Tag Archives: continuity can go fuck itself

12 Rounds

I ducked into the dollar movie last Wednesday to watch 12 Rounds, which is kind of a puzzling film. At first glance, it’s a cross between Speed and Die Hard 3, in which our New Orleans cop hero is forced by a vengeful international terrorist to cater to his every whim, one round at a time, or risk the death of his pixie-looking but tough wife. And within the set time limits, for added tension. The characters’ puzzle-solving skills are dumbed down just a little too much for my personal taste, possibly as an artifact of the WWE audience that was its primary target, but by and large it’s a serviceable action movie as put together by a, y’know, vengeful international terrorist.

And then there’s this weird turning point in the final act where the cops and FBI guys suddenly get a lot more intelligent than they’d been at any previous moment, and using clues that do not actually exist anywhere in the prior scripting, they determine that this movie has a twist ending wherein revenge was never really the point. And suddenly there are unreferenced helicopter pilots in the cast, and it’s all very much like a particularly imaginative audience member at one of the test screenings had said, “You know what would be a cooler ending than what we just watched?” and the writer and director had nodded and just created this new, purportedly cooler ending out of whole cloth without worrying about the fact that they needed to alter the rest of the movie for that to make any kind of sense.

This is maybe not as bad as it sounds. I mean it was bad, no question, but it was also interesting in a head-spinning kind of way to see the rules of plotting be so flagrantly ignored. Very few movies are (let’s say) brave enough to make this kind of artistic decision. Kudos?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Summer arrived at last. Technically, it arrived in the form of a horrendous downpour that was among the worst I’ve experienced from the driver’s seat. But the important thing is, I and my companions got to the theater in time, so none of that matters. What does matter is having seen the Wolverine movie, and having it work pretty well. Explosions: check. Pathos: check. A few new mutants, both familiar (to me, that is) and un-: check. Matches current movie series continuity: check. Matches current Marvel continuity: well, okay, that part not so much, although it could be that it matches some Ultimate continuity I have not yet exposed. However, I do not care that it didn’t, because all the other parts were done pretty well.

In the end, it was a nice little summer comic book movie, better than some that have been released over the past decade; and I have no driving need for more. Though if they want to give me a simultaneously hysterical and horrific riff on the Superman origin story while they’re at it, I am willing to laugh and cringe appropriately, and with a song in my heart. Well, y’know, sort of. Maybe less so during the cringe?