...and I wasn't really blown away by them. Except for...
But I'll do some quick reviews of it. Because maybe there is a gem in this bunch.
The first is -
I've been a fan of magic for quite some time in my life. My favorite magicians are Penn and Teller (which was my first show in Las Vegas), and some of there tricks are just... hehehe.
This movie is more of a spoof of magicians, like Sigfried and Roy vs. David Blane. And it's... eh?
I am not a fan of Steve Carell. Or more correctly, I am not a fan of him in the office, and this is pretty much him in this movie. I did like the parody of Jim Carrey, making fun of Chris Angel (which I also saw in Vegas) and street magic, but it got pretty transparent really quickly as he was just used as a cliche rival character. And poor Steve Buscemi, I remember the trailers for this movie and he was just written out pretty much without much effect to the plot. You can tell that the story was worked on multiple times though... and it wasn't that strong. I don't understand Steve's ego and the fact that he had been doing the same tricks for 10 years but didn't change anything? That's magician code breaking! You need to keep studying, do NEW tricks, keep trying different ways of doing it! This is probably why I like Teller's tricks the best.
(David Copperfield and his team do a trick in the movie, and it's decent)
However, I did like Alan Arkin in this. His tricks were the only ones that made me think, "Now that's more like it! I want to see more of that!" But, his was also kinda squeezed in as a cliche mentor.
Overall, this movie was underwhelming.
But as underwhelming, at least it wasn't as awkward as...
Where do I even start...
SO you take a historical story and put magic and demons in it...
FAIL!
Well that didn't take long.
The fighting in this movie is good, and I would recommend it for that alone, because everything else is crap.
And before I go to far, I will say that Keanu Reeves isn't that bad in this... it's just that he feels out of place in this narrative. And that's the problem with this movie, the narrative is fucked up. I suppose it was trying for a more fanatical approach in a way like the story telling ways of the Japanese... but it didn't work.
Not to mention the love story was... out of place.
This whole movie made me feel unclean.
So would this last movie put the final nail in my coffin lid of not so good movies?
I went in expecting the worse with this movie. As soon as I heard of it's PG-13 rating, I thought "How could they fuck up a zombie movie like that? NO blood or gore... this won't be a zombie movie."
And it turned out... they didn't need to. It actually kinda worked.
It was like the "Abridged Zombie Apocalypse", anything that had a zombie movie made of was in this movie. It followed rules like in the Zombie Guide book (which I have, I didn't read the World War Z book though but I also heard it was nothing like the movie), and it actually was still pretty intense. It produced logic ways of fighting and surviving and I enjoy it.
Oh, and the Marines were bad ass.
The only scene I can say that bugged me was the sudden "accidental shooting" that everyone who has seen it knows what I am talking about. I guess it was suppose to be realistic and saying "be prepared for anything and shit happens", but it felt out of place for the plot flow.
Other than that, it's actually worth a watch. And you can watch it with a squeamish spouse who doesn't like gore and they might like it also.
Next time, I tackle the dreaded Amazing Spiderman 2, another one of those mixed reviewed movies, and throw my two cents at it. Will it be as good as the first one (like Captain America 2 and Thor 2) or does it fail heavily (like Dark Knight Rises and Iron Man 3). My eyes will be the judge.
~Later
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