Single-sentence review of Total Recall (2012)

Because as long as people like you pay to see the films, the assumption is proven correct (at least financially).

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I liked Live Free Or Die Hard, but it had more to do with Bruce Willis OWNING the role of McClane than with anything the director did.

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I think the issues with Total Recall can safely be considered to begin and end with a tunnel through the fucking center of the earth.

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This isn’t disabusing me of the notion that movies were better when I was a kid. I know there’s nostalgia at work, but even objectively… I guess I can just say I like the old movies better, but what about when they objectively suck?

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I agree with Christian. That giant elevator through the center of the earth is so mind-bogglingly stupid, blatantly ignoring every basic tenet of physics and showing an absence of even the most rudimentary knowledge of the composition of the earth, that it became pretty much unwatchable when they started hanging major plot points on it. They might as well have had Quaid take his own head off, beat up the badguys with it, then put it back on. It would have made just as much sense as what they actually did include in the movie.

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Well, I liked Live Free Or Die Hard :T Actually, given the general state of the American action film, I thought it was pretty damn good, foremost because it was in fact coherently shot. It was the weakest of the series, definitely, but still a lot of fun.

That said, fuck this movie; you cannot hope to improve upon Schwarzenaegger and Verhoeven in their respective primes by going the same route with the source material they did. I like Colin Farrell quite a bit, but not even his presence could make me the least bit interested this.

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Peter Principle?

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The fact there wasn’t a single character in the movie to really give two shits about was another reason why this movie failed. Quaid and Jessica Biel’s (I honestly don’t even remember her name) character seemed to have such an implied history, that at some point you expected to learn more about it, but you never do. You never see any of the implanted memories Quaid has with his fake wife, so you don’t care much that she’s trying to kill him. There’s a war between two colonies, that people visit everyday, and you never see this “war” being waged. You have these resistance fighters, that never resist anything. You never see them struggling to survive, so you don’t care about their war. There’s so much going on in this movie that there really isn’t anything going on. To further insult, the movie was FUCKING BORING! How do you make a special effects driven, action-heavy, summer blockbuster boring? You let Len Wisemen direct it, and hope his wife gets more people in the seats.

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