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Wildislander
Reviews
The Promotion (2008)
If you like waiting for a payoff that never comes, this is your movie!
This film had potential, but it never went anywhere. The pacing of the film was terrible - everything was so slow. The dialogue: it seemed like every character had to clear his throat before uttering a syllable. It's fine to draw out the suspense in a dialogue by slowing it down as long as there's a payoff for the audience. In this film, there was never a payoff for anything. The plot was slow too: the writers of this script forget to include anything resembling rising action, let alone a climax. About halfway through watching, I started fast forwarding to see if anything of any interest was going to happen. Nothing ever did. The jokes were crude, and really not very funny. To me this movie was a lot like Nacho Libre. Both were films that tried to recreate a sort of "Napoleon Dynamite" charm but utterly failed. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that I didn't care about the characters much. The best scene in the movie takes place when the two rival characters have a heart to heart chat while smoking a joint. It seems like perhaps they're going to team up to face the odds, or some sort of change is going to occur after the conversation. Unfortunately, nothing changes. This movie was terrible. If you like being frustrated be my guest. Otherwise steer clear of this one.
21 (2008)
Shallow characters and slow paced
The story never gripped me; there never was a point in the story where I was in suspense or moved emotionally. The plot plodded along with predictability and shallow conversations that left me wishing the movie was over long before the end came. As much as the movie was supposed to deal with counting cards and gambling, there were very few scenes dedicated to it. The transformation of the lead character was predictable. The only bright spot was the actor who played his best friend - he seemed like the only believable character in the film. If the film was supposed to be based on a true story, they should have left some of the Hollywood out so that the story felt a little more authentic. I was not expecting much and I got what I expected.
Transformers (2007)
A recipe for mediocrity
I loved the first 15 minutes of this movie. Unfortunately, the film didn't end until almost two hours later.
Here was the recipe: start with fifteen minutes of interesting character development and mysterious robot attacks. Next, throw out all efforts to deepen character development in favor of moving the lame plot forward. Next, bring in several unnecessary and uninteresting characters (the blond computer hacker and her black friend) to confuse things and take up time. Then, make the audience wait for the action by adding unnecessary attempts at humor (i.e. the scene at the boy's house and the addition of the John Tuturro character with Special unit 7 or whatever it was called). Finally, be sure to fill the remaining time with cool shots of the transformers transforming and shooting things (which were good I must admit). The audience will be awed by the special effects and won't realize what a poor movie they've just seen.
By the way, how is it that one robot could destroy an entire outpost earlier in the film but a whole fleet of robots couldn't hit even one marine later on? Those guys must have trained at the G.I. Joe headquarters to be able to dodge so many bullets.
This movie started great but quickly transformed into a sub par action film with shallow characters and little plot. The special effects were great but they weren't enough to keep this film from ending up on the scrap heap of mediocre action films.