You may remember a while back I made a photo gallery of sorts for the Hail HYDRA meme. Now I'm doing it again for another meme...
AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENAAAAAA!!!!!!
I dare you to wear headphones and turn the volume up as high as it will go while watching these. If you don't do it, you're a chicken and not cool, and I won't let you join my club.
A dreaded criminal mastermind has broken
out of prison after being behind bars for a year. During that time, he’s stewed
in his feelings of hatred and rage towards those who ruined his life, driving
him to terrotise the city upon his escape. Only a WWE superstar can save the
day…
Some of the skills needed for
professional wrestling, such as the ability to put on a good show or react to
what your colleagues are doing, lend themselves well to acting, so it’s not
uncommon for wrestlers to try their hand at acting in films and TV shows. 12 Rounds sees John Cena take a stab at
stepping outside the ring, but does his film win the Royal Rumble, or get KOed
by a submission hold?
Miles Jackson, international arms dealer
and the only Irish terrorist in fiction not affiliated with the IRA, is about
to be caught red handed, but the informant confesses to Miles at the last
moment that he’s wearing a wire, so Miles and his girlfriend do a runner. The
police are fired upon by Miles’ henchmen and have to deal with them, while
officer John Cena chases Miles on foot. To his credit, he’s able to keep up
despite Miles having a car by re-enacting the chase from the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, minus the bit
where Ferris Bueller falls through the air in slow motion while everyone else
moves at normal speed. When John Cena catches up to the car, Miles’ girlfriend
gets out and flees on foot, only to get intimately acquainted with the road
surface almost immediately thanks to not looking before she crossed. Miles
gives himself up, but he swears that one day, he will get his revenge on John
Cena.
That day comes a year later, just as
John Cena is thinking about settling down with his girlfriend. Miles engineers
a prison riot to cover his escape, then upon getting out he blows up John
Cena’s house (You’ll be glad to hear his dog is safe because it ran outside
when John Cena did. Unfortunately, the plumber who was in the house at the same
time wasn’t so lucky.)
John Cena’s girlfriend was going on
holiday on a boat at the same time, but she gets kidnapped by Miles, who was
also on the boat. He then contacts John Cena to tell him his girlfriend has
been captured and Miles will take what John Cena took from him – unless John
Cena plays 12 Rounds. I always get so excited when they say the title of a movie in the movie!
Miles gives John Cena 12 challenges. If
he beats them all, he gets his lady friend back. If not, she dies, and then a
lot of other people die when the city goes boom. So far, so Die Hard with a Vengeance. Rounds 1 and
2 have already been. Round 3 is to figure out where to go next, which ends up
being the scene of a fire. Round 4 is to brave the fire to find two boxes with
clues to the next round. John Cena does that, only to find out that one of the
boxes is a bomb! Round 5 is to get the boxes somewhere safe then figure out
which is the clue and which is the bomb, which proves easy enough since one of
them is ticking and the other isn’t.
Round 6 takes the form of a trap. John
Cena is lured to a hotel lift with a security guard when Miles announces that
the lift will fall in one minute and they have to decide which of them will be
saved. John Cena escapes with time to spare, but he is unable to save the
security guard despite his best efforts. Round 7 involves John Cena’s
girlfriend on a bus wearing a suicide bomb vest and Miles has the detonator.
John Cena wins by calling Miles’ bluff: since he’s on the bus with them, if the
bomb goes off he dies too. For Round 8, John Cena is given a list of phone
numbers to call. One is safe, the rest will all activate a bomb attached to a
runaway train, and he has one minute to figure out the correct number. He
fails, and Round 9 is to stop the train before it runs over a carnival. While
this has been going on, John Cena’s colleague has been chasing after Miles’
accomplice for Round 10, only for Miles to blow both him and the accomplice up
with yet another bomb for Round 11.
At this point, John Cena is about ready
to give up, but he gets a second wind when it’s proven to him that Miles
cheated for several of the rounds. He ended Round 6 before the minute was up
because John Cena was about to save the security guard, and Round 8 had no safe
number, they would all activate the runaway train. John Cena also figures out
that all the rounds have been part of an elaborate bank heist. Miles has been
using John Cena as an unwitting accomplice and running the police ragged all
over the city at the same time, giving him as much time as he needs to steal
millions in out of circulation bank notes. Instead of going to the graveyard
for the official Round 12, John Cena heads to the hospital, where Miles is
getting into his escape helicopter. John Cena blows up the chopper, landing
safely with his girlfriend in a rooftop swimming pool, along with the stolen
fortune. Happy ending, right? Not really when you consider that since their
house blew up, they’re homeless now, and they can’t use the money to buy a new
house because even if it hadn’t been ruined by the explosion or water, it’s out
of circulation and therefore cannot be spent. At least they still have each
other, John Cena muses while mentally calculating how much overtime he’s earned
today.
It’s surprising how quickly the film
writes itself into a corner thanks to its concept. The 12 Rounds of the title
don’t work all that well, as about half of them are wasted on trivial minor
tasks, or combined. The first two are also done before the game officially
begins. It’s as if the film realised that 12 distinct challenges in a 90 minute
film was too ambitious, especially when the challenges don’t start until 30
minutes in, but instead of trying to resolve the problem, it half-asses the
challenges. The format would have probably worked better as a TV show or video
game, as each challenge could then have an episode or level dedicated to it.
With the gimmick being unable to achieve
its potential, it doesn’t help that this is not a particularly original film,
and a lot of what it riffs on has been done better elsewhere. As stated
earlier, the main plot owes a big debt to Die
Hard with a Vengeance, with a dash of Saw. There’s a sequence involving runaway public
transport, a la Speed. The European
accented villain and obstructive by-the-book law enforcement are action genre
clichés. The love interests of both the hero and villain are plot devices as
opposed to characters. An idea I had while watching to make it stand out a bit
more was a twist inspired by Greek mythology. The 12 Rounds reminded me of the
12 labours of Hercules, which lead me to think of the three central characters
as descendants of the three figures of the story of Persephone. John Cena’s
girlfriend is a descendant of Persephone, abducted by Hades against her will.
Miles Jackson is a descendant of Hades and a kidnapper. John Cena is a
descendant of Zeus, who forced Hades to return Persephone, and just as Hades
tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds that forced her to return to
the Underworld for a period of time every year, I was expecting some kind of
twist involving John Cena’s girlfriend. It didn’t happen, though I did get a
bit excited when it could be seen briefly that the next stop of the bus in
Round 7 was Elysium Fields, the Greek afterlife for the descendants and
champions of the gods. Such a twist could have easily been really lame, but it
would have been unique.
On the plus side, John Cena is likeable
enough as the protagonist. To his credit, he doesn’t imitate another action
hero’s shtick, instead being one to think on his feet and being clever enough
to solve Miles’ riddles. He is portrayed as being sensitive and empathetic, and
even expressing doubt in his own abilities and whether he should carry on with
his quest when innocent people are killed. It’s just as well that he gets some
degree of depth, as he has to carry the film himself for the most part, and the
other characters are stock archetypes.
After a decent start, it’s disappointing
to see 12 Rounds fail to make the
most of its intriguing premise, despite John Cena’s best efforts to make it
somewhat watchable. Tap out.
The first 3D title by renowned cult 2D
studio Treasure, Freak Out (or Stretch Panic, its more descriptive
American title) was released on PS2 in 2001. I got it as part of an Ebay bundle
for 99p. Freak Out is what happens when you get the idea of making a game after
binging on an entire family size bag of skittles, but have I stumbled across a
hidden gem here?
Freak
Out tells the tale of Linda, a girl
who’s bossed around and treated as a slave by her 12 vain older sisters because
she isn’t as fixated on her appearance as they are. It starts off as a Japanese
take on Cinderella, but this is where
things get weird. One day, a mysterious package is delivered to the sisters,
and when they open it, 12 demons come out and transform the sisters into
monsters. Because of her kind heart, Linda isn’t transformed. Instead, the 13th
demon attaches itself to her scarf, bringing it to life. With her new scarf,
Linda sets off to save her older sisters.
The main, and indeed only, mechanic you’ll
be making use of in Freak Out is
Linda’s scarf. It has the ability to grab onto objects and stretch them before
letting go. This can be used either to inflict damage to enemies, or on the
environment to catapult Linda onto higher ledges, which you might need to do as
she can’t jump otherwise. It’s a good idea, although it takes a while to get
used to moving Linda’s scarf independently of her and telling where the scarf
is. The camera is also pretty bad, since the right stick is used to control the
scarf and the lest stick is used for Linda, meaning camera movement is limited
to tapping L2 to centre it behind Linda. Even then, it’s slow moving, meaning
that it can be tough at times knowing where Linda is in relation to enemies.
The progression is similarly unorthodox.
The bulk of the game is a series of boss battles against each of Linda’s
sisters, like a primary coloured Shadow
of the Colossus. The catch is you need to use points to pay a toll before
attempting each battle, and to get those you’ll need to enter the EX levels.
These levels involve Linda EXploring (See what they did there?) an environment to
find enemies and defeat them to gain points. The enemies are all women with
enormous breasts, and they’re defeated by grabbing them with your scarf, with
points only being awarded for grabbing them from behind.
Yes, groping cartoon women is a game
mechanic. Japan isn’t exactly known for enlightened gender attitudes.
Most of the boss battles are fairly
similar, and involve grabbing the bosses with your scarf and stretching them
repeatedly, although some have weak points you can exploit to inflict more
damage and render them vulnerable. On the plus side, some of the bosses are
more unique in how they’re battled, such as the bipolar 2nd sister, who
switches between a good and evil form, and her minions must be thrown away from
her while she’s good, or they’ll attack Linda while the boss is evil, and the 10th
sister’s battle, in which Linda must protect a team of astronauts until they
shoot the boss, enabling Linda to damage her. The most inventive, and also
difficult, battle is the 9th sister, who takes the form of an unseen
horror movie monster and is defeated by grabbing and slamming doors in her face
while she’s trying to break them down. The bosses all look very distinct with a
unique theme, (The 5th sister is a satellite, the 8th
sister attacks with a Chain Chomp, the 11th sister is a Yamask-resembling
mummy that can summon sandstorms, and so on) so it’s a shame that not all their
battles benefit from the same imagination, since they form the core of the
game.
You may think that there wouldn’t be
much to a game that’s 90% boss battles, and unfortunately you would be correct.
It quickly becomes clear that the EX levels and point collecting are only there
to pad out what would otherwise be a very short game. You can unlock new
battles by defeating each sister, but if you want to complete the game, you’ll
have to use the scarf bomb attack to exorcise the demons possessing the sisters.
This ability can be used while grabbing a boss to create two more scarf arms
that grab the boss and once all three arms are attached, shaking them around
frantically will deal massive damage to the boss, as well as cause an explosion
that removes the demon and turns the sister back to normal after the battle.
The catch is that this ability costs 5 points per use, which means more points
and thus more padding, which really should not be the case.
Freak
Out is a neat concept, but that’s all
it is. There’s no fleshing out of the mechanics or more creative uses of the
scarf. Why not have puzzles that involve carrying items around, or pushing and
pulling? Why not have more traversal mechanism, such as using the scarf to
climb up walls or hang from ledges safely? There’s a lot more that could have
been done with the idea, but it’s sadly wasted. At least the game was cheap.
Graphics: 6 Bright and colourful, if blocky. They do the job.
Sound: 5 A generic soundtrack with nothing standing out in either a
good or bad way.
Gameplay: 5 The skeleton of a good game is here, but there’s no meat on the
bones.
Lifespan: 3 Without grinding for points, you could beat it within an hour. Even
with grinding, it only lasts 2-3 hours.
Overall: A bizarre curiosity that will
almost certainly be one of the strangest games you come across. It’s definitely
original, but originality alone isn’t enough to carry it.
I’ve alluded to this one a few times
here, but now it’s finally time for me to take a look at it. Fant4stic was one
of the biggest casualties of last year’s summer blockbuster season, with a
disastrous production period and negative audience anticipation leading to
terrible reviews, a single digit score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a box office
bomb. The result killed the career of director Josh Trank outright, and damaged
those of stars Miles Teller and Toby Kebbell (Michael B Jordan and Kate Mara
were very lucky, as they bounced back a few months later with Creed and The Martian respectively.) Amidst the backlash, did the film itself
get a fair shake? Do we have a misunderstood diamond in the rough on our hands?
Sorry, couldn’t do that with a straight
face. Get your popcorn ready folks, this is gonna be a slaughter.
Young Reed Richards gets an F on his
science homework for writing about teleporters, which his teacher is convinced
aren’t real. To prove the teacher wrong, Reed builds one and breaks into the
local junkyard to get the parts, while narrowly avoiding getting assaulted with
a baseball bat by his classmate Ben Grimm. Their teleporter works, albeit with
the side effect of causing a citywide blackout. The second attempt at
a school science fair years later limits the destruction to a basketball hoop,
but at least the teacher is pleased as the destruction gets them disqualified
and he achieves what Frank Grimes couldn’t: humiliating grown men by entering
them into a contest for children and laughing as they lose. However, one person
is impressed – Franklin Storm, who recruits Reed to his teleporter project. (Big Hero 6, is that you?) This leads me
to a thought I had while watching: Does Franklin regularly go to science fairs
to recruit children for his experiments, or does he just really like baking
soda volcanoes?
Reed is set to work alongside Franklin’s
daughter Susan (prompting the most “Because the source material says so”
romance since The Last Airbender),
his son Johnny, who isn’t a scientist and is only here as punishment for
crashing his car during a street race (I can only assume Michael B Jordan was
trying to reach 88MPH so that he could skip this film and go straight to Creed), arrogant creep Victor Von Doom
and a lot of 8-year-olds with baking soda volcanoes. Doom convinces Reed and
Johnny to get wasted with him and for the three of them to test the teleporter
because he wants them to have the credit for their work instead of a third
party astronaut. Reed invites Ben to join them while Doom distracts Susan by
telling her to go to the kitchen and make him a sandwich (He’s a misogynist, so
he’s okay with not letting Susan join them despite his rousing speech earlier.)
The four go into the teleporter, but as they leave a fly buzzes in with them
and they all degenerate into Jeff Goldblum fly hybrids!
Oops, I started thinking of a better
film there, the fly thing doesn’t happen. What does happen is that the four
find themselves on a desolate alien planet (Thor:
The Dark World says hi) covered in green goo, which Reed surmises is an
energy source. Doom’s astronaut training was limited to watching Prometheus while drunk, so he gets the
brilliant idea of tasting the goo while Reed puts up a flag, but the flag being
planted in the ground causes the planet to go haywire and start erupting green
goo everywhere. The goo is acid now and Doom is seemingly killed by it (he's lucky this happened before the goo he ate did a number on his insides)
and the other three escape, but the teleporter malfunctions and each of them
has a terrible misfortune befall them between dimensions. Same goes for Susan
even though she wasn’t there. The teleporter felt bad for her so she got to
have powers too. This wouldn’t have happened if they’d worn their safety
glasses! And not watched Prometheus while
drunk, that film could be named How Not
to Astronaut: The Movie and nobody would complain.
Before we move on, allow us to spare a
thought for Doom’s sandwich, which Susan made for him, but he never came back
to eat. In the ensuing chaos, it’s likely the sandwich was forgotten
and lay uneaten until it went stale and was thrown away
Everyone has powers now, but they’ve
been captured by the military and are being made to do secret black ops
missions (Captain America: Winter
Soldier, check.) Reed is able to use his stretchy powers to escape, but the
other three are left behind for a year while Reed fixes cash registers and
lives in a log cabin. That is until Ben comes to get Reed for one of his
missions and captures him with an apathetic looking headbutt. (Friends become
enemies, Spider-Man 3!) During Reed’s
absence, the military have repaired the teleporter and want him to go back to
the planet to find a cure/get more goo. He doesn’t do either of those things,
but he does find Doom, having somehow survived the acid eating away at his
insides. Doom comes back to Earth, but it’s all part of his plan to take over/
destroy the world, I’m not sure which as I’d fallen asleep 30 minutes ago by
this point. Then he goes all Scanners on
the military people, which is the only bit that’s kinda good because it nails
Doctor Doom’s attitude – so full of himself that he pays no attention to all
the insignificant people around him that he kills. It’s still better in Scanners though, because the people here
whose heads explode are all wearing helmets.
Not like this poor sod.
Doom then kills Franklin, but not by
making his head asplode, that doesn’t work on named characters. With his dying
breath, Coulson, I mean Franklin implores the team to set aside their
differences and come together (just like in The
Avengers) which they do while Doom escapes and starts terraforming Earth to
make it like his planet (Would Man of
Steel please stand up?) The Four go to the planet once again (Final battle,
different dimension? Someone’s been watching Ant Man) and use teamwork to defeat Doom (X-Men 3, here we go). Doom was a load bearing boss and the planet
is destroyed following his death, but the four are able to escape just in time and
get a sweet base out of the deal where a smoking crater used to be (Avengers: Age of Ultron, BINGO!)
As for what happened to the teacher, he
gets to rub shoulders with Bruce Campbell’s theatre usher from Spider-Man 2 as a member of an elite
group of superhero movie antagonists who defeated the heroes and never got
their comeuppance.
What can be said about Fant4stic that hasn’t already been said?
Not much, as it turns out. Ironically, despite the film’s desire pre-release to
distance itself from the previous Fantastic Four films, it’s content to copy
all of the plot points beat for beat. The previous film covered empowering the
team in about 30 minutes, with the remaining hour going over how the four
became a team. In an inversion of what you’d expect, this one takes twice as
long just to give everyone their powers, then spins its wheels with angst for a
bit before quickly bringing the team together in the final 15 minutes. This isn’t satisfying
because even with the increased time, there’s very little interaction between
the team members, and certainly nothing that makes you care for them. Ben barely
even speaks to Susan or Johnny and falls out with Reed, so there’s no reason
for him to be there. Likewise with Johnny, who falls out with Susan and doesn’t
interact with the other two. Franklin dying near the end is a cheap trick to
bring the four together which really shouldn’t work since they barely know each
other, and those who argue don’t reconcile. It doesn’t help that the film
abuses time skips to avoid any chances at character development, preferring to
tell as opposed to showing. Then again, this may be for the best, as some of
the dialogue is atrocious. (Army Man: “What if we say no?” Reed: “Say yes.”
This scene could be dubbed over with the “I implore you to reconsider” scene
from Kung Pow and it would be an
improvement.)
The race change for Johnny Storm, Susan
being an adopted sibling, and the response towards these changes was much
publicised prior to the film’s release. Personally, I didn’t oppose it, as the
sense of what a family is has changed in the 50 years since the characters were
first introduced, and such a change provided a chance for the film to do
something new, both in terms of modernising the story and as a way of placing
greater emphasis on the idea that family is not restricted to blood relations.
Disappointingly, the film wastes this opportunity. Susan says to Reed in
passing that she is adopted, and nothing more comes of this. The adoption angle
could have provided character development for Susan, to explore her feelings of
loneliness at leaving her native Kosovo and living with a father and brother
who aren’t biologically related to her, before growing as a person when she
settles with her new family. This could have even made her invisibility powers
thematically appropriate. While Johnny being black is progressive in some ways,
the film negates this by having Johnny not be a scientist like the others and
by having him be on the project against his will when he would rather be
racing, with the presumably unintended implication of the black team member
being less capable and willing than the three white members.
Unfortunately, this summer’s Ghostbusters
remake/reboot/re-whatever looks to be making the same mistake.
Another key selling point for the film
was that it would be a darker and edgier re-imagining of the Fantastic Four, with
the big question here being what if the team didn’t want their powers and
viewed them as a curse? This doesn’t amount to much either, as the only scene
where there’s any implication of this plot point is when the team first use
their powers after being captured. The rest of the film is your typical
superhero movie. Never mind that plenty of other superhero films, such as X-Men, Spider-Man, Man of Steel and even
the previous Fantastic Four films
have done it before as well, so it’s hardly unique. You can see how not unique this film is from how I started playing bingo whenever I spotted something that had been
done before. The one thing that is somewhat unique is how the four get their
powers. Unlike most other superheroes, who are empowered at birth, suffer a
freak accident or choose to be a superhero for the sake of themselves or
others, this incarnation of the Fantastic Four get their powers because of
Drunk Science, which effectively means their powers are the ultimate hangover. “Did we do drunk science again? This has to stop!” Technically, there was a freak accident,
but it was caused entirely through their own stupidity and irresponsibility.
Once again, I must name and shame Ben, as he wasn’t drunk at the time and was
invited after the boozing, so he should have been responsible enough to talk
the others out of their adventure, or at least make them wait until they’ve sobered up.
I wish we’d gotten this film instead.
I dearly wish I could give this film an
ironic score, a Fantastic 4/10 if you will. But alas, even that would be giving
it far too much credit. It’s easy to draw comparisons to Hulk, but that film was at least an ambitious failure, whereas this
one doesn’t even have that going for it. When riffing on a film isn’t even enough to
keep you awake, let alone entertained, you know it’s a disaster. Fant4stic is a misguided, cynical mess
of a film with no redeeming qualities. See you in 7 years for the next reboot,
I guess.
1/10
Enough negativity, let’s talk about
something positive. The other week, I saw a picture of shirtless Zac Efron and
he is ripped! This was illustrating a newspaper article on an increase in
eating disorders in men, but I wasn’t really paying attention to that because I
was too busy being gay for Zac Efron. It’s like as soon as High School Musical 3 finished filming, he went to the gym and
never came out. This is a man who definitely even lifts, bro. I bet he could
snap Leonardo Dicaprio in half like a twig if he wanted to.
Pictured: Zac Efron at the gym, where he even lifts, bro.
Pictured: Zac Efron snapping Leonardo Dicaprio in half like a twig.
Zac Efron: "This is for not giving up your Oscar for Michael B Jordan or Idris Elba!"
It's probably too late to do an #OscarsSoWhite joke now, but I don't care. I just watched Fant4stic, let me have this!
