2103: The Deadly Wake

I just rented this movie and was very disappointed. The costumes were not well done, not enough incidental music, sets could have been a lot better in design, the plot was very unfocused and needed several revisions before production and as for the special effects...... why even bother?

I felt sorry for the actors, they gave it their best, but there is only so much you can do with a script this bad. Good acting alone won't pull it off.

I recommend this film as an example of what NOT to do when making a film. It looks like it was mostly well cast, but sadly lacking in everything else.

The makers of this film obviously had a low budget and should have examined other films and TV shows with similar budgets to see how best to use their resources. You can do a lot with a little. The TV show Doctor Who is an excellent example, it was always done on the cheap, but had strong scripts and acting. .

Malcolm McDowell has not had too many good movies lately and this is no different. Especially designed for people who like Yellow filters on their movies.

Yet again Michael Pare has made an unwise choice by signing onto this mediocre action movie which takes places almost exclusively in the confines of a large boat. As a result of this fact, the entire movie feels extremely confined and in absolute need of being opened up with various locations... or for that matter a set design with imagination.

The direction is lackluster at best leaving Pare and McDowell to wander the cheap sets bellowing lines as though they were in a high school play. For two actors who have had stellar performances in such films as "Eddie and the Cruisers" or "A Clockwork Orange", one wonders how they could have fallen so far. Gwenyth Walsh (of Star Trek fame) makes an appearance here and is about the only high point in this overly long film. A brief flash of breast from Ms. Walsh seems to have only been tacked on for the sake of a sale on the foreign video market.

All in all, your video rental dollars would be better spent on one of these actors' films from their hey-day instead of this tired re-tread of a formula sci-fi action film.

If Mr Cranky had rated this, I'd be tempted just to copy his review and paste it here. But as he hasn't, I'll have to give it a go myself.

The only thing giving this movie a 1 instead of a 0 is that Malcolm McDowall's acting is excellent. However not even he can save this film from disaster. The director must have been really distracted when he worked on this one because it is just a conglomeration of scenes that were thrown together with very little continuity - reminiscent of bad '70's movies. Even worse, both the actors and director appeared to be making it up as they went along which probably showed how bad the original script was.

It's not even worth discussing the story line although it revolves around a futuristic corporation called the Proxate Corporation who put together a crew of dispensable people to carry a dangerous cargo on an old container/slave ship to Nigeria. This ship's computer is a baby kept in a glass jar and wired into one of the crew via USB 12 or something. The company should have been called the Prostate Corporation as the entertainment value of this movie is on a par with an examination of the same name.

I honestly can't find one scene that I could say was well made and made any real sense in the context of the movie. I only watched it to the end as I had a touch of the bird flu and this movie reminded me that there were people out there who were actually worse off than me - Malcolm McDowall in particular. I won't hold this against him as he's a great actor and every great actor is entitled to one bad movie in their career and this one is a doosie.

So, unless this is the only movie your shop hires out or you're male and you're doctor isn't doing prostate examinations this week and you somehow feel this is a bad thing then give this one a really wide berth unless of course if you're really community minded, buy a copy to support Malcolm and then use it as a drink coaster.

I think this one of Malcolm McDowell's worst performances. Acting stinks and the breaks in the movie as well as the music remind me of an after school special.