Broken Plot Device

I don’t normally watch a lot of movies. Bob and I got Netflix earlier in the year, but in recent months our entire movie queue has been taken up by Battlestar Galactica (I just started the 3rd season, so no spoilers in the comments, please!) This weekend however, I got the chance to see 2 movies; the new Max Paine movie with my dad & brother Nick, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story with Bob.

I hated this movie. You might even say it was… wait for it…. PAYNE-fully bad. Kind of like that pun.

I never played the Max Payne video game, so I knew nothing about the story going in. The only thing I knew was that it used “bullet time” effects of slowing motion down during a shot. So please bare this in mind.

I thought the story was confusing, disjointed, and terribly paced. I predicted the entire outcome within the first 15 or 20 minutes. I thought the casting was horrible; Mark Wahlberg just didn’t read as “bad-ass cop out for revenge”, and I could not take the girl from “that 70′s Show” seriously as the gun-toting touch chick. I never once saw the “I miss my wife” connection once. I never felt sympathy for it at all, and Wahlberg just didn’t pull off any kind of emotion to this effect. When they showed him remembering those events, he just looked disconnected and uncaring, like he was watching a really bad movie.

Oh wait….

Some of the visuals were cool, I will admit. They had these hallucination-induced black angels coming up that did look neat, and some of the slow motion shots were nice. But those pretty shots were few and far in between, and didn’t even come close to overcoming the festering wound that was the rest of the movie.

I kinda wish I HAD agreed to go when my dad offered to just walk out 30 minutes in.

You know what’s even worse? It’s not even the worst movie I’ve ever seen, though I’d say it comes at a close second.

I had never heard of this movie before I watched it, though it had come out last year. I also didn’t see any of the movies by the same guy (Knocked Up & Superbad). But now that I’ve seen this, I am definitely looking the other stuff up. thanks wright for the correction!

This movie was hilarious! It’s a parody of every “behind the music” rock and roll story, about fictional singer Dewey Cox, who is inspired to be “double great” after cutting his brother in half with a machete. He goes on to make friends with Buddy Holly, Elvis, and the Beetles, have 23 kids and a Monkey, bounce in and out of rehab, and spend 8 months writing his masterpiece which features a singing goat. No, really. It all does end up making sense… kind of.

There is a huge number of musicians referenced in the music, as well as a large cast of cameos playing legendary artists from the 50′s to today. Also, the music written for the movie is really good.

There is a penis close-up in it though, for those who may be squeamish about such things.

I would strongly recommend this movie if your a comedy movie fan. I don’t laugh out loud at most movies, but this one had me rolling.