Red Dragon-2

The original style of storytelling is highly effective. The plot is intense and interesting. In fact, this movie has only one bad point--its low replay value. A large part of the movie's intensity revolves around being in the same shoes as the protagonist, not knowing anything about a character beyond a brief hand-written note. Once you know the full chronological story, which characters are good and which bad, the movie loses a lot of its effect.

If you haven't seen Memento, go rent it--it's excellent. However, once you've seen it once, little can be gained by seeing it again.

Rating: 10/10 for first viewing, 4/10 after that. 8/10 overall.

OK, so it's a movie my friends and I could have made in the backyard. But keeping that in mind, it's fairly good for what it is. It's entertaining in a cheesy sort of way.

You can guess the plot line--a few cops and Steve the Buff Hero set out against an army of "nin-ja!" bent on an evil scheme. Still, it wasn't *all* completely predictable...

In short, the best thing to do with this movie is to get a group of friends together, watch it, and jump in with MST3K-style comments whenever it seems appropriate.

3/10 for the movie, but hey, I had fun.

This movie is extremely hard to define and is certainly not a movie to be seen only once. When I first saw it, I would classify it as a simple action/suspense/thriller movie, fairly entertaining but nothing special. The difference between this reaction and the reaction I got from seeing it a second time is astronomical.

Edward Norton does an excellent job playing the unnamed narrator, a man who has a steady job, a nice apartment, a stable life...and is beginning to realize that it is all meaningless, that he is a by-product of the corporate society, that he is not really living at all. Enter Tyler Durden, an independent rebel who identifies immediately with the narrator and by his nonconformist lifestyle that things do not have to be this way, that he can reject the cookie-cutter "perfect life" and instead make his life mean something--to stop living as society would have him live and not care about the reactions he gets.

I've been told that this is a "guy" movie, but a look at the breakdown of user ratings here will tell you otherwise. Despite the bare-knuckle boxing and action, this is not a "guy" movie, nor is action its focus. This movie is about rebellion against a stagnant society, against living a life without purpose. Tyler Durden carries these ideas to the extreme, and the results are clear. However, I submit that this movie suggests that the opposite extreme is equally bad, if not worse.