Timeline (Or, Oh Screaming Baby Jesus! Please Kill Me Now!)
Wow. Two movie reviews in one week.
What's wrong with me, you ask.
Answer: I like pain.
Normally I don't review movies unless I see them in the first-run theater, since I figure that's the whole point: if it's good, you'll know to see it on the big screen, and if it sucks, you'll know to stay far, far away, or at least wait for second run or video. So, despite the fact that I watch a lot of movies on DVD, I don't generally talk about them.
I am making an exception today. This warning may come too late, but if it saves even one of you poor souls from making a bad choice then it is worth my pain.
Last night spacezombie came over and we watched Timeline, which was a mistake.
Everyone has a few favorite bit actors who can render the unwatchable watchable. This movie had two of them in it, and for the life of me, I still could not bring myself to care what happened.
It was "directed" so poorly that I couldn't care long enough to pick up the threads of plot. I haven't read the book, so I won't go into how appallingly they apparently butchered it (if you can butcher something like Crichton).
Richard Donner has made some good movies, like Maverick, and he has also made some bad ones, like Lethal Weapon 4, as much as it hurts me to say that.
Some of the bad ones, while recognizably bad, are still enjoyable. Take Ladyhawke, for instance, one of my favorite fantasy movies. Parts of it, too, looked like it had been shot at a renfair. But it was redeemed by a decent script, good performances, and beautiful scenery.
This was not one of the good bad movies.
We'll start with the good, since that's not going to take long.
They had a good villain, played by Michael Sheen, the same guy who played Lucian in Underworld. Now, I love him forever because, well, SEXY WEREWOLF. So I was pleased to see him attached to this project. For my sake, not for his sake. He should find this embarrassing.
He looked pretty good in the renfair clothes and even managed to be menacing and charismatically ranty despite an alarming Irish afro. Unfortunately, they abandoned his character almost as soon as they brought him on screen, and he was not seen again until the final twenty minutes. At that point, he reappeared acting kind of tired of the whole thing, as if in the intervening period he had been off watching dailies and had decided that rather than put himself out any further for this panoramic dungscape of a movie, he would just quit trying. He looked impatient to get away. No doubt he, like us, would rather be drinking lots of bad beer out of a leather mug and hanging around the renfair watching falconry demonstrations and hitting on underage chicks in fairy costumes.
The only other spot of light was Gerard Butler, who has been in both Reign of Fire and the new Phantom of the Opera movie (which I haven't seen, so I can't say if that is a strike in his favor or not) [edit: Huge guilty strike FOR.]. I like him enough to be pleased watching him, but he was trying far harder than this movie deserved.
Even David Thewlis, whom I normally find enjoyable, only made me flinch in embarrassment. What was he doing in this movie?
The squinting, rodential wench cast as the female lead was annoying to the point of physical pain. The male lead, that chunk of blonde buttcake christened Paul Walker, was about as hard for me to watch as it would've been for me to watch a bus full of day-old kittens driven by Tanith Lee and Neil Gaiman plunging into a fiery lake of molten iron with my entire collection of signed books and vintage My Little Ponies lashed to the top in flimsy cardboard boxes.
Every time he opened his mouth to burp another California-accented chunk of dialogue, the movie ground to a halt with the sheer force of not caring. You could feel the director, cinematographer, and other actors rolling their eyes behind his back. I have seen better performances in Mystery Science Theater movies; specifically Space Mutiny, where Reb Brown plays essentially the same character to better effect, and that is SAD.
I suppose I should not have expected much from the guy who managed to make The Fast and the Furious even worse than it would have been without him, but his performance in Timeline provided the absolute nadir of both the movie and his career. I can only hope that he fails math or something next semester, and his eligibility gets suspended until he brings his grades up. That, or the coach cuts him from the team.
He fucking sucks.
Yes, Paul Walker is very, very handsome. And he could not act dead if you bashed his brains out with a surfboard. Through the whole course of the movie, he did not manage to successfully convey a single emotion, though he provoked several: loathing, annoyance, disgust, irritation, confusion, scorn, and maniacal laughter. Yes. I know that last is not an emotion. But you get the point.
The fact that he was not immediately cut from the cast and replaced with someone else, anyone else, is proof conclusive that Richard Donner has Completely Lost His Shit.
A director is there to make decisions, not to eat lice and hoot.
Even Hayden Christiansen, who is like a horrible, lurching, second-generation clone of Ryan Phillippe minus all talent and good looks, would have been better. An inflatable doll would have been better.
Paul Walker is (and these are fighting words) as bad as the guy from Scanners.
The whole movie was an hour and a half long cinematic poke in the eye. Its constant, grating ineptitude made Blade: Trinity feel like a well-lubricated handjob delivered by a thousand-dollar callgirl. I have sincerely seen made-for-TV movies that outshone it (even Dinotopia was better, and that was not a good movie).
If I could go back in time and warn myself away from it, I would, but I cannot, so I am now warning you:
Avoid Timeline at all costs.
I'm also sending it back to the store with a note in the box warning the next renter to download random video clips from the internet. Japanese tentacle rape and gangbang ass porn is a much better way to spend an evening.
link
What's wrong with me, you ask.
Answer: I like pain.
Normally I don't review movies unless I see them in the first-run theater, since I figure that's the whole point: if it's good, you'll know to see it on the big screen, and if it sucks, you'll know to stay far, far away, or at least wait for second run or video. So, despite the fact that I watch a lot of movies on DVD, I don't generally talk about them.
I am making an exception today. This warning may come too late, but if it saves even one of you poor souls from making a bad choice then it is worth my pain.
Last night spacezombie came over and we watched Timeline, which was a mistake.
Everyone has a few favorite bit actors who can render the unwatchable watchable. This movie had two of them in it, and for the life of me, I still could not bring myself to care what happened.
It was "directed" so poorly that I couldn't care long enough to pick up the threads of plot. I haven't read the book, so I won't go into how appallingly they apparently butchered it (if you can butcher something like Crichton).
Richard Donner has made some good movies, like Maverick, and he has also made some bad ones, like Lethal Weapon 4, as much as it hurts me to say that.
Some of the bad ones, while recognizably bad, are still enjoyable. Take Ladyhawke, for instance, one of my favorite fantasy movies. Parts of it, too, looked like it had been shot at a renfair. But it was redeemed by a decent script, good performances, and beautiful scenery.
This was not one of the good bad movies.
We'll start with the good, since that's not going to take long.
They had a good villain, played by Michael Sheen, the same guy who played Lucian in Underworld. Now, I love him forever because, well, SEXY WEREWOLF. So I was pleased to see him attached to this project. For my sake, not for his sake. He should find this embarrassing.
He looked pretty good in the renfair clothes and even managed to be menacing and charismatically ranty despite an alarming Irish afro. Unfortunately, they abandoned his character almost as soon as they brought him on screen, and he was not seen again until the final twenty minutes. At that point, he reappeared acting kind of tired of the whole thing, as if in the intervening period he had been off watching dailies and had decided that rather than put himself out any further for this panoramic dungscape of a movie, he would just quit trying. He looked impatient to get away. No doubt he, like us, would rather be drinking lots of bad beer out of a leather mug and hanging around the renfair watching falconry demonstrations and hitting on underage chicks in fairy costumes.
The only other spot of light was Gerard Butler, who has been in both Reign of Fire and the new Phantom of the Opera movie (which I haven't seen, so I can't say if that is a strike in his favor or not) [edit: Huge guilty strike FOR.]. I like him enough to be pleased watching him, but he was trying far harder than this movie deserved.
Even David Thewlis, whom I normally find enjoyable, only made me flinch in embarrassment. What was he doing in this movie?
The squinting, rodential wench cast as the female lead was annoying to the point of physical pain. The male lead, that chunk of blonde buttcake christened Paul Walker, was about as hard for me to watch as it would've been for me to watch a bus full of day-old kittens driven by Tanith Lee and Neil Gaiman plunging into a fiery lake of molten iron with my entire collection of signed books and vintage My Little Ponies lashed to the top in flimsy cardboard boxes.
Every time he opened his mouth to burp another California-accented chunk of dialogue, the movie ground to a halt with the sheer force of not caring. You could feel the director, cinematographer, and other actors rolling their eyes behind his back. I have seen better performances in Mystery Science Theater movies; specifically Space Mutiny, where Reb Brown plays essentially the same character to better effect, and that is SAD.
I suppose I should not have expected much from the guy who managed to make The Fast and the Furious even worse than it would have been without him, but his performance in Timeline provided the absolute nadir of both the movie and his career. I can only hope that he fails math or something next semester, and his eligibility gets suspended until he brings his grades up. That, or the coach cuts him from the team.
He fucking sucks.
Yes, Paul Walker is very, very handsome. And he could not act dead if you bashed his brains out with a surfboard. Through the whole course of the movie, he did not manage to successfully convey a single emotion, though he provoked several: loathing, annoyance, disgust, irritation, confusion, scorn, and maniacal laughter. Yes. I know that last is not an emotion. But you get the point.
The fact that he was not immediately cut from the cast and replaced with someone else, anyone else, is proof conclusive that Richard Donner has Completely Lost His Shit.
A director is there to make decisions, not to eat lice and hoot.
Even Hayden Christiansen, who is like a horrible, lurching, second-generation clone of Ryan Phillippe minus all talent and good looks, would have been better. An inflatable doll would have been better.
Paul Walker is (and these are fighting words) as bad as the guy from Scanners.
The whole movie was an hour and a half long cinematic poke in the eye. Its constant, grating ineptitude made Blade: Trinity feel like a well-lubricated handjob delivered by a thousand-dollar callgirl. I have sincerely seen made-for-TV movies that outshone it (even Dinotopia was better, and that was not a good movie).
If I could go back in time and warn myself away from it, I would, but I cannot, so I am now warning you:
Avoid Timeline at all costs.
I'm also sending it back to the store with a note in the box warning the next renter to download random video clips from the internet. Japanese tentacle rape and gangbang ass porn is a much better way to spend an evening.
link