Reviews

Where to start? I'll just spill it out by the numbers.

1. A tiny child amazon girl competes against adult amazons and basically wins. Something must be wrong with such ridiculous competition. 2. Aside from a few 1980s props, nothing makes you feel that the action happens in the 80s. 3. In the middle of a crowded shopping mall a regular-looking guy drops a small object that looks like a revolver. Who knows that it is a real firearm and not a toy just bought for a child? Why does it cause wide-spread public panic if no shots were fired? 4. Why there is police at that mall? Malls are normally guarded by private security. Why cops aim their guns at someone in a crowd, from a significant distance, but with no knowledge of why, by whom, where anything criminal is being committed? 5. Destroying security cams ALWAYS erases any recorded footage. Video recorders are for losers. 6. The Wonder Woman is aware of events ahead of time, but then she is not aware of any of them. 7. City parks are always full of well-dressed business-suited males who are hell-bent on committing the most heinous crimes. Despite of this fact, lonely females constantly walk through those parks at night time. 8. Why Maxwell's son speaks with such thick accent? And what's up with his wax figure-like "acting"? 9. Why would any sane, busy person become so excited about having to help some FBI agents? What's so great about that? 10. Why an experienced-looking FBI agent speaks with some random guy and tells him whom his team is there to apprehend and on what charges? 11. These are things that already existed in the WW I times: large aircrafts, fireworks, ugly artworks, trash cans, subway systems (since late 1900s). 12. The Wonder Woman loses and gains various powers for no reason at all. 13. If she can fly supersonically at stratospheric altitudes, then why would she need to steal a Panavia Tornado strike plane? 14. WHERE at the Smithsonian institute a major guarded military airfield and a 24/7 active air traffic control tower can be found? 15. In the Tornado plane, a pilot and a WSO are seated in tandem - not side-by-side! A non-armed fighter jet can take off from a shorter distance. 16. No fighter jet can fly non-stop intercontinentally with or w/o drop tanks (especially w/o). The Tornado's range is ~2,500mi with FOUR drop tanks for up to 2 hours (endurance). 17. A fully prepped, charged, fueled, military jet just sits at a museum? 18, A WW I pilot flies a late 20th century fighter jet just like that? Yet, he is not familiar with the concept of fireworks, so he flies his aircraft right into a bunch of EXPLODING and BURNING fireworks PROJECTILES! 19. But nothing happens, because his plane is INVISIBLE. 20. The depicted Mercedes-Benz G-Class became available only in 1992. 21. A hand-wound watch won't start running without being wound up first. 22. The WH secret service personnel don't take much of initiative except for striking warning poses. 23. A war veteran WILL choose a small serving tray as a bullet shield. 24. A technology that allows broadcasting of live TV program to the ENTIRE WORLD was never tested, but it works perfectly. Yeah. 25. TV broadcast is automatically shown on every computer display. The basic principles of telecommunications mean nothing to Hollywood. 26. When several world's nuclear powers have enough existing nukes to destroy the whole planet 20 times over or so, then obtaining some more nukes can lead to a strategic victory? 27. The nuclear war-time ICBM-exchange vocabulary doesn't include "return fire". No military professional speaks like this. "Retaliatory strike" - yes. 28. A major secret military installation is guarded by a couple of the short range Vulcan Phalanx AAAs and no ground-to-air missiles? Meanwhile, a radar picks up a large bird-sized air target and the system opens fire at it? It's interesting how they deal with seagulls and other large birds. 29. At a base a security guard is armed with an auto grenade launcher that he fires practically right at his comrades? Why everything around that base is so dark? Where are any search lights? 30. Most Caucasian and Asian male characters are nitwits, losers, sexist drunkards who are also constantly violence-prone, rude, corrupt, and good for nothing. 31. You MUST be constantly reminded that all guns are essentially evil by the very nature of their existence. All wars, all liberties are won and all crimes are stopped with nothing else but positive vibes, body-positivity, and non-threatening conflict avoidance workshops.

Who would care about any of those cardboard characters? Acting and dialogs are appalling. Any logic is missing. A primitively politicized, poorly written, badly acted, confused, essentially sexist and racist "entertainment" is not entertaining even as a mindless eye-candy.

Horrible. Horrible. There are no words to describe this politely. If the "Prometheus" was just bad, then this idiocy BASED on the already failed concept of the "Prometheus" movie could not possibly be dumber then dumb. This is beyond contempt. 1)What was the story with the solar sails that were called "recharges" or something? Obviously, they were "sails". Had no light-catching properties. EDUCATION, people. Get at least SOME EDUCATION, before you start making movies... Really... 2) No automatic controls. Is this for real? Someone invests heavily into a certain project and then every member of the crew gets frozen, but a computer cannot make the simplest decisions w/o killing a whole bunch of everyone??? 3)WHO ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE? I cannot possibly associate with ANY one of the actors. They come from nowhere. I don't know what they do and who they are. They look pretty much the same. Can't tell them apart. How can I possibly care for any one of them??? 4) The crew members have no obvious command chain. They all act like some school idiotas. This kind of structure cannot possibly survive. 5) Why don't they have any meaningful ways of protecting themselves against alien life forms? NO respirators -- NOTHING? Why do they bother wearing those idiotic caps with "ears"? What's the point? There are potentially aggressive bio-entities out there of "who-knows-what-sort"... At this moment I felt as though this amount of pure stupidity was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much. So, I stopped watching. Enough is enough. I don't have to wallow in dirt in order to figure out that this dirty cold stuff is dirt. I do not feel obligated to be in any way "nice" to this sort of a completely trashy product. This "movie" is garbage. Well, garbage can be recycled. This is worse than garbage. This is total waste.

Don't even want to bother listing everything that is wrong with this movie -- there is not enough space for such a listing here. If this is not the bottom of the Hollywood's cinematographic idiocy, then it must be somewhere, somehow below the bottom.

There is not a single redeeming quality to this flick. Never expected any, though.

The worst part is probably all this rehashing of the ideas, scenes, concepts from other movies. And, yes, it was so painful to listen to all those celebratory and troops-rallying speeches. Oh, the speeches! How they love to show all this cheap "brave" talk!

Scientifically and logically this one is simply below the lowest possible expectations. Shows that the Hollywood producers and directors seriously think that the movie-going public has mentally degraded to the level of some single-cell organisms.

BTW, with all those supposed technological advances, how come that the cars, the radios, the school buses, the TVs, the houses are still all the same? How come that the humanity that was just recently brought down to the literal stone-age level and then fought a total war was able to return to a completely normal, highly developed state of existence after those mere twenty years? Everything at all appears absolutely like there was no war and no total infrastructural destruction since ever! ...Also, first, the "alien" weapons keep not having any effect on the aliens and then they start having the devastating effect; a guy with two panga knives is more effective than the "alien" weapons, when it appears convenient for the "plot" of this flick.

Why that white sphere did not communicate its intentions earlier (before appearing as a threat and getting shot down)? Why it had to be touched first? What? It just liked to be touched or something? And if the "good virtual aliens" who built the white sphere are so dangerous to the "bad aliens", then why did they need to "teach" someone else how to fight the "bad aliens" instead of using that destructive knowledge themselves? Why couldn't they protect themselves in the first place? Sounds exactly like "get rich fast -- ask me how. send me $20 first, though" (like, if you know how to get rich fast, then why do you need my $20 now, instead of already becoming rich yourself?).

If the entire control of the "alien hive" depends upon this single "mother" creature, then why would she want to expose herself to a significant danger? Sounds simply dumb.

All the "alien" weapons still look like rifles and cannons. No creativity there.

Why the captured "aliens" were kept in such great numbers? Also, why were they allowed to stay within their bio-armor suits that offered such excellent protection? Does anyone capture an enemy tank crew and then allows them to remain inside their tank?

The movie is disgustingly audience-targeted at the Chinese teenagers of the lowest intellectual denomination (lots of Chinese people are way smarter than to watch this sort of trash). Many reviewers here noticed it with the same disgust.

What puzzled me was that Chinese Lunar base "commander" who barely spoke any good English, and who so harshly reprimanded the tug pilot (played by Liam Hemsworth, if I am not mistaken) for SAVING the whole Lunar base and the expensive defense weapon! I also noticed that not a SINGLE person at the base cheered the guy who just saved everyone - there was not a flick of positive emotion. Everybody droned about their daily duties as though nothing happened. This just could not be. It could not be a human reaction to such an event. Personnel of the entire base could not be programmed or remotely controlled by that chicken-droppings "commander"! The script writers must be pathologically emotionally shallow and depraved individuals.

The CGI and the props were not all that good either. Many CGI scenes looked like takeouts from some cheesy video game. Like I noticed already, the cars were all present-day models. The weapons were quite uninventively designed. Also, why the "alien" weapons were so perfectly ergonomically built as to be used by humans with no difficulty or modification? The "aliens" in their armored suits appeared quite different from the humans. This was just dull.

Really, I just can't go on talking about this absolutely shameless attempt at making a movie. Too bad about so many good actors who had to play in it. I am sure they were all completely desperate for money, so they basically prostituted their names and their reputations by "starring" in this garbage.

I am very sorry for those people who missed the 4th of July events in order to attend the premiere of this trash of a movie. They were obviously cheated out of their money, their time, and their patriotic celebration, but there is no point to be saying "I want my money back". No one gives any money back for bad movies. "Caveat Emptor"! And just quit expecting any kind of quality from this sort of Hollywood production already! There are directors who are never any good. Seriously. Stop throwing your money away to support such horrible products, folks! At best, if you really have to, watch such stuff on pay-per-view with some friends.

Another reviewer here called this movie "Fast&Furious in Space". I could not put it better myself. Its IMDb rating is not truthful due to a usual (nowadays) abundance of evidently fake paid reviews.

Our dear JJAbrams, JustinLin (who are obviously not into StarTrek themselves and know nothing about it) are only capable of creating the endless number of the 'shoot 'em up + kung-fu fighting', 'crash! boom! bang!', 'crazy speed chases' kinds of flicks that may be good enough to mildly entertain some brain-dead patients.

There is no spirit of exploration, no real discoveries, no real intellectual or diplomatic challenges, no interesting crew interactions (aside from some trailer-trash-like 'relationships" scenes). People go whining, complaining, drinking heavily, while some turn out to be flamboyantly gay in the overall process. And none of this can advance the plot; it only promotes the stale liberal agenda.

Capt. Kirk is like flat soda, Lt. Spock is constantly emotional, although we do not see this being his Pon farr season (and him having all those breakups and makeups with Uhura), Doc McCoy is always without any medical tools (although the real one seemingly never took them off his shoulder), Lt. Commander Scott is kind of wimpy and cannot be trusted with a boombox. There are so many horridly ugly crew members aboard the Enterprise that it is painful to watch them, especially that lady with what appears to be a built-in "facehugger" from the 'Alien' that comes conveniently integrated into her skull. Gave me the unnecessary creeps.

There are scenes borrowed from previous StarTrek movies (how many flagships do they want to crash-land already?) and from StarWars. Even some sound effects are taken from StarWars! The holographic clones effect and idea is obviously stolen from the original 'Total Recall' movie. What, JJ and JL, no fresh concepts? Anything new in your heads? Nothing? I thought so.

In short, JJAbrams and JL do not know first thing about StarTrek, but they go boldly to destroy all the characters for the sake of making a brainless movie based on special effects.

I don't even want to start complaining about the technical aspects of this atrocity! But I might point out a few here:

1) Why would they transfer, dock, and maintain a space vessel in the immediate, close proximity of the civilians, civilian objects and infrastructure deep inside the space station? Those vessels need to be decontaminated, refueled, rearmed, something can go wrong with them, so then what? What happens to all those people and to their beautiful pond, as well as the space station? This is why them ships are built and serviced in space! Why shove the huge space ship into the guts of the station, if the vessel can be safely docked somewhere outside? Did they need to dock it the same way as they do it with the modern day commercial airliners? See what I'm talking about? JJAbrams clearly lacks any technical and safety knowledge and the StarTrek mentality!

2) How can a dangerous mission be organized on a simple oral request of some unknown alien lady? Especially if this mission would lead the flagship of the Starfleet into a region of space where space crafts systematically go missing, and where is no subspace communications!

3) A "miraculously" discovered, conveniently located CRASHED StarFleet vessel turns out to be fully functional, fueled, space-worthy and battle-ready in no time (apparently within hours) with no visible effort. It beautifully takes off without any testing while being banged around like a solid chunk of vanadium-steel or something and it all turns out just peachy! Then, they crash-land this ship, too. I guess that landings is not their forte after all.

5) There are no safeguards and no security around this vital air processing station or whatever, so no one else but Kirk himself has to go there and stop a raving maniac from planting a destructive device there. How do they keep the entire enormous space station safely in one piece with so many aliens there?

6) The fight scenes are waaaay off any realism scale. People get hit so hard all over, thrown against hard walls and other hard objects, but they wouldn't even squint (even if everyone was heavily on drugs, they would still suffer from physical trauma). This immediately kills any remnants of suspended disbelief leaving only disbelief.

On the positive note, I do believe that poorly made hip-hop music can be THAT destructive. At least they got one thing right.

Also, I sort of liked the looks of Jaylah (the alien engineer/kung-fu fighter lady), but she had not been given a chance to develop her character or to do anything except for walking around and fighting. So, despite of all this criticism, I am giving her one star here, but it is kind of shared with the special effects.

Overall, lots of folks get killed in various horrific ways, vast amounts of hardware get destroyed, nothing is taught, nothing is learned, nothing is discovered, there is no story or character development, and then the endless credits start to roll. This is it. No one seems to care that the genre is supposedly called SCIENCE fiction (meaning, it has to be at least science-like, based on some common and technical sense). The fact that StarTrek is a whole imagined UNIVERSE with a long history of technical concepts, relationships, characters, ideology, internal politics, and so much more, so you just don't go screwing it up, does not seem to bother the creators of this monstrous disaster of a movie!

Dear JJAbrams! Dear Justin Lin! With your total IQs not being equal to the one of a mentally-challenged 2-year old, STOP making movies! Leave StarTrek alone! Get your hands off of SciFi! STOP ruining the great genre for us! You are no directors! You both lack talent, education, common sense and professionalism. Thanks for nothing.

First, it is impossible not to notice that nearly EVERY positive reviewer of this movie NEVER reviewed anything else on IMDb and keeps complaining about "too much criticism". It so obvious that practically all of the positive reviews for "Chappie" are paid fakes some of whom published SEVERAL positive reviews under their names.

This flick does not come anywhere close to "District 9". Same director - different results. "Chappie" is a touchy-feely movie for infantile teenagers. All the characters are very 2-dimentional and there is very little character development present. The dialogue, the acting, the plot are all just abhorrent.

Technical aspects of this movie are awful. Mind-reading helmets work the same for both humans and droids (while droids obviously lack a biological brain). A droid has to use a keyboard - a HUD (human interface device) - in order to communicate with various comps. Anyone ever heard of Bluetooth? The Scouts got those moving antennae and other moving parts that have no other purpose but to make those droids capable of what exactly? That's right: of providing more of the simple emotional indicators to the infantile viewers. The sabotaged Scouts have their heads set on fire with sparks flying, but then it turns out that no serious damage comes to them. That's right: the infantile viewers would not recognize a more subtle way of disabling machines. Furthermore, why do those Scouts need to retain such human shape with the actual protruding heads being so vulnerable AND their "CPUs" located in that most vulnerable area??? The Scouts movements are waaay too human-like, but it is unclear how could this be achieved with all the artificial joints that would unavoidably have limited range of motion.

Meanwhile, the Moose's shape was obviously stolen from the Robocop movies. Besides, being powered by two large jet engines, where does Moose stores all of its fuel? All its armor, legs, armaments, ammunition, the engines themselves - all this stuff would easily weight at 30-40 metric tons while not being aerodynamic at all. How much engine power and how much fuel (which also needs to be carried; more fuel = more weight) would be needed for such a non-aerodynamic monster to fly any distance whatsoever???

Then, a seemingly serious business establishment (it's management still keeps two of their head engineers in the common cubicles) does not seem to have any security and no network administrators, so the staff members come and go when they please, they take stuff away, bring stuff back,remove important control devices, develop and deploy highly destructive code - and there is no one who would notice all this rogue activity! An employee runs around the office with a pistol; then he attacks, threatens with a firearm, batters another employee in everyone's plain view, and he does not even get reprimanded only because his "ammo magazine is empty" and the assailant simply laugh is off? Really!!!

Alright. And what about that gangster guy who fires a huge Russian-made RPG-7 from within a small room and survives the effects of the igniting booster?! Then, even more unbelievably, the HEAT rocket (an antitank munition!) capable of burning through armor of most modern battle tanks makes this nice little hole or a dent in a Scout's armor - from a distance of something like 5 yards! The rocket would not even arm so quickly and even if it armed, then its explosion would be highly destructive to anyone located within 20-30 yards of the impact area, and a target like the Scout would be burned all the way through and utterly destroyed.

And then about the helmets again... An android-engineering company also just "happens" to be running a successful, safe, instantly effective human brain-reading project that allows droids and humans to start performing these endless switcheroos all over the place! This is not science fiction, people.

And the rest of it is just as dumb. There are also all those overused, stuffy concepts there, such as "Guns are bad", "people who display Christian rituals are all crazies", "all real good software engineers are from India", etc. Really, I do not expect much from new movies nowadays. But this flick is just that - it is simply a bunch of badly rehashed clichés and technical stupidities with an overly heavy touches of tears squeezing.

In order to be fair, there where two things I actually liked in "Chappie" -- how them gangstas were getting blown up to bits, and how the CEO lady ran out of her office in the middle of a disastrous situation while not forgetting her coat and purse!

I kind of think that a movie director has to make up his mind about a movie first making sure that at least he clearly knows what it is going to be about. This movie seems like an attempt at a psychological drama of loneliness and failure. Why did they even bother with the space theme? It could've been filmed entirely in a couple of studio apartments somewhere. The movie fails at many points. KEEP IN MIND that people ALREADY have real-life experience of spending up to 437.7 (!!!)days in space in ZERO gravity (Valeri Polyakov, Russia, Soyuz TM-18). Here are a few of the most obvious failures: 1) Solitary space travel? Why? To make more room for this "psychological" drama? 2) No teamwork, failure to obey the chain of command. This is no way to fly into space. 3) Building an entire super-expensive interplanetary mission around a poorly tested water-making machine? Plus, if EVERYTHING depends upon such a machine, why not carry at least one more to be safe? 4) What kind of a ship comes complete with a whole SHOWER, but has no significant reserve of water for drinking? 5) Who accelerates a space ship, then stops it for some "shopping" for extra "supplies" (while we don't even get to see them or know what they are needed for), and then accelerates it AGAIN? What? "The fuel is no problem, 'cause we got plenty of it?" 6) If a pilot of the space ship is such an expert on the ship itself, then how come that he screws everything up so constantly? 7) They couldn't store enough water on the ship, but instead they filled it with dirt for this unreliable "reactor" to be extracting water from this dirt? WHY? At first, I though they wanted to run tests on the water reactor using some samples of soil, but who could imagine that they were going to rely upon it during the entire 270 days of flight? 8) First there are complaints about excessive water condensation, but the next moment there are complaints about aridity and dry air. It could not be both at the same time. 9) The pilot of the space ship takes off from Earth sitting in a vertical position instead of lying down. Weird. Also, should he be able to see anything during takeoff through a "shroud" that protects his module? The "shroud" is ejected when a space ship reaches space. Then they can look through windows. 10) What kind of a water supply system could be built in such way that some electrical malfunction would contaminate water with battery chemicals? I see it this way: this movie was made by some wannabe "psychologists" who wanted to make a drama, who lacked technical background, so the movie turned out as a display of their own phobias, personal weaknesses, suicidal tendencies, and fears of failure. Well, they manage to achieve a full-scale failure with this movie! If you are a sci-fi fan like myself, then watch something else.

I don't know where to begin. I am used to the Hollywood flops. They produce garbage. But the increasing scale of the stinky force of this garbage keeps me amazed at the complete loss of everything that Hollywood used to represent. And this flick is no exception. Let me list the "pluses" first: 1) Arnie. I always liked him. Even when he played in some so-so movies. This is The End of the "pluses".

Now, for the endless "minuses" of this poor joke of a movie. 1) I can't stand this tradition of hiding poor SFX and bad camera-work with total darkness. Most of today's bad video games and movies are "shot" in this stupid darkness. If I can't see anything, then I won't be a part of it! 2) The ENDLESS, boring, lengthy dialogues intended for a mentally-challenged viewer are unbearable! Everyone talks mind-numbingly, slowly, lengthily, explaining everything for that "special student" sort of a viewer. 3) Except for the good old, unavoidable Arnie, the casting is ATROCIOUS. The "lovely" Clarkes family is so miscast that I cannot find the right critical words to describe it. WHY ARE THEY EVEN IN THIS MOVIE??? Neither Jason (who looks like some sort of a pervert), nor Emilia (who looks like a nobody-next-door and could not possibly look less than the Sarah Connor character) appear to be in any way convincing in their roles. Besides, their acting purely stinks. IT STINKS. Like garbage. 3) Jai Courtney CANNOT ACT. Period. I cannot make myself discuss him any further. 4) "Byung-hun Lee" playing the T-1000 ?????????? Seriously? If you do not know why I question this casting, then you have to watch the original two Terminator movies. Or, at least, the second one. I usually like them Asian actors, but this is probably THE worst miscasting ever. 5) The 40mm grenades do not detonate like this - neither with this effect nor from these distances. If you don't know how they work, then try to learn something or join some military force or something. 6) The makers of this dumb flick did not know what they were filming, what history this story had and built over the years. So they didn't care about it, and they felt bored about this whole subject. It is totally obvious. Look, if you do not like a certain subject, then do not get involved in it! It's common sense, morons! But then again, we're talking about Hollywood... 7) HORRIBLE ACTING! Who the heck casts "actors" who can't act at all??? This crap movie is probably the greatest way to stop screwing the Terminator classic. Leave us with the originals, if you cannot and will not make anything sane to add to it.

AFAIMC, I will watch The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Again. The mentally-challenged exec who cancelled this series should be proud of his/her/whatever stupidity. Period.

I would like to make this review about the movie in question, while avoiding as much political rhetoric as possible. This site is not a political publication, so we all should concentrate on talking about movies here. I cannot believe how primitive and illogical this movie turned out. I expected something deeper and more believable from Clint Eastwood (don't know why, but I did). What is there to like in this movie? Well, maybe some good camera-work, some FX, such as the sand storm scene. Those turned out fine. What's so illogical about this film? Many things are.

For instance: 1) The main character who considers himself such a dedicated, G-d fearing Christian doesn't think twice about stealing from a church (although it is just an old Bible, but theft is theft, especially from a place of prayer; Kyle never reads this Bible, though. Some Christian.). 2) Then, this same dedicated "christian" eagerly runs on multiple killing sprees all over the world shooting not just adult male combatants, but also women and children -- all based on what he saw once on CNN. Isn't it just lovely? The CNN folks don't blink twice before telling everyone about Australia building a wall on the border with SLOVENIA. A wall. On the border.

It order to feel good about these killings, the main character just calls the people of Iraq "savages". According to this movie, it must be cool to be killing "savages", if CNN tells you so. But then again, since "...In real life Chris Kyle and his fellow SEALs were such big fans of GI Joe that they named their vehicles after 2 of the characters...", there is no reason to expect any extreme intelligence there. 3) Being an experienced sniper, the main character occupies same poorly protected and not tremendously well hidden spots for hours, making multiple kills without ever worrying about being detected and taken down with an RPG or a mortar, although later on one single shot made by Kyle causes his team to be immediately noticed and what looks like hundreds of enemy combatants attack the team. Kyle's spotters don't ever do any spotting. They just sit down somewhere making jokes or snoozing. I guess that Clint Eastwood is not really familiar with some basic principles of sniping and doesn't really know that a long-zoom rifle scope usually produces a very narrow field of view that makes it hard to see "the big picture" around you. So this Kyle character goes on identifying targets, correcting for wind and temperature, taking targets down all on his own while endlessly chatting on the radio and on his phone. What a marvelous fairy-tale! 4) He constantly loses expensive equipment, such as a sat phone, a customized sniper rifle, and he never gets reprimanded for it. Then eventually his comrades practically lose him in a sand storm. 5) Counter-sniping in this movie never involves any use of artillery or air assets. All the snipers just run from/after one another while dodging bullets. Counter-sniping done western-style.

While true patriotism is admirable and there must be more movies made depicting it, this film is full of what is called "patriotic garbage" in its purest form, which is very unfortunate, because it cheapens image of a real patriot. Most of the "civilian" scenes are nothing but clichés and they merely water down the action. So, generally speaking, this could've been a great dramatic and action movie, but it leaves a comic-book impression with compete and utter disregard for any aspects of morality. Certain scenes are obvious plagiarisms "borrowed" from Top Gun and Black Hawk Down. When a director lacks his own original ideas, it is a HUGE 'minus'. This movie seems to be highly rated and well accepted by other CNN/Fox viewers. Not a 'plus'.

This movie might have been somewhat better, but its producers and directors did everything in their power to ruin the whole useless thing even further. They could've made a movie about a dumb girl with a pointless go-nowhere education, go-nowhere job who found herself in this Ersatz-Cinderella sort of story where the Prince turns out to be a monster and so on. But this is where the makers of this flop show how lost they are and how they have no idea what to do with this sorry piece of pseudo- literature. The only one minor redeeming value of this movie is the depiction of the main female characters. Both female roommates are shown as rather brainless whores one of whom finds herself stupidly confused while trying to figure out a difference between mindless whoring, prostitution, and romance. So, this Ana character keeps slowly and boringly contemplating how should she prostitute herself out to this sicko guy, although with all her dumb drinking and with her being just a loose girl she might not even remember who did what to her, when and where (getting educated but not getting smarter is what plagues her). But I am afraid that I am inadvertently making this awful movie sound more interesting than it really is. Because truthfully, this is a slow-dripping, boring, pointless crap. No, it is not really "sick". It doesn't explore any "dark sides of human nature", since the characters appear so 2-dimentional and uninteresting. No, it is not sexy. There is no attraction between the main characters and they are dull to watch. No, it is not in any way more dramatic than a wet sponge. No, there is no interesting dialog in this movie. No, there are no unexpected plot twists. Is there any plot there at all? I didn't notice any, really. No, there are no valuable lessons that could be learned from any of this. Truly, this "50 shades" thing is an empty shell of a movie based on an empty shell of a book made for empty shells of women. I just can't imagine a non-brain-dead person watching this travesty. Hollywood proves one more time that there are more than 50 ways to produce garbage that can still be sold, re-used, thrown out and re-sold again as long as there are "consumers" out there who would buy any annoyingly-marketed trash.

1) I like Jason Statham, AND somehow I believe that he's got some potential. 2) I like action movies that don't pretend to be philosophical, deep, uncovering some "truth" about deeply hidden emotions or whatever.

Still I don't get it what was the point of all this? A typical Statham-style tough guy runs around Vegas, knows all the bartenders, hookers and one cheap sleazy lawyer. Along these lines, a hooker lady gets all cut to shreds and beaten up by a rich sadist guy AND THEN she's unhappy with simply being left alive. Usually, this doesn't happen. So, she wants to retaliate. Furthermore, she (a hooker, mind ya) wants to file a lawsuit against this sadist character. A not-so-long story short, as you've imagined by now, the Statham's character helps the hooker lady to secure the culprits (w/o any firearms being involved on the JS's side); besides, the whole movie shows that there is no way that a bunch of highly trained and armed killers could have a chance against a "really tough guy" armed with a spork. Then, the hooker lady slightly bitch-slaps the bad guys and scares the rich sadist, along with his henchmen. It all happens then and there, and everyone leaves. Along those lines some "IT-nouveau riche" guy comes along who wants to learn from the "great master". Why is this guy even there? Who knows. Then the Statham's character loses all his money (looks like over one mil) while keeping his cool, but then he gets ugly drunk. And ONLY THEN the "nouveau riche" character catches up with the Statham's character, and everyone gets to be killed by the good old Jason S. Then, leaving everyone behind, JS takes lots of money from his stupid "apprentice" and leaves the city of Las Vegas for good. He gets away. The movie ends. So,this is a tremendously confused movie based on this idea that one tough guy can defeat a crazy bunch of criminally insane sadist by using nothing else except some "credit card" knives. Basically, this tremendously confused movie that someone got started and then no one knew what to do with it, deserves to be categorized as a "Jason Statham's discount-rack movie piece that shows lots of Las Vegas night sites and a few of JS-kind of fights. I don't even know what this movies was all about.

Prepare for a review from someone who uses more that 1.0% of his/her brain capacity. Scary? It should not be so. This movie, while being based on an interesting theory claiming that humans do not use more than 10% of their "brain powers" caters to the usual, common audience that hardly uses 0.001% of the thinking power given to them. First of all, I do like Luc Besson and Scarlett Johansson, so I have nothing "personal" against them. I DO hate all those endless close-ups of Morgan Freeman. All he does is this: he speaks decent English SLOWLY while keeping a serious face. All of his roles are like this. The idea behind this movie? Is there one? Aside from a metric tonne of rather inexpensive SFX, there is this poorly hidden ILLEGAL DRUG PROMOTION that is intended to make one think the following: "IF ONE OVERDOSES ONESELF ON SOME UNKNOWN, OBVIOUSLY ILLEGAL BUT PROMISING-NAMED SUBSTANCE, THEN ONE MIGHT JUST AS WELL ACHIEVE SOMETHING LIKE GOD'S POWERS OVER EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE". As far as anyone who is NOT ALWAYS on drugs thinks, this is the idea that is being promoted by this movie. Really, unless you are an uneducated junkie or an underage fan of a cheap movie visual SFX, then you might probably figure out that no matter how much of your brain capacity you manage to control, it would still NOT make you a god of some sort, it would NOT make you capable of controlling anything else short of your own ability to memorize, analyze, and learn. THIS IS IT. The rest is nonsense. Unless you start abusing illegal drugs and find yourself being capable of controlling the court, the jury, the law, the space-time continuum, it all ends when the drugs are out of your system and you are in jail. So, in short, just SAY NO TO DRUGS AND TO THIS MOVIE!