Expectations Have Fallen

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Before I saw Angel Has Fallen there was an advert on the radio which claimed that “it's the best of the Fallen trilogy” and “it's the film that's causing critics to go wild”. Now that first boast is the total definition of 'damning with faint praise' considering that the first two instalments of the Fallen trilogy were actual dog shit. The script for the first movie was so bad that lead star Gerard Butler's mates were apparently texting him in lines for it whilst the second movie managed to lower that bar even further by adding a little racism into the mix. Both movies were an irony and joke-free remake of Team America but in which the main characters were somehow even more convincing as dummies. I'm aware that technically the puppets in Team America were marionettes rather than dummies and that nobody has used the word dummy as an insult since about 1950. But in the words of Gerard Butler's Mike Banning, 'let's have a game of fuck off... you go first'. Saying that Angel Has Fallen is the best of the trilogy is like going to a restaurant and having the head chef claim that your food has less shit in it than an unflushed toilet. Technically that's true of a meal with no shit in it but it certainly makes it sound like he's pinched at least a little something off into it. In terms of the second boast, saying that the film is “causing critics to go wild”, is also interestingly worded. If critics loved it then wouldn't the advert just say, “the film that's loved by critics”? Because when I picture people going wild I don't imagine them to be having fun. I imagine them running down the street with their balls out after they've bitten a tramp in the face and are being shot at by the fucking police.

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Things Were The Way They Should Be

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Like going for a massage and finding yourself being tugged off before you leave, the end of Toy Story 3 was absolutely perfect. So why the fuck would anybody make a Toy Story 4? The trilogy had concluded with Woody and the toys accepting that their life with Andy was over as they watched him drive off into the distance. Where could you possibly go next? Does Andy come home as a paedophile, grab his old toys back, and use them to lure in the local children? Meanwhile in this scenario, his toys would have to decide whether or not they can reveal their true consciousness to intervene, whilst also coming to terms with the fact that the child they loved has grown up to be a monster? Because that's the only logical way that I can think of Toy Story 4 having anything interesting or new to say. Each of the three films have so far told the exact same story in that they're about one or more toys getting lost and having to find their way home. Meanwhile, there's an extra layer of existential subtext in there in which the franchise spoon feeds you the bullshit lessons of life. The first movie taught us that we're not unique or special, the second that we will be abandoned by the people that we love, and the third that finally, we will die. But if we remember that quote from pretentious wall painter Banksy, “you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time”. This might present itself as being nothing more than a children's film but with Toy Story 4 it seems that it's time for Woody to experience his second fucking death.

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A Load Of Old Pooh

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The film begins with Christopher Robin telling his best-friend Winnie The Pooh that he'll be leaving to go to boarding school and that their time together has come to an end. Christopher Robin is clearly a fucking snake and it was from that point on that I refused to trust him. He doesn't tell his childhood chum that they'll be separated but he'll be back as soon as he can be. And nor does he seem particularly upset that he has to tell the innocent bear that their relationship is about to end. Nope. He just calmly sits him down, looks him in the eye and says “We're done”, with all the emotion of a fucking serial killer. From here we're given a snapshot of Robin's life and the hardships that he has to endure as he grows up. These trials range from a bad time at boarding school to the terrors he had to suffer whilst fighting in the war. The film doesn't talk much about how good a soldier he was although I'm guessing he was a shit one due to his complete lack of fucking loyalty with Pooh bear. 

This Franchise Is Bad For My Health

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Near the time when the first Deadpool movie came out I got ill to the point that I thought I was going to die. It was only a cold, but I get ill so infrequently that when some twatty bug is strong enough to get past my immune system, I can only conclude that it's probably cancer and my brain is going to start leaking out of my nose. Obviously I got better, and furthermore I remained in perfect health until the first trailer for Deadpool 2 came out ..when suddenly I found myself enduring a bad case of the shits.. or as I assumed at the time.. arsehole cancer. I started to notice the pattern and worry that perhaps I was allergic to Deadpool movies. The first film has really grown on me over the years and so I'd be disappointed if I was unable to enjoy its sequel simply because its existence might cause bits of my body to drop off. I hadn't been ill since the trailer but sure as shit the week that the film hit the cinema my throat began to hurt and I've developed white spots at the back of my mouth. Google says it's probably just a viral infection and that I shouldn't worry, but I know in my heart of heart that it's probably the throat AIDs. By the time I got to the cinema to watch the movie I was hoping to be able to enjoy it, but you can imagine my worry. If the build up to Deadpool 2 was enough to do this to me then what the fuck would happen during the actual screening? I don't want to seem like a hypochondriac.. but I was fully prepared to either catch the plague or somehow find one of those weird amazon-fish things living up my dick.

No Country For Old Man Logan

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In the way that the media presents us with an unrealistic expectation of beauty, it also, to a slightly lesser extent, presents us with an unrealistic expectation of coolness. I mean, we all agree that James Bond is cool, right? But apply his lifestyle to reality and imagine that dopey fucker surviving more than a year. If his hard-drinking hasn't left his liver on the verge of packing in then at the very least his years of sexually exploiting a never ending conveyor belt of vulnerable simpletons would surely leave him with a horrendously crippling case of knob-rot?! Well it seems to be in this later and slightly more realistic world that Logan takes place. Having spent his cinematic career watching everybody he ever loved end up with a bad case of being completely fucking dead whilst remaining a total bad-ass himself, Wolverine has finally hit rock bottom. He's a shadow of what we've seen in the past and now lives the kind of life that Mel Gibson might in an alternate world in which Hollywood failed to find him. He's got a shitty job, his anger issues and mental anguish have isolated him from society, and his alcoholism could only be worse if before taking a shot he replaced the sprinkle of salt on the back of his hand with the ashes of George fucking Best.

Clawing A Way Back

Despite being in my mid twenties I'm depressingly still not able to grow facial hair. A full beard is completely out of the question and what I can get of a moustache is just embarrassing. Imagine the upper lip of a pretentious French child and that's kind of where I'm up to. Thankfully though, the one thing I can grow is a pair of meaty sideburns which I've insisted on sporting since first being raped by puberty. As a young teen I probably looked fucking ridiculous with my youthful complexion overshadowed by a hedge of spidery pubes that were sprouting out of the side of my face but I didn't care. I still have them now although I think that after about ten years of hatred my ageing face will have weathered enough to, hopefully, suit them. The problem was that when I was young my Mum hated them and I'm stubborn enough that that would be reason enough to keep anything. Nor did it help that to try and deter and insult me she once said, “You look ridiculous, you look like that bloody Wolverine”. Now, I know that I didn't look anything like him at all but as insults go my Mum couldn't have said anything that would make me want to keep my sideburns more that that.

I've been a huge fan of The X-Men since I saw the animated series in the early 90's and Wolverine has always been my favourite character. I guess when I was about three or four years old, I was the kind of cute little boy who loved nothing more than seeing a man stab people in the face with knives protracting from his knuckles. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released a few years ago and was so bad that its was statistically more shit than an actual shit. Considering that X-Men: The Last Stand was also about as enjoyable as pouring vinegar into an open bollock wound, my enthusiasm for the franchise was sadly being replaced by apathy. With The Wolverine now on release I went to see it, although this time more for the sake of curiosity and hope than anything else. It might be receiving average reviews but I guess no matter how much disappointment a franchise might inflict, there's always going to be a toddler in me that's desperate to see a character that glorifies knife crime.

X-Men 3 was shit...

Like the rest of us, Wolverine is now suffering from the aftermath of X-Men: The Last Stand and is rightly living a life of shame. Haunted by memories of a woman that he loved and murdered, he's wandering the Earth like a wounded bear which might explain an early scene in which he meets an actual wounded bear. If you like your metaphors to be obvious and very annoying then this is the film for you. To cut a long story short, some old dying Japanese man tracks Wolverine down and drags him to Tokyo for a pre-death chinwag. Things don't go too well though and suddenly our snazzy haired anti-hero is wrapped up in somebody else’s shit which, despite being nothing to do with him, still results in several attempts on his life. As the film progresses it becomes very apparent that the message it's trying to convey is that 'helping people isn't worth the fucking bother'.

 Okay, so on the bright side I didn't hate The Wolverine but nor did I particularly love it. It is a text-book definition of an average film which to be fair is such an improvement over its predecessor that I think it actually deserves some praise for that. It's like when the thick kid spells his name right and you feel you should pat him on the back for managing not to dribble at the same time. Also, it's good to see that Wolverine is still so enjoyably cool that Hugh Jackman must get into character by smoking cigars rolled with John Waynes dead scalp. Not only that but since his sweary cameo in First Class, he hasn't half developed a fucking potty mouth on him. However sadly I would say that one of my biggest gripes with this film was in how for the majority of its running time he'd had his powers taken away from him. One of the main selling points of the character is surely his mutant healing abilities and so to remove them is slightly defeating the point. When someone punches Wolverine, I don't want him to wince, I want him to get angry and start smashing shit up like a drunk Mel Gibson during the Sabbath. I understand the logic behind him suddenly being vulnerable as supposedly it provides the film with a sense of threat. However does anyone really think that Wolverine is going to die? With the exception of Brandon Lee, there isn't a bullet out there that a studio would allow kill a main character in a valuable franchise.

"My garden needs tending!"

Many people have criticised the third act action sequence as being a bit out of place and although I kind of agree, I still loved every single fight in this film. The movie is composed of two elements - one part mystery and the other part action, but in honesty I think that it's the latter that's done much more competently. The drama kind of feels like a Chinatown for idiots whereas the fight scenes are actually pretty imaginative. For example there's an enjoyable scene near the end in which Wolverine is shot with so many arrows that despite dying and gushing blood from his back he ends up looking like Toy Story 3's loveable Mr Pricklepants. The films problem is therefore actually in its inability to blend its tone in a particularly un-obvious way. It doesn't help either that the end is completely obvious and the villains are a little on the shit side. I won't give away who the mysterious big bad is although anybody who doesn't work out their identity should probably think about waking up their brain from its forever-sleep. Plus there's another baddie here called Viper who spits poison, seduces strangers with a kiss and dresses in green. Short of having flowers sprouting out of her vagina, she's basically just Uma Thurman's desperately slutty Poison Ivy. I guess I'm not an expert but perhaps if comic book movies are going to start ripping each other off then maybe Batman and Robin is the one to avoid.

Still, like I said though, The Wolverine is an enjoyable but average film. It doesn't do anything spectacularly wrong and there's enough in it to make it worth at least two hours of your life. Unless of course you're dying and two hours is all you've got left, in which case I'd just crack on with the consequence-free rape and murder. The film has a strong main character, two well rounded female leads plus it makes good use of Japan as a location and culture. Oh but when I say, “well rounded female leads”, I should clarify that I do obviously mean it in terms of their depth and not as a smutty Roger Moore-esque one liner that refers to their tits. Film is a male dominated medium and so it's always nice to see some non-men get a look in too. Although having brought attention to it I'm sure that they do have nice tits as well. Personally I'd recommend The Wolverine to anyone who hasn't already seen it and I'm sure I'll end up buying the DVD. In fact, now I know it's just a guilty pleasure I'm kind of looking forward to seeing it again.

 Although whilst I've still got you here, I do have a slight theory. A while ago Nick Cave wrote a script that was meant to be a sequel to the film Gladiator in which Maximus was brought back from the dead and became a warrior through time. Is it just me or would this not have been a fucking amazing idea for a Wolverine movie? Just a thought, I guess. I suppose you could argue that, that idea was done in the opening credits of X-men Origins: Wolverine but that was a shit film that we've all forgotten and so should consider my suggestion an original idea. People think that the key tragedy of Wolverine is his extraordinarily long life which inevitably means that he's going to be suffering the loss of a lot of loved ones. But on the flip side to that it also mean he'll outlive a lot of people that he considers cunts. Finding out that someone you hate has died is always a good day if you ask me and I'm already well into preparing my, “Fuck You Piers Morgan Party”. However, for me the real tragedy of the character is that more or less nothing can kill him and yet he still mopes about looking like a fucking tramp. He could make a hell of a lot of money with some sort of Jackass style television show and from that point on live quite happily for the remaining centuries. I know money can't buy happiness but it can buy things that will make you happy, like medicine for sick children, computer games and a lot of cheap prostitutes. Anyway, as you can probably tell I'm never sure how to end these blogs so lets just save me three hours of struggling and say it's ended now. Blog has ended, see you next week and good bye!

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