Hey folks, Harry here with a review of a movie that sounds really really bad. However, that could be an illusion, by one person that just didn't like the movie... It is always good to give a film the benefit of the doubt... unless Matthew Perry is in it... and Natasha Henstridge... oh and Amanda Peet... BUT - it has Bruce Willis, so I'll give it a shot... I check out all of his movies, never know when they'll be quirkily perfect. HOWEVER, given this movie hits on October 10th... the same day as Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL and the Coen Brothers' INTOLERABLE CRUELTY... what sort of monkey is gonna go see this thing? Not you, not me. And ya know what... I can live with that. BEWARE OF SPOILERS...
Hey Harry,
Every now and then while walking through the local shopping center here in Orange, CA, I get invited to see a test screening of a movie due out in the near future. I saw "Joy Ride" and "Unfaithful", both way before they were released in theaters. Recently, I was fortunate enough to catch a screening of Kevin Costner's "Open Range" which, although flawed, has a lot to admire about it. Tonight, though, I lost two hours of my life to a God awful movie. I am talking about the comedy, and I use that term loosely, The Whole Ten Yards. There is only one word to describe this catastrophe and that word is "Ughhhh". Jesus Christ, this movie is BAD! I have laughed harder at funerals. I am going to be completely honest here when I say that I am not sure if there is very much to salvage from what I saw on screen. Nothing works with this movie! Where was the fucking script! The acting feels like it was all improvised!
OK, I am getting ahead of myself. First, let me start by saying I am not a big fan of the first film. I didn't find it very funny, but at least it was a complete story. It was somewhat entertaining. It didn't end with me thinking comedy is dead. The film was introduced as being the first screening ever and an early rough print. Rough? Watching this movie is like wiping your ass with a pine cone. Some of the scenes in this movie seemed like they should be outtakes on the DVD.
You want the premise? Here it is! ******Spoiler Warning*******
The movie starts out with Matthew Perry and Natasha Henstridge's characters settling down into a nice peaceful life with a kid on the way. Granted, Matthew has invested in a whole lot of fire arms and surveillance, paranoid that one day gangsters will return. Amanda Peet is still trying to become a successful hitman, married to Bruce Willis who has settled into a life as a happy home maker in Mexico. Bruce and Amanda are also trying to have a baby. All seems well until Kevin Pollack (in elderly man makeup) returns as the father of the main gangster Bruce killed in the first movie. The gangsters trace everything back to Oz (Perry) and kidnap his wife in order to get their hands on Jimmy the Tulip (Willis). Out of desperation, Oz travels to Mexico to enlist a very reluctant Jimmy to help him. The gangsters follow Oz down there and mayhem ensues. Not good mayhem...BAD mayhem. Jimmy and Co. travel back to LA, kidnap another of Pollack's sons, and try to bargain for Henstridge. Of course, this plan all goes to shit when the son is accidentally killed by another hitman. All seems lost as Jimmy and Co. begin to take it out on each other. This leads to one of the weirdest scenes in the movie where the audience, along with Oz, questions if he and Jimmy had drunken anal intercourse. You heard me right! This is one helluva movie! We're talking Blockbuster awards all around! The bad thing is the audience is left wondering if they really did. The joke just drops from the face of the earth along with the attention span of everyone in the theater.
Just to sum up, this movie is bad. It's like someone took the first movie, ate it, and shit out a smelly, nutty sequel. I don't know if they will re-tool this movie or not, but it needs drastic re-shoots. Seriously, there are scenes where Peet fucks up. Once, she runs into the wall, hitting it hard in mid-sentence and another where she must have flubbed a line and they still kept it in. Whether they keep this in or not is still not the point. No matter how rough the footage is, this is a bad and uninteresting story. The comedy is all pratfalls that get real old, real fast. It may seem like I'm being overly mean to this film. I'm not. I wanted to like it. I wanted to be entertained. Who knows? Maybe this does have potential to still be an entertaining comedy, but as of right now, it is a complete and total mess!
Call me Stab Master Arson
