mange01

One of the productions companies for Willy's Wonderland is "Chicken Soup for the Soul". A film about a mute, scowling Nic Cage beating satanic, animatronic animal mascots to death is clearly not going to qualify. It's more like a half-serving of fried chicken: cheap, cheerful and leaves you feeling slightly unsatisfied.

I say slightly because while some things were pretty good, there's ultimately too much repetition and too little ingenuity for this to become a stone-cold cult classic. Things get off to a familiar start when Cage's unnamed drifter arrives in a desolate Nevada town needing to get his car fixed. Unable to pay for the repairs for unconvincing reasons, he instead is badgered into doing some light janitorial work at the abandoned Willy's Wonderland. Mopping the floor and scrubbing a few tables seems like a suspiciously good deal when the owner is offering to pay for your $1,000 repair bill in return, but that's because the Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant is populated by various possessed, anthropomorphised animals, led by the titular Willy the Weasel.

When Cage starts cleaning, the animals start attacking him and the revenge-seeking local teens arrive. Unfortunately, they're mostly anonymous and blandly-acted. The only two that stand out are gang leader Liv (Emily Tosta), daughter of the local sheriff; and Kathy (Caylee Cowan), Liv's bubble gum-popping, long sock-wearing best friend. Kathy's boyfriend Bob, Liv's fawning friend Chris and two other anonymous men round out the half-dozen. Try and guess which two die first. From there, it's pretty much 60 minutes of repetitious teen deaths, robot beatings, fizzy drinks and pinball. There's a certain amount of fun in watching Nic Cage beat a robot to death with a piece of wood but the unfortunately thin budget doesn't stretch to much in the way of imaginative kills and the film suffers from having a main character who is clearly never in any danger and supporting characters we're not really bothered about. You know who's going to die, so it's just a pity there's not more fun to be had in watching it happen.

But, it does skip past and it's competently made. That probably sounds like a back-handed complement but it's not a bad film, just a missed opportunity to do something a lot more fun. At least Nic Cage is clearly enjoying himself while working off his tax bill, unlike the dour and miserable Bruce Willis. Mostly recommended, but it's got no rewatch value.

A door closing. An eye changing colour. Another door closing. If any of these things frighten you, you'll still find Ouija boring.

The acting is wooden (even from the usually good Olivia Cooke), every plot development is telegraphed and predictable, and the whole thing reads like a first draft full of placeholder dialogue.

After watching it, I was completely unsurprised to find that half the film had been re-shot and the last 20 minutes completely added from scratch.

It's a film with no scares, no good dialogue, no interesting ideas, nothing at all. It's completely and totally vacuous.

Die Hard films used to be fun. No matter how much trouble John McClane was in, he had a wisecrack or two and Bruce Willis always looked like he was enjoying himself. They were fantastic action films, with great stories and memorable villains. And then they made this one.

So, what's it about? Well, a Russian oligarch is about to go on trial for corruption because he fell out with an aspiring politician. For some reason, John McClane's son Jack, who is in Moscow, shoots a man in the head and is arrested. John finds out and flies to Russia, hoping to... something. That's it. The film spends all of 5 minutes setting this up before John is sat in a taxi in Moscow. There's no point to any of this, there's no motivation behind anyone's actions and the villains are completely anonymous. One of them is called... Chagurin? Chagrin? Something like that. The "plot" meanders on as John rescues Jack, they fall into the middle of the two Russians' dispute and ultimately end up in Chernobyl. Of course they do! Because when bad guys in Russia have an Evil Plot, it has to involve the only place other than Moscow that moronic screenwriters think the average cinema-goer has heard of. But don't worry, they never even try to explain it. Or the fact that Chernobyl is in Ukraine now and not Russia. Or the villains' motivations. Something about a double-cross? I didn't catch it.

Throughout all the other films, John McClane was reckless, but he never intentionally endangered the lives of innocent people. In fact, he tried to help them. In this film, it's like he's playing a video game and he gets points for causing more damage and injuring more people. After he rescues Jack, they pursue the bad guys through Moscow traffic. John commandeers vehicles, punches passers-by in the face, smashes through barriers and into other cars. Then, he drives his very large SUV on top of the traffic, crushing the vehicles beneath. He leaves a trail of destroyed cars and possibly maimed and dead commuters lies behind him. And this is all played for laughs because as he drives off, a woman screams in terror and he yells, "sorry ma'am" in reply! Do Russian lives mean less than American ones? He's possibly injured or even killed people and at no point does he care or do the Russian police even show up! The rampage continues for about 20 minutes and no-one tries to stop any of them.

This utter stupidity continues throughout. But it isn't even fun stupidity! The whole thing has such a dour, po-faced glumness to it that there's no enjoyment to be gained from it at all. Even the attempted "jokes" fall flat because Bruce Willis is so grumpy throughout the whole film. There are a couple of lines that made me smile, but there were even more missed opportunities. At one point, John and Jack shoot a glass ceiling and shower some henchmen in glass and nobody thought to have John tell his son "shoot the glass"?!?

So, what do you get when you take a Die Hard film, suck the life out of it and in its place inject a threadbare plot, endless stupidity and mind-numbing dialogue and then film it in a slapdash way and make it both boring and grim? You get this awful excuse for a film.