Deviator-4

I didn't expect much and I was let down anyway. Sitting alone and staring at a wall would have been more enjoyable than watching Reese Witherspoon feign awkwardness as joke after joke fell flat.

There is a painfully interminable fight scene where two characters fight over a gun that bounces all over a hotel room. It was supposed to be funny, I guess. This sedative of a movie refused to give me a single genuine laugh. I think I chuckled at some point during the movie, but can't remember when. It was a mild chuckle, at best, and not worth the time to recall it.

Every single scene that was supposed to be emotional felt forced. You know that scene in buddy comedies when the characters realize they kind of like each other? This movie has that scene. The characters start laughing and sharing personal information for no reason. They have no reason to like each other and neither one says anything funny, yet the scene is added anyway.

One boring scene after another streams along and they are followed by more boring paint-by-numbers "buddy comedy" scenes. I hope the actresses got new houses or something from their paychecks. At least then someone will have been rewarded for slogging through this bog of blandness. Avoid this movie at all costs--even if you face divorce for refusing to watch this film with your spouse, choose a life of loneliness. It'll be worth it.

This movie was made for Final Fantasy VII geeks. I'm not a Final Fantasy VII geek, so the enjoyment was more limited for me. You see, I'm a Final Fantasy VIII geek.

I actually really appreciated the way this movie was made. From the beginning it sets off to alienate every single person who hasn't played the game in order to provide extraordinarily fun surprises for fans of the game. I tried playing the game a couple of times, but could never get through it. Without playing the game, at all, you WILL BE completely lost. No doubts, don't let anyone tell you otherwise...lost.

That being said, the movie kicked ass anyway. Wall to wall action scenes better than I've seen in any movie. In the computer generated arena, it seems that the Japanese are the only ones willing to escape the confines of a traditional film camera. Movies from the USA attempt to replicate the appearance of actually filming something. Square Enix does just the opposite. The "camera" chases characters into the sky at lightning speed. It flips upside-down and rotates instantly. Since there are no boundaries to filming a CG movie, the filmmakers exploit that to the limits of human vision. Several times, it took me a second to figure out what happened in the middle of a fast shot. Not because it wasn't an effective shot, I just wasn't used to the blitzkrieg filming style.

So, the movie is worth seeing for everybody. Oh, and to all the FF7 geeks, if you can keep from fainting with excitement after the first fight scene, you'll like it too.

This movie is awesome because: It didn't screw up Nightcrawler. The Action was top Notch. Wolverine slashed the $#!^ out of many faceless bad guys. The special effects blow every other movie this year out of the water. And...Oh my god! Good acting in an action movie.