I watched Tron: Legacy on DVD tonight, and it answered a question that was raised for me two weeks ago and which I thought would take many years to answer, which is remarkable. That question was: How long will it take to find another film as bad and unengaging as Unstoppable?
I would have been better entertained had someone taken a wet fish and slapped me around the face with it for two-and-a-half hours. I like Jeff Bridges. I like Olivia Wilde. Daft Punk’s music was superb. Michael Sheen is always fun. So it really takes a special kind of effort to make something that should be brainless fun so tedious - it never occurred to me that they might take the premise of the 80s movie seriously. I was stupid enough to think it might be just a bit of entertainment with light cycles, good fodder for a Friday evening after champagne and Royal Wedding overload. Please God no one employ Garrett Hedlund in a lead role again; he makes Sam Worthington seem expressive. Cillian Murphy was in it for about two seconds and in that time oozed more charisma than Hedlund managed throughout the entire film. I was constantly worried that the protagonist was psychotic because he keeps making what are presumably intended to be amusing asides all the way through the film but TO HIMSELF. “I see how it is.” “I’m all over this.” WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO YOU SMUG G*T?
It’s my own fault for sticking with it past the first ten minutes, in which an “OS 12” (wonder which big software company they were naively trying to lampoon there, eh?), which is presumably gigabytes in size, is uploaded, dispersed all across the internet and the leak is reported on the news, all within TEN SECONDS. And then the CEO goes nuts because how could an OS which was supposed to be “the most secure OS ever” get leaked? Yeah, because, like, how can anyone steal a padlock? Oh God, someone stole my bike chain from the back of my car, how can they steal something that is supposed to secure something else? How can that be possible? (That didn’t actually happen, by the way, unlike the travesty of my evening’s viewing.) No, wait, don’t stop to think about it, because the “hero” is now standing atop a girder at the top of a skyscraper and the security guard who gets paid $5 an hour has followed him at risk to his own life to tell him that “stealing is wrong”, and the hero is now parachuting to safety. And don’t even ask me how the kid with curly brown hair grew up to have straight blond hair, maybe they just forgot to CGI that in properly later, because they were having too many problems with young Jeff Bridge’s mouth.
I really should have stopped watching when my forehead started bleeding, I should know better by now.
So yeah… I don’t know what I was expecting. Something that was a bit of fun, I suppose. Stay away. Danger, Will Robinson, danger…
