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YellowMonkey
Reviews
Forbidden Warrior (2005)
An atrocity. Seriously, WORST. MOVIE. EVER.
While the production values are not terribly bad, EVERYTHING ELSE IS. The lead is reasonably attractive but is a pretty poor actress overall, performances by the rest of the cast are laughable, worse than community college theater (which is probably where they were found). But the worst aspect of this movie by far are the story and script which happen to be the most contrived and clichéd that I have EVER had the misfortune of enduring.
This is the sort of tripe I expect from low-budget Saturday morning cartoons created solely to sell action figures. The fight scene choreography was mediocre and very poorly filmed. The laziest community college hack could have come up with a better storyline than this mind-numbingly boring and insultingly trite tale of an airhead and pure-hearted warrior girl who undergoes a craptacular quest of clichéd craposity to learn about love, destiny and her one dimensional self. Seriously, this movie is more shallow then a puddle in the sahara, and more predictable and unimaginative than a bologna sandwich on white bread with mayo.
Please do yourself and the rest of the world a favor by not renting, watching or coming within 10 feet of this movie. Do not watch it because you expect a movie so bad that its funny. Its not, trust me. It is just cringe inducingly bad all around. This is fair review of this movie and it rightly deserves only 1 star.
If you enjoyed this movie, you are probably under the age of 14 and have never seen a martial arts movie prior to this one.
Fantastic Four (2005)
Could have been decent, but for Dr. Doom.
This could have been a decent movie. The Fantastic Four themselves were not too bad at all. However, the actual story was rather poor particularly because of the weakness of the Dr. Doom character. He was one dimensional and just plain annoying. He had none of the characteristics of the comic book character (that made the character interesting) and the costume was just AWFUL. Comic book costumes seldom translate to live-action without looking just ludicrous, and Doom's is definitely no exception.
Here's another comment, the fact that the Thing's love interest just happens to be black would be sad if it wasn't such a common thing for white Hollywood. God forbid they let the freakish monster have a white romantic interest. Hell, if the character actually was black in the comics, it might be some excuse, but nope. Why does it have to be a black woman who gets hooked up to the ugly freak monster? Duh, because this is Hollywood and it's still racist. Since there weren't any major characters who were a minority, they just had to cram one in. For shame.
Overall, if they put the Four heroes in a different movie written by someone with some competence, this movie could have been quite good. Like if they focused on sciency stuff and character development instead of brainless super hero action sequences. Oh yeah, and the plot was so predictable and straight forward that I was bored with it pretty early on. Mr. Fantastic should have stretched his brain to a huge size so that he could conceive of a more interesting way of super-heroing.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life (2003)
Time to put this franchise into the tomb.
(no spoilers)
I wonder if you can use the excuse of "this vapid excuse for a movie consumed valuable hours of my time" to get your money back.
I usually try to find atleast one redeeming factor in every movie I see (well, maybe i'm just trying to justify the expenditure), but I can't find a much here save for the inclusion of the fellow who played Rimmer (who was extremely poorly utilised) and a view of Angelina Jolie in a skin tight wetsuit(which was not nearly revealing enough).
You'd think they'd have a bit of a better budget to make the sequel better, no? This stinker should have gone straight to video.
The special effects look like they were done in the _early_ 90's. The cg was god-awful. The few "monsters" were poorly done and lifeless. The sets were sparse and plastic looking. The cinematography was claustrophobic and jerky. The few stunts were filmed so as to look very bland and boring. The dialog was cliched and extremely annoying. And oh yeah, in the jungle scene, it looked like they took stock footage of animals from the discovery channel and spliced them in.
In nearly every action scene, everything was so close up as to make it impossible to see any action. The cuts were so fast and jerky that you can't see any action. I've noticed this sort of poor camera work in many action movies as of late. I'm assuming it is because the director is trying to hide the extremely poor fight choreography.
I don't think anyone, (save the guy who played Rimmer on Red Dwarf) was actually from europe. (i.e the co-star says "ass" instead of "arse")
The final joke was the mildew on the turd. I've seen worse honestly, but this is a real piece of garbage, all in all. SAVE YOUR MONEY.