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Reviews
Hitman (2007)
A script written in crayon
Decent acting, decent director and decent budget destroyed by a script written in crayon. There's no excuse for a movie like this. This goes on the pile of drek of movies from video games like BloodRayne1/2. Our hero, a hit-man trained from birth and known only as 47 has been pursued by a cop from Interpol for 3 years. One thing clearly obvious is that this cop sucks. For one thing, 47 is bald and has a bar-code tattooed on the back of his head just like his other dozen or two assassins running around in this film. You'd think just from that that maybe there would be a APB for bald guys with bar codes on their head. Maybe the director should have taken some artistic license as has been done with other comic and video game translations and maybe moved the bar-code where it could be concealed by a shirt collar.
Starting with this, scene after scene simply stretches credulity. He assassinates the president of Russia publicly in front of hundreds of witnesses. Blood from a head shot to the face splatters dozens. Yet somehow not one of them speaks up when the Russians later claim that he missed and the president is fine. The secret is known only by the president's double and a secret police chief. Yet somehow they are able to pull off this hoax. Agent 47 asks his control who hired the hit on the president and he is told the president hired him. Now, you'd think if your taking down orders for hit jobs you might have asked a question or two when someone orders a hit on himself other than "Would you like fries with that?" 47 instinctively knows that a woman witness he is told to must have information he needs to get himself out of his dilemma.
47 makes a dramatic escape from police by leaping out his hotel window into the river. To bad he booked his room on the other side of the hotel from total lack of foresight for an escape route. Besides police at least a dozen of his brother assassins are after him for no good reason. When confronted 3 to 1 they all decide to put down their guns and duke it out with swords. They are all supposedly trained from birth to kill but their swordfighting apparently comes from a weekend course from the Learning Annex.
It just goes on and on like this. How this got higher than a 3 must be from the fanboys of the video game.
The Golden Compass (2007)
See it!
We are getting fantasy films by the shovelful this year. This is by far the best fantasy film since The Lord of the Rings. The majority of negative comments are by fans of the books and people that have a vision in there head of what something should be are rarely satisfied. And there is the campaign by certain religious groups that have put out scares that the books are written by an "atheist"(ooh, booga booga!) and have gotten themselves on television news to tell people not to see it.
The film is 2 hours and doesn't have a dull moment. The effects are flawless to the point where you don't think about them and they don't overwhelm the story and characters. I found this story to be a huge contrast to the Chronicles of Narnia. Not because of Narnia's deliberate Christian message but because as a children's film it does not talk down to it's audience. I had a huge problem with The Lion, the Witch, et al. because it has children pick up weapons for the first time in there life and go off to war as skilled warriors and tacticians. There is also something unnatural about the way talking animals were done in Narnia vs. a more natural feel in Compass.
The story is about the choice to think for yourself and to stand up and fight for the right to do it. So, see it for yourself and decide.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
See the movie for action, read the book for story
It's unfortunate that so much of the book needed to be cut for time and the movie is still nearly 2 1/2 hours long. The rule of movie editing is when you must trim for time you remove the sub-plots. A lot of story and character development isn't there.
But what is there is a great visual treat. If the movie leaves you with questions just read the book or get the audio version on CD. It would have taken a minimum of another half hour to flesh the movie out and that simply wasn't going to be done by a studio whose primary target is a younger audience. (Note how no studio wants to release an animated film longer than 90 minutes for this reason.) Perhaps Alphonso Curon would have done a better job of cohesion but there really isn't much more that could have been done in the time and the script would have been essentially the same. This movie begs for an extended Lord of the Rings type DVD, another 30 to 60 minutes to give you what was left out for theatrical release.
See it and spend the bucks to see it on the big screen.