Wolverine VS RED 2 VS Pacific Rim

Movies aren’t exactly my cup of tea, but ever since danny started making fun of my movie choices (I chose 28 weeks later over 28 days later, he’s been bugging me ever since), I have been working on my so called “taste” in big theater cinemas. Although it does depend on what type of genre people usually prefer, there are those kinds of movies that fit into everyone’s taste. I will try to cover that later in the blog.

I try and avoid Horror movies (Zombies are fine, at least you can take out a shovel and hit them on their head) as much as possible because for one, they don’t let me sleep and two, they don’t let me sleep. If I somehow end up carrying Nepal’s nuclear code and the CIA needs to extract information out from me, all they need to do is strap me to a chair, glue open my eyes, dust a DVD copy of Grudge and wallah! there you have it, the code will be all theirs. To put things into perspective again, if I had to choose between having to watch a Horror movie to having to give up Momo for life, I would have probably chosen to give up on MoMo:. That bad.

Fortunately for me, the movie theaters are a flush with action packed movies and thus, I have had the opportunity to avoid embarrassment of people knowing I am a shit head when it comes to Horror movies. Pacific Rim, had monsters but hey, you could fight them. Ghosts no, they go through you, they try to act all ninja and its kinda hard trying to know exactly how to counter one. If I do see a ghost, I will probably faint right then and there so I probably don’t have to worry about it.

Hollywood seems to flirt around the concept of how world is going to come to its very knees by alien invasion and how a few individuals end up saving the world. The world I mean, by saving the US. It’s always either Washington D.C or New York City that gets destroyed and that’s it. Pacific Rim though, had streets of Hong Kong all mashed up, skyscrapers falling down and Chinese people running which was a pleasant change from the usual.

What about the movie you ask? As you might have probably known, its about a bunch of monsters fighting a bunch of insanely brain linking huge robots. Think about transformer robots but without their “lets become a car”. Even some of the Godzilla like creatures looked very similar to robots that belonged to Decepticons.

Character wise, I thought Ron Perlman did a good job filling in the role of Hannibal Chau, a Kaiju (the monsters from outer space which come through a portal in the pacific) body parts smuggler, gets later eaten by one of the baby Kaiju’s only to survive later and say “where’s my shoe?”, Charlie Day looked like he was high throughout the screening who played Dr Newton, a crazy scientist who mind bridges with Kaiju brain to figure out what their next plot would be and so forth. It was interesting to see Asians starting to gain prominence in supporting role with Rinko Kikuchi coming in as Mako Mori, one of the “pilots” of the Robots aka the Jaegars.  Idris Elba acting style never changes. If you have taken time to watch Prometheus and seen his acting there, its basically copy and paste over here. I liked the line where get’s pissed off and says “One, don’t ever touch me again, and Two, don’t ever touch me again”

Overall, the visual effects and the characters synchronize quite well to produce a decent movie. There were some predictable moments but I thought the idea that Monsters came in through a portal in the Pacific and not from the bloody sky was refreshing. One disappointing thing to note was there was absolutely no kissing scene, only hugging. There was a lot of those fake human bonding stuff going on but absolutely no kissing. What a waste of time. But if you do have time to waste, I think it’s worth the buck. (I still need to transfer your money boss, will have them out by today)

There was this rumor back in January that Hugh Jackman was in Nepal and that nobody did really care that he was there. Apparently he was in one of those rural parts probably getting lost and getting his hair all worked up like Sadhu Babas. That’s basically how his latest movie “Wolverine” begins anyways, inside a jungle in Canada with Sadhu Baba Hair style.

What seemed to be a promising start to the movie, ended up being a disappointment although there were some scenes where you really had to hold on to your seat. I thought the bullet train fight scene was fantastic.  The way they jumped around in a 300km/hr ride was simply stunning and the cinematography was spot on. The movie also packed a bit of humor, especially the part where Wolverine ends up with the Japanese tycoon granddaughter in a Love room themed as “mission to mars” or something. I had to laugh out loud when Wolverine throws out another character out of the window into a swimming pool down below. When his “bodyguard” asks him how he knew there was a swimming pool in the first place, he answers “I didn’t” as he walks away not so pleased with what just happened.

Again, it was interesting to see more Asian’s being involved. Rila Fukushima plays the role of Yukio, an adopted but highly trained girl who acts as the “body guard” of Wolverine, Tao Okamoto in supporting role of Mariko who acts as the granddaughter of the Tycoon Yashida played by Hal Yamanouchhi.  But the whole movie, as the title suggests, was about Wolverine and about Hugh Jackman and that’s about it.

As expected, there were a lot of sword activities and ninjas doing stupid stunts just so that they could close the door stealthily. Even the robot at the end had a sword. How retro can you go? There were also some moments where I got reminded of Bollywood just because the lead actor refused to die. If you were one of those fortunate people to have seen Bollywood movies where not even a 1000 bullets, million bazookas, tanks, missiles, apaches could destroy the lead actor from reaching his love, you know what I am talking about. Overall, not worth the buck.

What about RED2? I don’t know. I talked to some people who have watched it just because there’s a Korean actor (guy from IRIS and G.I.Joe), and there were mix comments. Most of them said it was far worse than RED, so I will just wait for a good copy to come out in kickass.