Concessions

When movies are really, truly terrible, publicists don’t schedule
screenings for the press. But sometimes I like to play catch-up on the
shitty ones—the ones that didn’t screen—on my own time.
Shitty things give me a reason to get up in the morning. It’s like I’m
the Roto-Rooter of movie reviewing, and shitty movies represent the
chunks of shit blocking the underground shit-pipe (which flows into,
um, the pristine ocean of cinematic artistry), and the only thing that
can save the day is the action blade of my righteous critical
word-snake, slicing and dicing through the subterranean
obstruction.

Wow. The deeper I get into this metaphor, the less I like being a
part of it.

Last Sunday, I saw three terrible movies. In a row. In this order:
Babylon A.D., Righteous Kill, and Bangkok
Dangerous. These movies have several things in common. All three
protagonists are renegades: a futuristic mercenary, a rogue cop, a
lonely assassin. All three renegades have good intentions (if not quite
hearts of gold). Also, all three movies make zero fucking
sense.

In Babylon A.D., Vin Diesel is Toorop, a bald, busty soldier
of fortune in the year Not-That-Long-From-Now-Wink-Wink. When a lumpy
Russian named Gorsky (Gerard Depardieu! Hoh-hoh-hohh!) conscripts
Toorop to smuggle a pretty lady (Melanie Thierry) to New York City, you
know what’s coming—yep, iiiiit’s ROAD TRIP TIME!!! Against the
combined wisdom of a thousand lifetimes, I sometimes find myself
attracted to the barely conscious Vin Diesel. I assume it’s some
visceral, hormonal nesting instinct that causes me to seek out the man
most likely to defeat a saber-toothed tiger in hand-to-paw combat.
Anyway, this movie is about a psychic Russian nun impregnated with
magic babies for no reason. It has possibly the worst ending in all of
cinema.

Righteous Kill is about two grizzled police detectives
(Robert De Niro and Al Pacino) who are also best fwiends! One of
them is secretly murdering “dirtbags” and leaving horrid little
poems at the crime scenes: “Merchant of the thieving class/I slit
his throat and capped his ass.” “He took what women would not give/He
did not have the right to live.” This movie is worse than Babylon
A.D. No joke.

And, finally, Bangkok Dangerous, which raises a lot of
questions. For example: How hard does Nicolas Cage have to poop? Is
Nicolas Cage part shark, or are all sharks part Nicolas Cage? Is it
written into Nicolas Cage’s contract that he must be allowed to wear
loose, breathable sweat pants for at least 75 percent of all his films?
And, most importantly, Nicolas Cage’s hair: WTF? Just what exactly is
clinging to the top of that head? A prehistoric beaver pelt? A coal
miner’s sooty beard? The mystery deepens. But one thing’s for
sure—it’d clog the shit out of your sewer pipe. (Call me!
Metaphorically.)