The Dynamic Duo

I just got back from watching The Recruit at the dollar theater and I have a few insights, to share with anyone who’s interested, concerning a general trend in cinema. You see I also recently watched The Hunted with Benicio Del Torro and Tommy Lee Jones and have come to the startling conclusion that all new plot ideas for movies are being summarily rejected in favor of ones which have been proven successful in the past. The prime example of this is The Hunted, a story about a veteran from special ops who has been having flashbacks from combat experience and surprise surprise, might just be a little crazy. So he is hiding out in the woods and kills some hunters who he thinks are after him, so who can the authorities turn to in their need to catch him? Why the man who trained him of course… Anybody else seeing a similarity here? Why didn’t they just call the film Rambo Revisited, then they could skipped the elaborate back-story (approximately 43 seconds of the film). Now I don’t want to be too harsh, there are some obvious differences between this film and Rambo, Rambo didn’t suck for instance. Also Sylvester Stallone was a good actor, no offense to award winning Benicio Del Torro, but he not only successfully suppressed his accent for the film but also any actual acting ability he may possess. Of course to be fair to him he did have to work with the dialogue (if you are so charitable to call it that) that they gave him. I wish I had the script right here in front of me so that I could quote it exactly because I can’t make it suck quite as bad as they did, I’m just not that talented. The most poignant speech given was when Del Torro was talking to a little girl and explaining to her how to track, by showing her the squirrel tracks in the grass when they here her cat meowing or something and the girl asks something about whether they should get the cat and he says “no, he is hunting too”. Now let’s forget for a second that this is an obvious attempt to make the audience think this guy is a real badass and all in sync with nature and whatnot, let’s focus on the fact that this statement made no sense. He’s hunting TOO? Too as in addition to? Well that would be all fine and dandy except for the fact that Benicio and the girl weren’t hunting… The best lines from Tommy Lee Jones were nothing but an impassioned recital of the Colonel’s speech in Rambo. “How many men are you willing to lose?.... You better get a good supply of body bags because if you go after him like that then that’s what you’re going to need”. The other things I have to say about the movie are more about why it so colossally sucked, rather than how it was the Cheap Taiwanese Generic version of Rambo, so I will skim over these briefly. Tommy Lee is chasing after Del Torro as are about 400 FBI agents and miscellaneous other agencies, and yet not only is Tommy Lee the one that finds him (with enough time to spare to engage in drawn out combat) but they both have time to stop along the way and make their own knife. Tommy chips his out of rock (I’m like… “Tommy, they aren’t after you, you can just hop on down to a Sporting Goods Store and buy a real knife.. and do it a hell of a lot faster than you can chip that piece of crap out of stone”), and Del Torro goes all out, heating up metal and pounding it into the shape… I guess the FBI must not be exceedingly fast huh? Then there are the fight scenes where the camera jerks around and the only real dialogue is both characters grunting loudly every few seconds or making some kind of sound showing pain when they are cut (approximately 56 times each).

This and other numerous examples have convinced me that reincarnation is alive and well in the cinematic world (although Rambo must have had some seriously bad karma to have come back like that steaming pile). But less you think that old movie plots are the only ones that are being revisited, let me remind you of the countless remakes that we get, even from movies that weren’t good the first time around, Mr. Deeds I’m talking to you. But aside from this, even recent movies have been shamelessly ripped off. I’m speaking of The Recruit of course, which was actually an entertaining enough movie, but it had some striking similarities to a few movies (actually a lot more I’m sure but these two just came to mind). Despite being the typical spy thriller with all the cloak and dagger, figure out what’s going on, type of stuff, this through in a little touch of Insomnia, in the form of the very star of Insomnia, Al Pacino who was afflicted with that same condition in this film. Also we got a good deal of Matrix paraphrasing, “come through the looking glass, nothing you know is real, everything is a test, blah blah blah”. So yeah good times. Anyway, I think I’ve written about enough about this but if any of the rest of you have noticed this type of trend and want to comment or would just like to bitch about how bad some movie or another sucks please feel free to do it here, I would really enjoy to find out that I’m not (or am) alone in this.