Sunday, August 21, 2011

Mechanical

The movie The Mechanic, the remake with Jason Statham, comes shockingly close to being a good movie. It's not one, but it comes oh-so-close.
Weirdly, every ten minutes it becomes a new, different movie. And then there are large swaths of the picture where one is saying "who's movie is this?" Meaning "Which character is the main character?"
For a long time it seems like it's Ben Foster's movie.
I bet there was a conversation at one point that Ben Foster's character be Jason Statham's character's love interest. Which would have been... interesting.
But the thing the movie does repeatedly is lose all conflict. The main character will go a couple scenes without any conflict. I counted 4 occurrences of loss-of-conflict. Which is really deadly.
The ending too was unmotivated. A slow, slow, burn to wait, why did he do that?
Cat Stevens' ex.
That brings us to everyone's favorite blog post of the moment: Disney Exec Says Tentpole Pictures Are About Spectacle, Not Story.

2 comments:

Lindsay Stewart said...

i thought tentpole pictures were about people i don't want to be in a room with sitting in front of a bright flashing light.

Andrew Bellware said...

I like the trapeze the best!