Skyline

In the 50’s, low budget genre films were all the rage. In the US, to feed the boom in drive-in theatres, studios churned out movies with simple plots, stock themes, and reliable shock effects to satisfy punters more interested in copping a feel than character development. Let’s not mess about - most of these films were crap.

A popular staple of these genre efforts were alien invasions, tapping into the public’s Cold War paranoia and the suspicion that those dirty Commies were lurking somewhere in the laundry basket waiting to take over.

Amongst the B-movie dross a few classics did emerge, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, It Came From Outer Space and War Of The Worlds remain enduring examples of the genre.

The reason I’m waffling on about these second tier features is because Skyline (2010) is a direct descendent of those exploitation efforts. In fact, Skyline is little more than a pedestrian retread of War Of The Worlds but with added special effects gimmickry.

Unfortunately, for a film which has decided to put the emphasis on providing smorgasbord of special effects, the aliens are poorly designed and look about as convincing as those in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The end result is neither scary, funny or remotely thought provoking. Indeed, the whole film feels like nothing more than a straight-to-DVD X-files spin-off.

In an effort to cover-up the entertainment vacuum, the directors have piled on the CGI in much the same way a budget fast food joint uses melted plastic cheese to mask the flavour of your three day old donkey burger.

Confronted by this utterly disinteresting sorry affair, I struggled to write even a single page of notes. Fortunately, my torpor was briefly alleviated when an army helicopter hovered into view and with it the impending prospect of a chopper fireball.

Thingy-me-jig and whats-her-name in Skyline

So, let’s set the scene. Skyline’s two anonymous protagonists Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson) are holed up in an up-market apartment complex. But, with the aliens closing in, they try to escape by hailing down a passing chopper from the rooftop.

As it approaches, a large alien climbs up the side of the building and shoots two sticky tentacles from its claws which fix onto the chopper’s chassis. There is a short tug of war until the chopper succeeds in overpowering the alien with a volley of gunfire. Unfortunately, it’s here the problems begin.

As the alien tumbles off the side of the building it drags the chopper - to which it’s still attached - down with it. The doomed whirlybird is pulled into the tower block’s glass and concrete structure and goes up in flame, its rotor blades spinning off and narrowly missing the heads of our protagonists.

The rest of the fiery debris plummets to earth and crashes through a glass foyer.
Artistic merit

The exploding helicopter set piece is competently executed and I liked the way the shell of the helicopter comes straight at the camera from above, adding to the impact.

Exploding helicopter innovation

As a mostly innovation free film it comes as a surprise that the destruction of the helicopter is executed in such an unconventional manner. Until a giant chameleon sticks out its tongue and brings down a helicopter this will remain a unique set-piece.

Do passengers survive?

Rule 1 of the helicopters pilot’s character arc: if you haven’t got any lines and you tangle with a bad guy you will only ever end up as slightly charred worm food.

Positives

Apart from the helicopter explosion there is absolutely no need to watch this film.

Negatives

It’s hard to know where to start as this film misfires on almost every level.

A no-mark cast of actors are understandably unable to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Donald Faison (Turk in Scrubs) pops up as a rapper and is mercifully dispatched half way through the film before he can tarnish his resume any further.

David Zayas (who you might recognise as Latino gang leader in prison drama Oz) plays a strangely aggressive concierge who has some awful lines: sample dialogue, “Vaya con Dios, you son of a bitch”. When the aliens come calling Zayas decides he’d rather take his own life and kills himself in a gas explosion. After watching this turkey you might want to do the same.

Despite being an effects driven movie nothing much interesting seems to happen for the bulk of the film. The dialogue is flat and, as most of the film is shot in the confines of an apartment block great swathes of the film are just plain dull.

A one location shoot is not a barrier to a good film. Phone Booth, 127 Hours and Glengarry Glen Ross prove movies with smart dialogue can use their restrictive environments to ratchet up the tension. The directors could have tried to show a siege mentally or evidence of cabin fever, but this is ignored in favour of more shots of clunky looking aliens floating about outside.

There’s no exploration of wider themes, such as the public’s reaction to an alien invasion, the possibilities of societal anarchy, or even why the aliens are there in the first place. No allegories to commercialism, secularism or politics are discussed let alone contemplated. Perhaps I’m expecting too much.

To top it all off the ending, and here we should issue a *spoiler alert*. is complete and utter baloney. The aliens, it turns out, use human brains as fuel. But, when Jarrod is captured and his brain harvested, he amazingly has the power to control the alien he‘s just been ingested by.

No-one else has this ability. And, this point cannot be made strongly enough: THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO F*CKING EXPLANATION FOR HIS SPECIAL POWER! It comes apropos of nothing. All the poor viewer can do is throw up their hands and accept this important plot point like the moron the directors clearly expect you to be.

Favourite quote

(As the aliens revive themselves after being blasted by a rocket)
Jarrod: “They’re not dead. They’re just really p*ssed off!”

Interesting fact

A special mention should go to directors, The Brothers Strause. They have a background in effects work having been involved on the visuals for the Fantastic Four, The Day After Tomorrow and Terminator 3.

They then moved into directing and were responsible for the sh*tfest that was Alien v Predator: Requiem. All in all, tthey have an unenviable record of routinely making bad films.

Out of the $20m this cost to make (chicken feed by today’s mega-budget standards) only 2.5% of the budget went on physical production. The vast majority went on the effects costs.

Despite the thoroughly negative reviews the film made over $78m at the box office and you will probably see a sequel as a result. It goes to show the movie going public are mostly made up of f*cking idiots.

Review by: Neon Messiah

Mega Piranha

I blame Steven Spielberg.

With Jaws, the bearded boy wonder created the ‘blockbuster’, a cinematic carnivore that greedily devoured any movie minnow unfortunate enough to swim in its path.

More than that, Jaws’ success has spawned a veritable ocean full of watery creature-features over the years, including this one.

So, landlubbers, is this a prize catch? Are we going to fall for it hook, line and sinker – or is it just another old boot, fit only for throwing back into the water? Look at that title again, and take a wild guess…

The story begins with the chewed-up remains of an American ambassador and his boat mysteriously washing up on the shore of a Venezuelan river. Suspecting something (ahem) fishy, the US government send their top secret service agent (Paul Logan) to investigate.

But Logan doesn’t really need his deerstalker for this case, which most definitely isn’t a three-pipe problem. Far from it, in fact. Within minutes of flying into the country, he’s greeted by a helpful scientist (improbably played by Eighties pop princess Tiffany) who immediately tells him a shoal of genetically modified ‘mega piranhas’ are to blame.

It turns out the murderous meat-hungry fish are, predictably, the product of an experiment gone horribly wrong. (Do they ever turn out any other way in films like this?) With the mutated fish now the size of double-decker buses and chomping their way through legions of screaming extras, Logan and Professor Tiffany team up to try and prevent everyone from becoming glorified fish-food.

But wait! I hear you cry. Where’s the pointless, confusing and vaguely racist sub-plot involving a dusky military type up to no good, which has for so long been a staple of these films? Fear not, my friends, for here comes Diaz – a shady Venezuelan army colonel who’s up to something dodgy and mysterious in the jungle.

Paul Logan plays a top (and topless) secret agent

And yup, this boy really knows his mystery onions. Indeed, so secretive are the good colonel’s nefarious activities that, come the closing credits, you’ll most likely be none the wiser than you were at the start. There’s something almost Beckettian about Diaz’s involvement in the film, and the way in which his character sails blithely over such hum-drum concerns as plot and sense. It’s positively post-modern.

But sadly, none of this can stop Mega Piranha (2010) from becoming a poor addition to the pantheon of fishy thrillers? As a denizen of the cinematic deep, it’s a definite bottom-feeder.

Exploding Helicopter is by no means adverse to cheap and predictable thrills, but here there’s a sense that the filmmakers had ‘adequate’ as the very summit of their aspirations. A viewer needs to believe that somebody, somewhere is at least trying, but this is the film-making equivalent of watching someone treading water.

Contributing to this jaundiced feeling, literally, is the weird yellow tint that the whole film is shot in. Presumably meant to add a dusky ‘golden hour’ feel to the cinematography, it merely looks like the cameraman has dunked his lens into an egg yolk, or simply forgotten to adjust the contrast.

Even worse, for an action film, very little actually happens. Amid the conversational longeurs and paucity of thrills, the viewer is left flailing around for positives like a flounder on a line. Fortunately, as you’d expect in a film of this ilk, there’s some extremely questionable science on display, which thankfully provides a few fleeting moments of amusement.

Mutant piranhas should be fought with your feet

Particularly watchable is the credulity-stretching scene where Logan manages to top up his mobile phone battery by sucking on it, because “the acid in your saliva gives you ten per cent extra charge”.

Granted, most of the fortysomething DVD-viewing audience would probably have preferred to see Tiffany orally giving some ‘extra charge’ to a hard, rounded object, but the ridiculousness is enjoyable nonetheless.

Even better, it turns out battery blowjobs are just an entrée. Our heroes really up the bonkers-science gauge in a later scene, where they hotwire an aerosol can into the fuel supply of their helicopter to give it a ‘turbo boost’. Don’t try this at home, kids.

On the subject of helicopters, there are in fact two explosions to report but, like much else in this movie, they are pretty sub-standard fare. In the first scene, Diaz and his henchmen – armed with a couple of choppers – engage in an aerial dogfight with Logan and the good Professor, and the colonel fires a rocket at our heroes.

In the finest tradition of the exploding helicopter genre, Logan makes his helicopter dodge out the way just in the nick of time and the rocket naturally hits the other baddie whirlybird, which has conveniently chosen to circle round right into the missile’s path.

Later in the film, Diaz manages to destroy a helicopter he was actually aiming at, this time a rescue chopper called out by Logan. In both these scenes, admittedly, helicopters do actually explode – but, sad to say, this lacklustre movie never really seems in any real danger of catching fire.

Artistic merit

There’s some extremely poor conflagration on display here. Low budget CGI is used throughout and the explosions are nothing more than artificial yellowy smears in the sky.

Exploding helicopter innovation

We were this close to exploding helicopter history

Sadly, director Eric Forsberg settles for two routine chopper fireballs and completely fluffs his opportunity to make exploding helicopter history.

A third helicopter is destroyed when a giant piranha leaps from the ocean and grabs it between its jaws. Unfortunately, the helicopter doesn’t explode and remains intact as the piranha swims away with it clamped between its lethally sharp teeth.

Forsberg’s abject failure to actually explode a helicopter under such promising circumstances instantly condemns Mega Piranha to also-ran status.

Positives

Logan’s boss, the US Secretary of Defence (Barry Williams), is a joy to watch and perhaps the most trusting person in Congressional history.

When Logan phones to report that, contrary to everyone’s belief that a terrorist or criminal conspiracy was to blame, the ambassador was actually killed by bunch of mutant piranhas, the whole call goes, well, swimmingly.

Now, most people might have been a little nervous ahead of such a call. Would the secretary of defence think you’d completely lost your marbles having spent too much time out in the Venezuelan sun slurping banana daiquiris?

Would he demand copious documentary evidence of your outlandish claim before even countenancing that murderous genetically-modified super fish were responsible for this diplomatic crisis?

No, he basically says ‘Jeez, that sounds awful. Well done for solving the case.’? Just imagine the excuses you could come up with for being late for work with this guy…

Negatives

Tiffany: rocking her 'I think we're at home now look'

One of the few attractions of watching this film was the chance to catch a glimpse of Eighties pop moppet Tiffany, the flame-haired songstress who had a massive worldwide hit in 1987 with ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ at the tender age of sweet sixteen.

Unfortunately, Tiffany seems here to have arrived on set straight from the school run. At least, that’s the impression given by the seriously frumpy hairdo and frowsy outfit she sports throughout the film. The vibe is definitely ‘I Think We’re At Home Now With Three Demanding Kids’. Well, that’s another teen crush, crushed.

Favourite quote

Talking about the piranhas: “Oh we’ll stop them. But you Greenpeacers aren’t going to like it.”

Interesting fact

Mega Piranhas was rushed out by its producers ‘The Asylum’ to exploit interest in Piranha- 3D. If your aspirational starting point is the execrable Piranha-3D (a rotten trout of a movie where several former Hollywood stalwarts – Ving Rhames, him from Scream – literally went to die) then there really was never any hope.

Review by: Jafo

Angels & Demons

After The Da Vinci Code inexplicably made money, Hollywood was always going to squeeze a bit more out of the Dan Brown cash cow. But there was a problem. Having already used the big – and famously nonsensical – bestseller, they had little choice but to go back to an earlier, even more incomprehensible novel.

There’s possibly not enough room on the internet to explain the full plot of this impenetrable book, but here’s a dummy’s guide. The Pope’s been murdered and the four cardinals most likely to succeed him kidnapped by a shadowy, sinister sect called the Illuminati. They are threatening to kill one cardinal each hour then blow up Vatican City at midnight. How? Simples. By using a powerful anti-matter bomb they nicked from priestly scientists who had been constructing it to help find the ‘God’ particle.

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry – it’s because it doesn’t make any sense.

Enter expert symbologist Tom Hanks, sporting the kind of hair only ever seen on Hollywood men of a certain age. (Yes, we’re talking about you, Nicholas Cage and Sly Stallone. Indeed, Cage coiffure-watching is almost a spectator sport these days – his hairline seems to bob backwards and forwards like the tide. And, as mentioned in this website’s review of The Expendables 2, it was often hard in that film to tell when Stallone was or wasn’t wearing a black woollen beret.)

The Hankster’s barnet here is a prime example of the ‘Hollywood hair’ form. It’s dark, it’s impressively lustrous, but not really like any recognisable follicle arrangement you and I have ever come across. It’s more like a hair-hat, really. And styled in a demi-mullet, no less.

Sad to report, the problems don’t end with mere tonsorial matters. There’s a fundamental flaw at the heart of this non-movie, which is thus: Angels and Demons is a plot-heavy, labyrinthine novel – virtually a puzzle, in fact – with next to no characterisation. As such, and it’s hard to overstate this point, it’s a terrible fit for film adaptation.

Hanks' hair: an unrecognisable follicle arrangement

This sequel could easily have been called The Exposition Code. As soon as the Hankster meets his obligatory foxy Italian sidekick (Ayelet Zurer), they start busily explaining plot points to each other in a way that doesn’t remotely resemble a human conversation. And they don’t stop for the whole film.

For a deadening first hour, the pair simply rush from church to church, spouting saints’ names and other religious gobbledygook to each other. It’s literally impossible to keep track of what’s happening, and the scriptwriter was clearly as confused as anyone.

All this expository tomfoolery tips over into the absurd during a bizarre scene about half-way through. Tom (a peaceable academic, remember) enters a church to find a cardinal strung up and literally burning alive, then sees his cop friend viciously gunned down and only escapes the assassin’s bullets by diving into a scary, pitch-black cellar. Ye gods.

Finally rescued by the police, he stands in the wrecked church, bruised and battered, his dead cop friend at his feet and the smell of spit-roast cardinal heavy in the air.

So what does he do: collapse into tears? Crumple into a ball on the floor? Show the merest sign of emotion? Nope, he just says: “Right, we’re looking for a statue of a cross-eyed angel pointing westwards next to the Holy Chapel of Saint Badger…” (or something. I may paraphrase slightly) and bounds off to find the next clue.

And that’s it – no hint of upset or trauma: of anything, in fact. The truth is, there’s so little character to Hanks’ ‘character’ – and just so much plot to get through – that director Ron Howard has clearly thrown his hands up in the air and not even bothered to try.

So the whole thing is a (ahem) unholy shambles, but aerial conflagration enthusiasts are given a whiff of potential early on when Ewan MacGregor, dressed in a priestly cassock and with hands clasped in prayer, announces for no earthly reason whatsoever that he knows how to fly a helicopter.

As mentioned previously on Exploding Helicopter, our Ewan never saw a bad script he didn’t like the look of: his cinematic CV has more turkeys than a Tesco refrigerated shelf in mid-December. But even by his own high standards, this is a colossally bad choice. He plays the Vatican’s Camerlengo, a top Vatican official who, following the Pope’s murder, is actually the acting Pope.

That means, after Obi Wan Kinobi, Nick Leeson and numerous other bad choices, we finally get Pope Ewan the First. Truly, the Lord does work in mysterious ways. No wonder Benedict resigned.

But what about that grinding plot? After an arse-numbing amount of time, the action does finally reach a climax of sorts. We’re in some catacombs! They’ve found the bomb! There just happens to be a helicopter parked outside St Peter’s! Pope Ewan is a trained pilot! Surely he’s not going to take off for the high skies with the bomb and sacrifice himself in a spectacular explosion? Oh, yes!

Artistic merit

Given the chopper is already up beyond the clouds, the explosion itself takes the form of a night sky lighting up over the Vatican. The producers haven’t shirked on the tasteful CGI, and there’s something aesthetically pleasing about a ghostly light hovering over such a spiritual location. But then Pope Ewan suddenly ‘appears’ on a parachute and the whole thing turns unintentionally hilarious.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Exploding Helicopter has carefully checked the records, and there’s definitely not a previous entry under: holy man goes straight upwards in a bomb-laden chopper until it explodes, then unfeasibly drops back down on a flimsy piece of tarpaulin. That’s innovation in action, folks.

Positives

Scarcely the only entertainment to be gleaned from this mess comes from following the progression of MacGregor’s accent. In his introductory scene, he’s clearly aiming, badly, for an Irish accent, but five minutes later has fallen into the default Alec Guinness clipped English setting he uses for all non-Tartan outings.

A little later, he gets angry and it all goes a bit Trainspotting for a minute, but next thing he’s telling the Hankster ‘I was orphaned at nine years of age by a bombing in Ulster’ and suddenly it’s like the Reverend Ian Paisley has been given a five-minute cameo.

Ewan’s grandstand scene, when he appeals to all the cardinals for more understanding between religion and science, is in itself a model of inclusivity, containing as it does a rich array of accents – including, at one point, possibly Cornish.

Negatives

Given the profundity of choice on offer here, it’s perhaps best to focus in on the single greatest error – namely, that someone showed Ron Howard the script for Angels and Demons.

Favourite quote

“You’re talking about THE moment of creation…”
This fatuous line, pompously delivered by Hanks in his most sonorous tones, neatly captures all that is hammy and terrible about the movie.

Interesting fact

This movie portrays the Catholic Church as a sinister and introverted organisation beset by deadly rivalries, which will stop at nothing to hide its dirty laundry from the public. So, entirely fictional, then.

Review by: Chopper

Listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast on Angels & Demons on iTunes, Podomatic, Stitcher, or YourListen. Or hear it right now on the embedded player. 

Doomsdayer

For every hero, there must be a villain. And, as the cinematic canon expands, the need for ever more colourful baddies – with grander and more ingenious schemes with which to threaten the world – only grows.

Bravely rising to this challenge, Hollywood has exploited every possible reason and unlikely motive for villainous skulduggery, giving us a memorable rogues’ gallery of scoundrels in the process.

We’ve had terrorists out for a spot of nuclear blackmail (think Art Malik in True Lies), disgruntled ex-employees out to avenge themselves with oriental elaborateness on their old boss (Javier Bardem in Skyfall), even attempts by intergalactic-beings to enslave the human race (Terence Stamp in Superman II). 

Why, we’ve even seen Nazi war criminals try to recreate the Third Reich by populating the world with infants cloned from Hitler (hats off to Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil, featuring a plot so epically bonkers you almost want it to succeed. Well, almost). 

So where could Hollywood’s dark, twisted imagination go next? Surely the pool of poisonous evil-doers intent on destroying the world has been exhausted?

Oh, happy day – it is not so. There does remain, it would appear, one last group whose potential for unspeakable evil has yet to be utilised on celluloid. A twisted coven whose veneer of respectability harbours a secret desire for global Gotterdammerung.

But who are these evil masterminds, I hear you ask? Well, let me tell you. They are…philanthropists.
Yes, that’s right: philanthropists. Do-gooders. Charity types. People with spectacles and no shoulder muscles. Who, according to Doomsdayer (2000), apparently want to tear the world apart – presumably between tea breaks and reading The Guardian.

Udo Kier: millionaire and mentalist

Meet Max Gast (Udo Kier): a millionaire businessman and bleeding heart liberal who has already spanked away great chunks of his fortune funding good causes aimed at preventing disease, protecting the environment, promoting global peace and saving furry little animals.

Nothing to worry about there, you might think. But unfortunately, the world’s population are proving to be an ungrateful lot. And, much to Gast’s frustration, they’ve continued waging deadly conflicts and plundering the planet’s resources.

Now, men of more limited imagination would simply mutter bitterly about the ingratitude of mankind, put away their cheque book and get on with racking up a few more ka-squillion quid.

But our Max isn’t afraid to think big, and instead conceives of a bigger and altogether more radical plan. The basic idea, taken from page one of the Megalomaniac’s Guide to Really Getting Your Point Across, is thus: to create, first one must destroy.

To this end, Gast develops the ‘doomsdayer’ – a device capable of causing the simultaneous meltdown of every nuclear weapon and power plant on Earth. According to Gast’s wonky logic, the few thousand souls who manage to survive the subsequent cataclysmic Armageddon will be so chastened by the experience, they will build a new, better world - one more in tune with his own utopian vision.

It’s a lot to take in. And if you’re struggling to get your head round the rotten madness of this idea, just try and imagine Bill Gates suddenly deciding: ‘To hell with curing polio, what I really want to do is blow everything up, kill billions of people, and keep my fingers crossed that somehow magically solves everything‘. Think of it as a kind of ‘control, alt, delete’ moment for the human race.

Fortunately, a secret security unit run by the United Nations learns of Gast’s plans. Naturally, given the literally world-threatening nature of the evil plan, they opt for a softly-softly approach and send their top agent Jack Logan (Joe Lara) to infiltrate Gast’s base and stop the launch of the ‘doomsdayer’.

Cool African poster design

With a villain this unlikely, it’s obviously going to take one hell of an actor to sell the whole lunatic premise to the viewer. Luckily, in Udo Kier (Blade, Iron Sky), Doomsdayer has the perfect salesman for the job.

With an eerie, aloof demeanour, Kier delightfully portrays his character’s slowly-pickled evil.  His mellifluous German accent and purring delivery are wonderfully complemented by his pale grey eyes, which have all the humanity of a paving slab.

There’s an excellent scene early in the film where Kier chairs what turns out to be the final (in fact, very final for some) meeting of his charitable foundation. After running through its assorted failures, he outlines with chilling placidity his ‘doomsdayer’ scheme to the assembled trustees.

The earnest charity types are naturally appalled and start to protest. But Kier – having no further use for them – has had the forethought to poison their drinks. Before they can start droning earnest objections to his homicidal scheme, they all slump down dead on the boardroom table. It’s a hell of a way to chair a meeting. I guess they should have read the agenda more carefully.

Unfortunately, the vivid camp of Kier’s performance contrasts sharply with the hero, here played by Joe Lara. He’s a thoroughly bland presence. In fact, he rather started to remind me of a toaster: something that pops up every couple of minutes with a dry, plain, and unutterably dull product.

Still, aside from saving the world, Lara does serve one useful function in the film – and that’s to help explode that all important helicopter.

Trying to break into Gast’s headquarters, Lara is discovered and pursued by the villain’s private army. To stop the pesky protagonist, Gast despatches his attack helicopter – the sexily named Black Widow.

The rather white looking 'Black Widow' chopper

Quite why the chopper is called the Black Widow is somewhat mysterious. Not least because said whirlybird is completely white in colour. Anyway, the viewer has little time to quibble over this as the chopper fires a succession of rockets at Lara, who tries to escape in a truck.

It looks like only a matter of time before our hero is cremated. But luckily, the Black, White or Whatever Widow is fitted with a remote control, the purpose of which (like the confusing colour of the livery) remains obscure.

Still, said device does allow Lara’s buddy to hack into the chopper’s controls and command it to dump all its fuel. Sans petrol, the pursuing chopper plummets from the sky and crashes into the ground. No more Black Widow.

Artistic merit

Disgraceful. Despite an impressive amount of pyrotechnics throughout the film, the producer’s piggybank was clearly empty by this point.

Given that they couldn’t even afford a coat of paint to make their white helicopter look a little more, well, black, there was obviously little prospect of them being able to afford to blow the thing up properly.

To avoid showing a crash or explosion, the director cuts to what’s supposed to be the view from the helicopter’s cockpit. We see trees rushing towards the camera, while some poorly dubbed in, off-camera voices shout in fear, before we cut to a generic explosion which we‘re supposed to believe is the helicopter exploding. 

It’s a sorry, shoddy, sequence. In the general canon of chopper fireballs, Doomsdayer stands out as a larcenous crime, a permanent stain on the rich tapestry of cinematic helicopter explosions. Shocking.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The destruction of remote-controlled helicopters is not without precedent. We’ve previously seen it in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cloning thriller The 6th Day and dire sequel Lawnmower Man 2.
But in the Black/White Widow, we do have the destruction of the most misnamed helicopter of all-time – a first of some sort.

Positives

Time was that no car chase would be complete without one of the pursuing vehicles smashing into a petrol tanker that just happened, with startling convenience, to be pulling out of a side road. This generic trope provided the perfect excuse to deliver many an audience-pleasing huge explosion.

Sadly, there then came a time, around the mid-Nineties, when even Hollywood – never usually overly embarrassed on the subject of clichés – felt even they couldn’t get away with that one anymore.

So, imagine my retro delight when Doomsdayer served up a superb, late example of the art, having a car crash into a fuel truck which was inexplicably parked in the middle of nowhere. Some pleasures never get old.

Negatives

Brigitte Nielsen or possibly Dolph Lundgren in drag

Brigitte Nielsen plays Gast's wife and co-conspirator in the ‘doomsdayer‘ scheme. Unquestionably a striking beauty in her Eighties heyday, the Teutonic Titaness always had an imposing physique which made her look just a little bit like a man.

Made at the turn of the millennium, there's noticeable rust round the Nielsen chassis. It’s probably the last time we see Brigitte before her looks completely disintegrated into the ‘Dolph Lundgren in drag’ look we know and love today.

Favourite quote

I loved this statement of the bleeding obvious when a top brass military type answers a telephone call in a packed conference room: “Yes, Prime Minister…Certainly, Prime Minister…Of course, Prime Minister…At once, Prime Minister.”

Grizzled general then replaces handset, before announcing to the surprise of no-one: “That was the Prime Minister.”

Review by: Jafo

A Good Day To Die Hard

…aka A Bad Day To Go To The Cinema.

Expectations were never high for the fifth instalment of the Die Hard franchise – Bruce is getting old, and the basic premise was creaking badly even last time round – but this risible tosh is a whole new kind of bad. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being tea-bagged by portly, minor-bothering Liberal MP Cyril Smith for and hour and a half. Only worse.

Given Willis’ age, they’ve inevitably gone for the ‘lost son’ angle. The what, you ask? Basically, this means the producers have employed a young beefcake to do all the ‘action’ stuff that Bruce, as the nominal star of this action movie, is meant to be doing.

(Anyone who saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and witnessed the unedifying sight of Harrison Ford gingerly treading about in the background while the always-punchable Shia Lebouf threw himself under lorries and off cliff ledges, will recognise the form.)

The story, as always, involves our chrome-domed hero blundering unawares into the middle of bullet-strewn bedlam. This time, Bruce goes to Moscow to rescue his son, who’s been arrested as a terrorist but is really a top secret agent. Yippe-ki-CI-Yay, in fact.

Obviously, everything starts blowing up as soon as Willis sets foot at the scene, then the usual terrorists-apparently-wanting-nuclear-armagedon-but-really-just-thieves-after-all plot (copyright: Alan Rickman, 25 years ago) cranks into gear once more.

Exploding Helicopter has no idea who the actor playing the son is, having never seen him in a movie before. And on this evidence, it may well be some time before he troubles our screens again. Indeed, one of the less bearable aspects of the movie is watching the estranged pair’s torturous journey from flinty awkwardness to ‘I love you too, Dad’, delivered on both sides with a copper-bottomed lack of conviction.

But here’s the really troubling thing: the more the son punches and shoots and falls and gets stabbed, the louder grows that nagging, existential question: what does an action hero do when he has next to no action in his own movie?

Bruce Willis: Occasionally acts in his own movie

The answer: stand around uncomfortably while occasionally firing a machine-gun or delivering yet another lame quip. That’s largely why this is such a terrible movie. These days, Brucie chirping ‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker’ (yes, he does) has all the grace and novelty of Chesney Hawkes getting up at a pub karaoke night to belt out ‘The One and Only’.

Put it this way: if you showed this film to someone who didn’t know who Bruce Willis was, they’d wonder who that old bald guy was who kept standing around in the middle of all the scenes?

He’s become like one of those drunk fans who run on to the pitch in the middle of a Premiership game – right in the centre of things but not really part of it at all. Aged 57, he’s a spectator in his own movie and it’s painful to watch.

And sadly, no-one else is there to take up the slack. Granted, they probably cast an unknown as the son because the famously prickly and egocentric Willis didn’t want a younger star stealing his fading limelight, but you could always at least count on a colourful baddie in the Die Hard movies. The absence here of a ‘name’ villain speaks volumes about the franchise’s decreasing power. Where Rickman and Irons led, there’s now an assortment of beardy Russians from central casting. Nyet, thanks.

Incredibly, Willis has already confirmed there will be a Die Hard 6 – and it won’t necessarily see that it will end there. Mock if you like, but one day you’ll most likely pay good money to see Die Hard 9, where Bruce’s no-name grandson biffs the baddies while a wheelchair-bound Brucie, looking entirely like one of his own octegenerian testicles, pulls off his oxygen mask and yells ‘Yippee-ki-kolostomy-bag!’

The weird thing is, that would probably be more entertaining than this steaming pile of ordure.

Exploding helicopter innovation

So, to the explosion. It might be pertinent to warn there are spoilers ahead, but it’s doubtful anyone could ruin the plot any more than the writer already has, so let’s plough on.

The beardy Russian conscientious objector incredibly turns out to be the baddie, so – in a moment typical of the film – the no-name son gets shot and does the actual legwork of throwing him off the top of a building in Chernobyl (don’t ask) while Bruce skulks off camera somewhere having a fag / phoning his agent / demanding a bigger trailer.

Beardface plummets to a splatty end. Outraged, his sexy villainess daughter gets all Al Quaeda on our heroes’ asses and deliberately rams a huge military helicopter straight into the glass-fronted building where they stand helpless. And misses them. As the chopper smashes in to the building and explodes, Bruce and No-name jump out beside it and naturally land in a swimming pool that happens to be directly below them. The whole scene looks like the computer-generated nonsense it so patently is.

Positives

Do you know this man?

For the first time ever, Exploding Helicopter actually fell asleep for five minutes in a cinema during this movie – and has to report it was the most fulfilling five minutes of the whole enterprise.

Negatives

How long have you got? Let’s just do the script. Exploding Helicopter has seen a lot of bad movies, both blockbusters and small fry, but never one where such a huge budget has been coupled with such a piss-poor script. It makes The Chronicles of Riddick look like Citizen Kane. Every single aspect of the plot is so by-the-numbers, it seems to have been written by a computer programme – possibly an Amstrad home computer, circa 1985.

Special mention goes to the scene where Bruce starts emotionally unloading to a Russian bloke he’s literally only just met about how he wishes he’d been a better dad but still can’t express his paternal love, while the lumpen son listens in round the corner trying to pull off a ‘looking emotional’ expression. I’ve seen school plays with more conviction.

Favourite quote

“You know what I hate about Americans? Everything.”

Interesting fact

In the week of the UK premiere, Bruce put in a notoriously foul-tempered tour of British TV and radio studios, snipping at interviewers and petulantly refusing to answer questions across a variety of formats. It all sounds much more interesting than the film.

Review by: Chopper

The Losers

New comic book adaptations come around quicker than Usain Bolt searching for the stadium toilet after a particularly spicy Vindaloo. Following that trend comes The Losers (2010), a tongue-in-cheek actioner from the Vertigo stable, a company who make comics for people old enough to have moved on to real books by now.

The Losers are not a bunch of spandex clad superheroes though, but a crack commando unit declared M.I.A for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly aim to get revenge on their C.I.A superior after returning from Bolivia to the Los Angeles underground. Today still wanted by the Government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem hiring The A-Team on DVD, maybe you can hire, The Losers.

The motley crew consist of rugged platoon leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan looking like Raul Julia’s long-lost son), a no-nonsense black guy (Idris Elba as Roque), a good looking ladies man (Chris Evans as Jensen) and a crazy, wise cracking pilot (Columbus Short as Howling Mad Murdo….sorry…Pooch).

Is this set up ringing any bells for you? It should be, because The Losers is a transparent attempt to cash in on the A-Team template with clearly defined squad members screwed over by the system and aiming to clear their names (albeit with noticeably less panache).

Unfortunately, no amount of flashy direction, courtesy of Sylvain White, or high production values can mask the fact that this is a misfiring, derivative actioner with as much charm as a case of Chlamydia.

If you have a problem hiring The A Team on DVD,
maybe you can hire The Losers

For once though, the chopper explosion isn’t just there as eye candy, but an integral part of the “story”. After a botched attempt to take out a Bolivian drug lord the team inadvertently stumble across a gaggle of child slaves who they decide to rescue from his compound. There isn’t enough room in the evac-chopper for the entire group, so The Losers do the decent thing and let the kids fly off first.

For reasons not clearly explained evil C.I.A honcho Max, then decides to kill off The Losers once the drug lord is dispatched. Thinking they are on board the chopper, he orders it to be shot down. A missile is launched from a passing fighter jet which snakes across the sky and arrows towards the helicopter with only one possible outcome.

Artistic merit

This is a very nicely framed set piece. Shot from the ground, you see the tiny jet in the corner of the screen fire its missile. We follow its trail as it snakes across the sky into the large Chinook on the other side of the screen. The missile thuds into the fuselage and the explosion bursts the chopper apart like a ripe orange, its fiery contents spilling in slow motion to the ground below.

There are some nice shots of The Losers picking through the charred debris and finding a burnt up bunny rabbit belonging to one of the kids, you know, just to ram home the pathos. Overall, it’s first class helicopter explosion.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, or possibly
Raul Julia

Having sat through countless hours of indigestible boloney – including two more hours here - I have come to the conclusion that the quality of a helicopter explosion is inversely proportional to the quality of the film. The boffins at Exploding Helicopter HQ are crunching the numbers as we speak to establish if there are any cold hard facts to back up my hunch. We will keep you posted on the results.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Nothing much really. Whilst it’s very nicely done, it’s a standard missile vs helicopter face off done with CGI (you will do well to see an old school honest to goodness explosion these days such are the quality of computer effects in modern cinema).

Do passengers survive?

All 25 Bolivian refugee children are blown to pieces in an agonising, fiery death. Still, what a pretty way to go eh?

Positives

Visually the film is very easy on the eye with a strong colour scheme that emphasises its comic book credentials. The action is well staged and the final showdown is ludicrous but attractively presented in all its CGI finery.

Negatives

Much of the dialogue is desperately unfunny and formulaic “paybacks a bitch, we got a situation here” stuff. The actors would have got more laughs had they recited an FSA report on financial mismanagement in the banking sector.

This isn’t helped by Jason Patric as C.I.A kingpin Max who was a badly misjudged piece of casting. Neither quirky, evil or funny enough to be a villain, you feel he took a wrong turn at the set of Nip/Tuck and ended up here by accident.

Idris Elba has made some curious choices since his break out performance in The Wire. His roles have been very hit and miss and proven beyond doubt that the real star of that show was writer/creator David Simon.

Ever the optimists, writers Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt left room left for a sequel.  Fortunately the movie underperformed at the box office and hopefully it will never see the light of day.

Sample quote

Jensen: Legless Pooch and I are on it!
Pooch: Call me 'Legless Pooch' again, and you're gonna be 'Headless Jensen'
Jensen: I think it's a cool name, makes ya sound like a pirate.
Pooch: Ya mama's a pirate.

Interesting fact

Even though various scenes from the film are set in Bolivia, Dubai, Mumbai and L.A. respectively the bulk of the movie was actually shot in Puerto Rico.  The producers managed to save money this way as the country’s variable terrain doubled up nicely for the jungle, desert, beach and city scenes needed.  I was in P.R. in November and can strongly recommend the rum.

Review by: Neon Messiah

Green Zone

Many men have a man crush on Matt Damon. By many men, I of course mean me. Now that I think about it, it’s not so much a man crush on Matt Damon as it is Jason Bourne. A lone wolf assassin possessed with superhuman abilities, fighting his own demons as well as the entire CIA – but underneath it all, a good man, a man of his word and ripped. Who doesn’t have a crush on Bourne?

But sadly this isn’t a review of Jason Bourne (I’m still to find the niche film review site that will let me write lengthy homages to everyone’s favourite blank faced, amnesiac killer) but it’s not far off though.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, who also helmed The Bourne Ultimatum (the third instalment in the series), Green Zone (2010) features Damon playing a character that has more than a trace of Jason Bourne: Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller is a tough, relentless and hard man, in a race against time. Nothing will get in his way, not even jerky, handheld camera work.

The plot is an interesting premise and based on a collection of real life events relating to the US invasion of Iraq and the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Roy Miller heads a team tasked to search WMD sites based on CIA and military intelligence. After turning up potless several times, he begins to dig deeper into the source of the intelligence, an Iraqi insider codenamed Magellan. What he uncovers is a deal brokered with a senior Iraqi general who confirmed the absence of WMD and has kept quiet in return for a place in the ‘new Iraq’ after the invasion. Instead, he ends up becoming a patsy for the conspiracy and on the Army’s deck of playing cards as a key figure for kill or capture.

So begins a race to get to him first. It’s a conspiracy within a conspiracy, if you will. Miller wants to find him and expose the knowingly false reasons for the invasion; meanwhile, Jason Isaacs’ special ops commander Major Briggs – in cahoots with a Pentagon puppeteer played by Greg Kinnear- is out to kill him. There’s a suitably weary and battle hardened look about all of them. Isaacs, in particular, appears to come straight off the set of Black Hawk Down, and grown a Village People themed handlebar moustache on the way.
It’s a well shot movie with an intriguing premise.

It’s also excellently cast – Yigal Naor who plays General Al-Rawi (Magellan), will be familiar to many for his portrayal of Saddam Hussein in the BBC/HBO House of Saddam mini-series. He is to Middle Eastern army generals what Danny Trejo is to South American street villains.

However, there’s a problem at the heart of it all. The film constantly flits between action blockbuster and a thought provoking, fact based, political thriller. Is it Syriana? Or is it an extension of Bourne? It’s confusing. I recall once seeing the Russell Crowe vehicle Master & Commander described as ‘Maximus Gets A Boat’. Green Zone suffers from the same problem. It smacks of ‘Bourne Goes To Iraq’ or ‘Bourne Hunts WMD’.

Still, Greengrass knows how to explode a helicopter. When Miller finally manages to find Al-Rawi in a hostile part of Baghdad, he’s hotly pursued by Briggs and his special ops team, including a unit in an attack helicopter. Al-Rawi flees and Miller pursues through the streets at night, whilst Briggs and his team close in, all the while watched by the helicopter overhead. With Miller getting close to the general, the ‘copter moves to intercept when Iraqi fighters appear on a rooftop with an RPG….

Artistic merit 

It scores pretty highly. The RPG catches the helicopter flush on the mid-tail section, sending it cartwheeling across the night skies above a Baghdad suburb. There’s a terrific looking explosion as it clips two rooftops and then disappears out of sight. This wasn’t done on the cheap.

What happens next?

An angry mob of local fighters armed with automatic rifles, converge on the unseen crash site, while Miller watches them from his hiding place. When one group of rebels screech to a halt in a hatchback and run off towards the downed chopper, Miller immediately makes a dash for the car – and takes the opportunity to steal a Peugeot 205. It’s as if all those years on a Moss Side council estate finally paid off for Major Miller. The chase scene in the car is tasty although patently copied from the Bourne films.

Exploding helicopter innovation

None at all. RPG is probably the weapon of choice for rotor kill. And even the average cinema goer will recall similar scenes of an American military helicopter spinning across a dark foreign city. That’s right – Black Hawk Down was an entire film dedicated to this premise.

Positives 

The sight of Matt Damon, tough marine, pinching a Peugeot 205 and joyriding through Baghdad is really quite entertaining.

Negatives 

A confused mix of genres. It’s clearly a well-researched film based on some incredible real events (see below) but would have benefitted from choosing either more action or more intrigue.

Parting thought 

The background real events that inspired the film are worth reading up on. I haven’t read the book that the film was based on (Imperial Life In The Emerald City), but the Magellan character was based on a real CIA insider in Iraq known as Curveball, realn name Rafid Ahmed Alwan.

As a supposed chemical engineer within the Iraqi nuclear program, he claimed to offer details of mobile WMD labs in return for political asylum – this was a key component of the reasons for invasion. His testimony was soon discredited by German, British and American intelligence agencies, and he was shown to be a wholly unreliable source (his friends described him as a “congenital liar” and it was suspected that he was an alcoholic).

Yet despite these concerns, his claims appeared in over 110 US government reports relating to the Iraq war, including Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. Alwan later admitted that he had lied and the CIA acknowledged that he was in fact a con artist with some engineering knowledge but who actually drove a taxi in Iraq. If it wasn’t true, it would be funny.

Review by: Jindy