Fear - Review

Fear

There are times when I think I'm too masochistic. I mean, sure I like bad movies, but there are a lot of bad movies that have a lot of charm. It's kinda like a mangy dog you pick up at the pound and you just fall in love with it because it's so helpless and sad. However, there are times when I think I'm one sick puppy.

I should really learn that a movie that stars both Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon is going to hurt. Even a pre-CSI William Petersen and an always sexy Alyssa Milano can't help this movie.

Nicole Walker (Witherspoon) is your normal 16 year old girl. Sure she's in her rebellious stage but she still doesn't like skipping class or being out past curfew. So when she meets an almost perfect yet mysterious older guy named David McCall (Wahlberg) she stops being daddy's little girl anymore. Yet when she see the real David for the psychopath he really is and his good boyish charm melts away, she realizes that she picked the wrong guy in a seedy hangout bar. Who woulda thunk? Her father (Petersen) tries to protect his daughter the best he can, but soon David and his friends attack the family in their nice, safe home.

So dealing with Marky Mark first I have to be shown right, once again, that his attempt at acting is just the same way he plays every other character he's ever done, but with a bit more yelling. Half of his lines are whispering and on the verge of tears. When he tries to turn the character to the psycho he really is he doesn't do a very good job. All he has to do is frown and look at the camera with upturned eyes. Even when he completely flips and tries to take Nicole away to live happily ever after, you don't really see the person who actually believes that, you just see some guy who's kinda mean.

Reese Witherspoon has been trying to play the all American girl for so long now. She's tried it in this movie, "Cruel Intentions", and "Election". She's never been really able to pull it off. Her slutty character in "Pleasantville" seems like more the character she wants to be. I do have to say, getting felt up on a carnival roller coaster is pretty unusual. The thing I can say about her character is that I believe she's doing a good job at playing a 16 year old who's dating an older boy who turns out to be a psycho. She mopes and cries a lot, she never learns the first time that the guy is bad news, and once she finds how crazy he is she doesn't get the police involved in anyway.

I do have to say that the little kid in this film is awesome. Christopher Gray plays the brother, Toby Walker. The thing I like about this kid is that he's the smartest one in the family. The bad guys decapitate his dog and he takes his revenge out on one of the guys by running him over with a car. Does he check the guy to see if he's still alive only to be taken as a hostage when the bad guy gets up? No! He dials 911! He also saves his mom by himself, not to mention bringing the police to come and save the family.

There are three big problems that doesn't include the storyline or the acting. However, I must give a SPOILER ALERT, since some of them might give away the ending if you still plan on watching it.

1) When David goes out the window and onto the rocks below you can clearly tell that the falling object in a dummy; and no, I'm not saying that Mark Wahlberg did that stunt. This is a 1996 movie, films before have done much better jobs at showing people going over cliffs . It almost seems like the filmmaker did one take and didn't even bother to make it more realistic.

2) When David shoots his buddy for touching "his woman" it's one of the worst gunshots to the head scenes I've ever seen. You have a close up shot of the two men, David pulls the trigger, and the gun flashes. The other guy just says "Uhh" and drops to the floor. There is no bullet hole, there is no blood splatter, there are no pieces of bone and brains anywhere that would happen as a result of a gunshot to the back of the head at point blank range. It's not like there hadn't been a blood splatter scene in movie history before ("Pulp Fiction" was two years prior to this film). This shows sloppy work on the part of the director.

3) This is my favorite. In order to slow down David, Nicole takes the peace pipe he won her at a carnival and stabs his very hard with it in his back. I don't know about you, but I doubt anything won at a fair would make it more than a month without disintegrating, let alone being able to use it to forcefully stab an attacker. I think some carny is going to be getting sued if that were to actually happen.

Grade - D

The father is a moron in this movie, so is the mother, so is the daughter, so is everyone except the little boy. He's the only person that accomplishes anything to help save his family and he gets to take out some revenge on someone who killed his dog. Marky Mark falters severely at trying to convince me he's not just another whinny, whisper talking character he almost always plays (sometimes he both whines and whispers at the same time in this film). Witherspoon plays an okay 16 year old but she doesn't seem to do much in the movie. It's really hard to feel anything from this movie. I never really felt like rooting for either the father or the daughter and Wahlberg didn't scare me at all. If they were to just call the cops and get a restraining order on him, he would have went away quietly.

Shooter - Patrick

Shooter

For those of you who know me you probably know these two things about me. First, I have a passion for conspiracy theories and second - I don't like Mark Wahlberg. So when I saw Shooter looked good I had two sides of the scale with one good and one bad thing on it. So I had to make a choice. What would be the deciding factor to put on either side of the scale. The choice was made and the outcome was to watch it. It had guns...sniper guns.

This movie is about Marky Mark's character gets set up for a shooting of a political figure that he didn't do. He's one man...against the system. Man can I create art for a tagline or what?! Danny Glover stars as his main adversary and there's something strange about Glover in this movie. Listening to him, it sounds like he had dentures that wouldn't stay stuck and it sounded like he was talking over them. I'm not saying that's what it was, but he definitely talked weird in this movie. Really though, that's just a random observation from me to you. If you watch this movie see if you can tell.

So Mark spends the entire movie trying to figure out the who and the why of the plot and he snipes people to get to the top. This movie has some of the best modern day sniping scenes I've seen. There is minimal CGI in this movie but what there is is beautiful. Now I have a love/hate relationship with CGI. I believe CGI to be a tool used to create better works of cinema art. I don't believe it's there to be an excuse to make a picture around it. After all, look at the stuff that comes on the Sci-Fi Channel. At least they have an excuse. You want to see cheesy sci-fi movies on that channel. You don't want to learn that someone paid $250 million to make a movie where no two actors are in the same room. DISCLAIMER: This will be one of a few different short rants in this review. Anyway the explosion CG in this movie is gorgeous.

Now, onto our main *struggles to say it* s-star. The reason why I don't like Mark Wahlberg is the same reason I don't like Nick Cage. Mark acts like himself in his movies, he's only playing people with different names. The thing that makes me more angry is that he is a bankable star. If you kept putting Keanu Reeves in different roles acting the same....ok bad example. Okay, how about if Tom Hanks acted like Forrest Gump in every role he ever did? You'd say to yourself, "Wow, really, Tom? Again?" I mean, even Adam Sandler has changed and moved away from his moron with funny voices and has actually stared in some remarkable roles. Now I don't hate Mark as much as I hate Nick Cade. That's just would be too much hate for me to carry around. So I judge Mark now based on individual roles. I absolutely loved him in Invincible and that's what brought my hate level down in dealing with him. It rose a bit when I found out he'd be staring as Max Payne in the movie. So how was he in this movie? He was pretty good actually. Now, he does try to act hardcore in at least three different times in the movie. He does not pull it off at all. However, he plays his character well and he's not trying to be overly action star-ish in the role. Of course that might have to do with more of the director than the actor, but he needs all the points he can get with him. I do have to give him credit though. He has two great lines in the movie. I believe in catchphrases. I would go to Bond movies if there were no action and it was all bad pun catchphrases. Marky Mark pulls them off swimmingly. He really does. I won't give away what they are because you need context for great catchphrases and I wouldn't be a proper film snob if I just said them all willy nilly. If he had one more I might have had to change my mind on him again. At least until I remembered that he did star in Fast and Furious. Grrrrr!

The storyline is take from a Stephen Hunter novel and while I haven't read the book the screen adaptation was great. You had some great action mixed with a believable and convincing storyline. The plot about how the conspiracy has no head and no political agenda of left vs. right is true. This movie is about inside jobs and I find it funny that in the early start of the movie you see Mark with the 9/11 Commission Report. Hmm inside jobs and whitewashing cover stories? I think we're reading the same things. Watch this movie and take its themes in your mind. Ask yourself, "Are these things possible?" If you aren't too blind you might be scared of the truth and just it out of your mind and go about buying your grande lattes, your Old Navy polo's, and go about researching your lineup for your fantasy football team like it was important. Note: See this and the "Why I don't like Mark Wahlberg" parts were the other rants I warned you about. I think movies like Shooter, The Seige, and elements of The Long Kiss Goodnight are just fictions stories written around actual or possible actual events. If the conspirators inside governmental bodies were smart they'd sue these script writers for copyright infringement.

Grade - A-

Ya, I know. I'm just as surprised as you are. This movie has some really great action but not an abundance as to make it a true "action" film. It has a great storyline that kinda makes it hard to guess what will really happen in the end. It's got some really great sniping scenes for us fans of sniping movies. The big downfalls are Mark Wahlberg in it of course. Danny Glover isn't really that menacing of a bad guy. Lastly, the chick in the film is only there as something Hollywood deems men need to look at. Listen Hollywood, we can understand putting Mark Wahlberg in there for the ladies, but when you start out a movie with some great sniping scenes and break out a 50 caliber you don't need a chick with a horrible southern accent who hardly ever wears a bra in the movie. Give us more sniping scene, which you did, and leave her out of it. Also, you don't always need the stereotypical henchman in the film who is a jerk to his woman captor and who freaks out when the hero comes for her. Globalist elites, if you take notes from movies, hire some competent henchmen who aren't like this. I would suggest going even as far as making your henchmen unicks. You're running a business to control the world through fear and power control, you don't need shotty henchmen when you got the world on a string.

So folks, I suggest you watch this movie. Especially if you've just seen my other reviewed movie "Margot At The Wedding". Yeash! Watching those two movies back to back would make Shooter seem like the Godfather.