David Duchovny, THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE
If you like actors infusing the characters they play with comatose like indifference, then David Duchovny in the recent X-FILES film may just be your thing. Seriously, look up “phoning it in” or “doing it for the money” or “doing it for online porn fees” (too soon?) in the Film Encyclopedia and you’ll see a picture of Duchovny in this film. He gave us a hollow, emotionless, humorless, soulless Mulder. In other words, not Mulder at all.
John Hannah, THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
You know how some actors’ performances just steal whatever scene they are in? Well, sometimes there are performances that make you wish somebody would steal them right out of the movie. John Hannah in THE MUMMY 3 was one a case of that. Admittedly, in many ways this was more the fault of the writers writing the character, mainly because they turned an already barely tolerable goofball into an ingratiating, useless, painful punch line. Nevertheless, John Hannah could have passed on the role, and he didn’t, so he’s at least somewhat culpable. I mean really, who volunteers (well, volunteers to get paid) to have fake Yak vomit thrown all over them? Besides Laurence Olivier, no one.
Mark Wahlberg, THE HAPPENING
I like Wahlberg, but in THE HAPPENING it just seemed like he never connected with the material or the character, both because of his own initiative and some pretty poor directing on M. Night Shyamalan’s part. You know you’re in trouble when someone’s performance actually manages to be more wooden and awkward than (SPOILER) than its killer tree concept.
“The Yak Yaked,” THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR
It was hard to pick just one bad moment from the train wreck that was the third MUMMY film (the Yeti sequence was a very close second), but undoubtedly the sequence in the plan where not only does a Yak vomit for an unbelievable attempt at humor, but it’s promptly followed by a cut to an image of Johnathan covered in puke uttering the not even remotely clever line “the Yak yaked.” My soul died a little that day.
“The Ending,” INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
The less I have to talk about this the better for you all, because it will just end up in a vitriolic rant that will make your toes curl. Regardless, if you’ve seen the film you don’t really need me to explain why the ending of INDIANA JONES qualifies as one of the worst moments in a movie this summer.
One thing I think is cool with these two new posters for MAX PAYNE is that each elicits different images from the video game. The one above is obviously inspired by and maintains the style of the original video game cover (see here), while the one after the jump is pretty dead-on in terms of the visual style of the in-game comic book story sequences. Whether the film will turn out to be good remains to be seen, especially since some of the Comic Con buzz has been a bit mixed and the trailer was underwhelming in my opinion. Loyalty to source material does not necessarily make a good film, but for now it’s a placeholder for my interest.
Though in some ways I felt a little under whelmed by this trailer for the upcoming Mark Wahlberg actioneer, the one thing I have to give it credit for is nailing the feel of the video game I played through more times than I cared to imagine. The visual style, the darkness, the trenchcoat, the gruff narration that sounds like someone took a film noir voice over and ran it through a meat grinder… it’s all perfect. It makes me hope that maybe this could turn out okay, even if the action and story seem to be a bit too much “been there, done that” so far. Then again, if films like WANTED can prove anything, it’s that style can make up for a lot.
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