Identify Thief
I hate this movie so much.
This is a classic, stupid, road-trip, piece-of-shit movie that Hollywood loves to produce and defecate on the masses every year. The set-up is as generic as possible. Jason Bateman plays an average, everyday schmuck who has his identity stolen by brash, morbidly obese Melissa McCarthy. She has stolen his identity, racked up huge credit card bills, and put him in trouble with his employer. He travels across the country to set things right. What happens next is a prolonged road-trip where he uses her to clear up all the problems with his employer. Of course, in typically cliche fashion, they learn from one another and becomes friends in the process. This story has been told a billion times before, and this movie brings nothing new to the table. The characters are completely bland and one-dimensional. McCarthy uses physical “comedy” to elicit laughs from the audience. She punches a lot of people in the balls and runs away. This, I think, is the primary gag in the movie. It is also a sad commentary on what this film is. It’s a punch in the balls to the audience. If you paid money to see this shit, you got punched in the balls. If you saw it for free on Netflix, you still got punched in the balls, because this movie sucked 111 minutes of your life away. Don’t waste your time with this stinky piece of shit.
Verdict: Shitty
The World’s End
British culture summarized in a single picture.
The World’s End is directed by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and written by Wright and Pegg. It features the exploits of 6 childhood friends who return to their hometown to complete a famous pub crawl called “The Golden Mile.” The final pub on the crawl is the aptly named “World’s End.” The movie also forms the third act of the loose thematic “Cornetto Trilogy.” It’s one of those trilogies where none of the movies have anything in common except for the actors, director, and some thematic elements. I call bullshit on the fact they planned this as a trilogy. I bet they never had any consciousness of a trilogy back when they made the first or even second installments, but it only dawned on them when this movie went into production. In any case, the movie shows how different each of the 6 friends have become. Five of them have grown up, but one, Gary King played by Pegg, is still living life like he was 18 years old. He’s a drunk, a drug-addict, and an all-around loser. He revels in the nostalgia the pub crawl brings, while his other friends are wary of it. As the pub crawl goes on, the comedy becomes greater, and the characters warm up to each other. It seemed like things were really going to get deep, with serious character introspection, when the film throws a sudden curveball. It turns out that the town has been overrun by alien/bodysnatching robots. They started with this small town, and have plans for global domination. Only the 6 friends stand in their way. Things go balls-out crazy from this point forward. There are zany action scenes, chase sequences, killer robots, and heaping doses of comedy throughout the final act. The film turns itself into a commentary on our modern society and how everything has become homogenized (essentially all the pubs are identical) and how we have become like zombies, enslaved by our own technology. Zombies, hmm, yes, the alien robots are pretty much exactly like zombies. Which brings me to my biggest complaint about the film. The first film in the “Cornetto Trilogy,” Shaun of the Dead, was a spoof on zombie movies. The second, Hot Fuzz, was a spoof on cop movies. This film, sort of backtracks and does the zombie thing again. The town is overrun, the heroes are outnumbered, and slowly they are all turned into alien robots. They already did this before, and it seems like the filmmakers are spinning their wheels. The other problem was that the character depth we were just on the brink of experiencing was thrown away in favor of chases and fights. The characters do show growth by the end, but only in the most superficial ways (Gary quits drinking). To be perfectly honest, I greatly preferred the first half of the film. I want to see more of that, I want to see where those characters go in an organic way, without all the gimmickry of alien robots. Alas, we’ll never know. Overall, though, this was a fun movie. It was about something, had a deeper message, and had great action and comedy. Of the “Cornette Trilogy,” I’d say it’s my second favorite entry. Here’s how I would rank all three films:
Hot Fuzz > The World’s End > Shaun of the Dead
Verdict: Good
Awesomely Shitty 