out. Final Score: B.

Terminator: Salvation - The Terminator franchise can be a tricky one. The original was meant to be a simple action thriller, yet managed to lay out some predestination paradoxes that made T2 one of the best sci-fi movies ever. T3 pisses on the franchise by replacing T2's "No fate but what we make" message with the notion that Judgement Day was inevitable, and showing us that the future leader of humanity was a huge wuss who was completely incapable of acting under pressure without his girlfriend telling him what to do. T3 was followed up by The Sarah Conner Chronicles, which was probably one of the best shows on television until it's cancelation. Salvation avoids stepping on the toes of any previous Terminator fiction by simply showing the earlier days of humanity's war with Skynet. What follows is a vapid movie with a shallow, predictable plot that requires very little thought to follow. However, it's also full of explosions, chase scenese, and man-versus-machine action; in short, it's a popcorn movie. If you go in expecting a cerebral sci-fi flick on the level of T2, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If you take it for what it is, though, it's a cheesy, entertaining action movie. Final Score: C+.

Looking at May overall, we have a solid month that could have been a great one if Wolverine wasn't such a dud, especially with Angels and Demons turning out so much better than expected.

Final Score: B