Chronicles of Riddickulous (pt. 2)

 I realized that after some of my more recent posts that I may have come across as an Islamophobe or Muslim hater. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think Islam is a retarded, dangerous, and socially destructive institution that promotes ignorance, blind faith, xenophobia, and unquestioning obedience to self-asserted authority: I think all religions are retarded, dangerous, and socially destructive institutions that promote ignorance, xenophobia, blind faith, and unquestioning obedience to self-asserted authority.

And to be fair, the Imam in this film is the only character that's acted like a halfway decent human being thus far, apart from giving away the survivors' location to the escaped homicidal madman by screaming praise at an invisible man that lives in the sky.

We left off with giant space bats attacking our team of survivors who have locked themselves in part of the crashed ship while pitch blackness happens outside. Toolbox dies because she mistook "Stay down!" for "Run around drawing attention to yourself!"

One member makes the seemingly impossible deduction that the giant space bats may just be what killed fucking everything. Even though 'everything' seems to be 'giant space elephants that survive by eating dirt, since there are the remains of exactly one form of native, not-cave-dwelling life in this particular ecosystem. They then hush each other to listen to the bats make woop woop noises. Imam Al-Genius realizes that this is how they 'see'. Just like earth bats, only embarrassingly over-simplified!

The Archeologist then has another anxiety attack while random Muslims break into and lock themselves inside of a smaller room of the ship that promises to be harder to both defend and escape from. The aliens immediately begin punching holes in the walls with their hole punch appendages while one of the survivors cuts their way deeper into the ship.

Diesel wanders off and finds an alien (which looks like a cross between a bat, a hammerhead shark, and an alien from Alien, just to establish the level of originality on display,) and is soon joined by idiot Muslim child #8. They seem to be safe as long as they remain perfectly still, so the child panics, runs off and is inhalfitated after making it almost ten feet. Diesel uses this opportunity to flee back to the others who blind him and the pursuing alien with their flashlights. They manage somehow to bring one of them down by firing wildly in every direction.

Regrouping, they begin hatching a plot to find a way to drag the remaining batteries back to the ship with enough light to not be viciously and instantly destroyed by cartoon monsters.

John and Carolyn argue at length about whether to lock themselves in or make a run for it. Y'know, the exact same conundrum that was used in Night of the Living Dead and reused in every stoner circle since.

They decide to make a break for it, with Diesel and his magic implants scouting ahead. This works exactly zero times over the course of ten feet. After killing another sharkbat, they regroup and mill around. Fucking again.

While gathering more batteries, Diesel barks orders about formation. They FINALLY make a run for it.

This movie has an uncanny ability to be frenetically paced and tediously dull at the same time. That combination should only be possible on the inside of the kitchen in a fast food restaurant.

Outside, we find the survivors running (well, creeping unhurriedly,) forward, with aliens circling just outside of the light. The Archeologist, realizing he hasn't done something suicidally dumb to endanger the entire group in almost ten minutes, stops moving to better focus on the cutting torch running out of fuel and drop one of the flares he was carrying. Murder Child tosses aside his own light to run after it, which is exactly what I would do if I'd rather film child brutality than build tension.

Shit breaks out and the Archeologist unplugs the running lights. Obvious suicide.

After making torches from the remaining booze they debate their course. We discover that Murder Child is a girl. I'm not sure what bearing this has on the plot, as Diesel's explanation was delivered in his usual unintelligible whisper, but I think she's doing that thing where women bleed from their peehole, which is attracting the monsters via their naturally evolved ability to smell non-terrestrial blood and know what it is.

Carolyn decides to turn back, playing the Democrat by never thinking beyond the immediate future and constantly changing her mind. John now wants to push on, adopting the Republican stance of ad hominem attacks and stonewalling whatever the opposing team wants to do regardless of whether it's what he wanted to do as well.

John reveals that Carolyn attempted to kill the entire ship, which might have been an interesting bit of storytelling if it hadn't happened while they were stranded on a plain with monsters closing in. As is, no one worries overmuch about this, having far bigger problems at this point.

Pressing on, John and Diesel separate themselves from the rest of the group and plot the death of Murder Child to use as bait. Eyeballs eyeballs eyeballs. Diesel decides John would make better bait. John doesn't immediately understand because he's an idiot.

John SHOULD HAVE won this fight as well, given that he breaks Diesel's arm two seconds into the scuffle, but since one of Vin's superpowers  is magically having whatever exact superpower he needs at any given moment, he instantly recovers. John ends up losing the fight and being eaten by aliens.

The Imam suggests a nice prayer. Vin points out that that's a stupid idea. Nobody points out that sitting around in an open space while the light runs out is also a stupid idea.

Making it to the canyon, which is infested with aliens, they make a dash for it. Or they would if they didn't stop every three feet to look around. It's fucking aliens. Aliens are what there is to look at. Or would be if there was any light beyond the torch range. Mostly they're stopping to look at the film's run time and make sure it drags past the 90 minute mark.

One of the aliens, playing possum, trips up one of the interchangeable Muslims while Diesel, sick of these people's inability to run at any speed that isn't stop, forges ahead. He then turns back when Murder Child is attacked by an alien.

He then, somehow, despite repeatedly losing fights that involved sneak attacks against a dopesick heroin junkie, kills the alien single-handedly.

Most worstly delivered, wooden line thus far in the movie: "Did not know who he was fuckin' with."

FINALLY they start moving again. For about five feet. Again. This time the wounded Muslim has to be carried by the Imam while it starts raining. Just like on Earth! Water in the desert! Praise Allah!

The wounded Muslim is killed and the remaining survivors crawl into a cave. Diesel remains outside to drag the 300 pounds of batteries through the mud to the ship alone.

Back in the cave the last torch slowly burns out while aliens gather outside in the only scene in the entire movie that could possibly be considered tense. This doesn't last long as they happen to be in a cave with glow-in-the-dark slugs, which become new torch fuel.

Carolyn takes the first bug torch and follows Diesel while Murder Child and Imam gather enough slugs to make another torch. 

Carolyn makes it to the ship just before Diesel takes off and demands they return for the others. Diesel throws her some lights and tells her to make up her mind.

They scrabble around in the mud for a bit before returning for the others. The Imam gives the credit to his God, not Carolyn or Diesel, who were the ones who did all the work.

They dash back towards the ship armed only with the bug torches and not the lights from the ship that Diesel very pointedly threw to Carolyn, for some reason, and we're treated to the one line that is required by the US Army to be in every action movie from 1998 on: "Move move move!"

Diesel gets separated and decides to hide in the creatures blind spot directly in front of it, since knowing that the creatures had a blind spot and where it is wouldn't be an impossibly lucky guess. This works well until another creature happens along. He eventually makes it to the ship with the help of Carolyn's talents as a meat shield. Carolyn dies.

Onboard, Diesel kills the engine and lights and waits for the swarm of aliens to cover the ship for easy vaporization when they take off, reducing their numbers from infinity to infinity minus a couple.

Fin.

Oh, except for the fact that now they're now lost in space 22 weeks from where they were originally going with no food or water for the journey and no evident means of sending a distress signal or making contact with other humans. But still, small victories.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this movie could have been worse. The acting was mostly competent, except for Diesel's goddamn muttering, which resulted in having to turn the volume up whenever he spoke, then immediately back down when something boomed as soon as he finished.

The main problem I had was that, like Ghosts of Mars, this movie seemed to have no idea what kind of movie it was supposed to be. Of course, it was made in that terrible window of the late 90s/early 00s when any new intellectual property was required to span several genres to increase demographics.

As an action movie it didn't really work, since nothing really seemed to be a threat to Riddick, as he seemed to be treated like Superman when it came to superpowers, only without Superman's weakness to kryptonite and magic. In order for sci-fi/action movies to work the good guys really need to be hopelessly underpowered. Take Predator, where we had an invisible alien armed with 400 different space weapons and could jump over trees fighting a commando armed with mud, spears and crude booby traps. Or Aliens, where the good guys were placed in a claustrophobic maze surrounded by hordes of stronger, faster, and stealthier enemies that were well-camouflaged and had a knack for ambushing the humans in ways that humans aren't equipped to plan for. Not to mention that even killing one meant death by acid.

It failed as a horror movie because the entire premise was barely explored. Which is a shame, since darkness is such an easy fear to play to. I mean every store in America sells nightlights because of it. Strange noises in the night, wondering if that shadow just moved, creeping forward and freezing, knowing that something awful is right behind you. If the filmmakers had abandoned the action movie bullshit and focused more on atmosphere and tension than child murder and cheap boo moments it probably would have been a much better film.

The pacing was atrocious. I can't remember any movie that managed to be this busy and still have almost nothing happen. It's like someone started out with six plot points, filmed those, and then filmed another hour of footage around those. Then took that hour, cut it into 15 second long bites and rearranged them until it looked like a 100 minute long film trailer. For a perfect example: revealing halfway into the film that John wasn't a police officer, but a heroin addict bounty hunter. That entire subplot could have been cut and it would have had absolutely no effect on the rest of the film.

The message of the film seems to be 'shit happens.' Or more accurately, 'sometimes shit will go way out of its way to happen to you specifically.' Other than Carolyn's heavy-handed sacrifice to save Riddick to atone for attempting to kill the entire ship, and Riddick turning back to help Murder Child despite being a stereotypically ruthless and self-serving criminal, there was no real exploration of theme or morals or beliefs. Which seems weird, since they went out of their way to mix a group of very religious people in with a group of very secular people, and very religious children, at that. And if there's anything religion is good for, it's invoking emotions and teaching lessons via the interplay of light and darkness and childlike innocence. The Imam would occasionally make a wise-sounding comment, but those never had any bearing on anything else and wound up just making the Imam look dense.

Chronicles of Riddickulous (pt. 1)

Pitch Black was an action/horror/science-fiction train-wreck from 2000, brought to us by the writer responsible for such gems as Critters 2: The New Batch and Waterworld. Despite being a terrible encocklement of the worst parts of knuckle-dragger action porn and self-indulgent art film it managed to spawn two indirect sequels starring Vin Diesel's character Dick B. Riddick, the character every 13-year-old Shadowrun fan wishes they could be.

We open on a slow pan of a space ship that is totally not like star wars.

Vin Diesel's voiceover informs the audience that cryosleep causes most of the brain to shut down, except for the primitive side. I'm not sure what side of the brain he's talking about, but he says that's why he's still awake. I'm not sure if this means that Vin Diesel's skull only contains enough brain to keep his vital signs on, or if he's mistaking cryosleep with something that isn't "freezing someone for transport over long distances." Of course, it could be both.

Diesel is currently in transit with 40+ civilians, one of whom is "some Arab hoodoo holy man probably on his way to New Mecca." Which is a mean way to say “Islamic fellow.”

There is also a woman that Diesel can smell, despite them both being in cryosleep, in separate sealed chambers. She smells like sweat and leather and tool-belts. So, ladies, if you really want to know how to turn your man on then definitely spend more time hanging out at a tannery.

Diesel's real problem, he informs us, is a blue-eyed devil named Mr. John who is taking Diesel back to mumble mumble by way of mumble mumble but has made the mistake of mumble mumble mumble. Diesel is plotting a cunning escape. Don't know if you picked up on that.

Just then several somethings shoot through the ship, breach the hull, and trigger the alarm. A futury computer screen informs us that the hull breach has caused the gravity to fluctuate wildly and that Capt. Mitchell, Nav Officer Greg Owens and Docking Pilot Carolyn Fry are being un-cryoed. More somethings shoot through the ship, killing the Captain.

The Nav Officer and Docking Pilot fall out of their cryopods into a comical heap, where they both immediately panic.

After some sciency sounding nonsense the docking pilot informs us that they're losing air, in case anyone watching along at home doesn't know what 'hull breach' means, or what happens when you poke a hole in a space ship while it's in outer space.

The still-panicking Nav Officer manages to get the windows open just in time to crash into a planet. Which is convenient, considering space contains mostly nothing and lots and lots and lots of things that aren't planets with what I imagine is going to be a breathable atmosphere.

After some more technobabble, Carolyn decides the best course of action is to dump the passengers in order to make a safer landing, proving that in the future everyone is an asshole. This upsets Owens. As it should. 

While Owens does things to stuff to try to save everyone's ass Carolyn pulls the "Eject Humans" lever, which doesn't work. Something then breaks off of the side of the ship and smashes the front window, hopefully killing Carolyn in the rain of shattered space glass, metal, and space ship destroying heat and pressure.

It doesn't, and at this point the director decides to go 'art movie' for a minute with flash cuts to eyeballs and sepia filters and countdowns.

They crash like a motherfucker. But luckily they land on some relatively soft sand dunes and the atmosphere is indeed breathable. People begin milling around.

John, realizing his gun is missing, goes to look for it. He is then attacked by Diesel and saved by luck. He brags about this while walloping the helpless Diesel with a baton.

After a very busy sequence of finding survivors, they stumble across...someone...with a pole through his chest. He dies very noisily while dramatic music plays. I think it may be Owens. Still, it's WAAAAY too early to begin demanding sympathy for your throw-away characters, movie.

Outside, our Muslim friends wash themselves in the probably not dangerous dirt and pray to  probably New Mecca, but is really just 'up.'

The toolbox-smelling lady congratulates Carolyn for saving their lives. This is obviously being done to set up some "she tried to kill you" twist later. Everyone agrees about how wonderful Carolyn is, with an almost pathetic display of gratitude.

Back in the wreck, Vin Diesel is handcuffed to a thing with a blindfold and gag. We're informed that Diesel is only dangerous to humans.

Opening an Egyptian sarcophagus(?) the survivors find that the liquor survived intact. Since bottles are known to be far more sturdy than two foot thick steel crossbeams. Hooray.

The Imam, who won't be partaking of the miracle hooch, is convinced that there is water somewhere in the desert if they can find it. Which is usually true on Earth, provided you don't die before finding it. Other planets may be different, and I'm sure this won't occur to the filmmakers.

Vin Diesel, who seems to be able to see through his blindfold and hear solid, unmoving objects behind him, dislocates his shoulders and rotates his arms in an arc of about 290 degrees to get his bonds through the conveniently cut pillar he's been chained too, he then picks up the cutting torch he magically sensed earlier. Seems like that might tear a muscle.

Outside, John finds Diesel's handcuffs.

Inside, the survivors Rambo-up with the ships supply of guns and the sarcophagus-liquor-cabinet guy's collection of priceless antique spears and tomahawks. This is to defend themselves against skull fucking on the part of Diesel.

Back outside on Planet Sepia Filter, the archeologist draws attention to the fact that there are three suns, which as every one knows requires at least a masters degree to spot. There is a short theological debate on whether this is a blessing from Allah or not. After more pointless bantering the group sets off to either find Diesel or water or both or neither.

Shifting to the part of the planet covered in a blue lens we find Diesel has picked up the survivors trail and is stalking them by the cunning strategy of following the large group of people yelling “Shut up!” at a man chanting in Arabic at the top of his lungs and throwing rocks to drive out devils.

John almost shoots Carolyn for sneaking up on him. A random child almost murders the archeologist with an attack boomerang. The point of these scenes is to establish that in the future all humans will be murderous, unlikeable psychopaths, as evidenced here.

Carolyn, John, and the comically out of place Muslims (Which consist of the Imam and about a dozen children,) approach what look to be trees but turn out to be an elephant-alien graveyard. The Imam points out that this is yet another thing that happens on Earth, since if half a dozen impossible things have happened in the last fifteen minutes, anyone left watching won't mind a dozen more.

Owen investigates by pointing his gun at everything except the not-well-hidden Diesel, and then getting sloshed with Carolyn on space hooch. Diesel watches from five feet away. Not even around a corner or anything. He's just standing immediately to their left like a waiter waiting for them to decide what to order. Assuming they order SKULL FUCK!

Diesel then, I swear to God, cuts Carolyn's hair with a jagged rock while she confesses to John that she tried to kill everyone on the ship and Owens died stopping her. Somehow Carolyn doesn't notice the large convict standing directly behind her smelling her hair, adding situational invisibility to Diesel's list of ill-defined superpowers.

One of the children find a toy robot from the 1950s, implying that either the aliens had Buck Rogers as well, or they're not the first humans to pass this way. They soon come upon a presumably human settlement, conveniently in the one random direction they decided to explore. The Imam proudly proclaims that there was water here, utilizing the absolute upper limit of his reasoning skills: Someone built these buildings. Those someones must have needed water. Therefore there was water here. Praise Allah!

Carolyn then yells at a dark room for a while before opening a window, while outside the Imam magically finds water in the desert by pointing at a man-made well that God obviously put there just for him.

Carolyn, after finding a model of the solar system, stumbles upon an abandoned space ship. Allahu akbar!

Back at the wreck, Archeologist, Murder Child and the lady that smells like a toolbox panic, and amid many goofy camera tricks almost kill another survivor with a pickaxe. The survivor is then immediately shot repeatedly by a different survivor mistaking the first survivor for Diesel, who watches the proceedings from the top of the ship 50 feet away, again, somehow invisible.

Back at the encampment (I'm not skipping around or anything. Every scene in the movie is about 8 seconds long,) Carolyn begins explaining how they can get the space ship working and is silenced by John, who hears gunshots.

Switching back to the wreck again, we find Shooter returning to the hole he was digging before wandering off and shooting a survivor. The hole now has a small, triangular shaft running into it from the side. This is clearly the work of burrowing space gnomes, which are just like burrowing regular gnomes only evolved on another planet. The survivor wisely crawls halfway inside the shaft and is promptly eaten.

Toolbox, Archeologist and Murder Child hear his gunshots and immediately run, assuming the shooter has 'mistaken' one of them for Diesel again.

At this point the cuts are coming so fast that Toolbox, while running in a straight line for about 50 yards, looks like a skipping CD sounds. It's like an epileptic is trying to film what a seizure feels like.

Toolbox finds Shooter's bloodstain right next to Diesel, who runs away and directly into John. Diesel is beaten badly up, again, and during the one-sided ass-stomping his welding goggles come off and we learn that Diesel is extremely photosensitive. Which is nice that they explained, since welding goggles were even more impractical than ski goggles.

Inside the wreck Carolyn interrogates Diesel by informing him that she will be playing Good Cop in this feature. Diesel mutters something that sounds like an anatomy lesson and beckons Carolyn closer.

Carolyn then comes much closer, since even though she's the smartest person here she's still an idiot, and is almost attacked by Diesel and we finally see Diesel's eyes, which appear to have cataracts that were installed by a doctor in prison.

This. Just two goddamn hours of this.

Back at the hole Carolyn begins poking around in the shaft covered in the blood of the missing Shooter. She eventually comes to a larger chamber with many shafts running out that should be familiar to anyone that's ever played a video game with a dungeon. Aliens pop in and out of frame in the background and dash in front of the camera just like in every alien movie since Alien.  Carolyn finds Shooter's foot and loses her flashlight, rendering her blind in the moderately well lit cave. She climbs up a shaft in an attempt to escape but, lacking the kind of higher brain functions that link cause to effect, forgets to unclip her tether and can't make it out.

Back at the shaft entrance the men bravely do nothing. After an extended flurry of flashcuts where nothing happens the survivors hack a hole into the shaft Carolyn is stuck in and pull her out.

Carolyn is almost pulled back into the cave, having still not unclipped herself. One of the survivors does it for her.

Back in the wreck John takes a stab at interrogating Diesel. John offers to let Diesel go in exchange for his help, and then shoots Diesel's chains off.  Tough guy banter.

The survivors walk...somewhere. The only way to distinguish the sets is by the color of the lens filter which is now sepia in what I believe is supposed to be the blue or normal colored areas. More flash cuts of eyeballs.

Carolyn gets power back on the ship but informs the crew that they'll need to haul a lot of batteries to get enough power for take off. Outside, the anachronistic Muslim children begin emulating Diesel by wearing cargo cult welding glasses. Still, more practical and less crazy than religion, amirite? Diesel finds a pair of glasses trampled in the dirt in another blatant example of heavy-handed symbolism.

    PRODUCER: "You do realize that 15% of this movie is close ups of eyeballs right?"

    DIRECTOR: "Seeing things is important!"

    PRODUCER: "Yeeeeeeaaaah, I think we've established that. Repeatedly."

    DIRECTOR: "When you can't see things it is hard to see!"

    PRODUCER: "Look, the name of the film is Pitch Black and your main gimmick is having a character with robot eyes. I think we've established that darkness will play a role in this film."

    DIRECTOR: Eyeballs are what we see with!"

One of the Muslim youths sneaks into a locked building with a person-sized hole next to the door.

In another building the survivors establish that the encampment appears to have been used for geology. The survivors wonder where the original team is.

Something is not right in the locked building.

Whatever killed Shooter must have killed the geologists, points out Diesel. Everyone says fuck a lot, to remind the audience that this is all very grown up and mature. They notice that one of the children is missing.

In the locked building nameless child #3 manages to get the shutters open and is immediately swarmed by space bats. Which are like regular bats but in space. #3 panics and locks himself in a dark room where I'm sure he'll be safe.

The crew, shooting the lock and the area where #3 was standing moments ago enter the room and are swarmed by space bats that eventually leave via a pipe in the middle of the room. #3's body is found with an extreme lack of skin and eyeballs.

While the Muslims bury #3, John, Carolyn and Toolbox throw a flare down the pipe and discover a fuckton of human bones. They find the last core sample from two years ago.

Carolyn, back at the solar system model discovers that a total eclipse does occasionally happen, and given how the film has treated probability so far it will surprisingly be any minute.

In the ship, Carolyn questions the wisdom of John's plan to fuck Diesel over at the last minute. Considering Diesel has already displayed superhuman hearing, the ability to see through solid objects, turn invisible, and smell perspiration through two hermetic seals, the wisdom of even having this discussion seems questionable.

Outside of the ship, Diesel is shaving his head with engine grease and a jagged piece of metal. John exits the ship and almost throws up for some mumbled reason and admonished Diesel for having a knife.

Inside the ship, Diesel teleports in to inform Carolyn that yes, the guy with all of the cybernetic implants DID hear their conversation. He then makes some raperish comments before suggesting Carolyn ask why John is sick and leaving by opening the only door, confirming that he can, indeed,  also teleport.

Cut to John shooting drugs into, yes, his eyeball. Carolyn is upset by this, as he's using the ships medical supplies, which seem to be morphine and nothing else. Turns out John isn't a cop but a bounty hunter, although why this seems to make such a huge difference at this point is unclear. Muslim children then burst in yammering in Arabic.

Stepping outside the survivors realize that the total eclipse is conveniently about to happen.

The survivors drive back to the wreck, which is either 10 yards or 10 miles away, depending on what the plot calls for, and begin grabbing things while dark begins to fall.

After nightfall the jeep they were driving dies, being solar powered. Obviously an intergalactic civilization would never have thought to install batteries or some kind of back up system in case they ever had to drive somewhere at night.

Aliens begin spewing out of the caverns by the thousands. Toolbox gets eaten for not listening to directions. Everyone else lives. Praise Allah!

Diesel takes his goggles off and we get to see the world through his eyes,  which looks like too many Photoshop filters.

At this point, 15 minutes of movie and 45 minutes of padding into the film, the eclipse becomes complete, rendering the surface of the planet...PITCH BLACK. Except that we can still see things.

Next time: HORROR MIGHT HAPPEN!

Repo Men: Part 2

We left our hero last time in mid-epiphany, complete with the dundun-DUNDUN-dundun-DUNDUN cello music from every superhero movie. Let's see what kind of antics his new-found junkie-girl rescuing morals get him into.

Back in the locker room at Evil Organ Inc., Schreiber, at his most typical, gives Law's Recall Notice to Whitaker, who politely declines. Schreiber then offers the ticket to the other repo men who, since they have no lines in the script, look away embarrassed.

Cut to the slums, where Law and his girlfriend (I'm almost certain her character hasn't been given a name yet,) are digging through other peoples' refuse for valuables to store in a stolen shopping cart. Singer Girl, apparently done with drugs forever since, as any reformed drug addict will tell you, the only way to recover from the self-destructive cycle of addiction is to be abducted and kept against one's will by a violent psychopath. She also unearths the old-fashioned typewriter we saw Jason Sta...uh, Jude Law pecking out his voice over's on at the beginning of the film.

At this point Law, being legally retarded, asks in open wonderment how Singer Girl keeps track of her many organ replacements. It would seem remembering the names of almost a dozen different body parts is an incomprehensible feat of intellectual prowess to Law. Singer Girl then mumbles at length which, combined with her thick accent made it impossible for me to understand whatever plot points she brought up. But knowing the Director I feel confident that they will be explained several times over the next couple of minutes.

Oh. Her lips are not robots. Awwwww. Cue obligatory soft-core bag lady porn.

In the next scene Law's voice over explains that what he's been writing is a cautionary tale to keep others from making the same mistakes that he has. I would have thought merely posting a bulletin about never working with any of these people would have been a lot more effective and less embarrassing. Law then watches several school girls playing jump rope through his binoculars, since child voyeurism had yet to be checked off of Sapochnik's list of "Evil Shit To Put In Movie."

Singer Girl then uses her robot ears to detect the approaching repo man Landlord (not sure if that's his name or Law's attempt at humor, but he's the even more retarded repo man from the beginning of the film,) in time for them to make a daring escape. It would seem her unintelligible monologue earlier was explaining that she was the 6 Million Dollar Man.

After setting up a not very cunning or believable pitfall trap (the new repo man, after using his scanner gun to find Law from a block away, but somehow failing to detect the Robo-Junkie hiding in the same room, then gives up a tactical advantage by holstering his stun gun to attack Law with a machete,) the floor collapses further revealing that the Love Interest's name is Beth. Law then drops his typewriter on Landlord's skull.

In a freshly stolen Volkswagon, Beth repairs her damaged knee with a home surgery/electricians tool bag she had been hiding somewhere. Which is weird, since Law hadn't noticed it even though he carried her unconscious body to the stolen SUV.

Arriving in the parking garage, we find the Company's Lung Mascot on a cigarette break. The Director, realizing this is far too subtle and clever for anyone but him to notice, has Law point out the irony.

Law, disguised as a lung, although I don't think the audience is supposed to know that, but it's impossible not to, sneaks into the building where he is immediately set upon by the two most irritating children in the history of film (HI LARRY!!!! HI LARRY!!! HI LARRRY!!!! HI LARRY!!!!) He then has an irritating and pointless "I'll go this way, no, I'll go this way," collision with Whitaker, then goes to Schreiber's office and punches him a lot.

Surprise! The lung was really Law in disguise!

Law then pulls out the stun gun he so seriously and symbolically walked away from earlier and trains it on Schreiber. 'Witty' banter ensues, then Law tosses Schreiber a tattooed lump of skin from Landlord, ending their jovial reunion.

Schreiber informs Law that it's impossible to take Law's heart out of the system since (Dun Dun DUUUUuuuunnnn,) he knows about Law's clumsy attempt to scratch off the bar codes and all organs now have to be sent back to the Corporate Office instead of tossed in a bin in the locker room. Management, amirite? Then Schreiber, being Schreiber, tries to up-sell Law, who tazers Schreiber and steals some paperwork and probably the jamming devices from earlier.

Back in the parking garage Law informs Beth that they're leaving for Kenya, South America, which I guess is a place in the future. Beth points out that trying to get on a plane would be a titanically stupid idea. Law reveals (surprise!) the jamming devices.

After another Volkswagon commercial, Schreiber orders Whitaker to personally take out Law. The Volkswagon Touareg, by the way, got fourth billing in this movie.

At the airport, which is exactly the same as airports not in the future, Law and Beth proceed to behave as suspiciously as humanly possible. Or robotically possible, in Beth's case. Somehow this fails to work and Law has to kill everyone with his usual combination of Jason Statham-y swagger and inventive gleeful sadism.

Whitaker appears at the airport and seems genuinely surprised to see Law there. Which means Whitaker must have been at the airport for some mysterious, unrelated reason that didn't involve his job or getting on a plane. My guess is anonymous gay sex in the bathroom with someone he met on Craigslist.

Escaping back to the slums, Beth informs Law that, since his stupid-ass plan accomplished nothing except almost getting them killed repeatedly, they were going to a 'Vulture' that she knew. "Not a scavenger?!" exclaims Law, providing no clarification. It is made clear that neither of them is happy about having to do this, but it is also clear that repeatedly stabbing her own knee with a filthy surgical tool didn't fix Beth's knee as nearly well as she claimed it had.

The Vulture is John Leguizamo!!! He is so good! Why does he keep signing on for terrible movies like this?! I would like to point out that according to the Internet Movie Database, Leguizamo's role in this film was uncredited, placing him alongside Dancing Girl #2, Hot Commercial Girl and Hot Girlfriend on the shockingly short list of people that knew what a career-killingly awful movie this was.

After some brief half-in-Spanish tough guy dialogue, Leguizamo uses a 'universal remote' to control Beth's voice box. The universal remote, for some reason, is an antique television remote from the 60's with four buttons on it. Leguizamo then describes an impossible amount of sciency things that can be done with it. He then reveals himself to be (spit-take,) Beth's drug dealer. He then starts dancing. There is no reason for this. There's no reason for any of this. There's just, there's no God anymore. Just this, forever.

Leguizamo and Law then get into an ideological debate straight out of 4th grade while Beth slowly bleeds to death. Leguizamo informs Beth that he won't help her for unclear reasons and that she should seek the help of yet another previously unmentioned character that had, I guess, tried to kill her at some point.

Flash cut to a different shit hole apartment/operating room, this one containing several Asian stereotypes, in a nice break from the Mexican machismo stereotypes of the last scene. Beth mumbles out a list of her implants again while a 9 year old girl performs very disgusting surgery on Beth.

Later, in an alley, Beth's super-robot-ears stop working long enough for Law to hear the ping of the price guns first. This leads quickly to Leguizamo's gutted carcass. Leguizamo's universal remote activates a recording of the last things Leguizamo said, which was that he was killed by repo men. Whitaker then comes out of the closet. Unfortunately not in a dramatic "I've always loved you Jude Law," way, but in an "I was just standing over here,' way. He then gives no real explanation on how he tracked them to Leguizamo's apartment, since that would have required Whitaker to be Professor X. Or, you know, have access to a tracking device, which haven't been invented.

Whitaker, seething with jealousy over Law's feeling's for Beth, promises Law that he can make things right with Schreiber if Law returns with Whitaker. Law refuses, being in wuuuuv, and Whitaker calls him a pussy. The word 'pussy' makes Whitaker visibly uncomfortable. Whitaker also reveals that it was him that sabotaged Law's defibrillator unit in a cunning plot from the Psychotic Girlfriend's Handbook to keep Law from leaving him for a different position.

Law loses the ensuing fistfight badly, although he does take Terminator levels of abuse from the fight. In fact, the entire punch up was lifted almost frame for frame from the Terminator 3 bathroom fight.

Through a wall,

Into a sink,

Onto a catwalk.

At this point Law and Whitaker start laughing for some reason, Whitaker offers Law his hand, Law stabs Whitaker in the leg, and Whitaker smashes Law's skull in.

Law's life, or at least those parts of his life that had already been filmed, flashes before his eyes, along with scenes from the M.5 Neural Net commercial and computery noises. I have no idea what this could entail for our hero.

Fading back into the squatter's nest and totally not a computer generated hallucination of the squatter's nest courtesy of the M.5 Neural Net, Law is, amazingly, still alive, although Whitaker is mysteriously dead. The other denizens begin screaming "Raid!" and leaving en masse, since two repo men are not enough to trigger the squatters' flight or fight instinct, but three causes a full-scale panic.

In another action scene derivative of every action movie ever, our hero's manage to escape by pure dumb luck, employing the same running away strategy as everyone else and accidentally not being shot. They are then yanked into a Rebel Hideout, where Law is not summarily executed by dint of this entire sequence taking place in his damaged imagination.

Just to make sure all moves are telegraphed, the possibly Rebel Leader even says "Welcome to your world, Repo Man," completely out of context with anything else in the scene. Get it? He's in a simulation! Bet you won't see that coming!

Law, awakening to a hanger full of butchered corpses, including the nine year old surgeon, since the audience had so much emotionally invested in her after her two lines and 45 seconds of screen time. Law responds to this by going out into a field while Beth asks him to come back inside with the many, many mutilated corpses. Law, stating the hopelessness of their situation, informs Beth that he is going to finish this.

In a subway station, Law explains his plan to go behind the Pink Door at the Corporate Office and steal Project Mayhem from Fight Club. Law's wife and son magically appear. Law's wife, in mid-bitch, is tazered in the back by Law's son, himself an aspiring gleeful sadism expert. Law gives his Cautionary Tale to his son, tells him he loves him, and flees, leaving his child alone on a subway at night. There is also a very subtle billboard behind the subway car advertising the M.5 Neural Net.

After our hero's somehow bypass the alarm on Schreiber's car, break into it, rearm the alarm and hide in the backseat, Schreiber gets in his car and is promptly tazered.

Law then begins his assault on the Corporate Office in what can best be described as a mixture of terrible jokes and Cannibal Corpse album cover. Four long, long minutes into this Repo Men remembers it hasn't stolen any ideas from better movies in almost four minutes, and lifts the claw-hammer sequence from Oldboy, replacing the claw-hammer with daggers, a hacksaw and (in a fit of creative bankruptcy,) a ball-peen hammer, the seasoned gang members were replaced with white collar office workers. Somehow this fails to be as viscerally satisfying or tastefully done as Oldboy. I would like to remind everyone that Oldboy was a movie almost exclusively about blood-soaked revenge and incest.

Whitaker and Schreiber magically reappear again, just as Law and Beth break into the Pink Room, where they realize they'll have to manually scan their robo-organs into the machine.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that anyone reading this has plans to eat at some point in the future, so I won't go into detail about the climax of the movie, but phrases like 'hardcore snuff film,' 'drug-addled knife rape,' and 'wound-fucking,' would be woefully inadequate.

Finally this madness ends with, unsurprisingly, an explosion set to idiosyncratic music.

Cut to Law, Beth and Whitaker vacationing on the island from the M.5 Neural Net commercial where, HOLY SHIT Law has been in the M.5 Neural Net since Whitaker brained him back at the squatter's nest.

So, having resolved nothing, learned no lessons, served no purpose, or made any meaningful impact:

THE END 

 

Repo Men: Not the Good One

The good ones being, of course, 1984's Repo Man and 2008's Repo: The Genetic Opera. Those are excellent and, more importantly, more important films than 2010's Repo Men, also known by it's working title of Sodomized Stab Wound: A Love Story.

Repo Man was important because it was the first time the sub-culture of American Punk Rock had been portrayed on film in a way that wasn't silly, misinformed, demonized or clueless. Plus it had Charlie Sheen's brother and Harry Dean Stanton as a paranoid meth addict.

Repo: The Genetic Opera was a musical that some-fucking-how is okay for heterosexual guys to like. It's important because it was a 'goth' movie that, unlike every single other 'goth' movie ever made, didn't make the 'goth' sub-culture seem like the absolute bottomest of bottom rungs in any social hierarchy. For the record: 'goth' is the absolute bottomest of bottom rungs in any social hierarchy, despite their women being unfairly hot.

I apologize for beginning with a detour, but it's important for me to remember that good movies do get made on occasion. And also if you wound up here wondering if Repo Men is a good movie, you now have two much better movies to watch instead. Also and also the next time one of my friends watches a piece of shit like Repo Men and then recommends it to a self-diagnosed movie snob like me, I can have them read this, and ask them if they're okay with me sorta hating them for a while.

Before I begin: there is one single change that could have been made to this film that would have raised it from 'cataclysmic failure' to 'abysmal failure.' Happily, this is a change that can be made yourself. If for whatever reason you hate yourself and have your heart set on watching Repo Men, tell yourself the following before beginning the film: Forest Whitaker is a self-loathing closeted gay with a man crush on Jude Law. The whole fucking fiasco makes marginally more sense with this in mind.

At :30-:31 we see the most wholesome character in the film.

Now, on with the tide of spoilers!

The film begins with a sound-byte montage of news reporters screaming about economic collapse and war and recession and everyone being poor. That the director chose this very obvious 'subtle' jab at the current ongoing everything crisis to open his film seems like a bold and daring statement. Obviously the director believes he knows something about economics, government, business, military conflict and the alleviation of global human misery. Realizing, perhaps through innate wizardry, that this titanically pompous introduction is in a movie that managed to gross negative 15,000,000 dollars leads me to the conclusion that the director, Miguel Sapochnik, will be a member of the United States Congress in the near future.

In the first scene we see topless Jude Law (llllllllllllladies...) waxing poetic about Schrodinger's Cat. Unfortunately, he also waxes retardedly wrong about it. Does Jude Law think Schrodinger's Cat was an actual, literal cat in an actual experiment involving cat murder? Schrodinger's Cat was an illustration of a physics idea.

Jude Law then states that he's been obsessed with this thought experiment for years and still doesn't understand it. Since he still manages to be this fucking wrong about it that can mean only one thing: Jude Law's character is hopelessly damaged. He then resolves this internal quandary by removing a semi-conscious man's robo-liver while listening to salsa music on his iPod. To be fair, he did ask the guy if he wanted an ambulance. Since he's too brain damaged to know better he asked the guy after tazering him. Jesus, this is going to be a long fucking movie.

Cut to Jude Law driving a Volkswagon and describing his vocation to the audience. Well, to those members of the audience too cognitively challenged to make the connection between the title "Repo Men" and the previous scene of Jude Law repossessing an artificial organ. Repo Men's entire target demographic, in other words.

5 minutes in we roll credits. Last chance to take the film back to the rental place to try to talk them into store credit. No? Well, here's more fictional news about how bad things are on Jude Law's alarm clock that is also a television. Yeah, it looks fucking rough.

Family bullshit. Jude Law's married to a woman that resents him, together they have a son that will probably redeem Jude Law's humanity in a not-very-believable way later. Off to work.

After tazering and (presumably,) butchering to death a couple of people we're treated to more of Law's delightful voice over. All the owners of the organs he repossesses die, apparently. This segues into a tour of the office with the corporate commercials playing in the background. Thanks, Mr. Director. I totally never would have have imagined that a cutthroat multi-gazillion dollar industry could be cunning enough to hide behind the facade of a reputable and compassionate business and yeah, I get it. It's just like banks with home loans. Because banks are evil. Got it. Thank you.

Note to Hollywood: If you're going to cast Liev Schreiber in your movie and you want to create any kind of mystery or suspense, then don't cast him as the bad guy. He only has one gear: underhanded.

Cue witty office banter between Law, another repo man more obviously damaged than Law and Screiber being fucking underhanded while bags of robot gore are scanned into a computer. The love interest is then introduced via Whitaker's playful and totally not phallic stun-gunning of Law. According to the montage, Whitaker's character has been expressing his unresolved romantic feelings towards Law via violence for decades, it would seem. It also raises the question of why Law has made absolutely no effort to suppress his British accent since, according to the narrative, he's been in America since early childhood.

Law and Whitaker then stop at Law's horrible, nagging bitch of a wife's work to agree with her that she is, indeed, a horrible, nagging bitch. Whitaker talks about Law's testicles.

A commercial for a virtual reality spa they totally didn't steal from Total Recall plays on a blimp. I'm absolutely certain that the M.5 Neural Net will bear no further relevance to the plot. The soundtrack then reminds the audience that it is still 80 times better than anything else in the movie while Whitaker talks Law out of transferring to the 'not-butchering' department where, presumably, Law would meet a new creepy, violent best friend leaving Whitaker to die alone in his recliner, suffering a heart attack while jacking off to old MMA fights.

At a bar, after joking about organ harvesting their grandparents, Law is obviously lovestruck by a not very attractive or good singer. Whitaker, cursing his cowardice at his inability to tell Law his true feelings leaves to punch things. The singer, having attempted to croon "Cry Me a River" while making moon eyes at Law, will probably have no further bearing on the plot.

Returning home to his cold, vacant wife, Law attempts to instigate some romance while "Cry Me a River" plays on the radio. It's unclear whether this is to illustrate that Law is thinking of the sickly-looking singer from the dive bar, or that Law's wife knows he was out all night boozing and making eyes at the sickly bar singer, or if, as previously established by all parties, she's just a horrible, nagging bitch. Either way, Law's wife excuses herself to restock her vagina with ice cubes and centipedes.

Full of liquor and sexual frustration, Law wanders into his son's room to have a forced, clumsy dialogue drawing forced, clumsy analogies between the barbarism of the Roman Empire and the barbarism of American capitalism.

This movie is very, very bad at having a liberal agenda.

Cut to a happy barbeque with Whitaker, Law, various terrifying repo men and Law's wife and child. Whitaker excuses himself to butcher someone in Law's driveway. When Law's wife sees this her reaction is (for once justifiably,) horribly bitchy. Law's son films this. Wife and son leave, much to Law's puzzlement, him not being an intellectual giant and all.

Later, while driving around at night looking for past-due kidneys, Whitaker describes the M.5 Neural Net in greater detail, in case the audience missed the subtly of the previous attempt at heavy-handed foreshadowing.

Finding a cargo ship full of overdue organs using what appears to be an advanced supermarket scanner, Whitaker makes a valid point, saying "Wait a minute! Do we not have GPS in the future?" Seriously, if they're selling these organs for $750,000 at 20% interest you'd think adding a tracking device would be a pretty logical move. I mean, I can touch like 3 things, right now, with tracking devices, and I don't even live in a world with robot spleens or VR vacation packages.

Admittedly, this would hamstring the premise for the entire movie, but this is a fucking unrelentingly terrible movie. Check it out: Organ hackers find a way to bypass the security on artificial organs, leading to widespread black market organ dealing, costing the well-connected companies that manufacture them billions. Law and Whitaker are two good cops trying to bring down the organ pirates while wrestling with the notion that they may really be on the wrong side. As Law and Whitaker realize they have far more in common with the people struggling to survive in a world gamed against them than they do with the faceless corporations at the end of their leash they set out to bring down the system. Cue Whitaker's noble sacrifice so that Law and the plucky and strong-willed female lead can go on to complete the mission, etc.

That took like 2 minutes to come up with and A) doesn't involve the constant butchering of civilians to maintain the viewer's interest, B) is just as relevant with current real world events (piracy, intellectual property, consumer rights, health insurance, the systemic corruption of capitalism and so on,) C) doesn't require both male leads to be impossibly psychotic, and D) isn't fucking stupid. Back to the film.

After Rambo-ing up, L and W enter the ship and take down whoever these people are utilizing tazer guns, pulse grenades, knives, pipes and gleeful sadism. Mostly gleeful sadism. Really can't stress that enough.

Returning to Schreiber's Evil Business Office, our heroes report their glorious capture of 32.5 organs and a couple of price gun jammers that use made up science. All dialogue pauses while Schreiber very obviously hides the jamming devices among his personal belongings. He then offers Law and Whitaker the opportunity to do this 'professionally,' which would seem to imply an upgrade from 'callous professional murderer' to 'callous professional whatever's between murderer and genocidal madman.' Before Law can ask for a desk job instead Whitaker, terrified of losing contact with his unrequited love, tells Schreiber to keep them on the regular surprise surgery roster. Law looks conflicted about this development but keeps his mouth shut.

Whitaker then almost really tells Law his true feelings, but loses his nerve at the last second and begins babbling about 'rules and responsibilities,' while slowly reverting to his comical 'Macho guy who is not gay' defense mechanism. The entire undercurrent of Whitaker's performance is screaming "I love you, Jude Law! Put your dick in me!"

Law, realizing he hadn't talked down to the audience in several minutes treats us to another voice-over, in which he tells the audience that what he's doing in this scene is, swear to god, the thing he just talked about doing at the end of the last scene. At this point even I have difficulty believing that the people this was aimed at exist anywhere outside of the director's bloated sense of superiority, as they would have to have an attention span of less than one second and an inability to hold memory for more than five.

Anyway, Law is about to kill his last, uh, client, I guess, who is named T-Bone. Law claims to have been listening to T-Bone's music since high school. Since T-Bone, played by RZA, seems to be about the same age as Law, this creates the kind of paradox that would be the perfect opportunity to talk about Schrodinger's cat. They do not talk about Schrodinger's Cat. RZA explains music production to Law. Law manages to remember enough of his training to ask RZA if he would like an ambulance before stun-gunning and butchering him for once. RZA does a lot of coke. I think it's coke. It's red though. Obviously a drug, and no doubt the reason for the delinquency on his payments.It's almost a touching scene if you happened to be raised in a POW camp and think intimacy is when the guard tells you he pissed in your food before you eat it.

After exploding himself with his defibrillator unit, Law explains, via voice-overed flashback, how and when he had been rendered unconscious during his life. The first time was in the standard army test that involves being hit in the face with a baseball bat. Turns out Law has a "very small brain." Which explains, well, everything about his character. This led to him being put in a tank with Forest Whitaker, since there's only like 20 or 30 people in the military and he was bound to be deployed with his childhood best friend/worst enemy/gay lover.

Cut to a strip club after the war. Law and Whitaker are attacking the patrons with their trademark gleeful sadism when one of the patrons renders Law unconscious again. This brings us to his current KO at the hands of his own medical equipment.

Fade into a scene of Law regaining consciousness at the hospital with Schreiber looking underhanded and Whitaker looking like a gay guy trying really hard not to look like a gay guy. Whitaker points out that, even though Law's horrible wife isn't there, Whitaker would love to change Law's diaper.

To Law and absolutely no one else's surprise Law has been given an external robot heart, which will soon be switched with an internal robot heart once Law signs his soul away. Law freaks out, Schreiber gives Law the underhanded party line, because, y'know, evil business. Law pulls the cords to the external heart out and walks quite a long way considering there is absolutely nothing keeping his blood flowing at this point.

Returning home from the hospital, Law finds that his horrible, nagging bitch of a wife has packed his bags, changed the locks, and slams the door on Law's face when he asks to see his son. This is done to re-establish the Director's philosophy of 'A wink may be as good as a nudge, so why not emphasize every single point with a jackhammer?'

Law, of course, goes to crash at Whitaker's place, Whitaker being the only human outside of Law's wife and child that Law has ever had any kind of interpersonal relationship with since birth that didn't exclusively involve killing people for money.  Whitaker, as one would expect, is both kinds of gay about Law sleeping under the same roof as him. Whitaker covers by talking about sports and hot Chinese women that are coming over to, uh, do sex with them. Yeah, they're gonna, shoot milk at us out of their bosoms, and uh, giggle when we take our pants off. Yes, dog, they are some fine looking 'harlots,' and it is going to be 'hot.' They're gonna, like, shave their legs and put on make up. And we'll be watching 'sports.' Because we're men. We're gonna have so much heterosexual sex with these 'hoochies,' that we'll run out of Astroglide. I mean condoms. Because I'm all about doing sex with women, dog. We should practice before they get here. Take your pants off, dog.

Cut to Law's Welcome Back party at the office. There is a stripper. She gives him the pink slip for his new heart. That is the entire scene.

Cut to Law breaking into a house for organ harvesting purposes. After rendering the debtor unconscious Law experiences a panic attack at the prospect of performing surgery.

Later, at the bar, as the repo men exchange war stories Law's voice over explains to the viewer that what we just saw was him developing a conscience.

Later, on the porch of his estranged family's house, Law is ignored by his wife, says hi to and hugs his child and has the door slammed in his face, again, by his horrible one-dimensional stereotype of a wife. He convinces his wife to open the door, but instead of talking, she hands him a Past Due notice. Before this scene even ends, Whitaker's voice from the next scene begins by explaining that Law never turned in the pink slip from the guy he didn't murder before. Whitaker then does all of Law's justification and rationalization for him as they share an intimate dinner and a bottle of red wine.

inter-cutting scenes of Law being terrible at a sales job, possibly due to either his complete lack of non-violent people skills or his tiny brain, Law explains to Whitaker that he's fallen behind on his payments and needs to make some money. Since the Past Due notice was given to him almost 20 seconds ago I assume this is to remind the audience that it happened and to explain what Past Due means. Or maybe the Director just doesn't think film-goers can read.

This is about the point in the film where everyone involved in its making officially stopped pretending to give a shit. First of all, they commit the cardinal sin of reminding the audience that much better films exist by showing a scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. I'm sure you know which scene. Second, Law states that if he doesn't come up with some money soon he'll be put on the 'to kill' list.

Okay, I understand that this is a science fiction movie set in a dystopian future. But no amount of 'it's fiction' can explain this set up. If the company sics a repo man on Law then it's at best even odds that Law kills his assassin. Since Law's supposed to be one of the best the odds are probably way worse than that. So the company will probably lose at least two repo men to reclaim one robot heart. Since the reclaimed organs are kept in the repo mens' locker room, they must not cost that much for the company to make. If you think about it, and I can't imagine anyone that saw this movie on purpose did, these repo men can't be cheap for the company. First of all, not many people are cut out for the lifestyle of human jackal. I mean, I don't think I personally know anyone that would, on command, kill a stranger, friend or family member because their boss told them too. On top of that they would have to be intelligent enough to perform surveillance, breaking and entering, detective work and field surgery. They would also have to be healthy enough to best the vast majority of people in all forms of combat.

What I'm saying is, the job requirements for being a repo man are so impossibly varied and specific that finding a good one would be next to impossible, and training one would take years and cost a small fortune. And we're expected to believe that this company will risk sacrificing as many as it takes to reclaim an artificial heart that they're just going to dump in a bin next to someone's dirty towel? When the logical solution would be to force the delinquent repo man into indentured servitude for the rest of his life?

On top of all of that, since the repo men seem to have a high level of security clearance (they barge into Schreiber's office whenever they want, for example,) that would automatically be an unacceptable security risk. A ruthless, heavily armed, well-trained, intelligent, remorseless and experienced professional hitman that you want dead is the absolute last person you would want having a high-level security pass and working knowledge of your operation. Who the fuck wrote this shit? Back to the movie.

Whitaker, tired of watching his possibly-lover fuck everything up by not killing anyone, takes Law to the slums to go on a surgery spree. Whitaker, after a brief tazer rampage, mama bears a couple of delinquents over to Law and pleads, teary-eyed, that Law please just get over this hump and kill these people. As fucked up as that last sentence is, it still does no justice to the level of fucked up in the movie. While wrestling with his inner demons Law is (understandably and deservedly,) beaten to shit by a group of transients. Law's voice over, which is becoming more and more of a blatant rip-off of Jason Statham's from "Snatch," reminds us that this is KO number four.

Immediately after waking up, Law walks twenty feet and finds none other than the singer from the bar, strung out on a pile of garbage, singing to herself. Whatever drug brought RZA down is at work here, I guess, since her teeth are stained red.

In a romantic scene filtered through the director's quirky view of reality, Law takes the singer to the nearest No Tell Hotel to kick, complete with seizures and vomiting. True love.

In a twist that should be familiar to anyone that's ever seen a movie or television show or read a book or heard a story before, it turns out that the singing Cu (or Q or Queue or whatever the drug is,) Junkie is 90% overdue robot. Law's voice over informs us that he interviewed a serial killer once. The why and when and who aren't explained, but he did use the experience to inform the audience that serial killing also works in reverse. Which I think means once you meet someone and don't kill them, then it will be easier to refrain from killing the next person you meet. The monologue seems to think this is some sort of abnormal state for a person to be in.

Returning from the store to the hotel, the junkie singer promptly does her level best to beat the holy shit out of Law for no apparent reason other than her script telling her to. Since Law is in wuuuuuv he's okay with this. I would like to point out that Law still has not had a single conversation with this character.

While using his security clearance to break into the Organ Warehouse to perform some shady looking tampering on a couple of robot organs Law's voice over starts talking about Schrodinger's cat again, and manages, somehow, to be even more wrong in an even insaner way than last time. Whitaker, of course, catches Law doing whatever it is he's supposed to be doing with the organs.

The Director uses this opportunity to allow Whitaker some of what he probably thinks is 'character development.' Whitaker explains that his uncle was a bank robber until he got caught after he went soft and was off of his game, Whitaker almost cries, Law symbolically lays down his tazer gun, they almost kiss, scene ends.

After breaking into his own house to tell his son goodbye, Law returns to the hotel to collect his violent, homeless drug addict soul mate only to find out that she thinks she can do fine on her own. Not really surprising since she, you know, had done fine until he came along. She changes her mind when she learns that he had cleared the recall notices on half of her dozen parts and none of his one and she instantly falls in love with his selflessness. He then lights his Volkswagon on fire so that he and the singer can look serious while being lit by the flames. That is the only reason they do this, since they immediately travel further into the functionally lawless and unregulated maze of the slums on foot.

After finding a suitable squat, Law's voice over reminds the audience that he has an artificial heart and she has an artificial 'everything else,' although if she was 99% Terminator she would be the Terminator that the other Terminator's would pick on and make fun of for being frail, slow and useless. Law's voice over then comes to the obvious co-dependent's conclusion that this means they must be two parts of one whole, verifying that she is, indeed, the shoehorned-in love interest, despite her having only half a dozen lines and five minutes of screen time at the mid-point of the film.

Next Time: The Second Half of This Awful, Awful Movie's Less Awful Synopsis