Sarcastic Movie Reviews

“The Raid: Redemption” is a fantastic visual orgy of violence with one of the most moronic plots in cinematic history.

If you didn’t pick it up from the incredibly awkward title, this is an Indonesian martial arts action film.

So, sit back, grab yourself a large cup of “Yellow Surprise Drinking Water”, and prepare to be entertained.

Unless you’re looking for a plot, in which case I suggest that you take your “Vegetarian Swallow Balls” and wander into the next theatre.

Listen, we’re talking about a film in which a guy battles two opponents with a light bulb sticking out of his neck.

Pac-Man had a more compelling story than this.

The film opens with the most hilarious piece of exposition that I’ve ever heard.

The captain of a SWAT team, sitting the back of an armored police van, gives his crew a little pep talk that goes something like this:

“I don’t have to tell you how dangerous the leader of this gang is. He’s living in an apartment building that is untouchable, and it’s filled with many terrible tenants, who are heavily armed, and most of you will probably die.”

So much for  “I don’t have to tell you…”

Once they break into the building, someone trips the alarm, and the leader of the gang flips on the intercom to make an announcement:

“Attention slum dwellers. Anyone who kills a cop will get free rent for life.”

Free rent? Holy shit, that sounds like a great reason to get shot at!

Suddenly, every junkie and welfare case on the third floor shows up with a Cherkashin assault rifle and proceeds to waste 2/3 of the police force.

It’s like my pop used to say, “There’s nothing worse in this world, than a well-armed hobo”.

A handful of police survive and escape into an apartment where they blow a hole into the floor and jump through it.

Fortunately on this level everyone is just carrying rusty machetes.

This is a video game right?

I’m having a hard time with this logic.

There are 100 machine guns on the 5^th floor, but none of them will go down to the 4^th floor.

But wait; won’t you have to go up through the 5^th floor again anyway?

I mean, you escaped by blowing a hole into the floor, not the ceiling, and the gang leader is on the top floor.

Screw it…  you didn’t come into this movie to watch people get shot, you wanted to see people die in horrifically uncomfortable positions.

Heads, backs, legs, wrists… they serve only one purpose in this film:  To point in a direction that God never intended.

If someone left a bottle of ketchup on a table, you can bet that it’s going to be rammed up a nostril until an eye pops out.

Floor by floor, the carnage continues, along with a healthy dose of Hollywood cliché (including my all-time favourite scene: the one where the guy is hiding in the bathroom stall as the killer kicks open each door, and just before he kicks open the last stall, he’s called away).

The movie looks great, and the violence is completely over the top.

If you want a movie with a plot it gets 1 out of 5.

If you want something to discuss with your therapist, then I give it 5 out of 5.

I’m going to split the score like a scrotum with fork in it and give the movie 3 out of 5.

For God’s sake don’t let your kids watch this film.

8th floor, Ladies Lingerie, Sporting Goods, and Rusting Implements of Torture

I don’t ask for a lot in my movies, but when you give me a movie called “The Hunger Games”, would it have killed you to cast some people who actually looked hungry in it?

I dunno, but seeing a curvy woman in tight leather pants frolicking in the woods with a guy who looks like he just got back from the gym kind of sets the wrong tone for a story about a dystopian society where people are forced to eat grass to survive.

It’s like listening to Cee-Lo singing songs about the “Irish Potato famine.”

So, in a nutshell, the movie a combination of “The Running Man” and “Twilight.”

Here’s a question: Must EVERY teen flick written by a woman have a love triangle in it?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m down for the three-way in a story, but in my version there is some wah wah pedal in the soundtrack.

The main heroine of the story is “Katniss Everdeen”, a 16 year old girl played by a twenty one year old actress (and you wonder why men end up in jail).

Katniss is an occupant of “District 12”, which is an impoverished inbred section of society where the inhabitant’s primary purpose in life is to mine coal.

Or, if you prefer… “Kentucky”

Katniss spends her day hunting squirrels in the woods with a guy named “Gale”.

Did you write his name down? Good, because he gets three lines of dialogue in the entire film, and only two more scenes… but hey, at least he gets to purse his lips.

Somehow he’s an important character in this story, but I’ll be damned if I can tell why.

Listen, I’m just fucking grateful he wasn’t sparkling.

Anyway, there’s a vague explanation about a war, how District 12 lost (I guess the banjo-bomb wasn’t very successful), and how, in punishment, each district must offer up a child in a televised fight to the death, where there can be only one victor.

I wish “The View” had the same contractual agreement.

When the lottery finally arrives, Katniss volunteers to be a combatant when her little sister’s name is drawn.

Insert Gale pouting.

This is when we get to meet the only other person who has more than a page of dialogue — “Peta”, who is the boy whose name is drawn from District 12.

Peta is the slightly homelier version of Gale, but fortunately, has a crush on Katniss.

Cue the squeals of delight from the twelve year old girls.

Then… nothing happens for an hour.

Yup, that’s right.

We have a movie about kids locked in gladiatorial combat, except that there’s hardly any actual combat.

It’s like watching “Death Race 2000” but we spend half the movie in driver’s education.

Seriously, go get a snack, all that you’re going to miss is a cameo by Lenny Kravitz that serves no purpose other than to remind us that he can’t write a decent song anymore.

And there’s a lot of characters like that!!

Stephen Hawking could throw a baseball with a bigger arc than anyone in this film.

You can’t expect me to connect to a character simply because they share a sandwich with Katniss right before they die.

Even the deaths are boring!

If you gave me a movie where twenty four children would have to die, I would have hired a dozen writers and said “You have two pages of script each; make their demise interesting.”

Instead, most of the deaths happen off screen, which really doesn’t matter because the only thing that you know about them is that they had curly hair or that they were black.

Congratulations, you made the most non violent film about gladiatorial combat in the history of film.

Three out of five.

The fire doesn't even burn!!

Now, here’s where it gets confusing:

John, being pursued by the Union soldiers stumbles across the path of an Apache war party.

Everything is cool until a Union soldier shoots an Apache in cold blood.

In the middle of the ensuing battle, John rescues the captain of the Union soldiers, pissing off the Apache who then chase him into the mountains.

So much for not choosing sides, John.

Fortunately he seeks refuge in a cave which just happens to be filled with gold.

Gold good… angry Apaches bad… crazy bald guy inside of cave with a magical energy knife, even worse.

Why is there a Martian in a secret gold-filled cave on Earth?

I’m guessing “space taxes”…

Fortunately John simply shoots the guy.

Hey bald guy, you never bring a knife to a gun fight.

I guess he didn’t have Netflix.

Anyway, the guy has a magical medallion which transports John to Mars.

Just go with it…

Fortunately Mars’ gravitational pull is much less than on Earth which means that John is now basically Superman, and can leap over mountain tops.

Super Han Solo? What would that logo look like?

John’s leaping ability really impresses the natives, so much so that they imprison him.

Ok, then…

So John is shackled to a wall, and then a rebellious alien female gives him a drink of water that enables him to understand their language.

Hey, we don’t have time for “Dances with Wolves”… let’s just get this language shit out of the way.

It’s about this time that John figures out that she’s strong enough to snap the chains that are imprisoning him and he escapes.

Well, except that he doesn’t, and he gets recaptured.

His super powers are buggier than a Bethesda video game.

Maybe if I turn the movie off and then switch it back on, he’ll be able to snap the chains again.

At least he’s not being forced to carry around a fucking drum when he’s clearly completed the quest (yes Skyrim, I’m looking at you).

Sorry, back to the movie…

I’m having a difficult understanding if the aliens are or aren’t stronger than him.

One minute an alien is choking the life out of him and the next he’s standing in the middle of a pile of ten thousands steaming corpses that he just single-handedly dispatched.

Now, the director anticipated that you might actually start thinking in the middle of this film, and so in order to distract you they introduced a loveable “space dog”.

Anytime you start wondering why John Carter doesn’t simply leap away from trouble, or snap someone’s neck like a wishbone, the dog will fart.

Let’s just move on…

It seems that Mars has been destroyed by a giant moving city that has devastated all of the natural resources on the planet.

I think it was made by “Hummer”, but don’t quote me on that.

They are locked in a deadly stalemate with the last remaining city on Mars, which doesn’t move at all, but like all impressive space cities, it has a giant bridge that leads to the one gate that you can use to get inside.

5 bucks says that it’s a toll bridge.

One day, in the middle of a battle, a bald dude shows up and presents the king of the moving city with a special weapon that will allow him to vaporize his enemy.

Now, remember the opening cave scene where John shoots the bald dude and steals his medallion?

Right, well it appears that this guy had the option of vaporizing John from his barcalounger, but instead decided to turn his weapon into a fucking knife!

What? Was it recharging or something?

I’ll bet that he was playing some kind of Flash game with it.

10 hours of battery life? My ass!!

Anyway, what does the evil king decide to do with his new weapon of mass destruction?

Why, force the other king’s daughter to marry him of course.

Sorry, but didn’t you just tell me that this weapon can devastate an army? In fact, you just showed me a scene where this guy in fact, devastates an army.

What the hell is all this shit about a marriage?

And, for that matter, if you can devastate an army on your own, then why the hell are you employing an army?

Are they unionized or something?

Nothing in this movie makes a lick of sense.

I don’t understand why this walking city destroyed everything on the planet, I’m not sure if John’s problem is dietary or just really bad cardio, and I don’t know why, if you have an incredible weapon, and the ability to come to a planet that has trees on it, that you don’t just take your damn medallion and move into Versailles and staff it with teenaged Asian hookers.

Hell, you don’t even need the medallion; you have a fucking cave filled with gold!

Was the written by Adam Sandler?

Where the hell is Chewbacca when you need him?

Oh irony, have you come to pay us a visit again today?

“Act of Valor” the most videogamey movie to come out in the last twenty five years, doesn’t have any actors in it.

Bah, this is an action film! Who needs actors when we have fucking Navy Seals doing authentic Navy Seal shit, right?

Let’s put it this way: This movie was so ham fisted, that Jews won’t be allowed into the theatre unless they get permission from their Rabbi first.

The movie opens with a terrorist killing a bunch of children with an explosive filled ice cream truck.

Hmmm, I’m not sure if I’m understanding your subtly sir.

Are we supposed to dislike this man?

I mean, what kind of ice cream was he serving?

I’m only going to be 33% upset if it was Neapolitan.

Perhaps you should get him to punch a puppy as he’s walking away; no sense leaving anything to chance!

Well, now that we’ve established who the bad guys are, how do we know who the good guys are?

I know, let’s have a scene where a soldier finds out that he’s about to be a father, and right before he leaves on the mission he’ll have a barbeque on the beach with the other guys in his squad, and they’re all awesome parents, and they’ll go surfing!

See, now who can’t relate to a surfing, shooting, father?

This is fucking gold.

Now, just in case you don’t understand the nuances of an exploding candy truck, the filmmakers have generously supplied us with a droning voice-over to accompany the first half hour of a movie.

That way, when a guy looks at his wife, you instantly know that he’s thinking:

“This will be my last mission because I don’t want my son to be raised by my beautiful wife who will never remarry because she will be too busying mourning my death for the next sixty years.”

When really he’s thinking:

“Holy shit, I knocked her up? Jesus Christ, now her tits are going to sag.”

So anyway, the Navy Seals have to stop the evil Ice Cream guy, who is actually a Chechen rebel, working with Somalians and Mexicans,  who are planning on sending suicide bombers, armed with special metal detector-proof ceramic vests, through a tunnel into the heartland of America, where they will escape into the general population, allowing them to infiltrate  shopping malls in Las Vegas, causing havoc when they detonate their vests.

Las Vegas? Metal detectors? Shopping malls?

Listen, I was just in Las Vegas, and not only do you not have to pass through a metal detector in any shopping mall, they’ll hand you an aluminum Viking helmet filled with beer if you stop to tie your shoes.

Why are they wasting time with this bullshit technology?

If you want to kill tourists in Vegas, buy a machine gun; there’s a vending machine that sells them beside the twenty foot high statue of the hooker.

Here’s the best part.

When they do finally get to interrogate a terrorist, they don’t even torture him!

Nope, the interrogator shows the terrorist pictures of his family and then reasons with him by saying things like:

“You’ll never get to see them again if you don’t cooperate.”

Riiiiiight, because the Shoe Bomber is going to get fucking parole in 7 years (enjoy your stay in Cuba, mutherfucker; here’s a tent with your name on it).

Listen guys, if you want to make a 90 minute recruitment infomercial for the Navy Seals, then book some time on QVC.

A total embarrassment to film making.

I give it one star out of five.

Goona git some!!

When you’re standing on a ledge, one of the worst things that you can do is to look down.

Ok, the worst thing you could do would be to pay to see this film, but we’re assuming that it’s too late for that now, and you’re sitting in the theatre beside me.

In “Man on a Ledge”, Sam Worthington (he of the off again, on again Australian accent), is a former police officer who, now doing twenty years in a federal prison, is looking for revenge against “the man who done him wrong”.

Naturally, this involves standing on the side of a building somewhere.

If you’re thinking that he was planning on landing on the guy, then you’re way off, because that would actually make sense.

No, our hero wants all of New York to pay attention to his story, while his brother breaks into another building that is right across the street from him.

Listen, I know that it’s preposterous, but why fight it?

Here is the list of things you just have to accept if there’s any chance that you’re going to enjoy this film at all:

• You can bury just about anything in a cemetery because no one will question a coffin that only weighs 16 pounds. Then again, maybe sacks of sand now come with a certificate of death.
• Affirmative action has gotten so bad that New York City has been forced to hire cops with chronic short term memory loss, because they can’t seem to recognize the man who embarrassed them by escaping their custody a few months earlier. Oh, and he also used to be a cop on the same police force.
• There are still hotels in New York that have windows that aren’t sealed tighter than a Vatican page’s ass cheeks after three glasses of sacramental wine.
• People in New York actually give a shit if you want to kill yourself.
• The more elaborate the security system is, the more likely you can circumvent it with a Polaroid camera, a portable fire extinguisher and Phillip’s screwdriver.
• Your jacket pocket is much safer for a valuable object than a titanium wall safe with a retinal scanner.
• You can kill someone on the rooftop of a building, which is surrounded by skyscrapers, in the middle of the day, with news helicopters hovering nearby, without fear that anyone will witness anything.
• Kevin Bacon’s wife can still get acting roles.

I don’t want to say that this was a low budget film, but one of the “security” panels was made with the same shitty plastic covering that’s on my garage door keypad.

I give this film 2 accidental slips into an Australian accent out of 5.

Crikey, I feel like a shrimp about to be tossed on the barbie!!

You know those films in which a group of people are trapped somewhere, and are then butchered like pigs for the next ninety minutes?

I call them body count flicks, because once the premise is set up in the first act, it’s basically one gruesome death, every ten minutes, until the end of the film.

We’ve seen it set in abandoned space stations, abandoned summer camps, and abandoned mansions.

Look around you.

If you’re in a group with bunch of guys who are easily distinguishable because of their ethnicity, facial hair, or choice of hats, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, then you’re screwed.

Fat black dude, funny guy with a parrot, and hot chick with an accent will be the first to go, and if you’re in a wheelchair, just shoot yourself now.

In Liam Neeson’s latest film, “The Grey” he plays a hunter who, along with a group of roughnecks, survive a plane that crashes in a  section of secluded wilderness that is populated by a pack of killer wolves.

Secluded… abandoned… you’re not fooling me with this technicality; this should have been called “Frosty the 13th” because, at its core, it’s just about harpooning some horny teenagers in the boat house.

The film opens with Liam wandering around a secluded (there’s that word again) oil rig camp in Alaska.

Liam is sullen and suicidal, but the only thing that keeps him going is the memory of his wife who keeps getting ripped away from him in violent flashbacks while he’s lying in bed.

She keeps smiling and saying things like “Don’t be afraid”, except that she gets sucked out from under the sheets like her ankle is attached to Halley’s comet each time.

You know, whenever someone says “Don’t worry”, I usually start to worry, because no one ever says that when they’re giving you a cake, or a lap dance.

Try this out for an experiment sometime ladies; the next time you’re about to have sex with a man for the first time, smile and him and say “Don’t worry” and see how fast his erection disappears.

Anyway, on the plane ride back to civilization, the plane crashes and Liam, being an expert on wolves, determines that the must be near a den of wolves, and that if they want to survive they have to find shelter.

Then they run directly into the forest.

I’m sorry, but I thought that you wanted to get “away” from the wolves.

Running into the woods makes about as much sense as fleeing to Florida to get away from Quebecers.

One by one the group begins to fall, which is always a challenge when the only thing the director has to work with is a pack of man eating dogs.

Give a guy a hockey mask and tool shed and the choices for impalement are endless, but you can only rip someone’s throat out in so many different ways before it gets boring.

Fortunately this is where Mother Nature steps in and offers up a tasty menu of hypothermia, sheer cliffs, churning rapids and, if Al Gore had his way, exposure to ultraviolet radiation because of the thinning ozone layer above them.

Now, in order to make us care about who is about to die, the meat sacks, in between each savage owl attack, pour out their life story to one another or argue about which direction they should be traveling in.

Guaranteed that, as soon as someone says something witty, or two people shake hands, there will be a crimson spray that will shoot out across the nice, white, snow.

You want character arcs? Watch the arc of the blood as it spurts out of someone’s jugular.

This brings us to the climatic ending, which I can’t reveal, except to say that it will totally piss you off.

Imagine watching “Aliens” but at the end, Sigourney Weaver careens her spaceship wildly in front of some space cops, who pull her over, only to discover that the Alien Queen is hiding in the back seat, and they arrest her.

Here’s a tip…  stick around through the credits because there’s a final, secret scene that explains in greater detail, what happens at the end of the film.

It doesn’t make the ending any better, but as long as you’re angry, you might as well be really angry, which you will be after sitting around for 5 more minutes and finding out who the fucking “Best Boy” was before they finally show it to you.

I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Im angry, Im cold, and Im Irish... bring it, meat sack.

Watching “Haywire” is like watching a championship sumo wrestling team performing  “Swan Lake”.

It’s so freakishly bizarre, that you can’t look away.

“Haywire” is stacked full of amazing actors; Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, and Antonio Banderas, but they’re not even starring in the movie! No, the lead role goes to an MMA athlete (Gina Carano) whose acting is so bad that they had to hire someone else to overdub her lines.

The results are freakishly artificial, and not in the “Where the hell did Gina’s boobs come from, because I saw her last fight, and she wasn’t stacked like that”, kind of way.

Now, pretend that you’re the director Steven Soderbergh, and you’ve been told to make a movie with a chick whose only talent is kicking you in the balls. How the hell do you fill two hours of film with that?

I’m sure that Steven rented every Sylvester Stalone movie on Netflix when researching his answer.

Here’s the basic formula for the movie:

Gina walks into a room, she squints and pouts sexily, and then peels off a layer of clothing so that we can get a good look at her smoking body (which, by the way, is actually a bit thick in the legs by Hollywood standards, but if I say anything more, it will be my wife kicking me in the nutsack, and so I’m going to let it go).

Then she gets into a fight. Think of it as Jackie Chan light. She’s not jumping through a ladder or beating someone up with a dish towel, but she has enough skill to make everyone laugh when she beats the shit of a much bigger man.

And it’s ALWAYS a man.

I think they missed a golden opportunity here to have her get into it with another hot female assassin.

If I had written this, the climatic girl on girl fisticuffs would have started in a car wash in tight white blouses, and would have culminated in a kiddie pool, that would have mysteriously fallen off the roof rack of the car ahead of them, onto the floor in the hot wax section.

Sorry, what were we talking about again?

Oh right….

Anyway, after she finishes the obligatory beat down, it’s “Run Gina Run”, usually through the back streets of a European city, which will hopefully distract anyone who has done any actual travelling long enough as they think to themselves, “Hey, I had lunch at that place.”

After fleeing somewhere it’s time for a wardrobe change (into a different sexy outfit), then it’s back to pummeling someone, and then time for another travelogue.

Listen, if Condé Nast Traveler had photos of chicks in tight undershirts dropping an elbow on a spice merchant in the markets of Cairo, maybe I wouldn’t have let my subscription lapse.

Here’s the weird part.

Just when you think that the movie is going to be a total waste of time, someone who can actually act steps in and draws you back into the story.

It’s like being in an abusive relationship with great sex in a five star hotel. You keep threatening to leave, but then room service comes and you get a blow job with the lobster bisque.

I’ll leave… tomorrow… the day after at the latest.

The lizard part of my brain and the intellectual part, still aren’t talking after watching this because if you think about the plot, it’s kind of stupid.

• Nefarious international plots come undone because someone couldn’t be bothered hiding the evidence under anything better than a drop cloth in a barn
• People are randomly kidnapped and dragged along,  but aren’t given anything to do (at least the chick in The Bourne Identity had to get lunch once or twice)
• Sometimes a spy will show up at a party, recognize another spy and then just eat a canapé and wander off (WTF?)
• Assassinations are foiled because the trigger happy hit men insist on starting a gun fight when there are spare weapons and handcuff keys within easy reach of the target
• And when they decided to film a car chase, someone thought that going in reverse, through the snow, at low speed,  would be really awesome.

This film is just so weird on so many levels that I don’t know what to think.

You get scenes where Gina is suspicious enough to hack her partner’s cell phone, but then willingly turns her back on the same guy as they enter a hotel room together.

Gina will chase down a guy who just shot at her, beat the crap out of him, and then simply walks away without questioning or killing the suspect.

You should be questioning the film, but then you get a great bit of acting, and another shot of a tight t-shirt, and you just let it go.

Then, before you know it, room service has shown up with a hot beef sandwich and set of furry handcuffs.

I’ll give it three stars out of five, but I feel cheap.

You can kick my ass... just do it slooooowly

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is a film for clever people.

No, scratch that, because truly clever people would never use a word as pedestrian as “clever”.

In order to truly appreciate this piece of celluloid, you must find a way to work “byzantine” into the description.

This is one of those films that you’re too embarrassed to admit that you didn’t understand a single frame of story and so instead you wander around outside waving a three foot long ebony cigarette holder saying “Huzzah”.

I fucking hated this movie.

“Oh sure”, you say, “but you hate everything”, and while this is accurate, this is a special case. I don’t hate it because it was stupid; I hate it because it made me feel like a complete dullard for not getting any of it.

This film takes subtlety to such an art form that it deserves its own wing at a fancy museum at the end of a cobbled road somewhere in France, and even then, the only way that you could find the museum was if you were an Orienteering champion in elementary school.

Let me give you an example:  One of the characters is married to a woman who is cheating on him, except that we never meet the woman, and we only know that she’s cheating on him because there’s a scene when he comes home and he finds that his friend is in his dining room and he’s not wearing shoes!

See, now pants I get, but shoes?!

This scene had to be explained to me by a guy with a pocket protector and Buddy Holly glasses.

This story is an adaptation from a John le Carré book, which explains why everyone on the theatre looked like Agatha Christie’s grandmother, and it’s a classic example of why films need an antagonist for us to follow.

For two hours we wander around Europe during the rainy season, searching for clues as to who might be the secret mole in the British Spy Agency, except that at no point do they actually spend any time closing in on the bad guy.

As far as I could tell, Gary Oldman just randomly drew a name out of a mason jar when there was ten minutes left in the story.

Random people seem to get shot, or have their throats slit and I couldn’t begin to hypothesize why, other than the fact that they spoke with an Eastern European accent.

Even the subtitles are condescending.

Instead of just telling us what the person is saying, the subtitles always open with a description of what language is being spoken.

Again, I’m sure someone in the audience was squealing with delight when they found out that a Bulgarian was talking on the phone instead of a Russian, but then again, everyone sitting behind me probably spoke 6 languages anyway.

Why did any of this matter?

And if you’re one of those people who gleefully look forward to going back and watching the film again because you can’t figure out the ending, please fuck off and die right now.

I don’t want to have to consult a bulletin board with an abacus and coloured pieces of yarn before I head out to the cinema with my notepad and my fancy pen that allows me to write in the dark.

I give this film 1 out of 5, but only because the part of my brain that handles math caught fire and died as I tried to figure out what the hell was going on in this movie.

I think they should have called “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”– “The Girl with the Esophageal Tumour”, because I’ve never seen a film with more smoking in it than this.

People smoke in bathtubs, in cars, in bars, in the woods, in the hospital, in boardrooms, while making toast, while raping someone, AFTER being raped by someone.

Why not just save some money next time and film it in a tobacco field?

Now, if you saw the first film (my condolences, by the way), then you’re either a book nerd, a glutton for punishment or you write a sarcastic movie blog, because why the hell would you put yourself through this twice?

This is one of those films with twenty seven plot lines, which means the only way your brain can prevent its lobes from melting together is to just completely shut down the logic center and let the shiny-object-lizard-section take over.

Logic is jealous bitch goddess who packed up and left this story because she saw you checking your hair in the reflection of a stainless steel dildo.

The film opens with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) being convicted of slander in a court of law. In the first film, he was actually sentenced to prison, but in this American remake, he now just has to pay a fine.

I think he had Lindsay Lohan’s lawyer.

Mikael is on the verge of bankruptcy and since Playboy isn’t inviting him and the development team from Photoshop over to the grotto for a meeting, he has to find a new way to make some cash.

He gets a phone call from an elderly billionaire who has been searching for the killer of his favourite niece, that disappeared forty years earlier.

Who cares if a string of gruesome ritual style murders happened within a sixty foot radius of a private island owned by the richest man in Sweden? There simply can’t be a connection, can there?

Next we meet Lisbeth Salander, who is the greatest computer hacker in Sweden. This chick can type “Google” faster than anyone else in the country.

It turns out that Lisbeth was also hired by the billionaire to do some digging.

Why didn’t he just hire Lisbeth to investigate his niece’s disappearance?

I’m guessing that there wasn’t an entry in Wikipedia for her to print off.

For the next hour, the two stories chug along separately, until the billionaire, in a stroke of genius, decides that maybe he should introduce the two of them.

Like, seriously – how much would this story have suffered if we had just cut to the chase in the first 10 minutes?

Chris Tucker? Meet Jackie Chan.

NOW we’re going to get somewhere right? Some compelling evidence hidden in a high tech security complex that will require Lisbeth to hack the surveillance system, as Mikael, dressed in a rapidly deteriorating disguise attempts to download the incriminating evidence before the computer files are erased?

What? All of the circumstantial evidence is pasted into scrapbooks and photo albums?

Is the edge of the paper at least coated in a deadly neurotoxin?

You wish.

And the evidence that they uncover?

Ya, basically if you went into a court of law it would go something like this:

“Your honour, I would like to point out that the killer was in the SAME TOWN as the victim on the day she disappeared!”

You’re joking right?

Isn’t this the same judicial system that couldn’t prove Joran van der Sloot murdered a woman on the beach after he was filmed getting into a car with her and he admitted to having sex with her after he lied about ever knowing her? (Sweden/Netherlands… whatever)

Holy shit, you mean a blurry photo at a parade could have cracked that whole case wide open?!

I did learn one valuable lesson though. Always make sure that you close the secret sound proof door to your sex dungeon when entertaining a client.

I give this movie 2 incriminating Facebook profiles out of 5.

Hey, remember that really shitty 1980’s television show called “The Love Boat”?

Well, they’ve made a movie version of it, but changed the name to “New Year’s Eve.”

Now, if you’re under the age of 30, let me explain how show worked.

First you write 87 short stories — toss the script in a blender along with an assortment of stars you had forgotten about, people that you “sort of recognize” (but don’t know their names), and just for fun, toss in someone who’s famous, but not for being an actor (musicians… porn star… athlete).

You see, half the fun is saying “Oh, I remember him from that Purina dog food commercial in 1993!”

Ok, so we’re on a strict schedule here because we only have 30 seconds with each character before we move on, and so when a character opens their mouth, their entire back story must be worked into the dialogue.

Screw subtlety.

It sounds a lot like this:

“Mom, you need to let of go the fact that dad died twelve years ago today in the very building that you’re going to accept this award that could change your life, and for God’s sake, don’t let the fact that the boy who stood you up at your senior prom, and is also the award presenter, rattle you.”

Then take widow and her ex boyfriend, put them in an elevator, and cue the city wide blackout.

If you don’t have a malfunctioning elevator, then a car accident or a runaway chimpanzee will also suffice.

Now, much like a poker game in a James Bond movie, you also have to make sure that we can keep track of each character.

An eye patch, a parrot on their shoulder or a racially offensive accent is gold.

Why is a Swedish party planner working with a Jamaican delivery boy? We couldn’t get the parrot to stay still for the shot. Hopefully no one will notice that he’s actually Korean.

Now we need something to tie all of these stories together. A giant cruise ship with horny ship’s doctor works great, but so does a city with a famous event.

How about New York City on New Year’s Eve?

Fucking GENIUS!

Aside from the fact that New Year’s Eve usually happens in the winter, and there isn’t a single flake of snow to be seen in the city.

Seriously, it looks like its June.

Hell, who cares? There’s a chimp eating the face off a Norwegian porn star with a parrot on her shoulder in the next scene.

Two stars out of 5.

I was more interested in THESE characters!!