24 March 2020

The Last Blockbuster We Ever Made

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Fisting a donkey, fucking a monkey, or sucking off a badger? I keep asking myself what must be in the photographs that Vin Diesel has of the movie producer that he keeps blackmailing for work. Because I refuse to believe that he actually gets hired for his acting ability alone. Have you seen any of his movies? The Fast And Furious franchise literally only works because he seems to be the only person involved in it that doesn't realise how fucking stupid it is. I don't dislike him but I think that we all know that he is a po-face figure of absolute ridicule. In which case it must be his good looks that people keep casting him for.. right? ...Are you kidding me? He looks like a camel fucked a potato and then nine months later a baby made of shoe-leather fell out. When I look at him I see a gingerbread man wrapped up in recently-waxed bollock skin. Sure he has a deep voice but he sounds like a butch woman that's been smoking seventy a day since the early Fifties. I agree that his best role is in Guardians Of The Galaxy but that's only because he's playing a tree monster called Groot and he'd already spent his entire career giving wooden performances anyway. I'd probably sound like him if my voice was booming out of from a charisma-free husk too and listening to him speak is like being shouted at by a haunted cupboard door. About forty-five minutes into his latest film Bloodshot, he takes off his jacket to reveal that he's also wearing a white vest. As usual. My theory is that filmmakers actually keep hiring the vest and he just comes fucking free with it.
Bloodshot begins with an action scene that was so painfully cliched that it made me want to rip my own eyeballs out to shove them up my arse so that if they had to see shit it would at least be fresh. It continued in this vein for some time until Vin Diesel got shot in the head and died. That movie fucking dragged, I thought to myself as I got up to leave. But no. Despite having already felt about two hours long that was only the first five minutes. Of course, Vin Diesel isn't dead. Why would a shot to the head kill him? That's only where our brains are kept. Vin Diesel is brought back to as-close-to-his-waking-life as I guess he ever was thanks to Guy Pearce using a bunch of nanobots to fix everything that was wrong with him. Well not everything, obviously. At the end of the day, he's still Vin Diesel. When he's initially resurrected, Guy Pearce says, “this is amazing. He has full cognitive control”. Well clearly something has gone wrong then hasn't it because Vin Diesel didn't exactly seem fully cognitive before he was shot in the fucking head. Although to Pearce's credit he has made several upgrades to his mumbling lump of ham having decided to give Diesel a little extra super-strength to go with his newly added super-healing powers. It's a shame that he couldn't improve his ability to act either really. Vin Diesel just about gets away with his limited skills in the Fast And Furious films because all of the other actors in that seem to be taking the piss around him. But when you put him up against somebody as good as Guy Pearce he really does start to stink the place up like a roasting-hot elephant turd in a well-kept garden of roses. 

It's at this point though that something strange happens. Something really strange. There's a twist about halfway through the film which fully subverts everything that we've seen so far. Suddenly that cliched opening is completely recontextualised and actually now makes a lot more sense. The film arguably even gets close to being interesting. Is this suddenly good? Surely not! A film called fucking Bloodshot and starring an actor that has less understanding of the human condition than a captive chimp as it plays with its own dick? Can that really be anything but terrible? Well, as the third act descends into a slightly duller CG actioner I guess the answer is no, but for that brief moment in the middle, it was only a single gnats pube away from it. I have no idea who to blame for ruining this movie and I'd hate to level any criticism at somebody that didn't deserve it. But if I were to take a complete stab in the dark then I reckon I could do worse than pointing that 'shaming finger of shame' at Jeff fucking Wadlow. I could be wrong. But this film has two writers and he's one. Wadlow is one of the worst filmmakers whose work I've experienced, and yet every one of his failures seeming to propel him further up the Hollywood ladder like a rocket-powered fart that sprays cinematic diarrhoea in its trail. In fact, it was only one week before this that I saw Blumhouse's Fantasy Island which was the latest film to be both written and directed by him. As you might imagine it was about an island that grants all of its visitors their greatest fantasy, which at the time for me was to live in a world where that awful piece of shit movie had never been fucking made. 

Eric Heisserer is the other writer credited on this script with one of his previous pieces of work being the stone-cold masterpiece that was 2016's Arrival. Now maybe Heisserer knew Wadlow would get the blame for a terrible script and so took the afternoon off to shit this movie out. Meanwhile, Wadlow having found out that he'd be credited alongside Heisserer decided to really work hard to up his game. Maybe? But I doubt it. I know that if I was Heisserer I'd likely spaff this one up the wall to earn a quick buck and if I was Wadlow and I hadn't already knuckled by down then there's no reason to think I'd start here. I don't know if the script was initially written by Heisserer before Wadlow came in and fucked it up. Or if Wadlow was onboard first and Heisserer was simply hired to clean up as much of the minor wreckage as he could be bothered to do. All I know is that Bloodshot is a predominantly bland action movie with the occasional interesting idea in it. I can't help but assume that if this was a turd then Wadlow would be the one responsible for the majority of the mess with Heisserer likely the man to thank for the occasional lump of nutritious golden sweet-corn. I guess the director should take some blame too but I have no idea who they are to gauge their previous work from. I can see that they like slow-motion if this fucking film is anything to go by though. Bloodshot is like that episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace in which the episode was coming in too short. In the case of Darkplace, they at least claimed that “anything without dialogue was considered for slow-motion”. But thanks to the monotonous tone of Vin Diesel I can't say for sure that Bloodshot was able to make that exception. 

I know that when we all saw the trailer for Bloodshot we expected it to be another instantly forgettable addition to VD's filmography. But we've finally reached that point in human history in which no more art is to be produced. Ever. Well, I suppose we can all still draw pictures on the walls with whatever bodily fluids we're still able to create. But the week that I saw Bloodshot was the week that the Coronavirus really made itself known in the UK and we're now at the point that everything has just stopped. We're told to stay in our houses and wait there until this pandemic blows over but we have no idea how long it will be for and how many of us will survive. Will we all go mad in our isolation? Will future historians look back at this time and see the remains of the posters for this movie on the sides of the buses and buildings of what, to them, will be our 'ancient civilisation' and assume that Vin Diesel was our God? That everything was moving fairly smoothly in our world until Bloodshot was released and suddenly we all went insane like we'd witnessed the opening of the hell portal in Event Horizon? I can honestly say that I have no fucking idea. I actually didn't hate this movie because of how low my expectations had been when I was going into it. As a Vin Diesel movie I suppose it could have been worse but as a conclusion to both our culture and entire way of life I would have hoped for something at least a little more special. I really don't know what's in those pictures of the producer that Vin Diesel blackmails for work. But as we all settle in for a few months of alone time I urge you all to consider how you fill your time wisely. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time. 


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