Henry said:
I saw it Saturday, and I enjoyed it; it was a fun movie. About the only part I didn't like was the Carter Slade bit: "Well, here's the gun, stick to the shadows, I can't help you, by bye." Why the hell did he ride with him, then?
I think the ostensible reason was that Blaze didn't know how to get there. But personally, I found that the whole thing just rushed through the motions of being a comic book movie. There are just so many ways it was lacking.
Scenes occur and characters somehow stumble across other characters just because they're supposed to. Johnny just happened to go to his father's grave, where Slade just happened to be the caretaker? Reminds me of those last scenes in Daredevil with Electra and Bullseye both managing to track him down while he's aimlessly rooftop-hopping.
I've listened to my share of DVD director commentaries, including the deleted scenes, and I can tell you this movie suffers badly from this nasty imperative that directors often visit upon themselves to keep everything moving along. It's not important to do this scene right, it's important to bring the next scene online as quickly as possible. I can envision how many events were played for greater effect in the script, but the director just decided to go for something perfunctory instead. That is why, for instance, Carter Slade rides all the way to the swamp then just leaves.
Notice also how weak those battles with the elemental demons were. In each encounter, the respective demon gets one slam in on GR, after which GR revves up his fire and promptly annihlates them without much spectacle. Very tame action scenes, really.
It's funny, Roger Ebert mentioned in his review of Blade 3 how in these sort of movies the super-unbeatable-all-powerful bad guy invariably starts tossing the hero around the set, which winds up giving the hero the breathing space he needs to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Sure enough, guess what happens here?
We also get that Schuemacheresque rationale that because this is a comic-book movie, it's cool for everyone to behave like over-the-top charicatures. The cops show up in massive force to arrest Blaze just because they find his license plate lying somewhere in the miles-long swath of destruction, and based on this mountain of evidence we get treated to a silly good-cop/bad-cop routine on him as they try to get him to confess. Now, they have absolutely no motive and the circumstances they're dealing with--flaming troughs in the road, death by instant popciclization--should leave them totally stumped, and they are dealing with a national celebrity, but forget all that, right? Let's basically overreact and arrest him with nothing to go on so we can have a scene with him thrown in lockup where his fellow cellmates, being cartoony mooks, attack him almost immediately for entirely spurious reasons. Dumb-de-dum.
Let's see what else? Oh, preppyesque Wes Bentley is about as menacing as Corey Haim.
A friend who went to the movie with me also pointed the formulaic resemblance to Spawn. Demon-cursed hero, grimy old buzzard mentor, the spikes, the chains, the fire. Of course, unbeknownst to him, GR came first in the comics, so it was kind of an amusing observation.
AFIC, I spent $8.50 to watch a preview of Grindhouse, and a buck for GR. That's the only way to reconcile the expense.
