The Negatives
* A mindless action film--the bad guy is irredeemably evil, and exists just for the sake of being evil. Watching this film does nothing to further your understanding of the human condition.
The Positives
* The greatest mindless action film of all time.
The Review
This was the most intense thing I've seen on the screen. Ever. I was completely blown out of my seat.
The thing is pure male id. (Possibly not ideal for the average female viewer, although I'll leave that determination to the females themselves.) But definitely not for the faint of heart.
But if you want a movie to wow you like you've never been wowed before, this is it.
Rating
10 out of 10 Stars. (If all movies were judged on some sort of idealistic scale, probably no mindless action movie would deserve to rank higher than a 5. But I'm judging this film against it's genre --for a mindless action movie, as a mindless action movie, it just completely blows every other movie you've ever seen out of the water.)
Links
Whisky Prajer's thoughts here.
Fredrik deBoer's thoughts here. (The fact that both of these gentlemen gave this film such rave reviews was the main reason I was so receptive to seeing it myself.)
Link of the Day
Professor Noam Chomsky - Education is Indoctrination
My 16-year-old daughter loves it. Haven't taken her older sister or their mother to see it -- yet. Their mother's a shoo-in, but I'm betting they both love it.
ReplyDeleteSaw Tomorrowland with the older girl. A message movie of a different sort (Brad Bird and his Objectivist predilections are well documented), and weirdly enough I wasn't bothered by this one, either. It's a kid's film, though. Nobody will be fainting in their seats watching it. (Which I actually witnessed, btw -- no mere urban myth, that: Scorsese's Cape Fear rape scene should have come with a trigger warning.)
Update: the elder daughter enjoyed it, and claimed it wasn't quite as intense as Snowpiercer (which, I think, was a little too much for her).
ReplyDeleteYes, perhaps "intense" was the wrong word. It wasn't bloody or gory or particularly shocking in the way that say the rape scene in Cape Fear was. (I've never seen it, but I'll take your word for it.) May action packed was the word I was looking for. The action just kept building and building and building, and it had some of the most awesome action sequences I've ever seen.
ReplyDeleteI should probably just stop making blanket preferences about gender preferences on this blog. I guess my thinking was action movies are usually targeted more towards men than towards women, and this was a movie that was pretty much all action and no plot.
Ironically, I find out later that many people are calling this movie the most feminist action movie ever made, and men's rights groups are calling for a boycott.
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/05/23/mad-maxs-moderate-feminism-and-radical-egalitarianism/w
2nd caveat:
ReplyDeleteSomeone like me, who only sees a handful of movies every year, probably has no business talking in superlatives and saying any movie is "the most..." anything.
All I can say is that for me, personally, as I walked out of the theatre, I thought to myself, "I have never seen anything on that level before."
Good luck boycotting anything as entertaining as this. It's certainly a movie that invites superlatives.
ReplyDelete