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Reviews
The Expendables (2010)
Just Garbage
Really. Like many other reviewers, I had high hopes for this movie. I thought it would be in the tradition of Space Cowboys, the old pros come back for one more shot at the bad guys. But it quickly just degraded into typical shoot-em-up crap. Spoiler: The scene with Schwarzenegger is a complete rip-off - about a minute long, no action, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
About 65% of the movie is people fighting or shooting at each other or blowing things up, and it really did just get boring. The execution wasn't even that good - fight scenes had obviously sped-up footage that looked like those old dinosaur movies, sound effects were bad (every punch had the same fake thud), and the characters looked like they were in pain - not from the bullets which never touched them, but from the awful plot. Poor Jet Li complained the whole way through that he wasn't getting enough money - he was practically begging to be let out of his contract go so he could go work on something better - even a commercial.
Mickey Rourke was good but didn't have much of a part, or any purpose for being there. Also that 250-round per minute shotgun thing, going boom-boom-boom, was funny every time. But not worth the 9 bucks and two hours of sitting through another ridiculous re-hashing of the rogue-CIA-guy and "small band of mercenaries invades and overruns tiny central American dictatorship" story.
I was expecting a good poignant aging-action-hero movie, or maybe a comedy, but this was just laughably bad. It's baffling how this could be the number 1 movie, unless a lot of people were sucked in by the hype, like I was. Also the 7-point-something rating on IMDb has got to be inflated - rottentomatoes gives it a 42% which is more like it.
When I heard that Seagal and Van Damme turned down roles in this film, I thought it was because they were too full of themselves. But now I realize it's because they knew it was crap.
August Rush (2007)
Worst movie ever made
Absolutely unbearable. It was so unrealistic I couldn't stand it. Every time I started to like it a little, they pulled out something ridiculous and I started hating it again. The guitar playing, the cello playing, the piano, the organ - it was so badly done and obviously fake. The kid picks up a guitar for the first time, and in 5 minutes is playing like an expert? In the "dueling banjos" scene, his dad shows up out of nowhere, they don't bother to tune up, and instantly play something that would obviously take some rehearsal? The "instant Mozart" formula was preposterous. Come on, nobody teaches themselves to write musical notation in a day, much less write a symphony in 6 months with no training. This movie is an insult to real musicians. Robin Williams' abandoned theater where he kept a posse of little kids? Come on, even in New York he would have been thrown in jail. The only good part was that little girl who could really sing - at least I hope it was her and not somebody else dubbed in - who can tell. And other reviewers have said how great the music was - ugh if I hear that stupid 5 note theme again I'll puke. The repetitiveness of it was worse than "Coming Around Again" in Hearturn. Ecch.