The Journey: Absolution

Joel and the robots could have a field day with this piece of tripe. Dick (21 Jump Street) Grieco has either put on weight or is wearing a padded shirt. None the less, Dick is supposed to be a tough military dude, yet he obviously has a few hours a day to pluck those dainty eyebrows of his. This movie takes place in a military base in a frozen wasteland (in many ways it resembles Grieco's acting career). An uppity punk discovers a secret society within the base and after watching the ritual, my eyes started to bleed. Please, if there is a god, destroy this film.

This movie will probably excite only two groups of people: fans of latin hunk Mario Lopez and individuals who like to see scantily clad, well-built young men.

The movie purports to be sci-fi but the plot is confusing and unrealistic even for sci-fi standards. The dialogue is predictable and the actors try to make it serious but you can't do much with "you don't wanna ask questions" and other frequently used dialogue lines.

Mario Lopez stars and tries to act but the script forces him to behave and talk like his Slater character on "Saved by the Bell." Even his lead-up dialogue to his love scene with Jamie Pressley is predictable. The scene leaves you watching them talk and then all of a sudden they kiss and are in bed together. Lopez's impressive physique is seen frequently, along with numerous other handsome men, so if you like hunky men, it's not bad. But, having seen his ability to do more than just mouth lines in "Breaking the Surface: The Greg Louganis Story", fans of Lopez will be disappointed that he's in another Slateresque tough guy, I can kick your butt role.

Richard Grieco and Jamie Pressley are also wasted in this film, although Grieco is humorous at times. However, you can tell he's trying to "act" dramatic and the effect ruins the lines.

If you're looking for an interesting story, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for dramatic sci-fi action, you'll be disappointed. And fans of Lopez will hope he finds a better script for his next project.

This movie has the hottest men running around, training, fighting, all in Jockey pouch brand thigh-length boxer briefs. The typical military fighting fantasy is lived out. It is very hot! Too bad they wear briefs or thongs under their boxers.

I watched this film to play along with the "How Did This Get Made" podcast. Sometimes, the movies they do have enough about them that they're entertaining - not this time though, as this was truly dire.

30 years after a cataclysmic event has left most of the world uninhabitable, Ryan Murphy (Mario Lopez) joins the elite soldier training programme, ran by the formidable Sergeant Bradley (Richard Grieco). Murphy has an ulterior motive though, as he's looking for Liles (Charles Mattocks) a friend of his who joined the programme a few months earlier. As Murphy conducts his investigation, he discovers that, even amongst these soldiers, there is an elite tier, trained by Bradley himself for a secretive objective that only Bradley truly knows.

I mean, your tolerance for this might depend upon how forgiving you are for the fact that its an extremely low budget enterprise. The sets look cheap, the special effects, both practical and digital are poor, stunts are limited and the standard of acting in general is bad. Lopez never was much of an actor and though his charm works at the start of the film, where everyone hates him and he just has to be smug and annoying, but when he has to care about things, later in the film then he starts to struggle. He's like Marlon Brando compared to Grieco though, who's maniacal Sergeant Bradley has a plot reason for being a little unusual, but his decision to scream "for the love of Pete" every two minutes is as baffling as it is annoying. Other characters do swear, and die, and have sex, so why he chooses that particular juvenile phrase is really annoying.

Confusingly, given that they're supposed to be on an isolated base in the Arctic - the soldiers smuggle a couple of girls into the base, one of whom is played by Jamie Pressley, who is the only real positive about the whole film. She's really quite young here, but the only one capable of delivering a decent line read, let alone portray any emotion and it's really not surprising that she would have the best career of anyone in this one. Even she though can't defeat the mind-numbingly terrible, strewn together storyline that this film has, where huge great plot points that the film takes time to establish, then are ignored by the film when they need something different to happen. Then the ending... what?

An awful time that I really don't recommend.

This film has got to be some attempt to get Mario Lopez back on the celebrity map. I don't think at this point he cares what kind of press he gets: he'll even settle to have a rumor that he's gay spread around to get him attention.

The Journey: Absolution begins with the destruction of life as we know it, compliments of a lame CGI meteor hitting a lame CGI model of Earth. Skip ahead a few decades, and Mario Lopez has recruited into a military installation in the Arctic to find his friend, who is male. Haha. Richard Grieco is the ruthless commandant who trains the recruits and periodically selects one the most elite of the troop to be a part of the Z-team.

Everything that can go wrong in a movie does here. Uninspired direction, cheap, flimsy sets, embarrassing sexist scenes, flat, dull performances, laughable dialogue, bargain-basement special effects, and cliches and plot holes in the script larger than the hole left by the meteor that hits Earth.

Richard Grieco's constant repetition of, "For the sake of Pete," brings to mind John Travolta's mindless repetition of "leverage" in another sci-fi turkey, Battlefield Earth. Mario Lopez shows us exactly why he starred in Saved By The Bell and not much more.

The only truly decent thing about this flick is all the hot men prancing around in nothing but underwear and black combat boots. Otherwise, this awful, awful attempt at sci-fi falls flat on it's homo-erotic face.

2 out of 10