Lazer Team

Lazer Team (2016) is nothing more than mindless entertainment. While I can't call myself a current fan of Rooster Teeth, I did quite enjoy them when I was younger. I'm sure people who are actively following them and have grown to appreciate their sense of humor will find this film enjoyable. Still, the major problems lay within the script. Everything is played out and predictable, the attempts at one-liners are flat, and the story isn't even compelling. The special-effects are shoddy, some are fine while some are horrendous. This is a low-budget sci-fi flick, so that's to be expected, but the film relies on those effects too heavily. The acting is fine and everybody at least seems to be making an effort. The action is also pretty solid, but it suffers from being too foreseeable. Clichés are also something to be found throughout to point to where it just blatantly copies from other source materials. 'Lazer Team' is kinda fun but is also kinda annoyingly unoriginal.

I wouldn't call myself a big Roosterteeth fan, but I do enjoy their Podcast and early RvB. But I feel this movie relies to much on RT's general fandom, as much of the film's fun factor is recognizing the personalities present from their other productions. But for anyone outside of that fandom the uninteresting plot, stereotypical characters and, downright terrible cgi make this movie incredibly boring and bad.

For me however the biggest disappointment is the humor present or I suppose absence of, in the film. A series of immature jokes of people getting hit in the crotch or banging a daughter that a 15 year-old would question the humor of, fall utterly flat through out.

'LAZER TEAM': Three Stars (Out of Five)

A sci-fi action-comedy flick; directed, co-written and co-produced by Matt Hullum. Burnie Burns also co-wrote, co-produced and stars in the movie; which also costars Gavin Free, Michael Jones, Colton Dunn, Alexandria DeBerry and Alan Ritchson. It's the first feature film from Rooster Teeth Productions (which specializes in machinima); and they raised most of the budget for the movie, from a successful Indiegogo campaign. The story revolves around four incompetent losers, who are trained to save the world; when they accidentally stumble across a special alien power armor suit. I liked the special effects, and some of the humor, but ultimately I found it disappointing.

We learn, as the film opens, that Earth received a message, from peaceful aliens, decades earlier. After decoding it, we learned that we are going to be attacked, by evil aliens, and need to train someone to fight them. So a man, named Adam (Ritchson), is raised since birth, to be the 'Champion of Earth'. He will be sent a special 'power armor suit', by the peaceful aliens, to wear in battle. The ship containing the suit, is accidentally shot down, by four losers though. They then each become genetically attached, to different parts of the armor. So Earth's new plan, becomes to train these losers, to be 'Earth's champions'.

The movie kind of reminds me of the cult classic comedy flick 'SUPER TROOPERS'; except more geared towards kids. The film especially seems aimed at 'video game loving teenagers'. For that reason, I think a lot of the jokes are too silly, and somewhat forced. A lot of the performances are pretty weak as well (with a few exceptions). There is some witty commentary, about social media obsession though; and how it effects everyone's lives. The film also has some pretty cool looking special effects (as I said before), especially for such a low budget movie. It's not a complete waste of time, but it's nothing special either.

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Any film professors reading, here is a tip. You can do a final exam by making your class deconstruct Lazer Team frame by frame and identify the really good ideas and the zippy lines of dialog.

It is quite a challenge. The film runs almost two hours and there is no more than 10 minutes of quality material.

My fave: one of the "dumb and dumber" team removes an alien mind-control implant from the only female star and explains, "I was just removing the implant that made my girlfriend act like my ex-girlfriends." Actually the actor mumbles the line so you have to rewind to catch it. But that dialog is one of the keepers.

A Youtube production? In a way that is a good thing but virtually every other network, delivery system, channel, cable provider and postal worker who is now producing independently has done better work. So step it up Youtube.

When I first saw the poster and the IMDb rating of 7 - I was impressed and couldn't wait to watch the movie. However, I'm really disappointed that the hype couldn't deliver.

Some people argue that the story of "lazer team" could have been written by a child. But this doesn't have to be a bad thing. I found the plot to be interesting. Only the execution was poorly done. Why?

First of all - the characters are boring and annoying. I understand that comedies kind of live from stereotypical over exaggerated persona. But this was too much.

Do you knows this feeling when you're watching a bad horror movie and you think to yourself:"No, don't go there. You'll be killed. No, dude - don't go there.Oh, he's dead..."

"Lazer Team" is similar to that. Very predictable, flat jokes, boring character development. If this were made by a Youtube channel and only aired on Youtube - I wouldn't complain. But as a real movie - "Lazer Team" is just not good enough.