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The Mechanic (2011)
Well shot waste of time
This film was recommended to me by a friend, and I had nothing else to do at the moment, so I watched it till the end. It was intriguing with first action, but already after 10 minutes I've realized, that this is going to be a total waste of time. Actually the film could just end there! Well shot with some magnificent special FX and action, this is all that it is. All the rest is based on ridiculously bad, shallow-minded and over-abused clichés - the acting, the plot, the direction, lack of story whatsoever, cliché motives, insights and dialogues, etc. And total lack of humor kills it completely. So my recommendation - if you can abstract from all this and just want to watch some killing action, then go ahead. But if you expect something beyond - don't waste your time...
9 (2009)
Terrible disappointment, almost left the cinema in the middle
I'm not sure what dragged me into the cinema to watch this movie, but few minutes after it started, I wanted to leave the theater. For a while I hoped at least the story will surprise me, but then realized it's a waste of time, there was just nothing there. I stayed only because I had another show after it.
Design: some designs where quite beautiful, mostly of the environment, but the characters were terrible both in terms of animation and design. They look great while still - on posters and screenshots, but not when they have to come to life! They just didn't work, mostly because the very same mistake most 3D companies make: technically it is very hard to create really natural materials in 3D, that would make you feel that the character is alive. You need a lot of effort and knowledge (hence money) to create something that really feels like hair, skin, fabric, etc. Those characters in the movie were made out of "cloth", and that just didn't work! So they had this ugly cold feeling of the computer artificiality, where the cloth stretches or squeezes like a piece of plastic. It just didn't have the feel of a material, that dolls are made of (that's what those characters meant to be). I think it was a big mistake choosing this style for the characters. It just had a feeling of a 3D shoot'n'run computer game. I don't want to go to cinema to have a computer game on my screen, don't know about you...
Animation was also a disgrace. I am a professional animator and was terribly disappointed at the low level of animation in "9". It was stiff, boring, almost lacked any imagination or mood. It was just a little bit above most average 3D animations I saw, and that doesn't add to it any good...
And all that - the bad character design and bad animation could be solved with a good story, right?! That was not the case here. Actually the story was the worst thing in that movie. It was below any level. It starts straight forward, it goes straight forward and it ends the same. There is no twist, no surprise, no good dialogs, even no development. We've heard and saw stories of machines overtaking the humankind thousands of times and "9" is just one of them, and we know how it ends at the very first minute of that movie. The characters don't even have time to get into the story - they are just there, showing themselves almost immediately, and immediately some of them take action without even getting to know what's going on. It just didn't work. There are also many repetitive action sequences, that looked as if they were made to fill in the time for the lack of a story...
Acting, sound and script - oh my gosh, what can I tell, it was pathetic. Bad story has a bad script, and except dialogs like "No, don't do it!" "I will do it!" "But... you cannot do it alone!" "We can do it together!" "But there are rules!" "But we have to save him!" etc etc and so on, and repeating itself all the time, so besides those terribly pathetic dialogs, there were those non stop "Ahh" and "Ohhh" and"Ehh", and "Oooh", and "Whatchout", and "Run!" and "OhOhh!" that were following almost every jump, run, or fall of the characters and it even sounded as if they were out of sync or even unrehearsed.
Conclusion: bad acting, bad animation, bad sound, bad story, bad script, bad characters, everything expected, no surprises, no twist, nothing. Only some good designs are not worth the time. BIG NO!
Team America: World Police (2004)
Unexpected disappointment
Despite such a brilliant job of the artists, who created the environments and the puppets, the movie itself is a total disappointment.
First - everybody should know, that it's NOT animation - it's a puppet movie filmed live. Due to that - the artistic performance of the puppets is so low and limited, that in the long scenes they become totally boring, with the indifferent glass look, no expression on the face and very limited movement.
The puppets themselves are not stylized at all and miss the point of using puppets in a movie at all! The whole idea of creating puppets, is that they are not what we are in the real life! Think of South Park - the whole charm of the characters is that they are so stylized that they don't look realistic and at the same time so alive and funny! Or "The Nightmare Before Christmas" - brilliant puppet animation with such great characters!
It was surprise to me, that the creators of South Park could make such a bad movie! South Park is totally the opposite, of what Team America is about.
The humor is boring and not inventive, the scenario is totally slow, boring and stupid, and too straight to be ironically and surrealistically stupid, as it is in South Park - Hollywood has produced hundreds of stupid comedies equal to this one. The "Hot Shots" movie - a perfect example - it has the same elements as Team America and yet - it's much better.
I think, that the directors could achieve better results, if they were making animation instead of live action puppets. Probably their directing experience while making South Park was not enough to create live action movie with marionettes that cannot act!
The Hobbit (1977)
Quite terrible
Quite awful animation. Very limited, in some scenes a total potboiler.
Watercolor backgrounds tend to be professional, but except the nice textures, everything else is quite low level. Especially the colors.
The characters so badly designed - all the same looking, same color, a total lack of stylize ability of the artists... These lines on their faces that look like trenches and bubbles was the only attempt do distinguish the characters one from another.. oh - well - they painted the cloaks differently! And the elves are grey! Wow - that's some work!
The voices and the storytelling are totally pathetic - it seems like the movie was supposed to be an English language self training course for beginners... I understand that it's a children animation, but come'on - the children are able to understand much more sophisticated language than that. Well the clarity of the visual storytelling (the directing of the script itself) is not good either - that's maybe why they needed the text being read like for stupids. Although it doesn't help to connect some events together anyway...
The music .. well - they managed to write one song (wow!) and used parts of it through all the movie. The song is same pathetic as all the other voices and the voice of the singer - the king of the annoying pathetics!!!
so the whole thing, after watching 2/3 of it finally made me fast forward the movie so I can just skip it to not to be disgust too much. I only stopped at the more or less normal scene of the dragon falling down. They did some work with the fire and the body of the dragon over there...
Conclusion - read the book - don't watch this movie - anyone's imagination can make much better than that!