The Expendables 2

If The Dirty Dozen and Cocoon had ever had a drunken one-night stand, this is what the baby would have looked like.

The Expendables 2 (2012) is such a bizarre mash-up of styles and demographics – oh-my-aching-sides oldie gags and uber-violence – that it frequently leaves the viewer perplexed: “Aw, look at all the old people, still so sprightly and full of zest. Wait no, what’s he doing? Oh god no, he just shot somebody in the face!”

Following the respectable box office of The Expendables (which proved the adage: it’s never too late to put old dogs through exactly the same tricks), old stroke-features Stallone here rounds up the boys again.

Eschewing a state pension, the 66-year-old has gathered Schwarzeneger (65), Willis (57), Lundgren (55), Van Damme (52) and junior partner the Stath for another medley of tongue-in-cheek heroics and stomach-churning blood spillage.

(To fully appreciate just how downright weird all this is, just consider that cameo assassin Chuck Norris, at a coffin-brushing 72-years-old, is a full 20 years older than Cocoon actor Wilford Brimley was when he starred as a pensioner in that film.)

The ‘plot’, in which the team rescues some plutonium, blasts the baddies and saves the obligatory village, is so by-the-numbers we need not go into detail here. What really impresses is the gusto with which the screenplay (co-written by Sly) embraces every possible action movie cliché.

What, the team has to do an impossible mission or GO TO JAIL? You mean, the young buck who’s doing ‘one last job’ to raise enough money to marry his sweetheart ACTUALLY DIES? You’re kidding me: the glamorous female who’s foisted on the reluctant team turns out to be so kick ass and gutsy she eventually WINS THEIR RESPECT?

It sounds awful, but it actually works. The whole movie is essentially one gigantic wink to the audience, a cinematic karaoke of old action movie favourites. This can become wearing when the action pensioners repeatedly blurt out self-reverential soundbites (‘I’m back’, ‘Yippee-ki-yay’ etc) but it’s mostly cartoonish good fun.

In fact, the film only really falters when it tries to up the drama and get serious. Chief villain Jean Claude Van Damme’s opening soliloquy – a rambling, four-minute homily to ‘respect’ – is literally incomprehensible, and there’s a palpable sense of relief when he finally shuts up and kung-fu kicks a dagger into someone’s chest. (Yes, he really does.)

Despite all the guns, bombs and crashing planes, the most fascinating view on display – especially on the big screen – is the cast themselves. Stallone, arrested several years ago for smuggling his personal supply of human growth hormone into Australia, scarcely even looks human anymore.

He alternately wears a thick, black woollen beret and his own hair, but you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. The bulging veins on his forearms are just terrifying, and those HGH injections haven’t quite reached down to his legs, which are now comically old man skinny. It’s like there’s two different bodies waddling across the screen – Tom Hardy on top and Steptoe at the bottom.

Arnie, meanwhile, looks like a semi-melted waxwork of his younger self, his face tight and surgical-shiny in places, but hanging off his jowls at the sides. Van Damme wears sunglasses for 95 per cent of the time – even while underground – presumably because there are bags under his eyes you could carry your shopping in.

Of the others, Bruce Willis merely looks even more like a smug testicle, while septuagenarian Chuck Norris – with his magnificently white teeth and lustrous brown beard/hairdo combo looks like a human beaver. It’s like he’s accidentally strayed into the action from an Island of Dr Moreau set next door.

At a sprightly 45-years-old, it’s left exclusively to the Stath to provide all the actual action in this action movie. Director Simon West shows a good sense of the ridiculous for the most part with this movie (he made Con Air, after all), but his choreography of the fight scenes is lamentable. The clunky edits make abundantly clear that the baddies are obediently queuing to get biffed one at a time; I’ve seen queues in Lidl’s with more sense of danger.

Still, that’s a minor gripe about a largely entertaining yarn which, in its eagerness to please, throws us an exploding helicopter in the very first scene. Our crew, armed with all kinds of armoured vehicles, bust into a walled compound to rescue Arnie.

Before you can say human growth hormone injections, Sly’s somehow on a low rooftop with his tanky vehicle, which has a motorbike strapped to the back. A chopper swings low, ready to fire, so Sly revs up the bike and sends it blasting into the helicopter cockpit, causing an inevitable crash and, yes, explosion.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The driving-a-moving-automobile-into-a-chopper gambit has been used before (Willis in Die Hard 4 provides a worthy demonstration of the form) but the good thing about this example is that it doesn’t make a meal out of things. There’s no Michael Bay multiple-cut, slo-mo, shite CGI business going on: it just happens. One minute Sly’s shooting someone repeatedly in the chest, then he throws a motorbike at a helicopter, then he punches someone else to death. Simple.

Positives

I love how, with each movie, less and less of what Sly says is comprehensible, especially when he’s angry. There’s a whole scene where he castigates Bruce Willis down a walkie talkie that I didn’t catch a word of.

You can picture the director asking him to go through it seven times before just throwing his hands into the air. In the latest Batman film, Tom Hardy often can’t be understood because he’s wearing a big mask: Sly now achieves much the same effect with just the burden of his own slopey mouth.

Negatives

The gutsy woman character is – probably deliberately – neither that young nor that glamorous, presumably to avoid providing too sharp a contrast with her doddering co-stars. However, she is one cack actress. When you’re in a scene with Sly where he’s stutteringly growling out some half-baked ‘backstory’ and YOU’RE the one whose acting is noticeably bad, it’s time to start worrying.

Favourite quote

Van Damme’s colossally nonsensical: “Without respect, we are just people.” What?

Interesting fact

The collective age of the main cast a very high figure indeed that would have impressed you if I could have been bothered to work it out.

Review by: Chopper

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12 Rounds

12 Rounds (2009) could have been a contender. After all, it’s a high concept thriller with relentless action sequences that are kinetically propelled along. With a top heavyweight in the cast, we could have maybe had a contender for minor classic status. Unfortunately, with bantam weight John Cena in the leading role, this remains a strictly amateur affair.

Cena plays Danny Fisher, a New Orleans cop whose life is turned upside down when a ghost from his past returns. Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen), a dangerous terrorist Cena once arrested, busts out of prison intent on exacting an elaborate revenge.

So it’s gloves off, and Gillen kidnaps our hero’s girlfriend (Ashley Scott) before un-sportingly setting him 12 death-defying tasks (or ‘rounds’, geddit?) to complete if he wants to save her life. So much for Queensbury rules.

If the plot rings a distant bell in the punch-drunk recesses of your mind, it’s probably because it’s largely a reprise of Die Hard With A Vengeance. This comparison comes into even sharper focus when 12 Rounds inevitably delivers the same it’s-all-a-big-diversion-for-a-bank-heist plot ‘twist’ in the final round.

Now, it’s below the belt to criticise a film just for being unoriginal – I love too many formulaic films to even dream of doing that. But if you aren’t going to deliver a knockout blow with your plot, then the acting ring-craft on display needs to be first rate.

Unfortunately, 12 Rounds stars wrestler-turned-actor John Cena, a charisma-free presence whose performance makes you ache for a someone with real acting chops, such as The Rock. He utterly fails to sell the jeopardy or urgency of the film’s premise to the viewer. Other significant roles are equally ill-cast, with acting lightweights struggling to punch above their weight.

Aidan Gillen, left as the only decent actor in the ring, swings at his role in a half-hearted manner, seemingly unable to remember whether he’s meant to be attempting an Irish or American accent. ‘Hey, yoose guys, so it is, begorrah…’ etc. He also literally phones in his performance, since his role maroons him on the end of a mobile phone dishing out the instructions for each task. 12 Rounds, two accents.

In fairness, none of the actors are helped by a horrendous script which, when it isn’t jabbing you with cliché, pins you against the ropes and pummels you with ‘hurt bombs’ of exposition until you‘re almost begging to throw in the towel.

In one clunking early scene, we’re introduced to Gillen’s character as he’s being covertly tracked by the FBI. Despite being mid-operation, the FBI commander suddenly decides to explain to everyone, for no earthly reason, exactly who Gillen is. Presumably no-one involved in this massive, sophisticated surveillance operation quite knew who they were following until this point. D’oh.

That said, 12 Rounds does earn some points on this judge’s scorecard. Director Renny Harlin – a favourite bête noire of this blog – comes out swinging and doesn’t let the pace drop throughout. This is crucial, since in terms of logic the entire movie has a glass jaw.

Commendably, the film also doesn’t pull any punches with its stunt work. Genuinely exciting, its thrills, spills, crashes and smashes seem to have been shot for real, without the use of CGI.

All told, though, 12 Rounds ultimately blows its shot at the title. It’s a shame since, if they’d given the script more of a work-out and put a better class of fighter in the cinematic ring, we might have had a worthy (albeit unoriginal) champion.

Still, that’s enough blethering on about the under-card – let’s have a blow-by-blow account of the main bout: the helicopter explosion.

Still holding Scott hostage, Gillen attempts to make his getaway in a helicopter. Earlier in the film, it was revealed Scott earns her living as an air ambulance pilot. Hands up if you didn’t think that was going to turn out to be significant later on?

Having made it to the hospital’s roof where the helicopter is parked, Gillen and Scott are about to take off. Cena, in hot pursuit, only manages to board the chopper by making a daring leap onto one of its skid rails. I say daring, but given how frequently people in films successfully make this jump, it may actually be quite easy to pull off.

A struggle for control of the helicopter follows, during which a gun is fired several times into the chopper’s engine, causing Scott to lose control as Cena finally prevails in his brawl with Gillen.

Slumped at the back of the chopper seemingly down for the count, Gillen activates the timer on a bomb he‘s hidden away. With only a few seconds left before it explodes, and no hope of landing the chopper in time, our heroes appear doomed.

Until, that is, Cena spots a roof-top swimming pool. With only moments to spare, the pair jump to safety, landing with the dead-eyed accuracy of an Olympic high-diver in the centre of the swimming pool.
Meanwhile, Gillen the villain has a brief moment to wonder why he didn’t come up with an altogether simpler plan – or pick a film with a better script and co-stars –before the helicopter explodes.

Artistic merit

What’s not to love about a film that builds its entire climax around an extended helicopter sequence?

Having commended the film for it’s commitment to CGI-free stunts, one must concede computer chicanery is used to render the helicopter explosion. It’s not a particularly fine example of the art, as the chopper unconvincing splits in half.

Exploding helicopter innovation

No great innovation in the detonation but, ludicrous as it was, I enjoyed the aquatic escape from the helicopter. I’ve not seen that done before – though surely, someone, somewhere, has.

Do passengers survive?

Yes, the bland John Cena and anonymous auto-moppet Ashley Scott both survive – though the viewer is half hoping they’ll miss the pool and smack into hard, unforgiving, concrete.

Positives

During 12 Rounds denouement, there’s one superb moment of unintended hilarity.

At the start of the film, the scriptwriters establish that Cena and Scott’s relationship isn’t one of happy domestic bliss. “I’ve got to know I can trust you!” demands Scott, in what would’ve been a moment of high drama had she been talking about anything other than the fact Cena has forgotten to phone the plumber.

Having set-up this ‘trust issues’ story arc, we duly get the pay-off in the final reel. With Scott reluctant to jump from the helicopter, Cena barks: “Do you trust me?” We can only guess at the thoughts rushing through Scott’s mind at this moment: “Well, he did remember to pick up some milk last night, but then he did forget to pay the gas bill. Oh, and there was that time he left his wallet in the car.”

Fortunately, Scott decides that her certain and imminent death in a helicopter explosion trump any residual doubts she has about whether Cena is the kind of guy who always remembers to switch the iron off at the plug. She jumps.

Negatives

Just in case Harlin was in danger of giving his film a puncher’s chance, he shoots the film in that jerky, hand-held, camera style so beloved of directors who want to add an edgy, pseudo-documentary style.

This is fine during the action sequences – it adds to the sense of fast-moving chaos. But when, for instance, you’re simply watching two people talking it just starts to feel like the cameraman must have Parkinson’s.

The whole effect is intrusive and leaves the viewer feeling nauseous, almost like they’ve taken a couple of haymakers to the chin.

Favourite quote

The ball-achingly obvious: “Knockout, Danny! This time you’re not going to be saved by the bell.” I know, that really was the best they could come up with.

Review by: Jafo

Mission Impossible

Given that the Cruiser, now half a century old, recently creaked his weary bones back into gear one last time for MI4: Ghost Protocol, now seems an apt time to look at the movie that started the whole wire-dangling, face-swapping franchise.

This original revamp of the Sixties telly series sees Tiny Tom playing Ethan Hunt, agent of the top secret Impossible Missions Force. Just how impossible these missions can be is amply demonstrated in the first ten minutes, when the team’s opening jaunt in Prague goes absolutely tits up.

Plainly, it’s not a good day at the office.

Almost everyone gets killed, a secret list naming covert agents is nicked and Tom gets blamed for everything. Going underground, he recruits two blacklisted, ‘disavowed’ agents (Ving Rhames and Jean Reno) to help discover the truth.

Surrounded by a parade of esoteric characters – grumpy Ving, creepy Jon Voight, pouty Emanuelle Beart, the inexcusably French Reno – Tom as ever plays the straight man. (Hey, no laughing at the back there).

Stern-jawed and po-faced, he bounces through the movie like a superhuman over-achiever. Multi-lingual, computer expert, impossibly tough and endlessly resourceful, it often seems there’s nothing he can’t do. Except act, obviously.

Tom Cruise: There's nothing he can't do. Except act.

Still, it’s an entertaining rollercoaster of a movie. The justly-famous scene where Tom dangles horizontally on wires inches above an alarmed floor is wonderfully executed. In the space of ten minutes, it steadily builds tension and throws everything into the mix: scary rats, slipped wires, dripping sweat on touch-sensitive floors and even dropped knives. So expertly does it cause one’s buttocks to be clenched, they could market it as a sit-down aerobics exercise.

Shockingly, it turns out that Tom’s boss, the-slippery-lizard-made-man Jon Voight, is in fact a double dealing traitor. I know, who would have thunk? Finally revealed as an utter git while on a speeding train, Voight shoots his own girlfriend (for kicks, apparently) then – following the Golden Hollywood Rulebook of Questionable Baddie Behaviour – doesn’t just shoot the defenceless Tom square in the forehead.

Jean Reno: traitor, coward and French, naturally.

No, instead he escapes to the train’s roof, where Tom’s supposed colleague Jean Reno is waiting for him in a hovering helicopter, snickering away like a garlic-scented Mutley. (Note: I did not pass out with shock at this point. As a French person in an American movie made in the Nineties, the odds that Jean was going to end up being a back-stabbing, nasty, cheese-eating surrender monkey were always fairly high. And so it turned out.)

What happens next is sublime. Ethan follows Voight and uses a dangling winch-line to tether the chopper to the train as it speeds into the Channel Tunnel. Somehow, both the chopper and Reno’s massive conk squeeze into the tunnel as Ethan – after two hours of almost superhuman prowess – suddenly struggles to land a punch on an overweight sexagenarian. The climactic ‘fight’ is on.

It all comes thick and fast. Voight untethers the chopper and jumps onto one of its landing skids: Ethan jumps onto the other one then sticks explosive gum to the windshield. Bam! Inevitably, the blast kills the baddies but just propels Ethan onto the slanted back of the slowing train. The blazing chopper crashes on behind him and its sharp rotor blades stop just short of his neck. Phew.

Exploding helicopter innovation

This is pretty much top drawer stuff: innovative, original and well executed. Over and above the special effects, the whole scenario is simply a very good idea.

Positives

This is stomping good fun, with some classic set-pieces and more twists than Beyonce’s weave. For some reason, exploding helicopters often seem to reside in the lower quality, straight to DVD end of the market (I’m looking at you, Steven Seagal) so it’s good to see a chopper fireball in such good company.

Negatives

Clearly, there’s no arguing with his 30-year stellar status, but I’ve always found Tom a very limited actor capable of only two expressions: ‘shit-eating grin’ and ‘worried’. Obviously, the grin is regularly wheeled out (you don’t spend so much on a new set of gnashers without wanting to flash them on occasion) but the Cruise ‘worried’ look has become his hallmark, seemingly applicable to any situation.

Jon Voight: slippery lizard-made-man

Confronted by deadly aliens? Sacked from dream job? Faced with estranged paedophile dad? Whatever the scenario, Tom will – without exception – furrow his brow, tighten his mouth and dart his eyes about in a confused manner. There really is something of the Zoolander about him.

More worryingly, I saw the Cruiser being interviewed by Wossy a couple of years back and realised he can’t even really act being himself. The meaningful pauses, the cloying sincerity, the sudden, barking laughs: it all spoke of someone playing a role. Badly.

Favourite quote

“This message will self-destruct…”

Interesting fact

Jean Reno has the most schizophrenic CV in Hollywood. For every Big Blue, there’s a Godzilla. For every Leon, there’s a stomach-churning Pink Panther re-make. Ye gods, he even went back for Pink Panther 2.

Review by: Chopper

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Spy Hard

Spy Hard (1996) marks the moment where the joke wore thin, very thin, with Leslie Nielsen’s comedy career.

Formerly a stolid, patrician screen presence, Nielsen’s reinvention as dead-pan comic genius kicked off in 1980 with a film-stealing cameo in Airplane. It then followed a rather circuitous route – via the short-lived Police Squad TV series (now hailed as a classic) – to the box office bonanza of The Naked Gun trilogy.

Bizarrely, Nielsen found his greatest success by making a virtue of his inherent woodenness as an actor. With fame bestowed on him seemingly by accident, Nielsen understandably didn’t want to rock the money boat, and thus gamely churned out increasingly middling genre-spoofs for the next 20 years.

Of course, the trouble with any joke is that there’s only so many times you can hear the punchline before it stops being funny. Unfortunately, that’s precisely the point we reach with this lamentable secret agent parody.

An early indicator of the risible comedy level comes when we’re introduced to Nielsen’s character. He plays a former secret agent named Dick Steele - gedditt? - codenamed WD40. Oh, my aching sides.

The notional plot sees Nielsen recalled to service when his old foe General Rancor (ho, ho) threatens to destroy the world unless he gets one of those new-fangled, all-powerful computer chips that villainous megalomaniacs always seem to covet. Naturally, it’s a wee gizmo that – by some never-explained mechanism – will allow the owner to control the world. Or something.

Anyway, with the world facing destruction or enslavement, Nielsen’s job is to stop the crazed General’s wicked scheme.

None of it makes much sense. The ‘plot’ – such as it is – is merely a vehicle for a conveyer belt of sight gags, dumb puns and slapstick. And if some of the jokes leave you with a sense of déjà vu, it’s probably because they’re thinly rewritten variants on ones you’d previously enjoyed in the Airplane or Naked Gun films.

Curiously, given the title, the film scarcely even attempts to parody the spy genre. Apart from lamely mimicking True Lies and the 007 films, the film relies on haphazardly spoofing contemporaneous films of whatever ilk. This results in a series of feeble skits based on scenes in Speed, Pulp Fiction, Home Alone, Sister Act, In The Line Of Fire and that well known spy classic Jurassic Park.

Quite why the scriptwriters adopted this scattergun approach is bemusing. As Mike Myers’ Austin Powers movie hilariously demonstrated, just a year after Spy Hard, there’s plenty of laughs to be had sending up the spy genre.

Hardly sophisticated fare, Austin Powers comes across as a comedy Citizen Kane, a work of rare comedic subtlety, in comparison with Spy Hard. The way in which it repeatedly and brutally clubs the viewer with a succession of crass and arse-clenchingly dreary gags quickly becomes unbearable.

This is never more true than in the film’s only stand-out sequence – one which is memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Nielsen has a hand-to-hand combat showdown with double agent Desiree More, played by former Bond girl Talisa Soto. In a woefully misconceived martial arts parody, Nielsen slits his eyes and repeatedly cries “Aiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee”, demonstrating the sort of toe-curling racial stereotyping you thought had disappeared with Seventies sitcoms and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

It’s a jaw-dropping comic misjudgement: one that makes the very marrow of your bones turn cold, leaving you with the kind of deadpan expression Nielsen wears throughout the film.

Anyway, let us turn away from such uncomfortable moments to the good, clean, uncontroversial fun of a helicopter explosion.

In flashback, we see when Nielsen and General Rancor first locked horns. Rancor tries to make a getaway from his hideout in a helicopter, but Nielsen secretly plants an explosive on its side, before detonating it with a remote control device.

When he spots Neilsen waving benignly at him from the ground, Rancor realises – in one of those karmic moments cinema so often treats us to – what’s about to happen. Boom! It’s a chopper villain fireball.

Artistic merit

Much like the rest of the film, it’s a middling spectacle. Very brief, and the explosion looks like it was done with model work rather than CGI.

Number of exploding helicopters

One. Or maybe two. Yes, in keeping with the half-arsed nature of this film, there may in fact be a second chopper fireball but we’re not sure. An explanation is needed, methinks.

At the very start of the film, we see Nielsen being flown in a helicopter by Mr T, where he receives a Mission Impossible-style briefing via an explosive tape recorded message.

Having accepted the mission, Nielsen skydives out the helicopter. Unfortunately for Mr T, Nielsen leaves behind the tape recording, which in the time-honoured fashion self destructs. We see a close-up of Mr T yelling, but we never find out if the explosion was enough to destroy the helicopter. Budgetry constraints, presumably.

Exploding helicopter innovation

None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Negative. Nope.

Do passengers survive?

Yes. General Rancor miraculously survives, albeit minus both his arms.

Positives

Spy Hard actually opens quite promisingly with a funny pastiche of a Bond film title sequence.
Sung by Weird Al Yankovic, and with a classic brassy orchestra-score, the visuals send-up the expensively produced sequences which are a hallmark of the 007 franchise.

It’s never a good sign when the best joke occurs before the film has even actually begun.
Negatives

During a lame parody of In The Line Of Fire, we witness Nielsen running down a road in slow motion. While watching the sequence you can’t but help but notice the unsightly flapping of Nielsen’s unusually large ear lobes.

They bounce around much like I’d imagine a startled elephant’s. It’s quite one of the most extraordinary sequences ever committed to celluloid.

Favourite quote

“General Rancor wants the world, but he wants to kill you first. That may give us valuable time.”

Review by: Jafo

Avatar

James Cameron is a man who doesn't like to do things by halves. His recent penchant for leviathan movies makes early output such as The Terminator look like twee Arts Council small fry by comparison. Not content with breaking box office records with Titanic, Cameron embarked on Avatar his most ambitious project to date. A concept he'd had to keep on ice since 1994 until the technology caught up with his expansive vision.

It might be the most expensive movie ever made, clocking in at a wallet busting $280 million, but wrapped up in all that beautiful CGI lies the heart of a bog standard outsider redemption story. A very, very expensive Dances With Wolves starring lanky blue alien hippies if you will.

In the future, mankind is running out of natural resources so nasty corporations have begun mining valuable minerals from the distant planet of Pandora - a lush jungle covered planet that has a very rare and valuable material called Unobtainium (Jesus, really!?).

In order to persuade the native Na'vi that raping their planet is in their best interests, scientists try to ingratiate themselves with the locals by creating Na'vi-human hybrids called Avatars. This allows them to blend in with the population and show them that we're not really greedy bastards, whose only interest is taking advantage of their planet for financial gain.

When the locals sensibly refuse to be bullied or bribed the troops are sent in to change their minds with some good old fashioned "shock and awe". Seriously, as an allegory for the Iraq war Avatar is about a subtle as a stiletto through the ball bag.

So when the brown stuff eventually hits the fan, Cameron goes absolutely bananas on the exploding helicopter front. I'm talking record territory here. As befits the most expensive movie ever made it contains no fewer than six chopper fireballs, of all of which are obliterated in the space of five hectic minutes.

I can see why over at EHHQ there who was much discussion as to who was man enough to review this behemoth. Lucky for you dear readers, I have big enough brass cojones to deliver on a payload of this magnitude.

Towards the end of the film the massed ranks of the Marines launch an all-out assault on the Tree of Souls, the spiritual home of the Na'vi. In their way is Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine, who has gone rogue and thrown his lot in with the tree huggers.

He and his new buddies face a squadron of heavily armoured attack helicopters on nothing more than a bunch of emaciated pterodactyls armed only with bows and arrows. Despite these unfavourable odds they manage to achieve one of the greatest ever feats of helicopter destruction committed to film. Who needs Stinger missiles eh?

The first, sees Sully flying a huge dragon called Toruk (the Bentley of dragons) into the melee of choppers and space ships that have arrived to dispatch a six pack of whoop-ass on the natives. He grabs hold of the chopper in the dragon's talons and swings it around like a hammer thrower, launching it into a floating island where it goes up in delicious ball of flame.

The second flicks across the screen so fast you almost miss it, but gets similar rock/flame treatment at the hands of another, smaller, Ikran.

The third and fourth are destroyed by what when they are flung into each other by an Ikran. Using a similar technique, one of the Ikrans grabs another chopper and flings it into the path of the other, making it split apart and fall to the ground in a plume of flame.

Lastly Hispanic-hardass turned deserter Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez from Lost) plays cat and mouse with Colonel Quartich's (Stephen Lang) spaceship behind a huge floating island. She manages to dodge and weave wave after wave of missiles and gunfire before inevitable succumbing to the colonel's fury. The stricken chopper is finished off with a missile that sends the machine to chopper-heaven in a rich tangerine burst of flame.

Artistic merit

I remember watching this at the cinema in 3D and, for the first time in a long time (and maybe not since Cameron's other groundbreaker Terminator 2), felt truly blown away by a film's special effects.

Part way through this film, I distinctly remember realising that my mouth had been open for the last 45 minutes. That is how immersive it felt at the cinema. Yes, much of the plot is hackneyed feel-good fluff with a lot of clunky dialogue thrown in for good measure, but boy is it presented with panache.

3D movies are almost always gimmicky cash-ins designed to squeeze another £3 out of the punter whilst forcing them to do their best Buddy Holly impersonation but this one really is worth the money. The CGI blends seamlessly with the live action and you have to look very, very carefully to spot any glitches.

All the helicopter explosions are richly textured and authentically realised even though they all started life on a computer. The nine Oscars it won in 2011 including awards for Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects and Best Art Direction show a lot of care, skill an attention was taken to realising this alternate universe

Number of helicopter explosions

Six, putting it level with Charlie Wilson's War as the film with the most helicopter explosions ever.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Take your pick. Most helicopters destroyed in a film, helicopter killed by a dragon and two helicopters destroyed simultaneously by each other.

Do passengers survive?

Even the good guys die here. Chacon is sacrificed in the name of pathos and the rest of the anonymous pilots will surely not have survived the flames and impact of falling thousands of feet into the jungle canopy. This isn't Air America.

Positives

The two performances that really caught my eye were amongst the supporting roles. Giovanni Ribisi's hilarious performance as Parker Selfridge has echoes of Paul Reiser's corporate scumbag Carter Burke in Aliens.

As is the norm with amoral corporate money men he really is only interested in the company's bottom line, no matter how many lives he has to ruin. His comic interludes inject some much needed humour in a script that does stray into cliché territory from time to time.

Sample line: "You throw a stick in the air and its gonna land on some sacred fern"

The other is Stephen Lang as Colonel Quartich a caricatured d*ck-swinging bullet-headed Marine who must be a distant cousin to Robert Duvall is Apocalypse Now such is his passion for "The Core" and his desire to blow stuff up. He is an irredeemably nasty piece of work with a nice line in military hard-arsery.

"You let me down son! So, you find yourself some local tail, and you just completely forget what team you're playin' for?"

Negatives

Whilst the movie ticks most blockbuster boxes it is overlong and there is a enough New age eco-bullshit to have even the staunchest of environmentalists regurgitating their mung beans

Favourite quote

Col. Quaritch: This low gravity'll make you soft. When you get soft Pandora'll sh*t you out dead with zero warning.

Interesting fact

On average each CGI frame of the movie, equivalent to1/24 of a second, took 47 hours to render. With a running time of 178 minutes and with 60% of the film shot using CGI you start to see why the film had such a high price tag.

Review by: Neon Messiah

Invasion USA

The Cold War. A chilling, decades-long period of history when the world lived under the twin shadows of nuclear destruction and Chuck Norris’ implausibly huge Hollywood stardom. Looking back, it’s hard to know which of these two factors marked a more terrifying sign that we were facing the end of the world.

So, in a Cold War-era action movie, what could be better than a scenario where the Soviets are hell-bent on the imminent destruction of America and the only person who can prevent Armageddon is – Chuck Norris! Writes itself, really.

Our Chuck plays Matt Hunter, a retired CIA agent who’s traded ‘wet work’, ‘dead drops’ and covert surveillance to become an alligator farmer. Apparently, the skills are very transferable.

Seemingly content with his business supplying gator skin to the handbag industry, Chuck’s tempted back into the CIA fold when he learns that his nemesis – a Soviet agent named Rostov (Richard Lynch) – is plotting to destroy America.

Rostov’s dastardly plan involves tricking the USA into destroying itself. Flooding the country with hundreds of saboteurs, Rostov organises a co-ordinated wave of seemingly motiveless terrorist acts. With the authorities unable to stop the carnage, the country begins to disintegrate as the good citizens of ‘Uncle Sam’ turn against each other.

With chaos on the streets, it’s up to Norris to stop Rostov before America collapses altogether under the weight of its own rotten, decadent, bourgeois, capitalism.

Quite why the CIA believe Norris is the only man who can protect western civilisation is never made clear. They're convinced he's the only one who can find Rostov. But given that Chuck's search mostly involves going into bars and asking, "Where's Rostov?" it's hard to fathom why no-one else could manage the job.

Still, it does allow us to spend plenty of time in the company of Chuck. He’s in fine form here, resplendent in full beard and rocking a bold ‘double denim’ outfit. Tricky to pull off at the best of times, here it makes the Chuck-ster look like a kung-fu Shakin’ Stevens.

It’s also a joy simply to look at Norris, quite the oddest looking man in Hollywood. He looks like what might have happened if a lion forcibly had sex with a squat female bodybuilder. It’s a crying shame he was never cast in the film he was made for: The Island of Dr Moreau. They’d have saved a fortune on make-up.

Never the most naturalistic actor, Chuck compensates by giving a pared down performance, much like Charles Bronson in his better work. As a result, he’s surprisingly effective – although there are some clunky moments where his utter lack of empathy with his dialogue jars the ears. (The average Spanish tourist, enquiring about the nearest facilities with the aid of a phrase book, would possibly convey more emotion than the monosyllabic Norris.)

However, given that Chuck does indeed single-handedly stop a Soviet invasion of the USA, surely this film cannot fail to be anything other than a slam dunk classic? How can a film where Chuck Norris spectacularly shoots up a shopping mall and dramatically saves a school bus of kids be bad? Especially when the climax involves Norris and Rostov going head-to-head armed with only a couple of rocket launchers.

Unfortunately, in the cold, dead hands of director Joseph Zito, badness is entirely possible.

Each breathless action set-piece is punctuated by long, arse-numbing, brain-melting periods of complete tedium where nothing, absolutely nothing, happens. It’s the sort of film Samuel Beckett would have walked out of on the grounds it ‘was dragging on a bit.’

The opening to the film is particularly execrable. Zito spends an ungodly 40 minutes setting up the plot, when it could easily have been done in ten. Enraged by the slack editing, I started to fantasise about doing my own cut of the film, then slamming it down in front of the man and declaring, “This is how you direct a Chuck Norris film!... Oh, and by the way, I‘ve taken most of the bits with Chuck Norris out.”

Having failed to stake out his directing credentials, I had grave concerns about how Zito would handle the film’s key scene – the helicopter explosion. Surprisingly, he makes a decent fist of it.

Towards the climax of the film, Norris comes across the villain’s getaway chopper parked on the roof of a building. On spotting Norris, the pilot desperately flips switches on the dashboard to start up the rotors. Unfortunately for the doomed pilot, the only thing slower than the opening to a Joseph Zito film, is starting up the engine to a helicopter.

Chuckie therefore has ample to time to put the rocket launcher he’s been handily lugging around with him to good use. Hoisting it to his shoulder, he aims and fires, blowing the helicopter to pieces.

Artistic merit 

Screen-filling fireball, good, flaming post-explosion wreckage: Zito ticks a lot of boxes, but the whole thing is lacking in inspiration. Still, while it’s hard to get excited about a scene where Norris destroys an unarmed, stationary, helicopter from point blank range, I must confess, I did enjoy the cold-blooded overkill with which Norris despatches the chopper.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

Rocket launcher chopper fireball – we’ve seen it before. However, it does remind us of the limitations of helicopters as escape vehicles. Pilots really should take a tip from getaway drivers, and always leave the engine running.

Positives 

You really couldn’t wish for a better villain that Richard Lynch, who plays evil Commie mastermind Rostov. Lynch has a wonderful line in cold, dead-eyed stares which he puts to good use when he‘s about to kill someone. He can also turn up the wattage for stares of unblinking, diamond hard, psychotic malevolence, which he saves in Invasion USA for talking about his hatred of Chuck Norris.

In a juicy sub-plot, Rostov is obsessed by Chuck Norris and tries to kill our bearded friend to settle an old score. Even though he’s planning the downfall of America, he just can‘t bear the thought that Chuck Norris is out there somewhere still alive. I kind of know how he feels.

Negatives 

While the final, rocket-launchers-at-40-paces showdown between Norris and Richard Lynch is undeniably a great moment of over-the-top action cinema, the choice of location leaves a lot to be desired. The climatic shoot-out takes place in a sterile, neon lit office block, and the aforementioned rocket launcher battle is staged in a bland, grey, anonymous corridor.

I guess it was a way of reminding us of the freedoms and liberties that Chuck was fighting for – the inalienable, God given right of every US citizen to do a boring, socially meaningless job for low pay. You almost start wishing the Russkies had won.

Favourite quote

Chuck intones the immortal: “I’m going to hit you with so many rights you’ll be begging for a left.”

Interesting fact 

Sadly, we were denied one of the most bizarre screen pairings of all time in this film. Apparently, Chuck Norris wanted Whoopi Goldberg to play the main female lead. However, the director had other ideas and cast Melissa Prophet instead.

Norris and Goldberg, though. In the same film. The mind boggles.

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast show on Invasion USA. Listen to the show on iTunes, YourListen or Podomatic. 

T-Force

Roger Corman has just three rules for agreeing to produce a film.

One: deny any request for more money. Two: deny any request to make the film longer. And three: there must be a strip club scene or an exploding helicopter.

So, had T-Force (1994) been pitched to the legendary filmmaker, I’ve no doubt the king of schlock would have whipped out his cheque book immediately – and might even have been momentarily tempted to break his golden rules. For not only does T-Force have the necessary strip club scene, it’s also got an exploding helicopter.

Yes, it’s fair to say T-Force doesn’t really try to rewrite the rules of exploitation cinema. In fact, it scarcely even makes an effort to rewrite the films it’s so obviously, ahem, inspired by.

In the near future, the police have a special unit of kick-ass killer robots called the Terminal Force – or T-Force – who are used to deal with the most dangerous situations.

Sent in to a skyscraper to end a hostage situation (think Die Hard), the robots (think Terminator) end up killing some innocent civilians. With a public relations disaster on her hands, the Mayor (Erin Gray) orders the T-Force programme to be shut down. Unfortunately, the robots find out they’re about to have their batteries yanked, and through some crazy circuit board logic decide that the Mayor must die (think Blade Runner).

The only man standing in the way of all this cybernetic silliness is Jack Scalia, an old-school, robot-loathing cop (think I, Robot). He’s joined by ‘Adam’, the only tinny member of the T-Force who rejected the Mayor-murdering plan, thinking it clashed a bit with his programme to ‘protect and serve’ (think I, Robot. Again).

In the finest tradition of mis-matched buddy cop movies, Scalia and Adam team up and stop the rogue T-Force members before they whack the Mayor. That’s assuming, of course, they can stop irritating and arguing with each other for three consecutive minutes.

In typical PM Entertainment fashion, what follows is a riotously explosive 90 minutes of near non-stop action. Scalia is great as the grouchy, hard boiled, ‘shoot-first ask questions later’ cop, aghast at a future where the fun bits of his job – essentially, beating up punks and shooting people – are now done by robots.

Unlike Scalia though, we at EH headquarters aren’t fussed whether the real fun bits of films – exploding helicopters – are brought about by humans or cyborgs. Which is fortunate, as this is definitely what experts would term a robot-initiated chopper fireball.

And we don’t have to wait long for some ‘copter mayhem either, as the movie obligingly serves it up in the opening minutes. When the T-Force go in to deal with that initial, hostage-bothering skyscraper situation, the terrorists attempt to escape by fleeing to the roof where a helicopter is waiting to whisk them away.

They make it onboard, but the T-Force – having arrived on the job with enough weapons for a small war – fire a bazooka at the disappearing chopper. “Mission accomplished,” quips their leader as he surveys the whirlybird explosion.

Artistic merit

Unexceptional. The helicopter explodes, completely and thoroughly. No wreckage falls dramatically from the sky. Rotor blades don’t shear off and spectacularly spin away. There’s just a big, screen-filling explosion, and it’s gone.

Exploding helicopter innovation

None. The method of destruction certainly isn’t new, and we’ve seen robots destroy helicopters in Terminator 2.

Positives

The great Vernon Wells has a juicy little cameo as the terrorist who seizes control of the skyscraper at the beginning of the film.

A hulking, imposing figure, Wells has a nice line in flamboyant villainy, with memorable turns as a mohawked, S&M biker punk in Mad Max 2, and as the chain-mail vest wearing Bennett in Commando.

Here, somehow squeezed into a grey double-breasted suit, Big Vern looks rather ill at ease while trying to impersonate a suave criminal mastermind. Still, he retains the inimitable mad glint in his eye that’s the hallmark of his best work.

Negatives

Director Richard Pepin falls into the all too common trap of having the robots act like emotionless automatons. One of the reasons Blade Runner remains so eminently watchable is that Rutger Hauer and his cohorts get to act like real people, rather than flatly intoning their dialogue while maintaining a blank expression. If I wanted that from a movie, I’d just watch Keanu Reeves in The Matrix series over and over again.

Unfortunately, actors portraying the T-Force are required to give stilted performances, like lurching Frankenstein’s. Watching them act is almost as painful as having the old monster’s bolt shoved though your neck.

Favourite quote

“Get me six hostages into the chopper and then blow the rest to hell.”

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then check out a reviews by our buddies over at Comeuppance Reviews and DTV Connoisseur or have a listen to our podcast episode on the film. Listen via iTunes, Acast, Stitcher, Spotify or right here.