jessfink

Quite simply, one of the worst movies I have ever seen. This movie TRIES to be a social satire, but it is so broad, so clumsy, so turgid, so bloated, so self-conscious, so obvious, so sophomoric, and so clichéd that you will want your two hours back. Do not, under any circumstances, rent, TiVo or accidentally find yourself viewing this movie. It's a disaster and a colossal failure on every level. Nothing works. Nothing. It doesn't make you think. It doesn't do anything but club you over the head. Dialogue is painful. Acting is cringe-inducingly vaudevillian. Dax Shepherd plays such a convincing idiot you believe he has actually been brain damaged during filming, but instead of being interesting, it is off-putting, and tiresome. Luke Wilson flounders around, completely bereft of personality, playing the same earnest naif he always plays, and basically since the film ostensibly revolves around him, there is no emotional performance anchoring this mess and giving it any credibility whatsoever. The rest of the performances are equally inept, with actors flailing around in an effort to find a tonal consensus and all of them visibly aching to return to their trailers.

This movie is the most over-hyped, underwhelming mess I have seen in some years. Incoherent and idiotic, it combines disgusting brutality with stupid writing and unconvincing acting, creating a torpid, bloated, overwrought dreary mess that is so unpleasant, so torturous and so dismal that it is akin to having a tooth extracted without nitrous oxide. I literally thought this was a joke for a while--how could millions of people be so in love with this mess--but apparently people are lemmings.

The central character is SO APPALLINGLY EVIL--so mean, so insane, so brutal, such a DICK--that it just slams the film into the wall. He is so bad that watching him becomes a chore, and silly at the same time.

Direction of the actors reacting to him is like something out of a junior high school production of "King Lear". Everyone either stammers and quakes and stares in abject fear at this schmuck or salutes him with a "jahwohl" that would have given Hitler a hard-on.

The art direction would be fine if we were all beetles and lived in humus in the forest. As I am not, it was barely discernible on the screen, with the saturation of darkness and the fuzzy lensing and the cobwebs and smoke and all the other crap he threw into every shot. The creatures are nothing you haven't seen in the cantina scene in Star Wars back in 1977. Feh.

This film is TERRIBLE. DO NOT FALL FOR THE HYPE. Puppets and CGI notwithstanding, it is a train wreck.

I am only commenting because there actually seem to be people who like this movie. Now, since I like a lot of bad things, I normally don't presume to disparage anyone who likes something I don't--that's what makes the world go 'round. However, in this case, I have to wonder if the world has taken leave of its senses.

I don't care about the murky, almost incoherent special effects, the worst, most horrifically disappointing FX since I don't know when. If you liked them, OK.

I don't care about the stupid errors like fire in space, or implausible plot points...whatever, I can enjoy stupid errors and not diminish my movie-going fun.

I will pass on the absolutely inept Ben Affleck. Someone sometime decided this loser could act. Let me ask--has he been in one decent movie since "Good Will Hunting"? And I am NO GWH fan, by the way.

I don't even care about the gloppy fake sentiment at the end, the goopy silly over the top nonsense when the asteroid is imminent and mankind is about to get wiped out.

What gets me is the idiotic dialogue, the absolute unwatchably awful words that every decent actor in the movie is forced to gag out, grimacing. How did people like Steve Buscemi get stuck in this turkey? He was in Con Air--wasn't that loud and stupid and bombastic enough? The hideous editing--is there a shot in the movie lasting more than eight seconds? Seriously. SERIOUSLY. The deafening music. The dreadful, dreary scenic design. Did I mention the unwatchably bad script? You know, Michael Bay, you're the least talented person on this earth, and the luckiest. Studios keep giving you hundreds of millions of dollars to simply flush down the toilet. I think the four year old who paints the masterpieces selling for thousands of dollars in the Midwest could direct a movie better than you.