'Fallout: New Vegas' Review

In 2008 Bethesda Softworks gave us Fallout 3, an open world game where you could sprawl around the giant ruined city of Washington DC and fight approximately three types of enemies on your quest to save your father. Now Bethesda has released Fallout: New Vegas which involves you sprawling around the giant ruined state of Nevada in search of the man who shot you in the head, which is basically the exact opposite approach any normal person would take.

So then you’re set free in the desert wasteland of the future that’s been raged by a nuclear apocalypse, forcing you to survive against rogue soldiers, mutant monsters, and even the elements as you complete a number of quests and adventures and blah blah blah.

If you’re reading this review then chances are you know the basics behind Fallout and there really isn’t much more to say. And when I say that, I mean it. Because as far as sequels go Fallout: New Vegas gets the award for “Least Contributed to a Franchise” in that it changes virtually nothing from its predecessor. The VATS system that allows you to stop time and blow your enemy’s head off or vaporize them into a cloud of dust never gets old and comes with a certain sense of smug satisfaction that makes me question my sanity while you scrounge for food and water to maintain your health. Along the way you’ll meet numerous NPCs with as much personality as dead squirrels and have to constantly sleep and stock up on ammunition if you want to cross “not die” off your to-do list.

One of the major changes Fallout: New Vegas brings to the table (and by “one of” I mean “the only”) is Hardcore Mode. In Hardcore Mode the player is basically forced to constantly drink, eat and sleep to stay alive and fight against the elements. And I must say this is pretty god damned hard. There were times I’d think I was fine and hydrated only to have my H2O meter blinking five minutes later, obviously lending me to the conclusion that my character must be extremely out of shape.

The game allows you to switch between first and third person views but I’m really not sure why. Your character model is so stiff and lifeless in third person that it blends in with all the other husks of NPCs that roam around the deserted wasteland. Part of the appeal of first-person is using your imagination and pretending your way better than all the others around you so when you shift into third-person you suddenly just become a drop in a bucket of shit. Not to mention the fact that when in third person your character model doesn’t turn translucent so you essentially have a giant blind spot that any little head crab monsters will willingly take advantage of.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: moral choice systems in video games can fuck off. Fallout: New Vegas constantly belittles you for doing the wrong thing, like killing an innocent person or borrowing (stealing) some supplies, which are unarguably the most efficient modes of progress. It grades your morality by shooting red letters at you that basically sad “Bad” but takes very little time to praise you for your few good deeds. One of the best parts of open world videogames is the ability to be a dick without anyone chastising you for it so when the game constantly fires little red letters at you and embodies your psyche with a cartoon Satan it makes things a little off-putting, it’s like beating up on a 5^th grader with your disapproving mom constantly shaking her head behind your back. Videogames are all about escapism and the ability to be a total asshole with no consequences is one of their most rewarding aspects especially when the same actions taken in real life would most likely result in a loss of my lunch money. Can you imagine if Grand Theft Auto IV had a moral choice system? By your third or fourth massacre your morality would be so low your TV would start crying.

One of the other things I noticed is that everybody in the world of New Vegas is some type of extraordinary clairvoyant that can magically detect any wrongdoing even when they happen behind closed doors. For example there was one moment where I really wanted this guy’s caps, which are the in-game currency. So I waited till we were alone in a house then shot him in the head in the name of instant gratification. Victorious, I walked out into the sunlight only to be immediately attacked by every civilian in the town. “No problem” I thought, “I’ll just travel to some other town until the heat’s off.” Of course when I traveled to the other town the civilians immediately turned to firing enough lead at me to recreate the RMS Titanic, making my only option to load the game from an earlier save and forget any notion of getting that jerk’s caps.

Just like Fallout 3 the map is huge but you can’t help but get this ‘copy and paste’ feel as the buildings and landscapes have the variety of a sorority pledge class with the exception of the token fat girl. Everything looks exactly the same and while it may be an “open” world there are so many boundaries that you feel more like a rat in a maze with invisible walls. There were several moments where I thought, “Hey, that structure behind that rock looks interesting” only to hit an invisible boundary emanating from a fucking pebble or something. It’s this kind of bullshit that takes me out of the immersive experience the game’s trying to create and makes me want to put down my controller and actually go out and do something productive (God forbid). The other problem the maps have is that there’s too much to see but no opportunities to do so. I purposely did all of the side quests before doing the main quests and by the time I was finished I still had only unlocked about half the map. Not that I’m missing much anyway besides more dirt-painted desert. Of course this isn’t the game’s biggest flaw…

Everyone’s heard of the phrase “if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it” but apparently Bethesda Softworks’ developers decided to up the ante and chose to not fix what is broken. While the game is riddled with the same bugs that send NPCs running into walls and spontaneous controller throwing-inducing freezing that resulted in the deaths of so many television sets particularly after you forgot to save for a few hours there’s one flaw that brings New Vegas’s score down by an entire letter grade. When you finish the game after it’s measly 15 hour or so running time you can’t go back and explore the ruined landscape, which is breaking the cardinal rule of RPGs where most of the fun comes from dicking around. “Hey!” says Bethesda developer A, “How about we take the worst feature from Fallout 3 and put it in this game!” followed by Bethesda developer B jumping up and down and shouting “Brilliant!” I don’t quite understand who thought it was a good idea to bring back the one thing that held Fallout 3 from greatness but I’m assuming it was the same guy who decided fuck a bird so his kid would have wings. Free roaming around the open world is the most fun part of an RPG and if you take that away you’re taking away one of the few things that makes it worthwhile. It’s like taking Hitler out of World War II; say what you want about Adolf but without him WWII would’ve been pretty boring so that makes him an okay guy in my book.

All-in-all New Vegas is solid if not particularly good and feels far more like an expansion pack than a sequel and that would be fine if it didn’t come with that $60 price tag. It’s basically more of the same and I guess if you’re into that sort of thing then go by all means dive right in. If you haven’t played Fallout 3 yet, however, I recommend getting that and the five expansion packs so you can actually enjoy the game before dropping half a paycheck on what’s essentially a sixth. There’s just not enough new material to justify an entirely new game and feels less like Bethesda throwing us a bone and more like them throwing us the loose end of a milking machine.

Email:

Brent (Does Not Actually Think Hitler was an Okay Guy) Saltzman

Bsaltzman @ Radford.edu

*Not much new about New Vegas! Get it! Amiright?!

Dwayne Wade Loves Kids

I know this is a movie blog, but seriously, after watching this video I just had to post the link from Urlesque. If there was ever any doubt that LeBron, Wade and Bosh are simply putting together their own Death Star and are prepping to take on the Federation then it's alleviated with this clip. This is from a charity basketball event. With kids. With kids who are just excited to get to play with NBA Superstar Dwayne Wade.

Right before Wade lays the smackdown on an 8-year old then gets in his face about it.

Heart of a champion.

My favorite part is when the guy over the PA system shouts, "Nice block, D-Wade!" like he wasn't going up against someone literally half is fucking height. Nice block, D. Try that shit someone who doesn't have a bedtime.

RedsArmy.com: Dwyane Wade blocking childrens' shots from John Karalis on Vimeo.

'Kick-Ass' Review

Kick-Ass is probably one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen in quite some time. It isn’t really a drama, it isn’t really a comedy, it isn’t really all action, it’s just kind of there. But not in the bad way like a closed McDonalds, but rather it actually blends all of those genres into something much grander.

Kick-Ass is the story of Dave, a gawky teenager who sucks at talking to girls and has two friends who are just as socially inept. One day, Dave decides to become a superhero. No reason. Just for the fuck of it, basically. He doesn’t have superpowers and his costume is a flamboyant wetsuit and Ugz. Like any perfectly sane teenager, he names his superhero Kick-Ass, and despite the fact that he clearly gets his ass handed to him on several occasions, he still finds a way to get famous, prompting two real-ish superheroes, a father-daughter pair, to court him. He then continues to fuck everything up, blah blah blah drama.

You see, Kick-Ass isn’t your average superhero movie, at least at the start. It’s a very real look at a kid who decides, just for the fuck of it, to become a superhero. It explores the consequences of such exploits in the most brutal, gut-wrenching ways possible.

First thing’s first: ­Kick-Ass is rated R for a reason. There’s blood. Lots of it. Some of it hilarious. A scene where a mafia squealer is put into a giant microwave (I’m not kidding) makes the whole film look like something out of the mind of Quentin Tarantino. It’s darker than the cute and colorful posters make it seem, and most of the humor is cruel (but still pretty damned funny).

Aaron Johnson plays Kick-Ass, the title character. He has glasses, a jew-fro, and jerks off multiple times a day (seriously). Nicholas Cage plays Big Daddy and is surprisingly adept at his role, remaining likeable all while shooting his daughter in the chest (seriously). Hitgirl, played by Chloe Something, is one of the movie’s more interesting characters, and also seems to be the most brutal, going around and chopping off drug dealers’ legs (seriously). And finally, we have Red Mist, who’s played by Mclovin (seriously.) And no, I will not refer to Mclovin as Christopher Mintz-Passe because that would be like referring to Spongebob Squarepants as Tom Kenny. He’s Mclovin, dammit! And he always will be.

As the story progresses, things become much more complex as the lines between heroes and villains are blurred even more so than they were in other “gritty” superhero movies. Every character in the film is innately likable, even the ones we know are douchebags, which actually creates this very satisfying emotional connection to them. The consequences of Kick-Ass’s actions are far reaching, and the film, though on the surface but a gory slasher, actually provides a very intelligently written social commentary on friendship, relationships, and the social order all while never taking itself too seriously, resulting in moments where I actually laughed. I never laugh in movies. Checkmate, Kick-Ass.

I do have a few complaints, however.

First of all, the movie sort of spits in the face of its own “anyone can be a superhero message.” Consider this: Mclovin is only a “superhero” (there are quotes for a reason but I don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t seen it) because his father, who’s also the film’s main villain, gives him a few hundred grand to buy a costume, website, and tricked out Mustang (I still think Mustangs are girls cars, though). Hitgirl and Big Daddy are superheroes because of their seemingly unlimited access to bazookas and machine guns. And finally, Kick-Ass is only a superhero because he got fucked up in a parking lot and had metal plates installed in his bones, making him impervious to most pain.

What the fuck? I thought the message of the movie was “Anyone Can Be a Hero” not “Anyone Can Be a Hero as Long as They’re Rich, Have Access to Unlimited Heavy Weaponry, or Have Bones Made of Fucking Titanium.” Thanks, a lot Kick-Ass. There I was ready to don a cape and mask and go around fighting crime in Radford but then you go and laugh in my face and tell me I can’t. Looks like the closest thing I’ll ever come to being a hero is providing the last ten bucks for a fresh keg at a party. Oh well…

I’m also a little pissed off that the title character is actually the least-interesting character in the movie, yet we’re stuck with him for pretty much 80% of it. He’s boring, nerdy, with no family problems and his only redeeming quality is that he pretends to be gay to pick up girls (I wish I could pull it off, but I’m just so damned hetero). I don’t want to watch someone just like me for two hours, that’s boring, I can watch myself at home. It’s like watching a (hetero) porno that focuses more on the guys than the girls. I have a penis, I can look at it anytime I want. That’s not why I’m watching the damn thing! That’s what Kick-Ass does. It has five primary characters, including Mark Strong, who plays a fantastic villain in the form of Frank Domico and the father of Red Mist, yet the movie sticks us with the least-interesting one for two hours.

Mclovin is actually the most complex character in the whole thing. Even now, I’m still not quite sure what side he’s on (it’s actually been bothering me). His motives are originally evil, as he’s planning to lure Kick-Ass in so his father can execute him, but then a friendship blossoms, a friendship he’s obviously been craving, but then there’s betrayal, but then there’s just who-the-fuck-knows. He may be good, he may be evil, he may just be trying to impress his dad, who obviously loves his son (the chemistry between Mark Strong and Mclovin is great; they really do feel like a true father-son dynamic). I can’t even imagine what’s going through Red Mist’s mind, and the result is one of the most authentic characters ever in a superhero movie and it’s disappointing that he isn’t more fleshed out.

I cannot believe I’m saying this, but Kick-Ass is probably the most emotionally resonant superhero movie of all time. I mean that. More emotional that even the immortal The Dark Knight. The characterization is great, the action scenes are bloody and fun, and the story is satisfying to the very end. Go see it. Now.

Also, Hitgirl, call me in about six years, sweetpea.

'Clash of the Titans' Review

Ah, Clash of the Titans. The movie we’ve all been waiting for since the previews started dominating commercials during The Office. A remake of a movie that sucked 30 years ago must be good, right? And better yet, it’s directed by Louis Leterrier, a director known for raping The Incredible Hulk and starring Sam Worthington who had a hand in destroying the Terminator franchise. It can’t miss!

Clash of the Titans starts with horribly-rendered CGI coffin rising from the sea and being pulled up by a fisherman, Roland Tembo (The Lost World: Jurassic Park was on TV the other night, you have to be a nerd to understand the reference). Roland opens the coffin to find a dead girl and a baby, whom he raises as his own and then meets a horrible death about 25 years later (which is about 5 seconds in movie time), prompting the baby, Jake Sully, to go out and take revenge on the gods for killing his family. Then we meet the gods, who are composed of Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, and some other random people who don’t matter. It turns out that gods are whiny, attention-loving bitches and have decided that the best way to get people to like them again is to kill them in the most horrible way possible. I believe there are people like this on Criminal Minds.

So Jake Sully elects to join a band of macho warriors lead by La Chiffre from Casino Royale and are too lazy to work out (they wear body armor in the shape of abs...that's cheating) to kill the Kraken, who’s played by the Cloverfield monster. See, the Cloverfield monster, back before his days ravaging New York and killing 20-somethings, was a pet of the gods who went around fucking up cities whenever the gods felt like they weren’t getting enough attention.

Apparently.

This is a review and I don’t really like to go into details about the plot so I’ll simply sum up the movie in one sentence: Clash of the Titans is a fucking mess.

You know that 10-page paper you decide to write the night before its due and bang it out in 20 minutes after a brief Google run? That’s Clash of the Titans. It’s a messy jumble of random scenes stitched sloppily together into a premise that feels about as logical as one of those creepy anime movies. There’s a random semi-hot girl who follows Jake Sully around for no fucking reason other than to tell the audience the back story that Louis Leterrier is too lazy to actually show us. There’s about as much action as we saw in the 2-minute preview. The actors are practically reading their lines off of cue cards. And to top everything off, I’ve seen better special effects in those cheap movies on the Sci-Fi channel.

By about halfway through the film, right about the time that Jake Sully cuts his way out of a giant scorpion’s stomach, you start to realize that the movie’s slowly beginning to dissolve into a vat of stupidity. I can always think to myself, “Okay, it’s going to get better. As soon as the monsters show up, it’ll get better.” Well guess what: it doesn’t. For a movie that promotes itself with giant monsters battling gods it sure as hell doesn’t show us much of it. You know that shot in the preview where the Kraken opens its mouth and roars for two seconds? Well that’s about as much of him as we get to see before it’s gone. Seriously.

Forgive me for stealing a joke from Family Guy, but I was under the impression the name of the film was Clash of the Titans not Random People We Don't Care About get Killed by Random Monsters we Don't Care About.

Louis Leterrier doesn’t seem to care about the movie and as a result neither do we. Jake Sully’s family’s literally on screen for about five minutes, with the mother and sister never uttering a single line, and we’re expected to actually give a shit when they die. There’s a princess who, if she’s sacrificed, will end the Kraken’s wrath. And for some reason, despite the fact that she has maybe two or three lines, we’re supposed to feel something for her. If I was one of those guys in the town about to get destroyed that bitch would be going down. Zeus is supposed to “love” humans, and the other gods remind us of it constantly, yet at the same time he has no trouble killing them with a smile on his face. What the fuck? Either you hate humans or you love them, you can’t just switch whenever it’s convenient for the script. The characters, for the most part, are disposable and the few that we do actually get to like are killed within seconds. There’s one part of the film where they invade Medusa’s lair and one of the movie's most likable characters is killed in the corner of the f*cking screen while the action’s focused on Jake Sully. Fuck you, Louis! You made me sit there for an hour and a half watching these characters and then you wipe them out without so much as a second thought.

The movie doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. The acting’s stiff, the script’s a mess and the visuals aren’t much better than those seen in Xbox games. Sam Worthington plays the exact same person he played in Avatar and Terminator Salvation and Louis Letterier’s direction is totally careless. There’s a scene where a bad guy’s hand is cut off and it's seen turning into a monster. I’m thinking, “Oh shit, that’ll totally turn into a huge monster and kick some CGI ass!” Nope. Doesn’t happen. It’s never mentioned again. It’s like Leterrier completely forgot about it because he was too busy figuring out how to make all of the actors’ skirts shorter.

Why is it that certain directors get to keep making multi-million dollar movies even when their movies suck? In professional sports, if a player has a bad game they either A) get benched or B) sign with the Raiders. Shouldn’t it be the same way in Hollywood? If Louis Leterrier obviously can’t direct a good movie to save his life then stop fucking paying him for it.

Clash of the Titans is lazily shot, horribly written, and sloppily directed. It isn’t worth the film it’s printed, let alone two hours of your life. Do yourself a favor and just rip up some man-cards and go see How to Train Your Dragon. Trust me, it’s far more badass.

How to Train Your Dragon

Well, this is embarrassing. I’ve pretty much spent my entire, brief review-writing career tearing apart movies that most people enjoy and bitching about every little contrivance, blowing it up far bigger than it needs to be in the sake of comedy. When I went to see How to Train Your Dragon last night in 3D, I wasn’t expecting any different. Like Wesley Snipes before he met Woody Harrelson in White Men Can’t Jump, I was ready to pounce on Dreamworks’ newest foray into animation, a studio that’s essentially still suckling the last drops of milk from the Shrek franchise, and write an entire article dismantling it like everything else that’s come my way.

Unfortunately for me, however, HTTYD is actually one of the bigger surprise movies I’ve seen this year that…gasp…doesn’t suck.

Well nuts to me. Thanks a lot HTTYD, now I have to write a whole article praising you instead of overanalyzing every little detail and dragging what’s probably a decent movie into an abyss of putridity. Prick.

HTTYD is the story of Hiccup, a skinny ginger wannabe Viking who’s about a tenth the size of everyone else in his Viking village and is voiced by the dork in She’s Out of My League. His father is voiced by Gerard Butler, an actor who needs to take a look in the mirror and realize he needs to skip out on the chick flicks and stick to things he’s good at (being a badass) and his classmates in dragon killing class are voiced by the fat kid from Superbad (Jonah Hill) and McLovin, also from Superbad. Craig Ferguson voices Gerard Butler’s assistant and apparently this is a huge deal according to the promos but I’ve never heard of Craig Ferguson so I don’t fucking care. Anyway, Hiccup as it turns out, is actually a hippy and can’t kill a dragon, which he befriends and names Toothless, despite the fact that it clearly has teeth. He could’ve named it Godzilla Junior or Raven or something badass, especially considering that it’s the most badass dragon in the world (despite the actual Godzilla-Dragon ripoff that appears at the film’s climax). Hiccup starts to figure out that dragons aren’t in fact evil, well at least not that evil, and are essentially just giant reptilian cats. Seriously. They like scratches behind the ears, fish, and catnip. Not joking.

Telling you any more of the plot would probably ruin what is, dare I say, a very enjoyable experience. The 3D is, and I say this with absolutely no bias in opposition of James “Douchebag” Cameron, better than Avatar. That’s right, James Cameron; you’re half-billion dollar epic science fiction fantasy that was meant to revolutionize cinema as we know it and bring you a boatload of Oscars was beat out at your own game by a tiny Dreamworks cartoon that had all the promotion of my facebook statuses (not a lot). The 3D in Avatar was often more distracting than entertaining and immersive and Cameron spent every moment he could slapping our faces with it, whether it was with those little jellyfish-seed things or bows and arrows flying towards the camera. It also only worked on three planes; there was a foreground, middle, and background. HTTYD, however, is better. The 3D isn’t distracting and feels far more natural than Avatar’s ever did. Yes, there are your occasional moments where it gets a little blurry but the depth is incredibly convincing, the flying sequences are far more engaging and, unlike in Avatar, don’t stay on screen so long that you get bored and start glancing at your watch and lovingly eyeing the “exit” signs.

Suck it, Cameron.

Unfortunately this is a critique, and though I can’t find anything glaringly wrong with the picture (it’s f*cking perfect), I feel obligated to complain about something in the name of entertainment. I guess if I had to dig deep, I’d bitch about the accents. Why do the kids have clearly American accents while all the adults are running around with deep Scottish accents? You develop accents based on your surroundings, I was raised by my grandparents who were both from New Zealand and as a result I have trouble pronouncing “er” suffixes without them sounding like “ah” (no, it doesn’t get me laid). Though I guess I can forgive the film’s inadequacy to provide the right accents considering it’s a movie about fucking dragons.

Fine, here it goes: How to Train Your Dragon is good. It’s well-written, the voice actors are perfectly cast, and the 3D is the best I’ve seen so far, even better than Douchebag’s (Cameron’s) “epic.” It really isn’t that funny but has a surprisingly high level of emotional depth that makes it so immersive that by the time it ends your actually disappointed that it’s over despite how badly you have to go to the bathroom after your $8 small soda. It’s probably the best film of the year, particularly out of animated films, thus far in 2010.

That is, of course, until Toy Story 3 comes out this summer to piss all over everyone else while laughing all the way to the bank.

Score: 9.5

The Wolfman

I promised myself after Joe Johnston single-handedly destroyed the Jurassic Park trilogy with the worst dinosaur movie ever made (Jurassic Park III), that I’d make one of my many goals in life never contribute to his box office gross ever again. Luckily, Jurassic Park III was so utterly bad and a slap in the face to anyone who ever enjoyed the trilogy that I didn’t think I’d ever have to worry about it again. Johnston had sucked all of the intelligence and philosophical debate out of the series previous installments, and replaced them with 82 minutes of random people running through the jungle, and a plot about as dense and emotionally resonant as an episode of Barney. So, I’ve rested easy the past decade or so, knowing that Joe Johnston would never rise again to pollute movie screens.

But then The Wolfman was announced, with Joe Johnston directing. All I’ve heard about since the first trailer is the grittiness, the depth of character that Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins will bring to the screen, and how this will not only be Johnston’s best movie (which really isn’t hard to do), but one of the best werewolf movies ever (which, also, isn’t hard to do). Well, the definition of insanity (according to Wikipedia) is repeating the same action while expecting a different outcome, so clearly whoever hired Johnston to recreate one of Universal’s most legendary monsters was, well, insane.

Why? Because it isn’t different. Sure, it’s not the kid-friendly, action-packed spectacle of stupidity that Jurassic Park III was. No, instead, it’s a non-kid friendly, boring spectacle of stupidity.

The Wolfman is about a guy who turns into a werewolf. There’s no need to explain anything more than that. If you don’t know the basic plot, then you’re blind and deaf, or you just awoke from a coma you’ve been in since birth. We follow Benicio Del Toro, who has been in hiding for the last decade, as he struggles through the everyday issues of dealing with an estranged father, boning his dead brother’s girlfriend and turning into a wolf Hulk-style, using CGI transformations that take up a good majority of the movie. Seriously, by the third or fourth time we get to watch him transform into a wolf we just don’t care anymore. I’ve been more entertained watching my Squirtle evolve into Blastoise. Yes, the first time around it’s pretty cool but we get the f*cking point, you don’t need to show us every single time.

The overlong transformations essentially epitomize everything wrong with The Wolfman: it’s dumb, and the special effects, which grow tedious after awhile, make futile attempts to cover it up like an idiot who uses big words he just looked up on Google. Johnston’s thought process, I suspect, involves covering the screen with so much spectacle that we forget that the writing sucks. “You’re a monster hunter, sometimes monsters hunt you.” Brilliant.

Overreliance on CGI has become somewhat of a pet peeve with me, and though it can sometimes look pretty cool, you can’t deny the fact that it always looks fake. Even the world’s (arguably) best CGI, “Avatar,” looks more like an Xbox game than a movie at times. We’ve kind of become bored with the whole thing; thanks to CGI, saying a movie has good special effects is like saying it was filmed with a camera. Good special effects are pretty much a given, so they can’t really be used to cover up flaws in storytelling (I’m looking at you, Michael Bay). Hell, even most of the Victorian city in The Wolfman is computer-generated and looks more like it belongs in World of Warcraft rather than a big-budget Hollywood movie. However, the main werewolf probably could've used the CGI treatment in more action scenes, considering the makeup effects make him look like an oversized Ewok.

As far as acting goes, nobody really goes over the top, but nobody really entertains, either. Del Toro has about as much personality as that girl passed out on the couch at a party, and it’s difficult to empathize with his situation, especially considering he’s trading sexy looks with his dead brother’s sister the whole movie. Honestly, I’d rather hang out with the wolf he turns into, at least he’s somewhat entertaining. Anthony Hopkins is supposed to be the voice of wisdom, the good guy, but it’s hard to see him as such since he built his film career on eating peoples’ brains. The only actor who really does a serviceable job is Megatron…err…I mean Hugo Weaving, who will hereafter be referred to as Agent Smith…I mean Megatron. Anyway, Megatron’s the primary antagonist, or I think Johnston intended him to be. Or, well, would be if the film’s actual protagonist wasn’t so damn unlikable.

The Wolfman as a whole, seems like a wasted opportunity. It makes a good trailer but so did Jurassic Park III. Megatron does the best he can as far as characters go; the only other actor who does a decent job is the CGI wolf. There’s some good makeup effects when the wolfman isn’t computer generated and they somehow made Megatron look like a 6-foot tall human, so that’s some top-notch work. Between the painfully long transformations, and the relatively entertaining murder sequences (that sounds slightly sociopathic out of context), it’s boring and just plain dumb, with dialogue that’s as painful to listen to as the jerks who play Call of Duty all night in the apartment below me with their bass turned all the way up (seriously, on the off-chance you guys learn to read one day and end up coming across this article, I want you to know that I hate you).

It seems that Johnston, in an effort to avoid the mistake he made in Jurassic Park III of not having any character development, created brand new mistakes in trying to have character development and failing miserably. All in all, The Wolfman is the product of Johnston trying too hard to not seem stupid. The movie isn’t bad, as this relatively negative review may suggest. It’s just there. It’s nothing. A flash in the pan that you’ll watch, then forget about it 10 minutes later.

But trust me, that’s probably for the best.